Buried clues about early Christianity from the context of Pliny’s letters?

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John2
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Re: Buried clues about early Christianity from the context of Pliny’s letters?

Post by John2 »

GakuseiDon wrote: Thu Mar 11, 2021 7:10 pm Sure, and I'm not saying that Jesus (if he even existed in the first place) was not a revolutionary. Aleph One expressed surprise that Pliny "never hints in the least that these Christians are worshiping (as a god) a would-be Jewish revolutionary". What I'm saying is that, as far as I know, Jesus was never accused of being a would-be Jewish revolutionary by pagans, Jews or Christians. I agree that a case could be made that that was exactly what Jesus was, and people have made that case in more modern times. But no-one made the case back then as far as I know.

Alright, but I'm suggesting that the NT itself makes the case that Jesus was (and was thought to be) a "revolutionary," and by my dating it is more or less earlier than Pliny. It may not use the word "revolutionary" (or "Fourth Philosopher," since that's Josephus' label) to describe him, but it makes no bones about Jesus teaching against "the customs of our fathers" and being a "Messiah"/"Son of Man"/prophet/magician in the vein of Theudas and other Fourth Philosophers, and he suffers and dies for the same goals and with a similar resolve that Josephus says was "well known to a great many." The NT couldn't be more plain about these things, e.g., Mk. 8:31-32, 11:8-10 and 14:61-62:

Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests, and scribes, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again. He spoke this message quite frankly ...
Many in the crowd spread their cloaks on the road, while others spread branches they had cut from the fields. The ones who went ahead and those who followed were shouting: “Hosanna!” “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” “Blessed is the coming kingdom of our father David!”
Again the high priest questioned him, “Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed One?”

“I am,” said Jesus, “and you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of Power and coming with the clouds of heaven.”


And the NT says that Jesus was accused of "many things" that presumably pertained to the charge of being "the king of the Jews" (a label he does not deny) in Mk. 15:2-4:

So Pilate questioned him, “Are you the King of the Jews?”

“You have said so,” Jesus replied.

And the chief priests began to accuse him of many things.

Then Pilate questioned him again, “Have you no answer? Look how many charges they are bringing against you!”



Don't you suppose that these "many charges" included the accusation that Jesus was a "revolutionary"?

So what I'm saying is that the NT itself provides the evidence you are looking for, given that it presents Jesus as being thought of by Jews and pagans as a "revolutionary" (even if it doesn't use that word) and having the same goals and being arrested and killed like one.

What I think the NT is saying is that Jesus was a different kind of "revolutionary," a different kind of "Fourth Philosopher," with a different approach to accomplishing the same thing that other Fourth Philosophers wanted (that "one from their country should becomes governor of the habitable earth"). But by the time of Pliny, the "revolutionary" nature of Christianity had become more like a Gentile "superstition."
Last edited by John2 on Fri Mar 12, 2021 3:20 pm, edited 4 times in total.
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GakuseiDon
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Re: Buried clues about early Christianity from the context of Pliny’s letters?

Post by GakuseiDon »

Aleph One wrote: Fri Mar 12, 2021 2:54 am+1 My first thought as well. Interesting...I might try to look into whether a pre-sunrise service was a known component of other religious sects or groups at the time (and I see now that Ken mentioned exactly that regarding Josephus's Essenes).
I don't know how much should be read into that. Using the rising of the sun as a convenient time-marker would have been a common-sense approach to organising events in ancient times. It doesn't mean the sun itself was literally worshipped, anymore than people in modern times literally worship clocks. Here in Australia, every year we have a dawn service for our ANZACS, the service men and women of Australia and New Zealand. We don't worship the sun by doing so.

Terullian responds to the charge of Christians worshipping the sun in "Ad nationes", Chap 13:
http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/t ... ian06.html

Others, with greater regard to good manners, it must be confessed, suppose that the sun is the god of the Christians, because it is a well-known fact that we pray towards the east, or because we make Sunday a day of festivity. What then? Do you do less than this? Do not many among you, with an affectation of sometimes worshipping the heavenly bodies likewise, move your lips in the direction of the sunrise? It is you, at all events, who have even admitted the sun into the calendar of the week; and you have selected its day, in preference to the preceding day as the most suitable in the week for either an entire abstinence from the bath, or for its postponement until the evening, or for taking rest and for banqueting. By resorting to these customs, you deliberately deviate from your own religious rites to those of strangers. For the Jewish feasts an the Sabbath and "the Purification," and Jewish also are the ceremonies of the lamps, and the fasts of unleavened bread, and the "littoral prayers," all which institutions and practices are of course foreign from your gods. Wherefore, that I may return from this digression, you who reproach us with the sun and Sunday should consider your proximity to us. We are not far off from your Saturn and your days of rest.

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rakovsky
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Re: Buried clues about early Christianity from the context of Pliny’s letters?

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When I see "Pliny" and "early Christian" used together in a sentence, I think of Pliny the Elder's Natural History encyclopedia from the 70's AD where he talks about the Nazarine community:
Coele Syria has the town of Apamea, divided by the river Marsyas from the Tetrarchy of the Nazerini...

MODERN EDITOR'S FOOTNOTE:
It is suggested, that these are the Phylarchi Arabes of Strabo, now called the Nosairis, who were situate to the east of Apamea. The river Marsyas here mentioned was a small tributary of the Orontes, into which it falls on the east side, near Apamea.
This Apamea is near the city of Pella in Syria.

Eusebius reports that the Nazarenes/Jewish Christians of Jerusalem left Jerusalem soon before the 70 AD Roman Conquest and went to settle in the Pella in Jordan.
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Ben C. Smith
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Re: Buried clues about early Christianity from the context of Pliny’s letters?

Post by Ben C. Smith »

rakovsky wrote: Fri Mar 12, 2021 3:30 pm When I see "Pliny" and "early Christian" used together in a sentence, I think of Pliny the Elder's Natural History encyclopedia from the 70's AD where he talks about the Nazarine community:
Coele Syria has the town of Apamea, divided by the river Marsyas from the Tetrarchy of the Nazerini...

MODERN EDITOR'S FOOTNOTE:
It is suggested, that these are the Phylarchi Arabes of Strabo, now called the Nosairis, who were situate to the east of Apamea. The river Marsyas here mentioned was a small tributary of the Orontes, into which it falls on the east side, near Apamea.
This Apamea is near the city of Pella in Syria.

Eusebius reports that the Nazarenes/Jewish Christians of Jerusalem left Jerusalem soon before the 70 AD Roman Conquest and went to settle in the Pella in Jordan.
I confessedly do not have a brilliant take on what Pliny is talking about exactly when he mentions the Nazerini, but I am pretty sure he is not talking about the so called Nazarenes. The connection to the modern Nuṣairi, or Alawites, is tenuous at best, as Muslim scholarship seems well aware. And Pliny spelling the word with a zee/zed is suspicious, given the universal Semitic use of ṣade for the (quasi-)Christian group; the Christian use of zee/zed can be explained by confusion or conflation with the Nazirite vow, but what would explain Pliny's use of it as probably derived from Marcus Agrippa? Overall, whatever Pliny is talking about, it is precipitous to assume he or his source is thinking of the Nazoreans/Nazarenes.
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MrMacSon
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Re: Buried clues about early Christianity from the context of Pliny’s letters?

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GakuseiDon wrote: Fri Mar 12, 2021 3:06 pm Here in Australia, every year we have a dawn service for our ANZACS, the service men and women of Australia and New Zealand. We don't worship the sun by doing so.
Yet ... the the official insignia of the Australian Army, the Australian Army General Service Badge, is a Rising Sun Badge, viz. -

AusArmyBadge.jpg
AusArmyBadge.jpg (41.31 KiB) Viewed 4144 times

Rising sun designs had appeared on early Australian colonial coins and military insignia decades before the federation of the Australian colonies in 1901, and may have represented the image of Australia as 'a young nation' and a 'new Britannia'. As early as the 1820s, the symbol of a 'rising sun' was used by various progressive organisations, loosely characterised under the banner "Advance Australia".

The Rising Sun Badge became the Army Badge during the Boer War. Since its inception the basic form of the 1904 version has remained unchanged, although modifications have been made to the wording on the scroll and to the style of crown (it was initially ambiguous with the suns rays also being bayonets).

ANZAC commemorations involve reciting The Ode -

"They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them."


- which is the fourth stanza from a poem by the English poet and writer Laurence Binyon, For the Fallen, published in London in the Winnowing Fan; Poems of the Great War in 1914 (Binyon wrote the poem after British and French soldiers retreated from Mons, during the Battle of the Marne, in September 1914).

The dawn service follows from both the badge and The Ode .

(The phrase 'Lest We Forget', usually uttered after the Ode, was penned by Binyon's contemporary and fellow poet Rudyard Kipling)
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Re: Buried clues about early Christianity from the context of Pliny’s letters?

Post by GakuseiDon »

Right, so just finding references to the sun doesn't mean literal worship of the sun. The ANZAC Ode and Last Post ceremony is about as religious a secular society like Australia can get. It still brings me to tears watching it, even though most of it is a single bugle playing and then silence.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2E9ElAgAY4Y

(Note: there are even stakes -- stauros, if you will -- being used as goal posts and to hang flags on!) But other than the references to 'sun' and 'morning', it isn't about sun worship.
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Re: Buried clues about early Christianity from the context of Pliny’s letters?

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Ben C. Smith wrote: Fri Mar 12, 2021 3:37 pm I confessedly do not have a brilliant take on what Pliny is talking about exactly when he mentions the Nazerini, but I am pretty sure he is not talking about the so called Nazarenes. The connection to the modern Nuṣairi, or Alawites, is tenuous at best, as Muslim scholarship seems well aware. And Pliny spelling the word with a zee/zed is suspicious, given the universal Semitic use of ṣade for the (quasi-)Christian group; the Christian use of zee/zed can be explained by confusion or conflation with the Nazirite vow, but what would explain Pliny's use of it as probably derived from Marcus Agrippa? Overall, whatever Pliny is talking about, it is precipitous to assume he or his source is thinking of the Nazoreans/Nazarenes.
Wow, you did a lot of work on this. I want to better understand what you are saying about the problem in equating Jesus' Nazarenes with Pliny's Nazarini.

It sounds like you are giving two arguments against equating Nazerini with Nazarenes.
(1) When Roman writers came across the Semitic Ц (sade), like in the Hebrew word for Nazarenes (Notzrim in Hebrew), they practically never wrote it with a Z when they put it into Latin. In that case, what letter did the Romans use for the Ц?

It seems that your reasoning is that if Pliny in c. 70 AD was looking at the Hebrew word Notzrim, he would have written S like Romans did when they saw the Hebrew Ц. That makes sense.

(2) Pliny was using Marcus Agrippa (c. 64/62 – 12 BC) as his source, and the convention of writing Notzrim as Nazarene did not exist yet in Marcus' time. So even if he was talking about a pre-Christian Nazarene sect, Marcus would have just used the standard Hebrew-Latin transliteration that switches Ц to S.

I want to study the Nazerini reference more. But if Nazerini refers to "Nazarenes," here are some ways to explain the S vs. Z issue that you are bringing up for the Ц in Notzrim:

1. Roman writers could have confusion or imprecision when translating non-Romance words into Latin. An easy example is Chrestos for Christ. Just today I am going through Galilean placenames, and one of the difficulties in locating ancient sites is that we often take into consideration Arabic, Greek, and Hebrew names for the same place, and it looks really sloppy, like Qana, Kana, and Kanaa all being different names considered to match the famous city of "Cana."

2. As you mentioned, the conventional name for Nazarene in Latin was Nazarenus. It must have become a conventional spelling for them early on, because Greek uses a Z for them too. So if Pliny was reading a Latin text that mentioned the Nazarenes, or if Pliny or his source knew that they were talking about the Christian Nazarenes, they could have used the conventional spelling.

3. The Greek word for Nazarene was Ναζωραῖος, which uses a Z. If Pliny was looking at a Greek writer dealing with the word "Nazarene," he would have found it written with the Greek Z and transposed it with the Latin Z.

4. Hypothetically, a practice of spelling the pre-Christian Notzrim as Nazarene could have existed in Marcus Agrippa's time, or else hypothetically, occasionally Romans could have transliterated a Ц as an S. To give an analogy, in English there is no strict rule as to whether to transliterate the Russian Ц as Tz or Ts (eg. Tzar vs. Tsar). Personally, I prefer "Tzar" because it looks neater.

5. Perhaps Pliny did not take this particular passage from Marcus Agrippa even if largely he did use M. Agrippa's work when it came to this region. He could have used M. Agrippa's work and then added parts like this based on world geography as it existed in the 70's AD, ie. after the Nazarenes fled to Syria. Since we don't have M. Agrippa's work that he used (correct me if I'm wrong of course), we can't check.
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Re: Buried clues about early Christianity from the context of Pliny’s letters?

Post by Ben C. Smith »

rakovsky wrote: Fri Mar 12, 2021 7:42 pm
Ben C. Smith wrote: Fri Mar 12, 2021 3:37 pm I confessedly do not have a brilliant take on what Pliny is talking about exactly when he mentions the Nazerini, but I am pretty sure he is not talking about the so called Nazarenes. The connection to the modern Nuṣairi, or Alawites, is tenuous at best, as Muslim scholarship seems well aware. And Pliny spelling the word with a zee/zed is suspicious, given the universal Semitic use of ṣade for the (quasi-)Christian group; the Christian use of zee/zed can be explained by confusion or conflation with the Nazirite vow, but what would explain Pliny's use of it as probably derived from Marcus Agrippa? Overall, whatever Pliny is talking about, it is precipitous to assume he or his source is thinking of the Nazoreans/Nazarenes.
Wow, you did a lot of work on this. I want to better understand what you are saying about the problem in equating Jesus' Nazarenes with Pliny's Nazarini.

It sounds like you are giving two arguments against equating Nazerini with Nazarenes.
(1) When Roman writers came across the Semitic Ц (sade), like in the Hebrew word for Nazarenes (Notzrim in Hebrew), they practically never wrote it with a Z when they put it into Latin. In that case, what letter did the Romans use for the Ц?
They followed the Greek example and used an ess (S/s).

It seems that your reasoning is that if Pliny in c. 70 AD was looking at the Hebrew word Notzrim, he would have written S like Romans did when they saw the Hebrew Ц. That makes sense.[/quote]

Correct so far.
(2) Pliny was using Marcus Agrippa (c. 64/62 – 12 BC) as his source, and the convention of writing Notzrim as Nazarene did not exist yet in Marcus' time. So even if he was talking about a pre-Christian Nazarene sect, Marcus would have just used the standard Hebrew-Latin transliteration that switches Ц to S.
Not only that, but the convention of spelling the name of the Naṣoraeans with a zee/zed seems to have been Christian. There is no necessary reason why a pagan or even a Jew should fall into the same confusion with the Nazirites.
I want to study the Nazerini reference more. But if Nazerini refers to "Nazarenes," here are some ways to explain the S vs. Z issue that you are bringing up for the Ц in Notzrim:

1. Roman writers could have confusion or imprecision when translating non-Romance words into Latin. An easy example is Chrestos for Christ.
That is a good example precisely because we have numerous examples of it happening. How many Greek or Roman examples do we have of zee or zeta for ṣade?
Just today I am going through Galilean placenames, and one of the difficulties in locating ancient sites is that we often take into consideration Arabic, Greek, and Hebrew names for the same place, and it looks really sloppy, like Qana, Kana, and Kanaa all being different names considered to match the famous city of "Cana."
Yes, and some consonants were confused for other consonants all the time. Was that the case for zeta and ṣade? What I have found suggests that the answer is no.
2. As you mentioned, the conventional name for Nazarene in Latin was Nazarenus. It must have become a conventional spelling for them early on, because Greek uses a Z for them too. So if Pliny was reading a Latin text that mentioned the Nazarenes, or if Pliny or his source knew that they were talking about the Christian Nazarenes, they could have used the conventional spelling.
It is true that, if Pliny were drawing from a Christian source, he might have used a zee. So was he? What Christian source might have told him about a Tetrarchy named after Jewish Christians by that name? Do we even have a source, of whatever date, which suggests that Jewish Christians formed their own Tetrarchies?
3. The Greek word for Nazarene was Ναζωραῖος, which uses a Z. If Pliny was looking at a Greek writer dealing with the word "Nazarene," he would have found it written with the Greek Z and transposed it with the Latin Z.
Again, quite true. And again, what source, or what kind of source are you suggesting which would be a demonstrably better hypothesis than Marcus Agrippa being his source?
4. Hypothetically, a practice of spelling the pre-Christian Notzrim as Nazarene could have existed in Marcus Agrippa's time, or else hypothetically, occasionally Romans could have transliterated a Ц as an S. To give an analogy, in English there is no strict rule as to whether to transliterate the Russian Ц as Tz or Ts (eg. Tzar vs. Tsar). Personally, I prefer "Tzar" because it looks neater.
I would love for you to dig up the ancient examples of this happening. They appear to be extremely rare. We know that there is no strict rule in English about ts and tz because we can find so many examples of each. Does the same apply to antiquity?
5. Perhaps Pliny did not take this particular passage from Marcus Agrippa even if largely he did use M. Agrippa's work when it came to this region. He could have used M. Agrippa's work and then added parts like this based on world geography as it existed in the 70's AD, ie. after the Nazarenes fled to Syria. Since we don't have M. Agrippa's work that he used (correct me if I'm wrong of course), we can't check.
This is where A. H. M. Jones' argument comes into play, as cited at that link.

If you start with the presupposition that Pliny was probably talking about the Nazarene sect, and wait for some drop dead argument to overthrow it by sheer force, then your presupposition is safe.

If, however, you approach the issue more scientifically, granting all hypotheses the same treatment, which data make your presupposition more likely than the alternatives?
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rakovsky
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Re: Buried clues about early Christianity from the context of Pliny’s letters?

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It's better for me to reply to you on your other thread, Ben, which I admit I haven't read yet.
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Re: Buried clues about early Christianity from the context of Pliny’s letters?

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https://www.biblestudytools.com/lexicon ... atsar.html

Perhaps it was intentional. "Naw-Tsar'" => "to guard, watch, watch over, keep".
Who, in the Jewish Culture, had to "Guard" and were called as such? Did the Priestly Watch ever fail?

Josephus, War..., 2, 1, 3:

"...At these the whole multitude were irritated, and threw stones at many of the soldiers, and killed them; but the tribune fled away wounded, and had much ado to escape so. After which they betook themselves to their sacrifices, as if they had done no mischief; nor did it appear to Archelaus that the multitude could be restrained without bloodshed; so he sent his whole army upon them, the footmen in great multitudes, by the way of the city, and the horsemen by the way of the plain, who, falling upon them on the sudden, as they were offering their sacrifices, destroyed about three thousand of them..."

Mark 13: 35 - 37 (RSV):

[35] Watch therefore -- for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or in the morning --
[36] lest he come suddenly and find you asleep.
[37] And what I say to you I say to all: Watch."
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