mountainman

The WIKI page on nomina sacra shows that the nomina sacra symbol(s) for Jesus as follows:

The name of Jesus in Greek is given as Ἰησοῦς

The nomina sacra Greek symbol for Jesus in the Nominative (Subject) sense is given as ΙΣ

The nomina sacra Greek symbol for Jesus in the Genitive (Possessive) sense is given as ΙΥ.


I am not literate in Greek
and I have two questions
to which I seek opinions as to their answers
from those who are more greek literature than I.



An Exploratory "Jesus" FAQ



Question (1): Does the full name of Jesus - Ἰησοῦς - appear
anywhere in the earliest Greek New Testament Manuscripts ?

As far as I am aware the full name of Jesus given in the Greek as Ἰησοῦς does in no place anywhere appear in the oldest Greek manuscripts of the New testament (ie: Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, Alexandrinus, etc). What appears to physically exist in these earliest Greek manuscripts are the two variant nomina sacra symbols ΙΣ and ΙΥ. So I would answer this question as NO. The full name of Jesus does not appear in the Earliest Greek New Testament manuscript evidence -- only these two codes. Is this answer correct?



Question (2): What/Who is the Earliest Source that provides to us the "Legend"
(or "correspondence") between the Fullname of Jesus Ἰησοῦς and the Coded Forms -
ΙΣ and ΙΥ - found in the New Testament Manuscript Evidence?

The second question I have relates to the "Legend" that equates the use of the the two variant nomina sacra symbols ΙΣ and ΙΥ and the fullname of Jesus Ἰησοῦς . Is it true that nowhere in the Greek Bible itself -- and in the Greek New testament in particular- is this "Legend" or corresponding usage between the fullname (given by the translators of the codes) and the actual codes stated. What/who appears to provide the source and the ultimately final "legend" or correspondence in the equation between the "translated" name and the symbolic form appears to be provided by the "Church Fathers" themselves, and Eusebius in particular. So I would answer this question with the answer that Eusebius and his "Early Church Fathers" provided to us the "Legend" between the Fullname and the Codes. Is this correct? What are the alternatives?

Otherwise what or who is the earliest source that provides to us the "Legend" (or "correspondence") between the Fullname of Jesus and the Coded Forms found in the earliest Manuscript Evidence?

We might paraphrase this second question by asking who or what is the earliest source in the literary tradition and the manuscript evidence who first wrote out the name of Jesus Ἰησοῦς in full as being the "Historical Ἰησοῦς" as to be firmly associated with the codified forms used in the stories and events and Q-like-sayings found in the Greek books of the New Testament Canon?


Perhaps a 3rd question arising from the 2nd might be ...

Did Eusebius use nomina sacra in his literary works
when he referred to the "Historical Ἰησοῦς"?

I would be grateful for any opinions as to the answers to these questions.

darstec

Strangely enough I have seen alpha numeric representation of the monogram as IC with the bar across the top instead of iota sigma. I had to copy and paste it to change the font to make sure I wasn't misreading it. One of the websites that have the facsimile of the Codex Sinaiticus did this. Not once but every place the monogram occurred.

Granted it does look like a capital C on the manuscript. But that letter does not exist in Greek so possibly it is a case of very poor photography.

At least we know that the monogram goes back as far as that codex. However since it contains the Eusebius canons that gives us an early date.

Sorry, but I think I just made the waters murkier.

Toto

C is a variant of the Greek Sigma - the Lunate sigma

Toto

Encountering the Manuscripts: An Introduction to New Testament Paleography and Textual Criticism (or via: amazon.co.uk) By Philip Comfort (can be previewed on Googlebooks), Chapter 4, might be of interest.

darstec

Thanks.

I never considered the Cyrillic.

darstec

I consider paleography a totally bogus art. It doesn't take into account that any person could forge an older hand style. And none of the studies comparing radiocarbon dating substantiate the dates averred by paleographers.

Even the controversy over P52 which paleographers date to the early second century fail because they have also identified the same script to as late as the third and fourth centuries.

mountainman

Yes very interesting thanks Toto.

One textual critic says of the sacred names:

“Scribes wrote these names with special regard, and readers (lectors) uttered these names with special attention in church meetings as they read the Scriptures aloud”

(Comfort, Encountering, p. 253)

UNIVERSAL PROLIFERATION of the Jesus Code "ΙΣ"

The evidence appears to be saying that there was somehow universal agreement between all the scattered "Christian Churches" who preserved the new testament that the nomina sacra (abbreviated name) for Jesus "ΙΣ" was to be used as a standard in all manuscripts prepared.

Therefore we find conjectures which see the commencement of this process of standardisation happening in the first century --- some suggest the early Church in Jerusalem and possibly before 70 CE.

The phenomenom strongly suggests the work of a single redactor, who achieved an incredibly consistent orthodoxy in regard to the practice of using the one standard throughout the empire at some early epoch. This does not sound like the "Early Christian Church" as descibed for example in Eusebius.

But at the end of the day, it seems true to say that the full name of Jesus does not appear in the earliest Greek manuscripts of the new testament canon. Instead we are looking at the presence only of an encrypted code "ΙΣ" . This is like printing a huge set of maps without a legend for the color coding or other conventions used in the maps. The legend or correspondence between the full name of "Jesus" and the "Code" was not published at all within the New Testament.

If we were to go back to the early centuries of the common era and wander into an orthodox Christian bookshop and purchace a copy of the new testament then we would be faced with a problem. Even supposing we read Greek quite fluently, we would come across the use of this code "ΙΣ" ---- let's call it "J_S overbarred" . We read this, and even if we understood everything else in the books of the new testament canon, we would need to ask ourselves the question ... what does this code mean? To whom do these stories refer? There is no legend in these earliest Greek manuscripts! What to do?

Obviously we have to go the local Christian Church for directions! The authority as to what the encyption actually means must have been retained with the designers of the symbolic abbreviation. In the above we see that some people consider that the meaning of the code was retained by the people who read the books in church ...... They would say to us, when you see this code "J_S overbarred" in "our books of the NT canon" you need to read this code as the name of "Jesus". J ..... S. This appears to be an extraordinary state of affairs, and does not appear to have been outlined anywhere.

Could in fact "J_S overbarred" have been the symbolic form of "Jack Smith"?.

Do we have any clever pagans arguing that the code was not representative of "Jesus" but someone else?
For example, that "J_S overbarred" actually refers to another historical person called "Jackianus Smithellenus".
Did the Romans actually crucify a person called Jack Smith?
This is no longer a trivial question -- since no "Legend" has been explicated anywhere.

In any event the second question now becomes quite relevant.

Who or what is the earliest source in the literary tradition and the manuscript evidence
who first wrote out the name of Jesus Ἰησοῦς in full as being the "Historical Ἰησοῦς" ?

When the coded form appears early to be UNIVERSALLY employed,
who is the first to use the full name of Ἰησοῦς explicitly?
Do in fact all roads lead to Rome and the "single redactor" Eusebius?

Does anyone have any idea at all which is the oldest extant manuscript on Earth upon which the full Greek name of "Jesus" (ie: Ἰησοῦς ) has been written explicitly --- in full --- in unambiguous respect of "Our Man Jesus"?

mountainman

Thanks for that reference darstec. The Sinaiticus is often perceived as one of the original "Fifty Constantine Bibles" and it should serve to remind people that the "Eusebian Canon Tables" -- could have been -- issued in every copy as a "Ready Recknoner" of "Who said what"? and "Who didn't say What"? It was a real package, the Constantine Bible.

But the intriguing fact appears to be that the name of Jesus does not appear in it at all but rather, a code was used instead.

The code used for "Jesus" was the exact code that appears in the Greek LXX or septuagint for the name of "Joshua", namely "ΙΣ".

I dont think so. The waters get murkier when we see that the "Gnostic Authors" writing in Coptic also adhered to the use of a codified system in which a legend was not supplied.

"ΙΣ"

Fabulating Jesus, the Coptic Nomina Sacra, and intriguing questions

Fabulating Jesus: Why Gnostic "Codes" Do Not Name the Historical Jesus

"Jesus," considered as the proper name
of an assumed-to-be historical person,
does not appear in the Gnostic Coptic writings.
The same applies for the term "Christ"
understood as the Incarnation or Son of God
celebrated in the theology of Saint Paul and Saint John.

In my book "Not in His Image" I wrote:

In the Coptic Gnostic material
the names Jesus and Christ
are never written in full,
but indicated by code such as
the letters IS with a bar over them.
Scholars routinely fill in the blanks,


JESUS from IS making IS into I(eseo)S,
the Greek form of the Hebrew name Yeshua.

They do so with considerable poetic license,
for there is no textual evidence to support
the assumption that in Gnostic usage
IS indicated a historical person
named Ieseos, Jesus.

IS could as well be translated in another way:
I(asiu)S, giving the name Iasius, “the healer,”
a title rather than a common name.


But translators assume that IS
indicates Jesus of the New Testament.

In short, scholars do not allow us
the chance to consider that IS might indicate
anything else but a literal person
whose identity is predetermined.


Christ from XS (or XRS)

The same applies for Christ.
The code for Christ is XS or sometimes XRS,
which could as well indicate Christos,
or even Chrestos.

In Coptic it looks like this:

XC, with a bar over the letters.
X is the Greek letter chi
and C is the Coptic S.

Scholars fill in XC so that
it reads “Christ,” never “Christos,”
even though “Christos” is more
consistent with the final S.

Where XC appears in the Apocryphon of John, for instance,
scholars put the Greek Christos in parenthesis
but translate the coded word as “Christ.”

Doing so, they immediately equate XC
with the well-known entity of Pauline and Johannine theology.

Again, this is poetic license.
Considering all the Gnostic material
that argues against the Pauline-Johannine redeemer,
this equation is extremely dubious.

mountainman

G'day again darstec,

Needless to say I totally agree with you on this issue. However I think that paleographers themselves have their own disclaimer clauses on the detection of forgeries.



This is a nice succinct summary of the point which I was attempting to argue in another thread entitled C14 dating the "Gnostic Gospels and Acts" to the 4th century .

Please feel free to repeat any of your comments in that thread.


The late C14 date citation is of no use to anyone who follows Eusebius, and the entire mainstream BC&H camp either follow Eusebius or his chronological framework -- he is after all the ONLY available source.

This is why this question about the "JESUS CODE" is important. The mainstream have to go along with the implication that we are dealing with not only an apostolic lineage of tradition and scripture and church and history, but also a lineage of the use of the "JESUS CODE", which itself was simply lifted, copied ---- perhaps "forged" ---- from the corresponding "JOSHUA CODE" in the Greek manuscripts of the LXX.

The "JESUS CODE" in the Coptic language, as I have cited above, may also be translated as "THE HEALER" a Coptic title for one who heals. In other words, instead of translating the Gospel of Thomas, line by line concerning the sayings of someone symbolised behind the Coptic "Jesus Code", we are also able to translate the Gospel of Thomas as being concerned with the sayings of "THE HEALER". Perhaps the Graceo-Roman priesthood of Asclepius whom Constantine utterly destroyed by the army c.324 CE on onwards in the Eastern Empire.

We do not have a "hardcoded" equation between "Jesus" as a full name and thus "Jesus as an Historical Figure" in any of these texts. It seems reasonable to think that the fullname of Jesus may have been a contraversial issue for many of the Greeks in the Eastern Roman empire when Constantine turned up with his canons blazing.

The literary evidence and its use of a code which was "read aloud by the church reader to the assemblies" implies that the name of Jesus can only have been preserved in the oral tradition. This evidence IMO does not lend support to an "Historical Jesus" as such.

Clivedurdle

Judaism also did not say the full name of God but used a short form.

Does this not show that if the same idea is being used for the sacred name the assumption was similar to the Jewish one - it is blasphemous to say the name out loud or write it in full.

And therefore we are looking at a god - not a human.