Ken Olson wrote: ↑Sun Feb 18, 2024 9:48 am
I see no one has commented on this yet. I have not worked out for myself what the implications are for what Moles says about χρηστός and ἀγαθός in the New Testament and the Old Testament, at least not yet, but it seems quite significant and I am watching to see where you (and anyone else who might comment) go with this.
That's alright. I haven't quite worked them out either.
Moles begins this essay:
This matter of nomenclature belongs within large and contentious debate about: the cohesiveness of ‘the Jesus movement’ (or ‘movements’) and of ‘Christianity’; the legitimacy of that latter term; the relationship between ‘Christianity’ (or ‘Christianities’) and Judaism (or ‘Judaisms’); and Roman ‘persecution’ of Christianity. Throughout, I try to frame discussion in ways that take account of these debates but are not paralysed by them. Further, paradoxically, my material offers ammunition both to those who wish to generalise about ‘Christianity’ and to those who seek to demythologise it (who could infer that ‘Christianity’ was invented on the basis of a whole series of puns). My initial focus is restricted to a matter of language. But it will rapidly become clear that this matter has itself huge implications.
A little further down:
At the most basic level, there is indeed spelling ‘confusion’ or ‘error’, but that is the beginning of the matter, not the end. I shall argue that the name of ‘Christ’ (however spelled) was inevitably and multiply contested from the 30s of the first century onwards, and I shall tell a story about names, power, defamation, reclamation, pedagogy, and cultural appropriation in the earliest period of Christianity, a period which, on this analysis, will emerge as in essential respects the most formative period of Christianity. This last notion is of course itself highly controversial, but my material will support the claims of Larry Hurtado that Jesus was divinised from the very start of Christianity.15
When above I say ‘story’, I mean something not absolutely provable, something with elements of imaginative reconstruction, or muthos. This ‘story’ is a stitch-work from various materials: a selective account (surely nowadays substantially unproblematic) of some of the many ways in which punning and naming work in the ancient world; a preliminary potted history of the names in question that combines known facts with inferences about how ‘things must have been’; the puns on ‘Christ’ made by the Church Fathers; and a survey of New Testament puns. These materials should have interlocking force. The selective account illustrates the ubiquity and range of the phenomenon and the possibilities for our case. The history of the relevant names suggests certain key issues; these seem to be reflected also in the survey. The Patristic punning seems to echo punning already present in the New Testament and in pagan writers writing about the first century. Indeed, most of the things I say about the New Testament can be found in one form or another in the Church Fathers, but scholars do not seem to retroject this material or its insights into the first century.
This is the context in which he presents the discussion:
Punning is rife both in the Jewish and Gentile worlds, and both orally and in writing, and at both the most popular and the most sophisticated levels. One of its many forms is appeal to etymology and to different etymologies, including invention of etymologies. Another is substitution of synonyms (which is also part of Jewish pesher technique).17 Thus in Livy 6.1.10 ‘quae … ad sacra pertinebant a pontificibus maxime ut religione obstrictos haberent multitudinis animos suppressa’, the use of ‘obstringere’ = ‘bind’ alludes punningly to the popular derivation of religio from re-ligare.18 Another is punning on words that sound identical or very similar but have very different meanings (thus, hearing of Herod’s execution of his sons, Augustus quipped, ‘it is better to be Herod’s pig than his son’).19
Intellectual interest in punning is found among sophists, rhetoricians, grammarians, and philosophers.20 One particular focus was double-ness or the play of opposites. The Presocratic philosopher Heraclitus noted that bios meant both ‘bow’ and ‘life’, the one dealing death to the other (21 B 48 D–K {= D 53 L–M}), the Cynic Diogenes that the high Homeric phrase ‘he lashed [the horses] to make them go’ also meant ‘he lashed an olive’ (D.L. 6.55). Licentious Roman youths heard Sallust’s portentous ‘bellum patrare’ (‘prosecute a war’) as ‘do a pretty boy’ (Quint. 8.3.44). Rhetoricians admired the repetition of the same word or term in pointedly different senses.21
A phenomenon distinct from punning but allied to it is the intense juxtaposition of similar sounds in order to suggest causal patterns (which I shall call ‘sonic associativeness’). Thus at Livy 6.2.9 ‘imperator terroris intulerat’, the ‘cluster of similar sounds reinforces the connection between the general and the fear he inspires’.22
Names are words: the Greek onoma covers both categories; while ‘name’ does not seem to be generally recognised among the numerous meanings of logos,23 the verb lego can certainly mean ‘to name’,24 and it is difficult to see why this should not also be a possible implication of logos.25 Hymns place tremendous emphasis on divine names, their powers and implications. Names may have magic power. Ancient names are ‘speaking names’. They are religiously, morally, and interpretatively telling: Oedipus, who does not know where he is, whose foot—indeed, penis—is swollen; Pentheus, born for grief; Odysseus—who knows (oida), who travels (hodos), who hates and is hated (odussomai); Achilles—the barley man who fills the battle-fields with blood. In Roman contexts, such puns may be bilingual: Aeneas who is ‘terrible’,26 ‘Nero’ who is ‘fortis’,27 Parthenope who evokes Virgil ‘the virgin’.28 The great pagan gods were often polyonomous: even their individual names often interpreted as polysemous. By contrast, the accusative form [Δία] of the greatest Greek god, Zeus, could be used as a transcendental signifier (διά), signifying ‘Zeus’ as cause of everything and through and outside time.29 Individuals may have two quite different names (Paris/Alexander; Pyrrhus/ Neoptolemus). Identity or similarity of name may highlight opposition: Hera hates Heracles. Names may be palindromic: Roma/amor. Names may be linked anagrammatically: Camena/Maecenas.30 Philosophers made capital out of their names (Aristotle, whose ‘telos’ was ‘the best’; Diogenes, ‘son of Zeus’; Epicurus, ‘the helper’, Horatius, man ‘of the hour’, etc.).31
Names also have social and political significance. They both confer identity and affect reputation, including Nachleben: in Greek and Latin, as in English, the word ‘name’ means both ‘identifier’ and ‘repute’. Names can be bestowed honorifically (Augustus Caesar, Jesus Christ), but name-calling is also part of philosophical, social, and political invective. It is often crude: Cleisthenes of Sicyon renamed the three tribes that were not his own ‘pigmen’, ‘donkeymen’, and ‘swinemen’ (Hdt. 5.68.1). It could also sometimes be sophisticated: to call Brutus and Cassius ‘Pompeiani’ was to impute narrow partisanship—even absurd partisanship, since Pompey himself was dead. Proper names themselves can attract scorn: Cicero the chick-pea (Plut. Cic. 1.4), Tiberius to the Tiber! (Suet. Tib. 75.1). Such name-calling belongs within the general rhetorical strategy of hostile appropriation of one’s opponent’s language. Similarly, writers may appropriate other writers’ names: ‘Hesiod’ ‘out-Homers’ Homer; Horace ‘out-Enniuses’ Ennius; Virgil ‘outfights’ ‘Callimachus’.32 Suppression or erasure of names could occur within damnatio memoriae.33 But minority or oppressed groups may revalue a negative name. Diogenes turned ‘dog’ into a boast. And the verdict of history may rehabilitate: in time, no one criticised the philosophical ‘descendants’ of Socrates for styling themselves ‘Socratici’, even though Socrates had been executed by the state as impious and as a corrupter. In time, all Romans called themselves ‘Christians’ or ‘Chrestians’, even though ‘Christ’ had been executed by the Roman state as a political subversive.
Instead of clefting the sense of Chreestos from Christos and arguing for one instead of the other, the essay from Moles shows that he can see these allusions in the texts without hypothesizing any different word being used here. It does imbue the word with more shades of meaning through the inevitable awareness of how it would sound.
