Any Evidence For A Historical Jesus?

[EGross]

I have seen that discussion of Nazarite, Nasorean, Nazareth, too. It's interesting but I don't know how you actually prove it. The Greeks and Romans had a tendency to say "Joe of somewhere" while the Jews used the patronymic form "Joe son of Shlomo" for example. As has been pointed out repeatedly, if someone had said "jesus of nazareth" to a first century jew the answer would have been "jesus of where?"

When the story tellers were doing their myth making, they took 3 similar sounding names "Nazir" (someone who doesn't cut hair or drink wine), "Netzer" (literally a "branch" but is also a messianic reference), and "Natzri" (a dweller of Nazareth), and the word for Christians would eventually become "Notzrim"). So you get a long haired guy with designs on being the messiag from Nazareth. Or maybe the fiction was the result of the words.

As far as "of nazareth" goes, it was not unheard of for Jews to take the name of their birthplace rather than their father's name. After all, Jesus didn't have a Jewish father (and so the problem with being a Levi, Cohen, or Messiah, all of which require a Jewish father), so taking the name of his town would have been normal (Yose the Gallilean from the Talmud comes to mind). While rare, there is an occasion use of the mothers name when the father was executed for some evil deed, or some other reason that he wanted to forget him.