When I said "what it meant," my intention was not so broad as to refer to every shade of "significance," which can be quite a bit more involved than what I am talking about. Above, I'm talking about the correspondence of the nomina sacra (or ligatures, as Martijn called them, in a more neutral phrase) to words.MrMacSon wrote: ↑Thu Jan 11, 2024 2:22 pmIn the 'inter-testamentary [pre-orthodox-Christian] period' there would have been people coming and going in and out of communities with different interpretations and/or concepts of the meaning and significance of the terms 'Χρήστος' and 'Χρίστος' (and the nomina sacra that represent one or both of them); and of other 'terms' such as 'Messiah,' and even IS/IC/IΣaPeter Kirby wrote: ↑Wed Jan 10, 2024 12:52 pmMrMacSon also gets credit for interacting with the OP and presenting a useful insight. This is a fair point.
The most significant application of this point is that different communities of readers may have understood it differently, reading it differently, some as Χρίστος and possibly some others as Χρήστος, and this I would allow. It's possible that a particular community had a different interpretation. There would be no confusion within that community about what it meant, but it could still differ from the reading in other communities (whether we're talking about differences between communities in different times, different places, or different beliefs). It's worth exploring.
I am indeed saying that the situation would not be completely porous, which was point of the OP, that the spoken word was of course primary and that the spoken word doesn't have the same level of ambiguity found in the written word here. The people coming and going, for the most part, didn't use the texts directly. They spoke with each other. They heard it read. An assumption that people would be imparting various meanings to the text as written relies on the assumption, natural to a modern reader, that the text was primary, that the text was what people were approaching with a blank slate. It was not. People weren't downloading their gospels and epistles and reading them on their computers in the privacy of their home, where they could speculate on the unexplained squiggles (not that you're saying this but it gets the point across). That whole way of thinking about this subject is a modern conceit. It's one thing to attempt to muddle through, as we do, with the texts available to us. It's quite another to befuddle ourselves into thinking that they were muddling through the texts like that themselves. The readers were not encountering just the ligatures themselves, they were encountering the words with which they were familiar and reading them from the page, as they had been communicated to them in preaching and teaching, read to them before. In any given time and place, the word being used was clear to the reader because it was not a matter of interpretation.
They didn't. They didn't have to think about what it was. That was my point. They knew, and it was Ἰησοῦς.MrMacSon wrote: ↑Thu Jan 11, 2024 2:22 pm a fwiw, I also wonder what different people might have thought IS/IC/IΣ might have meant: eg.eta: iv. 'Man' [/Adamas, etc] (as per Secret Alias)
- ' a Tanakh Yeshua/'Joshua as Yeshua/'Joshua redivivus? and/or
- a new, post-Yeshua/'Joshua Ἰησοῦς? and/or
- Iulius Caesar? (known for his clemency and for whom a significant cult existed and persisted for a long time)
I apologize if this is disappointing to the modern reader interested in a good puzzle.
It's a hypothetical. I don't know if anyone, or if any particular person, was in what would have been this kind of rare situation.MrMacSon wrote: ↑Thu Jan 11, 2024 2:22 pm1 who do you mean by them?Peter Kirby wrote: ↑Wed Jan 10, 2024 12:52 pm This could also qualify the point of the OP just a little. If we take the word 'everybody' far enough, we will eventually get to someone who somehow held a copy of the text and didn't know what name corresponded to the letters (... getting it down to Ἰησοῦς and either Χρίστος or Χρήστος). If we consider the references in Pliny and Tacitus, for example, the manuscripts present them1 as knowing 'the name of Christus'.2 It's possible that someone would be familiar with that name alone. If someone like this in a position of power also got to see a copy of the texts briefly, they may not have been familiar with the name of Ἰησοῦς.
- Pliny and Tacitus?
- Some 'groups of people'?
With regard to Pliny and Tacitus, the reference is to Letters 10.96-97 ("cursed Christ," "sing responsively a hymn to Christ as to a god") and Annals 15.44 ("Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius"). They both write this name, i.e. Christ. They did not write "Jesus," at least not in these passages. I do not know that they had much idea what "Christus" meant, other than being a name.