My current and still developing view of the nomina sacra.

[DCHindley]

You [Ben] did quote me, but out of context - I had hit a dead end trying to make sense of the 318, and viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3149&p=114502#p114516 conveys that:

Yes, dead end there. Back to Barnabas and his impossible math of 18 and 300 having anything to do with IN, which is 10 and 50...

m,

Barnabas 9 involves exegesis of Genesis. The 318 men Abraham had circumcised from his household was teased out of Genesis 14 & 17.

The number 18 is gematria for the Greek letters I (iota) & E (eta), interpreted as "Jesus," plus 300 for the Greek letter T (tau), interpreted as the shape of Jesus' cross.

It does not appear to have anything to do with an abbreviation such as IN.

DCH

[mlinssen]

You [Ben] did quote me, but out of context - I had hit a dead end trying to make sense of the 318, and viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3149&p=114502#p114516 conveys that:

Yes, dead end there. Back to Barnabas and his impossible math of 18 and 300 having anything to do with IN, which is 10 and 50...

m,

Barnabas 9 involves exegesis of Genesis. The 318 men Abraham had circumcised from his household was teased out of Genesis 14 & 17.

The number 18 is gematria for the Greek letters I (iota) & E (eta), interpreted as "Jesus," plus 300 for the Greek letter T (tau), interpreted as the shape of Jesus' cross.

It does not appear to have anything to do with an abbreviation such as IN.

DCH

That is exactly the conclusion we reached

[Ben C. Smith]

You [Ben] did quote me, but out of context - I had hit a dead end trying to make sense of the 318, and viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3149&p=114502#p114516 conveys that:

Yes, dead end there. Back to Barnabas and his impossible math of 18 and 300 having anything to do with IN, which is 10 and 50...

m,

Barnabas 9 involves exegesis of Genesis. The 318 men Abraham had circumcised from his household was teased out of Genesis 14 & 17.

The number 18 is gematria for the Greek letters I (iota) & E (eta), interpreted as "Jesus," plus 300 for the Greek letter T (tau), interpreted as the shape of Jesus' cross.

It does not appear to have anything to do with an abbreviation such as IN.

DCH

That is exactly the conclusion we reached

We did reach that conclusion. The difference is that, in the context of the system of nomina sacra, we can know why that ΙΝ is in the text; it stands fully explained. Without the nomina sacra, what would the reason be for the ΙΝ?

[Secret Alias]

FWIW my conclusions after doing a lot of research into pre-Christian Greek abbreviation patterns. The overbar has something to do with gematria. The same marker exists in Hebrew. I think originally the line told people to pay attention to the words because they had numerological significance. Then someone came along (likely Irenaeus) and said 'it's not gematria.'

[Ben C. Smith]

FWIW my conclusions after doing a lot of research into pre-Christian Greek abbreviation patterns. The overbar has something to do with gematria. The same marker exists in Hebrew. I think originally the line told people to pay attention to the words because they had numerological significance. Then someone came along (likely Irenaeus) and said 'it's not gematria.'

How would gematria explain the declensional endings (ΘΣ, ΘΥ, ΘΩ, ΘΝ, and so on)?

[Secret Alias]

I know the evidence doesn't support all of this but ...

1. there are pre-Christian abbreviations.
2. people likely abbreviated words for the same reason that people do today. Speed.
3. the closest example I find is doctor's notes.
4. when I was studying Vatican 1899 (or whatever it is called) I learned about a whole stenographic shorthand which existed in antiquity. There were many mnemonic scripts to speed up transmission.

When doing my research I noticed that even within abbreviated words certain forms of the word were abbreviated more often in certain periods. I don't know why that is but KOU was far more frequent than KOS for instance. I also noticed that KURIOU is more frequent in the New Testament than KURIOS.

Does KOU appear more frequently than KOS as abbreviations in antiquity the pattern of the genitive being more common than the nominative in every day Greek? I don't know. I do know that Andrew brought up that KOU = 490 or 70 x 7 a number mentioned in the gospel. Does that have something to do with the KOU being the name above all names and going back to Daniel's seventy sevens prophesy (i.e. as a prediction of a being coming down from heaven before the destruction of the temple? I don't know.

[Ben C. Smith]

Does KOU appear more frequently than KOS as abbreviations in antiquity the pattern of the genitive being more common than the nominative in every day Greek? I don't know.

What would be the alternative? That authors and scribes deliberately chose certain grammatical constructions just so that the "right" form of a word would appear in the text? That would be like making sure to use "him" more often than "he" in a text just because we find words of three letters to be more symbolic of something than words of two letters. Not impossible, but is that really more probable than form following function?

[mlinssen]

We did reach that conclusion. The difference is that, in the context of the system of nomina sacra, we can know why that ΙΝ is in the text; it stands fully explained. Without the nomina sacra, what would the reason be for the ΙΝ?

Conjugating a word that in the nominative is IS with an accusative of IN is a no-brainer, but perhaps I'm missing a point or two?
Nomina sacra has nothing to do with it, but perhaps you can explain how the word IS being a nomen sacrum would give reason to its accusative being IN in that Barnabas piece?
He treats it just like a noun, although he undeniably tries to give it meaning - in fact, he doesn't treat it as a nomen sacrum; he treats it a something meaningless that needs to get meaning

It would be like me trying to explain why your name is Ben, via some elaborate numerical system, or some crooked etymology. I don't need to, it's meaningful enough to me

[Ben C. Smith]

We did reach that conclusion. The difference is that, in the context of the system of nomina sacra, we can know why that ΙΝ is in the text; it stands fully explained. Without the nomina sacra, what would the reason be for the ΙΝ?

Conjugating a word that in the nominative is IS with an accusative of IN is a no-brainer, but perhaps I'm missing a point or two?

The accusative works okay like that, but not the dative or the genitive: ΙΣ would not conjugate to ΙΥ.

Nomina sacra has nothing to do with it, but perhaps you can explain how the word IS being a nomen sacrum would give reason to its accusative being IN in that Barnabas piece?

Because Barnabas has the name Ἰησοῦς in mind throughout. His own abbreviation of this name is ΙΗ (which is found in some manuscripts). He used Ἰησοῦν (or ΙΝ, if that was not the doing of the scribe) because that is what the grammar demanded in that context (the accusative), but he and his Greek readers are all on the same page: everybody knows that Ἰησοῦς is the name being referred to, so the iota and the ēta make sense as the first two elements of his exercise in gematria.

It would be like me trying to explain why your name is Ben, via some elaborate numerical system, or some crooked etymology. I don't need to, it's meaningful enough to me

Explain a name by reference to numbers? Barnabas is doing the opposite of this. He is explaining a number by reference to a name: trying to explain an otherwise run-of-the-mill number (318) on a page in Genesis by saying that it was pointing to (an accepted abbreviation of) Ἰησοῦς.

[Ben C. Smith]

Duplicate.