Marcion and the Use of Diminutives With Saint Names

[Secret Alias]

Aramaic does not have a vocative case. The emphatic is typically used. This helps explain Ben's questions about Psalm 110:1 in the other thread. I am out of the country so I can't devote a lot of energy to this but this link might be of interest

The LORDemp and the Lordsprm: The Lord in Aramaic

by Ren Manetti

The word in Aramaic for lord is mry, marya’. Just as with the English equivalent, lord, and with the Greek and Latin words kurios and domine, there are over seven hundred uses of this Aramaic word in the Aramaic New Testament. In Aramaic, lord appears in almost sixty forms. Of these, only eleven are ever used in reference to the Old Testament name of God, Jehovah. In English, every use must be studied in light of its context to determine whether lord is being used either to represent Jehovah, to name the Lord Jesus Christ, or to simply attribute dominion to a man or a woman. Because eighty percent (48 of 59) of the Aramaic forms of lord are excluded from being a reference to the Hebrew tetramagamatton (JHVH) by their spelling alone, a careful understanding of the Aramaic forms is very important to the study of Lord and LORD in the New Testament.

With the listing of the uses of Lord and LORD on this site, are included two new major abbreviations. The first, LORDemp refers to the Aramaic emphatic forms of marya’ when one of these forms represents YHWH. The second, Lordsprm, refers to the use of one of these same emphatic forms for the Lordship of God’s only begotten Son, Jesus Christ.

Introduction: the Use of Emphatic Forms of Lord in the Peshitta

In the Peshitta,[1] the words for lord in the absolute state or construct states are primarily for showing genitive relationships. See the following examples:

*Matt. 9:38-constr.; *11:25 (abs. before daleth); 13:27-constr. (lord of a house), 52-constr. (lord of a house); 20:1-constr. (lord of a house), *8 (must be construct), 11-constr. (lord of a house); 21:33-constr. (lord of a house); 24:43-constr. (lord of a house); *Mk. 12:9-constr., 14-constr. (lord of a house); Lk. 7:41-constr.; *10:2-constr., *21 (abs. before daleth); 12:39-constr. (lord of a house); 13:25-constr. (lord of a house); 14:21-constr. (lord of a house), 23 absolute with emphatic servant and preposition (exception); *20:13-constr., 15-constr.; Acts *14:12-constr. (lord of the gods), 13-constr. (lord of the gods); *17:24 (absolute before daleth); Gal. 4:1-constr. (emphatic not used though Supreme Lord is indicated); Col. 4:1 (masters- emphatic plural; 2nd absolute “a master” – exception) *1 Timothy 6:15 (abs. before daleth).; Jude 1:4 (lord of us?); *Rev. 11:4 (abs. before daleth); *17:14-constr.; *19:16 (absolute before daleth).

Besides these few examples, every other use of lord in the Peshitta is in the emphatic state. At one time in the history of Aramaic, and in the era of Biblical Aramaic (the Aramaic for which there are examples in Daniel and Ezra), the emphatic forms carried a weight of “definiteness” or superlative “the-ness.”[2] However, by the time of the Aramaic of Edessa in the 5th century, the proliferation of emphatic forms had, at the very least, diminished this quality. For instance, in English, “my lord” is a sufficient translation of the emphatic Syriac word for “lord” with the first person suffix. However, in earlier eras of Aramaic, a translation such as “the lord of me” would not have been unreasonable. To say this another way, in the Syriac, “my lord” is used of Lord Jesus Christ, and, as a simple title of respect, to say “sir.” For instance, in Matthew 21:30 the honor a son has for his father is expressed with the Aramaic emphatic form of lord. Here is the King James Version:
And he came to the second, and said likewise. And he answered and said, I go, sir: and went not.

Here are two translations of the Aramaic, the first from James Murdock (Published in 1851; see http://aramaicnewtestament.org/index.htm), the second from Agnes Smith Lewis (Published in 1896):
And he came to the other, and said the same to him. And he answered and said: I [go], my lord, but did not go

And he said to the second likewise, and he answered and said, Yes, sir, and went not.

The use of the same word for “sir” and for “Lord Jesus Christ,” is just like the New Testament Greek. What might be slightly surprising to a Western mind not familiar with Syriac is that an “emphatic” form is used. That the emphatic forms of Lord are dominant throughout the Aramaic New Testament is evidence that the Peshitta text originated in the period of Middle Aramaic.[3] The Peshitta’s origin is very old, as old as the Latin Vulgate, perhaps even older. However, unlike the Koine Greek of the New Testament, the Aramaic of the Peshitta does not reflect language of the first century but of the fourth and fifth centuries.
No one contests the notion that the Aramaic New Testament, the Peshitta, is written in Syriac, the dialect of Middle Aramaic used in Edessa during the third, fourth, and fifth centuries. What is sometimes argued is that readings from the Syriac reflect even older texts that originated in the time of Jesus.

The Abbreviation Lordemp The LORD in The LORD and the Lord

Because of the dominance of the emphatic in Syriac, there are many of Aramaic emphatic forms for Lord in the Peshitta. Most of these emphatic forms reflect a pronominal number. That is, the forms with a third person suffix can be translated as “the lord of him” or “his lord”; words with a first person suffix can be translated “the lord of me” or “my lord.” Hence, it is not surprising that the Aramaic also uses an emphatic form without an identifiable pronominal number to say “the Lord”. This word is marya’. There is simply no other way to say “the Lord” in Aramaic without attaching a pronominal reference. An absolute form, for instance, could only translate as “a lord.” Though in certain genitive constructions, as in English, this can imply “the lord” (as in “lord of heaven and earth”),[4] common use requires the emphatic form, “marya’.”
“Marya’” (ܡܳܪܝܳܐ) is also the Aramaic word used as a substitute for Jehovah, or the Tetragrammaton in the Peshitta. Again, this is very similar to the words used in the Greek New Testament. The Greek New Testament also uses the Lord to represent the Tetragrammaton and to name Christ Jesus who is the Lord. In the first instances, “the Lord” is used to represent Jehovah not to mean Jehovah.[5] On the other hand, in both Greek and Aramaic, the uses of “the Lord” with Christ Jesus mean, literally, the lord, according to the lexicon definitions.[6] These lexicon uses declare who Christ is. These literal uses declare to us his lordship as the only begotten Son of God marked out by the Holy Spirit through the resurrection from the dead, the man, the second Adam, who is lord both of the living and of the dead.
The Greek of the New Testament also says lord, the lord, my lord, your lord, his lord our lord, and their lord. However, the article in the Greek New Testament appears or disappears for a wide variety of grammatical reasons. For instance, as Rotherham notes in the introduction to his translation of the Greek New Testament, “’the Lord’ is good English while ‘the God,’ is not.”[7] This is often reversed in Greek. Indeed, there is some evidence that the original representation for Jehovah was not “the Lord” in Greek but an abbreviation for Lord, KY, with a bar over the top.[8] If this was so, the grammatical need for a definite article would be absent. Still, when the Greek article does appear, or, according to Rotherham’s critically emphasized New Testament translation, when the article should appear with lord (kurios), and when the Syriac emphatic form, without a pronominal suffix is used, the note “LORDemp agrees with the Stephens text” is made. Whenever, according to Rotherham, it is unclear that the Greek article is meant, only “LORDemp” is used. In Ephesians 6:9, Colossians 4:1, I Timothy 6:2, and in I Peter 5:3 the abbreviation lordsemp is used to express the plural use of the emphatic form of marya, or the lord.

Lordsprm in The LORD and the Lord: an interactive online study

Since, the Aramaic New Testament does not employ the absolute form of lord except to show the genitive, it is probably unwise to translate the emphatic forms as “supreme lord.” To equate Middle Aramaic, Edessa Syriac’s use of the emphatic for Lord with the use of adownai in the Hebrew is also inadequate. The Masoretic text, whatever the source of its vowel pointing, still made abundant use of a plural emphatic for supreme lord and of other simple, nonfigurative, forms for lord.[9] Although an emphatic form to mean “the lord” might have been used during the period of Biblical Aramaic, this is not the case in the Syriac New Testament. (On the other hand, evidence that the Syriac reflects readings from the first century might make this an acceptable translation). Nevertheless, whenever the emphatic form without a pronominal suffix is used for our Lord Jesus Christ, I have shown this as “Lordsprm” (for “Supreme Lord”). Again, it is not necessarily true that the emphatic form of Lord in Middle Aramaic means supreme lord while the absolute forms used to show genitive relationships do not. For instance, in two of the three places “Lord of Lords” appears in the Peshitta (I Timothy 6:15, 19:16) absolute forms of lord, not the emphatic form appears. In the Hebrew Old Testament, the most intensive forms of lord, Supreme Lord, are used both times this phrase occurs (Deut. 10:17 and Psalm 136:3).[10] The point is that, in the Syriac New Testament, while the emphatic form of lord was equal in emphasis to the absolute forms, the definite article quality exists only in the context of specific genitive constructions or in the uses of marya’. This equality in intensity is what one would expect with the proliferation of emphatic forms, and this equality of intensity is what the usage of lord in genitive constructions confirms. The grammatical need to indentify the Lordship of Christ as objective rather than personal (mine, our, etc) was satisfied by the use of traditional genitive constructions. Otherwise, to express the lord with an impersonal pronoun reference, as an objective reality, “marya” was Middle Aramaic’s only choice.
The Syriac New Testament’s uses of lord reflect the spoken Aramaic of that era, not the potential emphases of Biblical Aramaic. Nevertheless, in general, in the Syriac, while “our Lord” means the lord of all who believe, the Aramaic use of “the Lord” seems reserved for showing that Jesus Christ is lord over all. That is, only when the Syriac wants to declare that Christ is objectively lord, is the definite, emphatic form of lord, without a pronominal reference, used. The universal quality of the lordship of Jesus Christ, independent of whether a man or woman accepts him, is expressed in Syriac with “marya” (ayrm), the Lord. When the Syriac wants to declare to us that he is the Lord, in essence, that he is “Lord of Lords and King of Kings,” it uses “marya” – the Lord. When the Syriac wants to make known that whether a man accepts Christ as lord or rejects his lordship, Jesus Christ is lord, it uses “marya.” When the Syriac proclaims that whether a man is living or dead, Jesus Christ is Lord, and to him every knee shall bow, it uses “marya.” When the Syriac declares the universal, objective, and absolute quality of the lordship of Christ it says “the Lord.”

Too much should not be made of the numerous instances in which the Peshitta reads “our Lord” or “my Lord” while the Greek and the Latin read “the Lord.” In the first place, while there are at least 128 uses of lord in the vocative in the Greek New Testament, there is no vocative case in Aramaic. The Greek and Latin vocatives do not require an identifying pronoun to accompany them (Similarly, we do not say “O our Lord” in English); however, neither the Latin nor Greek vocative has an analogue in Syriac. The use of emphatic forms to communicate the vocative in the Peshitta (“Our Lord, we don’t know where you are going”), may be odd in English (we would say, “Lord, we don’t know where you are going!”) but this would not necessarily be odd to an Aramaic reader. Additionally, if one is not absolutely committed to an Aramaic primacy (the belief that the Syriac is correct and from it all other “translations” came), the occasional rendering of a Greek form of kurios as “our Lord” is very understandable. The Greek definite article does not always occur when the Greek means (in English) “the Lord.” Additionally, if the Syriac was influenced by the Latin Vulgate, even more latitude in translation must be granted, for Old Latin did not have definite or indefinite articles at all.


[1] Based on the Dukhrana Analytic Lexicon (http://www.dukhrana.com/lexicon/),
[2] “The emphatic or determined state is an extended form of the noun that functions a bit like a definite article (which Aramaic lacks; for example, kṯāḇtâ, 'the handwriting'). It is marked with a suffix. Although its original grammatical function seems to have been to mark definiteness, it is used already in Imperial Aramaic to mark all important nouns, even if they should be considered technically indefinite. This practice developed to the extent that the absolute state became a virtual rarity in later varieties of Aramaic.” from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aramaic_language.
[3] See: Hasting, James, Davidson, Andrews et al. A Dictionary of the Bible, p. 34 column 2
[4] See a longer explanation of English and Aramaic use in the genitive in Galatians 4:1
[5] In Exodus 3:4 God connects Jehovah directly to the Hebrew verb “to become.” As father includes honor and lordship, so Jehovah includes these but is of even greater meaning.
[6] At the Aramaic Lexicon and Concordance website one can search on English word lord. The resulting lexicon entry is a little unwieldy because not only are numbers assigned each form of lord, but numbers are given for the use of each form with a wide range of Aramaic connective and prepositional prefixes. Marya’ entries are numbered 12364 (bmry`-in the lord), 12367 (dlmry`), 12375 (dmry`), 12379 (wbmr`), 12386 (wmry`)12392 (lmry`)12407 (mry`), 31031 (bdmry`), 31032 (dbmry`), 31033 (wdmry`), 31034 (wlmry`). In every case the lexicon definition of marya’ is given as lord. Never is Jehovah named as the definition for marya’. These Aramaic numbers, based on The Way International’s Aramaic concordance’s numerical system, may also be used in a search of Dukhrana Analytical Lexicon of the Syriac New Testament which likewise denotes lord for every use. The Dukhrana Analytical Lexicon is also linked, by each Aramaic form, to two other online English sources: Jennings’ Syriac New Testament. Lexicon, and Payne Smith’s A Compendious Syriac Dictionary. In every instance, the lexicon denotation of marya’ is given as lord.
[7] Rotherham, Joseph. The New Testament Critically Emphasized. “Introduction” page xv.
[8] Phillip Comfort on page 209 of Encountering the Manuscripts: An Introduction to New Testament Paleography gives an impressive account of the plausible development of a system in which KY with a bar was used to specifically replace Jehovah in the Greek translation of the Old Testament Hebrew.
[9] See “Adown and Adownai” on The LORD and the Lord: an interactive online study
[10] See “Adown and Adownai” on The LORD and the Lord: an interactive online study

*These verses are examples of the grammatical requirement that the Peshitta Aramaic use the construct state in place of the emphatic to show ownership. The phrases “lord of lords” (with the plural intensive in Hebrew—Deuteronomy 10:17) and “the Lord of heaven” would surely demand, from context, the title Supreme Lord. Likewise, the lord of the vineyard is the vineyard’s supreme lord. However, grammatically, the construct forms, rather than the emphatic were sufficient. The article-like power in these Aramaic genitive constructions “the Lord of heaven” must be translated into English. Likewise, this emphatic power is contained in the sense of the Aramaic constructions without the specific use an emphatic form. When these genitive constructions with lord appear, I’ve used lordcnsrt or lordabs.

[Secret Alias]

αββα is the Greek transliteration of the Aramaic term meaning 'father'. The Aramaic adds a syllable to the end, producing thus the emphatic or definitive form. It is used to express a vocative case in Greek.

[Charles Wilson]

The word in Aramaic for lord is mry, marya’.

Thank you, SA.

As I have stated several times, Pettinato, in The Achives of Ebla (ISBN -13: 978-0385131520), looks at several names in the Sumerian and finds words such as " 'nmmr-Ha'ad " ("Panther-of-Ha'ad", from which he concludes that we get "Nimrod") and concludes that " 'mmr-Yah " is "Lamb-of-Yah" => "Lamb of God" => "Mar-ya"=> Marya.

The word in Hebrew is " אמּר " (Strong's H 563, http://lovewins.us/bible/strongs/H563), which is THE SAME AS H 564, "IMMER", the 16th Mishmarot Service Group. There is a Natural Word Play here. Those who might wish to see how I got to my conclusions for this material could do a lot worse than start here.

Revelation 5: 5 - 6 (in part), 12 - 13 (RSV):

[5] Then one of the elders said to me, "Weep not; lo, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered, so that he can open the scroll and its seven seals."
[6] And between the throne and the four living creatures and among the elders, I saw a Lamb standing, as though it had been slain
...
[12] saying with a loud voice, "Worthy is the Lamb who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing!"
[13] And I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all therein, saying, "To him who sits upon the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might for ever and ever!"

The King here is probably Jannaeus. "The Lamb" is Immer, which was murdered in the Temple during Passover, in 4 BCE. Jannaeus was Hasmonean. The Hasmoneans were assigned to "Jehoiarib", first of the House of Eleazar in 1 Chronicles 24. Immer is the 16th and last of the House of Eleazar. They believe that the Hasmoneans come from them.

Don't look to the skies. The evidence is on the ground, in an excavated Settlement named "Jabnit", some 20 klicks southwest of Meiron.

"immer" <=> "Lamb".

CW

[Secret Alias]

Hypocorisms in Jesus's description of his followers

If, now, we ask why and with what meaning our Lord designated His disciples ‘these little ones,’ a twofold answer seems indicated. It is on the one side His chief Messianic designation of His followers: it is on the other side the chief of His hypocoristic designations of them. Other designations of each order exist. When Jesus speaks of His followers as ‘children of the kingdom,’ for example, He is applying to them a Messianic designation; or, to confine ourselves to the circle of ideas most closely related to the passages of the Old Testament supposed to be in His mind in the instance holding our attention, when He calls them His ‘sheep’ (Matthew 26:31) or more pointedly His ‘little flock’ (Luke 12:32), these are Messianic designations which He is applying to them. Similarly His language with reference to them was full of hypocoristies. They were not merely His ‘children’ (Mark 10:24, John 21:5), but His ‘little children’ (John 13:33). They were not merely His ‘flock’ (Matthew 26:31, John 10:16), but His ‘little flock’ (Luke 12:32). They were not merely His ‘sheep’ (Matthew 10:6), but His ‘little sheep’ (John 10:7; John 10:16); not merely His ‘lambs’ (Luke 10:3), but His ‘little lambs’ (John 21:15). In the designation ‘little ones’ both these lines of expression reach their height. In calling His disciples the ‘little ones’ of Isaiah 60:22, Zechariah 13:7, He points to them as the true seed of the Kingdom, the branch of God’s planting, the work of His hands in which He shall be glorified (cf. Schwartzkopff, The Prophecies of Jesus Christ, pp. 199–202). In calling them ‘little ones’ (οἱ μικροί) He applies to them the hypocoristic by way of eminence,—so pure a hypocoristic that the very substantive is lacking, and nothing persists but the bare endearing diminutive. There is combined, therefore, in this designation the expression of our Lord’s deep-reaching tenderness for His disciples and the declaration of His protecting care over them as ‘the remnant of Jacob.’ The ordinary suggestions of the meaning of the phrase as applied to the disciples may doubtless be neglected as artificial. Reuss, for example, thinks they were called ‘little ones’ because they were drawn from the most humble, the least distinguished section of society; de Wette, because they were despised and meanly esteemed for Christ’s sake; Dr. Riddle, in recognition of their weakness in themselves in the midst of the persecution of the world. These are all secondary ideas. Primarily our Lord’s disciples were called by Him ‘little ones’ because this was the natural utterance of the tenderness of Jesus’ love for them, and the strongest mode of expressing the glorious destiny that was in store for them. The passages in which the epithet occurs are full of the note of pledged protection, and they run up into that marvellous declaration that no man and no thing can snatch them out of the Father’s hand. We shall not go far wrong, then, if we say simply that our Saviour calls His disciples ‘these little ones’ because He thinks of them as the peculiar objects of His protecting care, and sees in them already of the travail of His soul that He may be satisfied. The greatness of His love for them, the greatness of their significance as the seed of the Kingdom,—these are the two ideas that combine in this designation.

[Secret Alias]

Mani as a hypocorism (probably derived from the title Menachem (paraclete)

THE NAME “MANI”

An almost exhaustive collection of the onomastic forms of the prophet’s name is given in Klíma (1962, pp. 260-70). Mani’s name is attested in Manichean Middle Persian, Parthian, Sogdian, and Old Turkish texts as (m(ʾ)r(y)) mʾny, also with extensions at the end of the word. (See Boyce, 1977, p. 56; Gharib, 1995, p. 207; Zieme, 1975, p. 81; and Drevnetyurkskiĭ slovar’, 1969, p. 336.) In Zoroastrian Middle Persian the spellings are mʾnʾ and mʾnyy (Dēnkard, ed. Madan, pp. 216.19; 216.22 and subsequently), in Pāzand mānāe (Škand gumānīg wizār, ed. Jâmâsp-Ãsânâ and West, 1887, p. 167 and subsequently), in Zoroastrian Sanskrit (ibid.) māneyasya (genitive, with long e). The New Persian spelling is mʾny; Arabic has m(ʾ)ny (Tubach and Zakeri, 2001, p. 278), Chinese mo-ni (Schmidt-Glintzer, 1987, p. 147). The main Western forms are Greek Manēs, Greek (and Coptic) Man(n)ichaios (Tubach and Zakeri, 2001, pp. 274, 281; Dictionary of Manichaean Texts [henceforth Dict.], p. 184), Latin Manes (and Manis? Dict., p. 206), Manichaeus (Acta Archelai, ed. Vermes, p. 35, n. 2), and Mannicheus (Dict., p. 206). Manes became the traditional European form of the name (just as Zoroaster beside Zarathuštra) and is still used sporadically as a given name.

All these forms go back to a name in Mani’s native Aramaic language which must have been correctly rendered by the Syriac spelling mny (Tubach and Zakeri, 2001, p. 277; also mʾny), i.e., Mānī or Mānē, depending on whether the forms in other languages point to an ī or ē in the second syllable.

In favor of Mānē, preferred now by François de Blois (personal communication; he writes Manes), one might adduce Greek Manēs and Latin Manes. But the Latin form evidently imitated the Greek spelling; and, as for the Greek form, the itacistic pronunciation (i.e., tending to /i/) of the letter ēta prevailed in the 3rd century CE and later (E. Schwyzer, Griechische Grammatik, Munich, 1939, p. 186). Besides, the extended forms Manichaios, etc. have an i, not an ē. In favor of Mānī is Chinese Moni, but the possibility that its final vowel was influenced by Buddhist Sanskrit maṇi “jewel”—the catchword of the most popular Mantra om maṇi padme hūm—must not be disregarded. In favor of Mānē are the late Sanskrit form *māneya- and Pāzand mānāe, if they stand for *mānai, which might have become mānē. Syriac mny allows both readings (however. its vocalization with Ḥḇāṣā, the vowel sign for i, demands Mānī; cf. Klíma, 1962, p. 266).

De Blois, too, admits that the testimonies in Syriac, Arabic, and New Persian are contradictory and partly in need of interpretation. His arguments will be given in the Arabic section of the Dictionary of Manichaean Texts and will not be anticipated here.

Three etymologies of the name Mani are worth mentioning. One is that it belongs to a proper name Mānēs, mainly given to slaves, which is frequently attested in Asia Minor (see Ph. Huyse, Iranische Namen in den griechischen Dokumenten Ägyptens, Iranisches Personennamenbuch V, 6a, Vienna, 1990, pp. 46-48). O. Klíma assumed that the word, as a slave’s name, derived from Old Iranian *māniÁa, which denoted any kind of serving manpower in a household (Klíma, 1966, p. 138). This Iranian component, Klíma argued, explains why Mani, himself a born slave according to the Acta Archelai, later bore the same name. But Klíma had to admit that “in the Middle Iranian vocabulary we find no mānī for the slave as a generic term” (Klíma, 1966, p. 140).

Another option is to start with the extended Greek form Manichaios, etc. (reproduced in Middle Persian as mʾnyʾxyws, for m’nyxyws; Henning, 1937, p. 19 = 1977, I, p. 433). This is what Schaeder did (1927, p. 88, n. 1), followed by many others (Tubach and Zakeri, 2001, p. 281, n. 38). He explained the extended form as a rendering of Aramaic Mānī ḥayyā “the living Mani,” which leaves Mānī unexplained. Adam (1969, p. 76, n. 4) regarded Mānī as belonging to Aramaic mānā “vessel” and reconstructed mānā dḥayyē or mānā ḥayyā as “living vessel,” meaning embodiment of the Holy Spirit, an honorific title rather than a proper name. The ī of Mānī remained unexplained.

A problem with both these explanations is, as Tubach and Zakeri justly underlined, the rendering of an Aramaic ḥ by Greek chi (the letter for /x/ or /kh/). They doubt any connection with the Aramaic words “life” or “living” and regard Manichaios as representing *Mānīxai, the short form of an unknown extended name. But their statement that Aramaic ḥ was not rendered by Greek chi, even if it is true of Greek Manichean texts, may sometimes be contradicted by other sources, such as the Septuaginta (Kheiram from ḥyrm, Kharran from ḥrn, Khōrēb from ḥrb, etc.), and by the Greek of the New Testament (F. Blass, A. Debrunner, and F. Rehkopf, Grammatik des neutestamentlichen Griechisch, 16th ed., Göttingen, 1984, sec. 39, p. 31 with n. 4; all these examples were given to me by Desmond Durkin-Meisterernst).

As a third etymology, not only Tubach and Zakeri’s *Mānīxai but also the shorter Mānī might be regarded as one of several Manichean hypochoristic (?) abbreviations, such as Addā, Ammō, Habzā, Ḥannī (or Ḥannai?), Quštai, Taδī (or Taδai?), Uzzī, Zakū (see Sundermann, 1994 [1996], pp. 245-46 = 2001, pp. 486-87). Beside Mānī, a short form *Mānai might be considered, and this might have resulted in Mānē. In that case Mānī and Mānē would both be acceptable forms.

If “Mani” is the short form of a title Manichaios (or something similar), the quest for his real given name imposes itself. The admittedly unreliable Acta Archelai has it that Mani’s real name was Curbic(i)us or Corbicius, and this piece of information was later repeated by other polemicists (Tubach and Zakeri, 2001, p. 284). The name was explained by Puech (1949, p. 25) as a rendering of the Middle Persian and Parthian noun kirbakkar “the pious one” (also to be restored in inscriptional literature; see Ph. Gignoux, Noms propres sassanides en Moyen-Perse épigraphique, Iranisches Personennamenbuch II, 2, Vienna, 1986, p. 105). In Middle Iranian Manichean texts it is used as a common epithet of Mani. Tubach and Zakeri’s proposal, however, to derive Curbic(i)us, etc. from Parthian (or Middle Persian) kirbag “good, pious” fits the Latin form even better than kirbakkar (Tubach and Zakeri, 2001, pp. 285-86).

A weighty argument against these considerations, however, is the fact that Mani as a proper name need not have been an uncommon one. In the primitive community there was also an abbot Mani (Sogdian mʾny-stʾnδʾrʾk, in Parthian called dbyr “writer”; Sundermann, 1981, p. 36, l. 347, with n. 11). Therefore, the most likely solution seems to be to start from a hypocoristic proper name Mānī, given to the prophet but also to other persons. In Mani’s case the name was upgraded by adding ḥayyā “living,” which confirms Schaeder’s old etymology and the form Mānī rather than Mānē.

Not surprisingly, Mani’s names became the object of uplifting transformation (Greek, Coptic Mannichaios, Latin Mannichaeus, i.e., Mannam fundens “pouring out Manna”; Tubach and Zakeri, 2001, pp. 274-75) and, in Christian anti-Manichean polemics, denigrating distortions (Greek maneis “madman,” Syriac mānā dbīštā “vessel (!) of evil,” mānāw dbīšā “vessel of the evil one”; Tubach and Zakeri, 2001, pp. 273, 276-77)

.

[Secret Alias]

More on Mani as a hypocorism

https://books.google.com/books?id=gjmbu ... hDoAQgnMAM

[Secret Alias]

Nomion est un sobriquet en -ιων (de -iwon), dérivé de νομός le pâturage ou l' hypocoristique d'un nom composé comme Δημόνομος. Νομίων est attesté dans l'anthroponymie111

https://books.google.com/books?id=kZL1A ... cQ6AEIGzAA

[Secret Alias]

Hypocorism in Acts

Priscilla (Acts 18:2, 18, 26); Prisca (1 Cor 16:19; Rom 16:3; 2 Tim 4:19)
Sopater (Acts 20:4); Sosipater (Rom 16:21)
Apollos (Acts 18:24; 19:1; 1 Cor 1:12; 3:4, 5, 6, 22; 4:6; 16:12; Tit 3:13); Apollonios
Stephanas? (1 Cor 1:16; 16:15, 17)
Epaphras (Philemon 23; Col 4:12); Epaphroditus (Phil 2:25)
Demas (Philemon 24; Col 4:14); Demetrios (Acts 19:24, 38)
Lukas (Philemon 24; Col 4:14); Lucius (Acts 13:1; Rom 16:21)
Patrobas (Rom 16:14); Patrobios?
Olympas (Rom 16:15); Olympiodoros
Hermas (Rom 16:14); Hermogenes (2 Tim 1:15)
Zenas (Tit 3:13); Zenodotos
Artemas (Tit 3:12); Artemidoros
Antipas (Rev 2:13) Antipatros

[Secret Alias]

The author of the Shepherd - Hermas - was probably Hermogenes

[Secret Alias]

The diminutime ion is used in the gospel especially in the Syro-Phoenician woman story (= θυγάτριον, κυναρίοις).