stephan huller

In response to your point. The Catholics say Nazarene is from the Scriptures. Tertullian's source says they got rid of this part of the gospel (which was never a part of Luke) to obscure the rooting of the terminology in the Law. There are two possibilities:

1) the Marcionites never used the term
2) the Marcionites used a similar term but one which had a different meaning

I prefer (2) because of the number of times Ephrem ridicules the Marcionite obsession with the re-forming of man and man getting a new 'nature' from the Stranger PLUs the presence of these arguments at the core of Clement of Alexandria's writings (whom I take to be a neo-Marcionite)

If the Marcionite excised the passage and they didn't have any term like it you wouldn't also see the parallel argument abouth Nazareth. The Nazareth argument comes from Tertullian, it was layered on top of the nazar etymology. You can't get from Lamentation 4:7 to Nazareth. The original text would have applied the terminology to Jesus's abstention and fasting. 'Nazareth' makes no sense here.

No Robots

The Son of man came eating and drinking.

stephan huller

But clearly the Diatessaron was originally connected with the Encratites (i.e. Tatian) and they would have emphasized - theoretically at least - Jesus the Nazarite. Maybe I am not explaining this well.

The reason why I think the Marcionites had the term notzrim is because you can't get from the original Diatessaron/Matthew interest in נְזִירֶיהָ to EITHER 'Nazareth' (נָצְרַת‎‎) or notzrim (נֹצְרִים). Both of these words have the letter tsade, nazarite has a zayin for 'z' sound.

A native speaker of Aramaic or Hebrew wouldn't have developed an argument for Nazareth based on Lam 4.7. Some people have claimed that Isaiah's references to the 'branch' form the basis to the prophecy but this is senseless as well.

The fact that we have a second century treatise (Tertullian was clearly copying out an original Syriac text) which develops the Lamentations prophesy makes it impossible for me to believe that the source was thinking 'Nazareth.' Something else is being hinted at here AGAINST the Marcionite interpretation.

Why do I say Marcionite interpretation? Because the whole Nazareth business seems to have been a second and separate refutation of that term - presumably notzrim - which gets layered all over the gospel - i.e. both as the place where Jesus grew up (i.e. to counter the docetic understanding of Jesus as wholly a mythical being) and an explanation of the name for Christians.

There are three separate traditions here, one being layered on top of the other.

stephan huller

And I unfortunately never photocopied this section of McCarthy's translation of Ephrem's Commentary on the Diatessaron. I can go to the library tomorrow. It would be interesting to see how Ephrem deals with this section as a native Syriac speaker.

stephan huller

Now look at how stupid NT scholarship is. No mention of Against Marcion's discussion of the material! http://books.google.com/books?id=8z9...page&q&f=false

Only in this idiotic field can people promote their own inventions without referencing second and third century witnessess to the complexity of the problem. Do you think Jews or Muslims would operate this way? If it were their exegesis they'd have ancient witnesses getting precedent over modern morons. But that's not the way with Europeans I guess.

mountainman

Remember to consider self moderation of this interest with a weighting, reserved for the possibility that "Ephrem" is "another tainted orthodox heresiological source", such as we have seen in academic discussion on the reliability of "Ephrem" and "Hegemonius" on the historical issues surrounding the Manichaean heretics. If these sources can falsely present "fabricated historical data" for the Manichaeans then they can do so for the Jews, and other segments of the "religious populace" which they deemed heretical. On the other hand, the Jewish sources themselves are the instrumental manuscripts that should be examined when asking the questions about chronology. What do the earliest Jewish sources say?

The scattered Jews, like all other religious groups in the Roman Empire, were savagely oppressed under the Nicaean Oath and subsequent religious trade agreements, in a novel attempt to enforce an empire-wide "official" state religion characterized by the official law of the Pontifex Maximus of the time, that "religious privileges were reserved for the Christians" (Theod).

Relevant to the OP are the references to the prohibition of becoming Jewish c.315 CE.

"Any Jew who stones a Jewish convert to Christianity shall be burned,
and no one is allowed to join Judaism.

Such a law appears to indicate that there was a religious "lock down" in progress. But more it also indicates that perhaps alot of people were prefering to become converted to Judaism rather than to go all the way and convert to "Christianity" as presented by Constantine at that time, if you follow what I mean.

stephan huller

Like I reserve the possibility that you might not be crazy.

stephan huller

As it turns out Ephrem seems to think John the Baptist and Jesus as a line of Nazarites which are forshadowed by Samson:

He called Herod a fox, since he defiled his chamber at all times with his lasciviousness he despised the law, and in his impureness he killed the Nazarite (i.e. John), and took a wife who also was like himself, and a damsel came up in the image of them both [Rhythm the 34th]

Why did John exempt himself, saying, I am not the Christ whom ye seek?' But John, and if the servant had felt that his Lord was his fellow servant, then the Nazarite who lieth not, did on the contrary deceive greatly." [Rhythm the 61st]

Samson the Nazarite shadowed forth a type of Thy working. He tore the lion, the image of death, whom Thou didst destroy, and caused to go forth from his bitterness the sweetness of life for men. [the Third Ode]

Do I need to continue? Could 'Encratite' (enkrasis) be an attempt to render Nazarite in Greek?

mountainman

Good. Well think about the evidence. In the early 4th century the populace was obviously being attracted both into and away from Christianity. There were those non Jews that fled Christianity perhaps via conversion to Judaism, and there were those Jews who for some reason found it a pragmatic option at the time to join the Christians. This religious turmoil and turbulence immediately presented, from the perspective of those Jewish communities that were attempting to preserve the lineage of Jewish manuscript authority, two separate classes of "Jewish heretics". There were alot of opinions (heresies) going around in that epoch.

spin

We witness the faint traditions of Ebion developing from the simple notion received by Tertullian that he was the founder of the Ebionite movement. Epiphanius has had access to well over a century's evolution and Ebion has gain traditions by that time.

Epiphanius's Ebion "was of the Nazoraeans' school" (30.1.1), not "Nasaraean". Most scholars trying to deal with the Nazareth material confuse the phonology with gay abandon. There is a plain difference between the Hebrew word containing the tsade and that with the zayin and that difference is in fact usually well preserved in the Greek. In the Greek literary tradition of the christians, the town has always been Nazareth, a phonological phenomenon which must be dealt with.

When Tertullian links the Nazarene epithet to Lam 4:7, the connection must be considered, for it is phonologically compelling. What Tertullian actually wrote was:

Nazaraeus vocari habebat secundum prophetiam Christus creatoris. Unde et ipso nomine nos Iudaei Nazarenos appellant per eum.

which actually means:

The Christ of the Creator had to be called a Nazirite according to prophecy; whence the Jews also designate us, on that very account, Nazarenes after Him.

He then cites a passage about Nazirites, so that you can't miss the connection. A nice switch of course, seeing as Tertullian goes on to refer to how apt the name is, given that he lived in Nazareth. This tying together of two separate ideas, I've noted before, because Eusebius does it and he indicates that it was appropriate for Jesus because he naturally had the qualities of a Nazirite:

while our Lord and Saviour having naturally holiness, purity, and separation from sin, needed no human unguent, yet received the name of Nazarene among men, not because He was a Nazarene in the sense of being anointed with the oil called Nazer, but because He naturally had the qualities it symbolized, and also because He was called Nazarene from Nazara

Both Tertullian and Eusebius using different means hold the same basic tradition which ties a Hebrew notion based on the root NZR (נזר) to a town named Nazara. There is no thought of Jesus's abstention and fasting, for he naturally held the qualities of the Nazirite.

My argument on the subject relates to the fact that the town in christian tradition has always been Nazara/-eth, never with a sigma as you would expect from the actual name of the town. The first use of "Nazarene" in Mark (1:24) relates directly to a tradition relating to Samson: a demon calls Jesus "Nazarene" and parallels the term with "holy one of god", this phrase is only used in LXX Jdg 13:7 (cf. 13:5) being used as a translation of "Nazirite". Nazarene in Mark does not come from Nazareth. (Hold back about Mk 1:9, for Mt 3:13 unexplainably doesn't reflect any Nazareth.) Matthew has lost each of Mark's references to a Nazarene and doesn't have Mark's Nazareth, but it does have Nazara twice (2:23 and 4:13) and a single Nazareth in secondary material in a Marcan source (21:11) and refers directly to the Samson tradition twice (1:21 & 2:23), the latter tying gratuitously back to Nazara.

Even Luke brings in references to another Nazirite, Samuel, and relates them to Jesus, so there is a certain Nazirite connection made across christian traditions to Jesus. This tradition is clearly not literary, for it is manifested differently each time: there was an oral tradition in circulation that connected Jesus to the Nazirate (and picked up by Ephrem). However, it was not coherent and obviously lost on the first Matthean editor, who removed Mark's "Nazarene", not replacing it (one caveat, but later if necessary). The trend was to miss the Nazirite significance in "Nazarene" and to see it as a gentilic, hence the first real references to the town were to a "Nazara". It is only later that the real town name had an impact, causing the preference for Nazareth, but the zeta was never corrected.

Of course in confrontations with christians the Jews knew which town was being referred to,
which probably explains why the Peshitta phonology reflects the actual town and considers Nazarene as a gentilic of that actual town, changing it as well as obscuring the Nazirite origin of the term in Syriac. The Jewish reference to Yeshu ha-Notzri is an important ingredient in the mix and knowing when the notzrim was added to the benediction is essential.

This is where both Epiphanius and Jerome come in, but I can't find the relevant reference to cursing in the latter. Epiphanius is very hard to digest alone. But my reading suggests that they both tie the cursing to the Nazoreans (ie those of Beroea) and not christian in general, while Justin knew of cursing christians, but not of Nazoreans. It sounds to me like ad hoc reactions based on the local conditions that Jews found themselves in and the appearance of Yeshu ha-Notzri in Jewish literature may be contingent on those conditions.