RE: What were Jesus and early Christians like?
March 7, 2015 at 5:05 pm
(This post was last modified: March 7, 2015 at 5:26 pm by TimOneill.)
(March 7, 2015 at 11:32 am)robvalue Wrote: He may well have been a nazarene at one point then the wine stuff was added later to the story, and no one noticed the problem.
Why go to all this effort to come up with a Jesus who wasn't from Nazareth, was a Nazarene and yet somehow this got forgotten and then Nazareth gets invented? Why not just accept a much more parsimonious reading of the text - that he ... was from Nazareth?
Is there some reason this is not likely? I've never seen it.
And if Nazareth was invented as a way of explaining Ναζαρηνός after it was (somehow) "forgotten" that this meant he was a Nazarite (why?), then it's very strange that a town of that name appears in the late first century, given we have an inscription detailing how a course of priests was settled there in the wake of the Jewish War. Co-incidence?
This whole tangled mess is simply unnecessary. Why was he called Ναζαρηνός? Because he was from the village of Ναζαρέτ/Ναζαρὲθ . Simple - no convoluted and unnecessary suppositions and tangled "what ifs" required. Occam's Razor applied.
