ynquirer

I agree. Note that ‘nazwraios’ is close to ‘naziraios’ (Judges 13:5, 7 y 16:17), which English translations usually render as ‘Nazirite’. Naziraios/nazirite is mentioned in Judges 13:7 as follows:

Strong defines the word ‘naziraios’ as meaning “a consecrated or devoted one” (05144). Yet, in the Book of Judges consecration or devotion is said to be effective from the womb. It is only too natural that Matthew’s nativity would peak at a passage that points at Nazara as a sign that a child coming from Egypt was the consecrated one to God from the womb.

Now, the transition from ‘naziraios’ to ‘nazwraios’.

‘Naziraios’ is Greek transliteration from NZYR. This word has two meanings, one is the Hebrew, another is Aramaic. The Hebrew meaning is defined by the Book of Judges, namely, ‘consecrated from the womb’; the Aramaic meaning is ‘self consecrated’, ascetic, hermit. In the first-second century it probably had come to denote those self consecrated to God through living in the wilderness – like John the Baptist. That is, ‘nazirite’ has lost its prophetic overtones and in popular jargon was a synonym of ‘nazarene’.

It is distinctively clear that Matthew strove to avoid both ‘nazarene’ and cognate overtones of ‘nazirite’. Still, they thought the prophecy of Judges to be highly relevant and attempted a linguistic innovation – something that the Matthean community attempted a number of times, such, for instance, as having Nazara/Nazareth be a declinable name, as much as Josephus had Gennesar/Gennesareth in Antiquitate Judaicae.

Y in NZYR is a matre lectionis, that is, a mute vowel, the phonetic ‘i’ being later represented by the Masorets with a dot under the Z. Matthew’s decision in this case was to replace the Y matre lectionis with another one, the most conspicuous candidate being the W matre lectionis, with a sound that transliterated into Greek omega. Thus, ‘naziraios’ became ‘nazwraios’.

spin

I just reread my last response to Ben C Smith and found that something went wrong with the editing.
I can't reconstruct what got left out of the following... ...so I'll rewrite it to make it meaningful.

spin

the_cave

Here is Carlson's chart:

http://www.hypotyposeis.org/weblog/2...-nazareth.html

He could get Nazara in Mt 3:13 from nazarhnos in Mk 1:24. He could get nazwraios in Mt 26:71 from nazarhnos in Mk 14:67. It is missing in Mt 20:30 (but notice Matthew uses it in 21:11) and 28:5, but he does hit it 2 times out of 4--which is not bad.

If he didn't have nazarhnos in Mark 14:67, for example, why would he just happen to use nazwraios in his version of Peter's betrayal?

No, but I do think Luke and Matthew shared a common ancestor that was more than Q: it was a full-fledged gospel containing the Q material. It resembled either Matthew without the Bethsaida section, or Luke without most of the Lukan material (it probably contained some sort of birth narrative). I can't decide which.

But why? Why would Jesus have to come from anywhere named Nazara?

I'm suggesting he got Nazara from nazarhnos--in fact I originally thought this was your suggestion.

I'm not suggesting it did--Matthew had, not Nazara, but nazwraios independently. He used nazwraios the same way the scribe did who used it in Byzantine Mark.

In the case of Mk 10:47, I agree--and this is the same way Matthew obviously preferred it, too (in general).

If you are suggesting that the Matthean community came to identify Nazara with Nazareth, I can see this part of your argument. But if not, then I have a much harder time with it.

Aargh--if you agree with this, then why couldn't it have been Matthew?

Do you think the relationship between Nazara and nazarhnos is accidental?

I don't see how--what is the relationship? ynquirer's explanation seems better to me (I actually prefer a different Aramaic origin, but it's not important.)

I do agree with this--it came last.

spin

Either you misunderstand Carlson or you are both wrong. The statement about Nazara in Mt 3:13 is incomprehensible to me. The second claim requires first that the denial scene has been rewritten and the mention of Nazarene deliberately moved. When that is admitted we are at the point that one has to show when that happened. We have the case that at least three times nazarhnos has been omitted and the fourth clear signs that the passage has been interfered with and there is no direct equivalent in the Matthean denial of the Marcan nazarhnos. This case suggests that it too follows the way of the other three. We must consider the possibility of later scribal intervention.

The writer has rewritten the passage, omitting nazarhnos as with the other cases. This is why he needed to substitute him being Galilean. In his provenance was Nazareth, the place to put it was in the first notice for Peter to deny. Instead, Matthew has "Galilean" to indicate provenance -- rewriting the last denial to talk about speech --, which is a weaker indication of provenance than nazarhnos or nazwraios if one was meaningful to the Matthean writer and indicated provenance. The second denial in Matt has apparently been improved by a later scribe who remembered the Marcan version.

Then you have to account for Nazara outside a Matthean provenance.

Mark says his home was in Capernaum. Matthew agrees and the writer was forced to find a compromise solution to deal with the Nazara tradition.

You haven't explained how look got Nazara. The Matthean writer obviously didn't invent it.

The Matthean omission of nazarhnos proves this theory dysfunctional.

Why did you add "in general"? nazarhnos doesn't exist in Matt.

The evidence is unclear whether the Matthean community knew anything about Nazareth. Matthew has Nazara twice for meaningful reasons. The one occurrence of Nazareth is in an interpolation into the Marcan text for which dating is impossible.

I'm having difficulty parsing the content here. I have said earlier that the Matthean writer excised nazarhnos. That was in the first effort of the community's gospel from its Marcan source.

I doubt it. I have suggested on numerous occasions that nazarhnos was probably perceived as a gentilic, for which Nazara would seem to be the logical source for such a gentilic.

It's called Mt 2:23.

You need to ask the writer who specifically used nazwraios to validate Nazara.

This is the guy who decided that Hebrew BRH couldn't mean what it normally meant because he confused the translation into Greek. In one of his tangents he tried sell the proposition that "procurator" had to be derived from "curator" without acknowledging the existence of a verbal source, ie procurare, before the time of the need for pro-magistates. He's one of the few on my ignore list, so I don't read his stuff if I can help it. It's Byzantine in its confusion. If you want to present a case, I'll pull it to pieces for you, but I'd advise you to get a second opinion before you use his material.

Well, that's something. In that respect I may have achieved something.


spin

ynquirer

A little bit more on Nazara and nazwraios.

nazwraios was obviously a neologism in Greek. The context was propitious for linguistic innovation. After all, what the NT-ers, whether gospellers or epistlers were doing was to transliterate Hebrew/Aramaic into Greek, and this offered many opportunities to express themselves. Matthew excelled at this. There was, of course, the Septuagint as precedent for many words. Yet, some were unknown in the Septuagint, which was most convenient for people that had a lot of things to say and even felt allowed occasionally to amend the precedent. Thus, they devoted themselves to a creative transliteration of Hebrew words into Greek neologisms.

The Hebrew NZR, – pronounced like /nazar/, (Strong 5144) – means ‘to consecrate’. The past participle is NZWR, pronounced like /nazour/ but Hebrew W usually transliterates into Greek w (omega). Thus, Hebrew ‘consecrated’ might transliterate into Greek nazwr- plus a conventional ending for adjectives – either -hnos or -aios.

The choice was easy for Matthew. naziraios of the Septuagint would have been a best choice, though the Aramaic usage of NZYR, as ascetic, hermit, etc., rendered it undesirable. And yet it offered the optimum ending for the neologism as it addressed the reader to the prophecy in Judges 13:5, 7.

nazwr- plus -aios make a compound nazwraios. Most probably, that was how the word was made.

And yes, there is a likely relationship of Nazara and nazwraios, but it comes down through the phonetic resemblance of Nazara and the Hebrew verb NZR, ‘to consecrate’.

the_cave

Spin, how about this--

I do agree that the same author could not have excised nazarhnos, substituted nazwraios, and invented "Nazara" (not to mention Nazareth) all at the same time.

What we are arguing about is whether Matthew had a text that contained nazarhnos. I think he must have--because, there it is in canonical Mark. And Byzantine Mark can exclude it and substitute nazwraios, then so could Matthew. However, I actually agree that Matthew was constructed in a two-step process.

I think we actually have very similar frameworks but are suffering from a difference in terminology. Let me try to adopt your terminology and see if you can agree with the following scenario:

You seem to argue that Nazara was derived from nazarhnos. Am I right? If so, I tentatively agree (though it could possibly have been the other way around.)

I argue that Nazara must have been supplied to Matthew textually (via an intermediary text which he shared with Luke), not via oral tradition, because of the parallel manner in which Luke uses it. I would be happy to flesh this argument out.

In which case, the “Matthean community” (your phrase) reads Mk 1:24 and reasons that Jesus must have been from a place called Nazara. Except they know from Mk 1:21 that Jesus is in Capernaum. So they add, in proto-Matthew (or deutero-Matthew if you prefer, which I call the Q-gospel) the detail in Mt 4:13 that Jesus left Nazara and relocated to Capernaum.

I agree that Matthew is trying to validate Nazara. What I can't see is how Matthew could invent nazwraios in order to explain Nazara. I think Matthew already has a nazwraios prophecy, but also has either Nazara or nazarhnos in front of him (or both). So he tries to reconcile them.

And finally, let me make the following suggestion as to why Matthew’s uses of Nazara and nazwraios sometimes seem to parallel nazarhnos in Mark, and sometimes don’t. Because: Matthew was using both Mark and another gospel—which, as you say, had been stripped of nazarhnos (and which I argue also contained Nazara). Matthew uses Mark when he can, but favors the other gospel, leaving out nazarhnos because it gets in the way of the nazwraios prophecy.

You call this gospel a version of Matthew; I call it the Q-gospel (or “proto/deutero-Matthew) at most). You say the “Matthean community” stripped out nazarhnos. I simply say the author of the Q-gospel stripped it out. But this is just a difference in terminology. So I actually can agree with all four of your steps--I just have a different perspective.

As for the relationship with naziraios, it makes no difference to me--I simply accept that Matthew got the nazwraios tradition from somewhere. But not solely from Nazara.

spin

I still mustn't have communicated the idea that the removal of nazarhnos happened in the first Matthean redaction.

I can't fathom this. By the time the Byzantine text was distinguishing itself, scribes of the era knew of the two forms in the gospel tradition. When the Matthean text was first redacted causing the loss of nazarhnos, the form disappeared from the Matthean tradition. The community had this text as its own and the readers didn't find nazarhnos in it and the term was not productive. When Nazara reached the community it was accommodated in the tradition through Mt 4:12-16. Still no nazwraios, but the interesting thing is that this Nazara was not seen at the time as in Galilee, as per the o.p. With the welding of the birth narrative onto the gospel, we now find that Nazara is seen as in Galilee and at that time nazwraios is added in 2:23 to justify Nazara. Obviously, nazarhnos would have been a clearer choice as the gentilic for Nazara, but it wasn't used because it was no longer in the Matthean community's traditions.

I have conjectured that Nazara was back-formed from nazarhnos, but, as nazarhnos was no longer in the Matthean tradition, Nazara must have come from outside the community.

I've already killed that idea from a b-grade Q wanna-be. It wasn't in Q. It cannot explain Luke's use of it.

The community doesn't have Mark. It's got a worked-over ex-Mark adapted to the current state of the traditions of the community, so they don't see Mk 1:24 containing nazarhnos.

Not "invent". Wrong word. There are traces of speculation regarding the birth of an earlier savior, Samson, who is a nazir in the LXX with the Sinaiticus having nazeiraios. As Samson would be a Nazirite and save [his people] Israel from the Philistines, so would Jesus be called a Nazorean and save [Jesus="Jah saves"] his people from sin, reading both Mt 2:23 and 1:21 together in comparison with Judges 13:5,7. The Matthean "realization" is that Jdg 13 could explain Nazara, hence Nazorean, a defective form based on another defective form, but apparently understood by the Matthean community as the reasoning behind the move to Nazara.

There is no evidence to support a continued use of Mark. The community obviously made a copy from a "passing exemplar" and improved it for its own purposes. Thus for the community Mark disappeared. The community's version was the new improved version made in their own likeness.

This theory doesn't seem to match the Q most of us have come to know and love.

The community didn't get nazwraios from Nazara: it "saw" the relationship between Samson and Jesus which provided nazwraios.


spin

ynquirer

The role of kai to introduce additional explanatory material cannot be ascertained without dealing with the Greek. And spin's Greek here is substandard.

spin has so far produced only one instance in Matthew of the alleged epexegetical use of kai, and it is a poor one to support the theory: Mt 20:28. It links two infinitives, and of course one infinitive may explain another one.

Yet, what spin needs is an instance of epexegetical use linking two aorists. One aorist never explains another aorist, but they denote actions that subsequently follow one another. And if this is not true, spin has only to produce an example of another two aorists linked by kai in which virtue one of them explains the other.

There are 900+ instances of kai in Matthew, and several dozens of them link two aorists. However, spin has so far been unable to show a sole instance in which an aorist furnishes additional explanatory material to another.

Ben C Smith

I am not saying it cannot be used that way; I am asking for examples from you of kai being used in that way in this construction. I would understand your objection if the construction I was asking about happened to be limited to a few measly instances of questionable parallelism; but kai plus aorist participle plus verb occurs literally hundreds of times in the scriptures; we have data, and I am in favor of using it.

I am not dictating anything; I am asking you for examples that would call my reading into question.

As for your question proper:

Ακουσας δε οτι Ιωαννης παρεδοθη, καταλιπων την Ναζαρα ανεχωρησεν εις την Γαλιλαιαν. και ελθων κατωκησεν εις Καφαρναουμ την παραθαλασσιαν εν οριοις Ζαβουλων και Νεφθαλιμ ινα πληρωθη το ρηθεν δια Ησαιου του προφητου, λεγοντος: ....

That is how to place Nazara outside of Galilee in this text.

Ben.

spin

Just out of curiosity, how many instances of kai plus future perfect have you found in the nt? Or much easier, kai plus pluperfect? If there were none, I doubt if you would have problems with the scarcity of these either, would you?

This is not really a grammar issue, other than to note the wide applicability of the conjunction, working at adjectival, nominal, infinitive, and clause levels. We've seen that the epexegetical kai can be found in all these situations. The problem is that this epexegetical usage isn't that easy to spot. It's not like any of the instances stand up and say, "Hi, I'm epexegetical." kais are routinely translated as "and" even though they are epexegetical, so the specific form you would like I haven't come across. However, there is no grammatical reason preventing a kai from being used this way. And it would appear clear that, given the functional synonymy of Zebulun and Naphtali with Galilee, the departure to Galilee is to be understood as the move to Zebulun and Naphtali, ie the move from Nazara is the move to Galilee. This means that the function of the kai is explanatory.

You're not answering the question, in that I specifically said "such an explanation, ie functionally equivalent to the epexegetical additive explanation. You're not considering the fact that we are dealing with a text that has already been redacted. It is now being augmented, meaning that the text already says:

Ακουσας δε οτι Ιωαννης παρεδοθη, ανεχωρησεν εις την Γαλιλαιαν.

It is this statement that the Matthean writer needed to explain due to the conflict between the hometowns Nazara and Capernaum. The epexegetical solution should seem the simplest.


spin