Toto

You were the one who made the assertion. You must have some evidence of someone who thinks this way?

You pick some archaeologists and ask:

As a general principle, would you date the founding of a city based on the earliest archaeological evidence, or to an earlier century where there is no archaeological evidence?

ApostateAbe

OK. My problem with that question would be that every guessed time period would be "based" on archaeological evidence, regardless of whether the guessed date corresponds with the date matching the earliest archaeological evidence or not. The statement of mine that you challenged was: "The tendency of history is to believe that a settlement existed sometime before the earliest archaeological evidence." I can ask the historians/archaeologists, "Do you agree with that?"

Also, I am offering you to choose three reputable historians/archaeologists. Do you want to just leave that up to me?

dog-on

Abe, have you ever toured any sites from antiquity? I can't help but thinking that you have not.

ApostateAbe

I have, but I was not thinking so much as a historian at the time, but more like a sight-seer. Do you have any insights to offer? Do you think it is probable that a settlement began existing at the same as the earliest archaeological evidence?

yalla

Some time ago, a year or two, archeologists 'found' the site of Cana, as mentioned in g"John".
It was mentioned in dispatches here at FRDB.
The newspaper account about this breathlessly mentioned the stone jars found, circa first century, may have been the very same jars whose contents alleged JC allegedly turned from water into wine.
Yeah, OK.

So far the relevance of this account may be escaping the readers.
But ....

At the same time those archeologists were criticized by a rival group who claimed that they [not the first group] had found the real site of Cana ....10 miles [maybe it was kilometres] away from the other site.

Seek and ye shall find!

Even if it isn't there.

Toto

I really have no idea what you think this means. What are these guesses based on? How could they be based on archaeological evidence that is not the earliest archeological evidence, but be earlier? :huh:

You find any archaeologist who agrees with that statement, and can defend it. It just sounds crazy to me that there could be a tendency in history to date things before there is any evidence that they existed.

ApostateAbe

Great. I have found four appropriate faculty members at my own school, two in the history department and two in the anthropology department. Here is the template of the email that I will send each of them:

Dear Dr. ______,

I am a grad student at USM in the Department of <private>, not [History or Anthropology], but I was hoping that you could help me settle a disagreement that I have with a friend over the probable date of the beginning of a human settlement in ancient history. The disagreement is over this statement:

"The tendency of history is to believe that a settlement existed sometime before the earliest archaeological evidence."

Do you agree or disagree with that? A short answer is OK. I appreciate your assistance in this.

Thanks,

<private>

Let me know if there is anything you would like to change before I send those four emails.

spin

Still not back, but...

There is some question here as to the existence of Nazareth in the 1st century. Arguments from silence fail given that we know there were a few thousand villages in Galilee at the turn of the era, of which perhaps a few hundred at the most mentioned in all the available sources, biblical, Josephan, church. Does that mean that the other 1800 known from archaeology did not exist? Obviously silence is useless here.

If the town has been continuously occupied from its inception it will be had to make tenable archaeological statements about the town without having dug under the currently occupied town, which is quite hard while people live in the village over top of any possible earllier village.

We know that certainly by the fourth century a town known to the Jews as NCRT existed because an inscription mentions a priestly family there. This means that NCRT was well established and fit for assignment to a priestly family, ie it was considered acceptible to Jewish purity and not a new Greek town.

Looking at this town in the reverse manner to what I've done in the past, if it were the invention of christians, how could Jews call it NCRT from the Greek Nazareth? The zeta in Nazareth should be transliterated into Hebrew and Aramaic with a zayin, but it isn't. This leaves the Hebrew form unaccounted for from the christian Greek. How can one explain the Hebrew name of the town if it were invented by christians and called Nazareth?

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As to the issue of the zeta in Nazareth, let me challenge anyone who wants to defend the zeta from Hebrew tsade to come up with a modern analysis justifying the change that is not reliant on W.F. Abright's errors of his 1946 JBL article (for example Raymond Brown, "Birth of the Messiah" simply reiterates Albright's claptrap). Goranson in ABD is insubstantial (Nazarene article). Wise in the Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels uses arguments refuted 90 years ago. So please feel free to find any scholar in the last 50 years who you think deals successfully with the issue. As things stand, NCRT is a failure to explain either Nazarene or Nazorean, or even Nazareth.

ApostateAbe

Toto, the four emails have been sent.

ApostateAbe

Those are some very good points. hjalti and I have been wondering what the original Aramaic pronunciation for the name of the town may have been. I don't know whether it was a "z" sound or something else, but the issue has to do with whether it was probable or improbable for the name of the town to be transliterated into Greek with "z." Do you know how to resolve that issue?