ghost wrote:Leucius Charinus wrote:I don't know at the moment. Nobody knows where these codifications originated, but they appear with the earliest evidence.
Do we have any artfacts - coins, inscriptions, etc - where the IS refers to Julius Caesar?
Not that I'm aware of, but the initial and final letters are the same, and they're both protagonists of the main religion in the Roman empire.
Some people point out that "IS" has a numerical value of 18.
Is this relevant for either Jesus or Julius or Joshua or Peter or Paul or Mary ...?
One standard argument mentioned here and there is that the word "life" also adds to 18.
But I have never understood that argument.
My guess is Roman Catholicism isn't called Roman for no reason.
That's a reasonable guess.
When and where this "Divine institute" first politically and historically started business would represent other guesses.
But whatever happened, the divine institute appears to have used a nearly universal standard of "sacred names" in the LXX and the NT
How novel a technique was this in the first few centuries of the common era?
Anyone know of any other literary works employing codes?
Euclid?
Since these nomina sacra are shorthand, I guess they were more resistant to rewriting and survived rewriting processes from the times when the identity of Jesus with Julius was still transparent to most people. :scratch:
There is no doubt that Augustus - the son of the divine "IS" - found in Rome a city of bricks and left it a city or marble.
The movement from Republic to Empire was an irreversible process. Roman Emperor's were ever more closely related to the gods than before.
http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/R ... /home.html
Monumentum Ancyranum (Res Gestae Divi Augusti)
At the age of nineteen,2 on my own initiative and at my own expense, I raised an army3 by means of which I restored liberty4 to the republic, which p347had been oppressed by the tyranny of a faction.5 For which service the senate, with complimentary resolutions, enrolled me in its order, in the consulship of Gaius Pansa and Aulus Hirtius, giving me at the same time consular precedence in voting; it also gave me the imperium.6 As propraetor it ordered me, along with the consuls, "to see that the republic suffered no harm." In the same year, moreover, as both consuls had fallen in war,7 the people elected me consul and a triumvir for settling the constitution.8