Everybody knew what the nomina sacra were

[lclapshaw]

It is a problem to propose a date for Coptic Thomas earlier than the evident existence of Coptic.

It is possible to lean too heavily on a misspelling.

It is more philosophic than religious to speak of the good.

It is the case that nomina sacra are a subset of abbreviations, which are sometimes misunderstood, such as R. I. P.

What on Earth does any of this, have, even remotely, to do with the subject at hand?

[lclapshaw]

If everyone knows what IC is then why use an abbreviation at all?

Rhetorical questions like this one don't really tell us what you're trying to argue. We are left to speculate and wait for the inevitable reply that none of the speculations match the hidden intention behind the rhetorical question.

Let's try that in the form of a statement and explicit argument (which may not be yours, since you haven't told us what yours is):

(1) If everyone knew what word was behind the abbreviation, then they would not use an abbreviated form of the word.
(2) They do use an abbreviated form of the word.
(3) Therefore, not everyone knew what word was behind the abbreviation.

Let's try again in the form of another statement and explicit argument (which, again, may not be your argument):

(1) If people use an abbreviation of a word, they need a plausible reason.
(2) One plausible reason is that not everyone knew the word behind the abbreviation, making it impossible for everyone to write out the word.
(3) There is no other reason that is plausible.
(4) Therefore, the only plausible reason to use the the abbreviation is that not everyone knew the word behind it.

Or maybe this:

(1) There's one or more plausible explanations of the use of an abbreviation that are consistent with the premise that not everybody knew the word behind the abbreviation.
(2) There is no plausible explanation of the use of an abbreviation that is consistent with the premise that everybody knew the word behind the abbreviation.
(3) If people use an abbreviation, there is a plausible explanation. People did, so there is one.
(4) Since the only plausible explanations are those that are not consistent with the premise that everybody knew the word behind the abbreviation, not everybody knew the word behind the abbreviation.

Of course, for us to know what is being suggested, only you can explain the implied argument.

In any case, people sometimes used abbreviations. The most common situation truly is that everyone knows what the word behind the abbreviation is, and this goes double when people's exposure to the written word is by hearing it read aloud. For example, Arabic numerals are a form of abbreviation. Instead of writing five, we can write 5. When it's read, we say five. Everyone knows that 5 is five. It's impossible not to know it; you can't say it aloud without actually saying the word. In this case, everyone involved knew that these abbreviations referred to the name of Jesus.

Obviously we can ask a question in a moment that takes a very long time to investigate or permits of various answers: the "why" behind the use of an abbreviation is a good question. We can look into the "why" of the use of these ligatures. Being able to ask a question about why they were used just doesn't mean what you seem to hope it means (that not everybody knew what word is being used here).

You know... IC, IHC, IH became IHCOYC. That is fact, not open to debate. What is open to debate is whether IC, IHC, IH started out as IHCOYC. I don't see how we can know that, as all we have in the original texts are IC, IHC IH.
So, in an attempt to not limit my options and be as objective as possible I will use IC, IHC, IH until I know for sure what the original usage of these abbreviations was meant to be.

That's all. Pretty simple really.

The point of the OP undermines the attempt to give this a diachronic account as you try to outline above. That is, they didn't have just the abbreviation, alone and by itself; the word is transmitted alongside the abbreviation because these texts (being used by Christians) were both oral and written at the same time. The idea of a diachronic development sneaks in the (modern) misunderstanding that the text existed as a thing unto itself, approached for interpretation without that prior knowledge. Accordingly, the abbreviations could not "become" the word because they always were the word. The two are inextricably linked.

And, since we know that this abbreviation was being used for the name of Jesus by ancient Christians (as you acknowledge above), we also have objectively shown that the abbreviation in the Greek manuscripts used by them referred to Jesus (in the general case).

Subjectively, that's not satisfactory because it limits options and is problematic for a lot of interesting speculations.

You make statements like the highlighted above as if they were facts but I have no idea how you could know that. As you said before "we both have the same sources of material available to us" yet I would never make such an unattested claim. Why do you?

[Peter Kirby]

That's just how texts were used and transmitted. They were read, which is to say, they were read aloud, which again is to say, the words were spoken. This applies necessarily in the case of Christian NT texts, and not only in general as the predominant way texts were known, given their cultic use.

[lclapshaw]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWdd6_ZxX8c

[Peter Kirby]

It's also not hard to solve the puzzle from first principles if we aren't afraid to dispel the mystery.

We know that it appears as a noun in the texts, adjusted in different ways for the nominative, genitive, and accusative cases, by varying the final letter(s). We also know that it appears as an abbreviation by suspension, containing the first two letters. So we know that in the nominative case it has the first two letters iota-eta and the last letter sigma. We know that it was written in koine Greek texts.

Consulting a comprehensive recent Greek dictionary (Bailey 2020), we know by deduction that there are exactly two candidates for a word that meet all of these criteria. One of these candidates is Ἰήνυσος, a seaport in Syria mentioned once by Herodotus. The other is the name Ἰησοῦς.

The logical conclusion is that this is an abbreviation for the name Ἰησοῦς. We can accept that and move on, or we can refuse to accept it and jerk off.

[lclapshaw]

It's also not hard to solve the puzzle from first principles if we aren't afraid to dispel the mystery.

We know that it appears as a noun in the texts, adjusted in different ways for the nominative, genitive, and accusative cases, by varying the final letter(s). We also know that it appears as an abbreviation by suspension, containing the first two letters. So we know that in the nominative case it has the first two letters iota-eta and the last letter sigma. We know that it was written in koine Greek texts.

Consulting a comprehensive recent Greek dictionary (Bailey 2020), we know by deduction that there are exactly two candidates for a word that meet all of these criteria. One of these candidates is Ἰήνυσος, a seaport in Syria mentioned once by Herodotus. The other is the name Ἰησοῦς.

The logical conclusion is that this is an abbreviation for the name Ἰησοῦς. We can accept that and move on, or we can refuse to accept it and jerk off.

Not quite. While the use of IHC is used so is IC without an eta (H), sometimes both being present on the same page of text.

Of the four main NS, θC, KC, IC, and XC only two have variants that use an extra letter, IC/IHC and XC/XPC. This suggests, to me at least, that the original usage was IC and XC and that those abbreviations were later added to, to make them more understandable in the way that the authors of the texts wanted them to be. Namely IHC for IHCOYC. But we still have IC by itself to wonder about.

Is IC the earlier abbreviation? That θC and KC remained a two letter combination suggests to me that it was. Plus we have the examples of more and longer NS being used over time that helps confirm this.

Was IC originally different than IHC? I don't know. I don't see how anyone could, given the material that we have.

"or we can refuse to accept it and jerk off."

Maybe tone it down a little?

[Peter Kirby]

Another alternative is to refuse to accept it and move on. I can respect that. Prescinds from knowledge, without obfuscation.

[Leucius Charinus]

Is an oral nomina sacra tradition falsifiable?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_gospel_traditions

[davidmartin]

yeshuah means salvation in aramaic
not a name a noun

[Ken Olson]

yeshuah means salvation in aramaic
not a name a noun

You are proposing a false dichotomy. In a previous post, Stephan Goranson provided Tal Ilan's list of the ten most common male names of Jews in Palestine in and around the first century (Joshua/Jesus is #6):

Tal Ilan (in Lexicon of Jewish Names in Late Antiquity. Part I, Palestine 330 BCE-200 CE [2002] page 56 Table 6) lists the 20 most popular male names. Here are the top 10 (with the number of times): 1 Simon (257), 2 Joseph (231), 3 Judah (179), 4 Eleazar (177), 5 Yohanan (128), 6 Joshua (103), 7 Hananiah (85), 8 Jonathan (75), 9 Mattathias (63), 10 Menahem (46).

All of them mean something in Hebrew.

Best,

Ken