Some Observations on the Nomina Sacra of the First Three Centuries

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andrewcriddle
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Re: Some Observations on the Nomina Sacra of the First Three Centuries

Post by andrewcriddle »

Jax wrote: Sun May 09, 2021 1:35 pm I confess, I'm unsure what David is getting at here myself.
IMVHO he is suggesting that you may be looking for patterns in random data.

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Re: Some Observations on the Nomina Sacra of the First Three Centuries

Post by Jax »

andrewcriddle wrote: Tue May 11, 2021 8:28 pm
Jax wrote: Sun May 09, 2021 1:35 pm I confess, I'm unsure what David is getting at here myself.
IMVHO he is suggesting that you may be looking for patterns in random data.

Andrew Criddle
Ah! Ok, thank you Andrew.

But aren't there actually some observable patterns in the data? For instance the consistent use of KY, KC, KN, and KW as opposed to abbreviations like ThY etc which are not always used, or that KY, ThY etc are always abbreviated using the first letter followed by a case ending unlike abbreviations like IC, IHC etc which sometimes use first letter followed by case and sometimes first two letters followed by case.

IMVHO there are patterns in the data, we just need to tease them out and separate what is relevant from what is not.
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Re: Some Observations on the Nomina Sacra of the First Three Centuries

Post by mlinssen »

Jax wrote: Wed May 12, 2021 6:47 am
andrewcriddle wrote: Tue May 11, 2021 8:28 pm
Jax wrote: Sun May 09, 2021 1:35 pm I confess, I'm unsure what David is getting at here myself.
IMVHO he is suggesting that you may be looking for patterns in random data.

Andrew Criddle
Ah! Ok, thank you Andrew.

But aren't there actually some observable patterns in the data? For instance the consistent use of KY, KC, KN, and KW as opposed to abbreviations like ThY etc which are not always used, or that KY, ThY etc are always abbreviated using the first letter followed by a case ending unlike abbreviations like IC, IHC etc which sometimes use first letter followed by case and sometimes first two letters followed by case.

IMVHO there are patterns in the data, we just need to tease them out and separate what is relevant from what is not.
Data is always random, it is Information that is structured.
It has been my working job for the past 25 years to distill information from data so the information can be used to do business.
Give me any system, in any form of software, bespoke or off the shelf, in any industry, that is causing issues and I'll give you the fix in a week, the cause in 2 weeks, and the solution in 3

Patterns - just put on your blindfold, shut off the brain, and line them all up: administer each and every one of them without any bias whatsoever.
Then present the patterns as they are, fully classified by their technical properties, regardless of context.
Then group them, order them, structure them: by those exact technical properties

And you will have found different Behaviour for those different groups of patterns: you have established rules for a given set of rules

And then, and only then, look at their context: does the context dictate the Behaviour? Is the context determining a rule that matches the Behaviour, or in short: does Behaviour follow from context? Or are there exceptions to the rules of context?

At the end, if you have a fairly sound thesis of rules and exceptions: test your theory. In IT we just reproduce situations and see if we get the same Behaviour, under identical circumstances, and we treat for different circumstances to try to invalidate our theory.
What you could do is to get halfway P46 and then see if the other half behaves like you would expect, given your analysis of the first half. The result is always right, by the way. Perhaps that is why I approach Thomas so very differently, because an IT system is always right. Correct? Pleasant? Sensible? That is irrelevant

Case ending is a good one, forgot all about that!
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Re: Some Observations on the Nomina Sacra of the First Three Centuries

Post by Jax »

So far the patterns that I have noticed are that the earliest forms of the NS seem to be the first letter of a noun followed by a case ending, KY, ThY, XY etc. Then some patterns emerge that suggest that abbreviations like IY, IC, become IHY, IHC, apparently being the first two letters of the noun followed by a case ending. The odd thing about the second type of NS is that it is not consistent, with IY, IC etc. sometimes being in the same text as IHY, IHC, with NS like KY and ThY remaining as they are.

It's as if the use of KY and ThY are so obvious that they can stand as they are but something like IY or IC needs to be elaborated on to make clear what it is. This makes me feel that the NS, IY, IC, etc. is the original form and that IHY, etc. was added later for clarification. But then why have both forms in the same document?

It would be helpful if we had texts that predated when the Church fathers were arguing for Iesous being the name of the XC to see if the NS was consistently IY, IC, etc. instead of the mixed bag that we have now.

Do the Church fathers use Iesous in the clear when they write it down or do they use the NS? And why use NS for what was at the time a popular name?

Something screwy going on here IMO.
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Re: Some Observations on the Nomina Sacra of the First Three Centuries

Post by mlinssen »

Ben C. Smith wrote: Wed Apr 07, 2021 1:05 pm
Jax wrote: Wed Apr 07, 2021 12:55 pmInteresting. How do they abbreviate Christ and Jesus? Do they use both XC, XR, and XRC as well as the various ways that IHCOYC is rendered? or do they just use simple renderings like XC and IC?
Coptic is not an inflected language (no noun cases), so the choices are more limited than in Greek. See the second table below for the options found in the Nag Hammadi manuscripts.
Jax wrote: Wed Apr 07, 2021 12:58 pm ^ It's also very interesting that God and Lord aren't handled like Christ and Jesus.
Yes, but that is because God and Lord are native Coptic words in the Nag Hammadi manuscripts. That is the thing: the Nag Hammadi scribes abbreviated only the Greek loanwords. The pattern is very striking:


Terry Miosi, Tables of Nomina Sacra at Nag Hammadi.png


The highlighted words on that second table are all native Coptic words with antecedents in Pharaonic Egyptian. In other words, we can deduce nothing theological from the nonuse of those nomina sacra. The distinction is clearly linguistic.
That is one way to present the data, and very much in line with Ben's posts really: let's provide all the information we can but above all send the message that nothing can be concluded from it - and when people try to get into a direction, let's just throw even more unrelated info on their path and before their feet, and actively distort what they are doing. Because the alhteia myth must prevail!

Yet do notice the great differences in number for the top half, as well as the fact that 25% of that is completely empty

So what are we really looking at? Well, this:
Miosi-NHL-Forreal.png
Miosi-NHL-Forreal.png (60.63 KiB) Viewed 659 times
And this is the real picture: a very clear top three followed by nothing else but at a great distance.
We see a Nag Hamadi Library that breaths the spirit of Spirit above all: this is a spiritual collection, and it is evident that this either has nothing to do with religion or is still a nascent religion, as every religion starts from spirituality - only to go mainstream, get misunderstood, exploited and ruin everything for everyone save for those that wields its powers and dominate others via it

PNEUMA, IS, XS - and that is it. Plus a ton of Saviour, swthr - yet little of that is abbreviated:

swthr 1.32; 2.11; 16.38; 43.36; 45.14; 48.18; 87.7; 95.35; 113.11,14,17,19;
114.9,31; 115.35; 116.3,19,26,28; 118.25; 120.10; 121.2; 122.15;
138.21*; cwr 1.23; 2.17,40; 4.2*; 16.25

swthr II [1,1]; [1,21]. III [1,20]; 40,9. BG 77,5.
swr II 22,10; 22,12; 22,21; 25,16; 31,32; 32,5. BG 19.9

swthr swr *63:33ap, 63:33ap, 63:34ap, 64:3.

swthr 105:26, 124:33

swthr 130:29, 134:35, 135:16

swthr, swr 138:1, 138:4, 138:27, 138:37, 138:39, 139:25, 139:32, 140:9, 140:40*, 141:4, 141:25, 142:6, 142:10, 142:26, 143:8.

swthr III 68,22; 69,16

swthr V 10,[9].13; 12,16; 13,14. Ill 82,2.7; 84,[2].8; 85,14; 91,7.10.24; 92,6
94,4.14; 95,21; 96,15.18; 98,12; 100,[2]. 18.20; 105,9; 106,15.20; 107,22
108,17.20; 112,21; 113,1; 114,13; 119,9. BG 78,8.12; 79,13; 80,3; 83,5
86,9; 87,9; 90,4; 92,13; 93,16; 100,10; 102,15; 103,4; 105,3; 106,11.14
107,17; 108,6; 114,14; 115,1; 118,1; 126,18. swr BG 83,19; 87,12 sr
V 12,9.12


swthr, swr 120:1, *120:2, *125:1, 125:18, 147:23

swthr VI 9,5. BG 18,11.13. swr BG 7,2.23; 9,[24]; 10,2.4.19; 17,8.14.18; 18,5.21

swthr savior 72,26; 73,11; 80,8; 81,15; 82,9.28. swr 70,14

swthr 131,15

swthr 132,18

swthr IX 4,6; 14,4; 45,17; [60,16]; 67,8.

swthr XI,1:3,26; 5,30; 21,23; 3:58,13

And what we find ourselves looking at it a Story about Spirit, with an IS and / or XS operating as some kind of agent, and a nickname / different label for either could be Swthr, or Saviour - but the latter is merely a label even though it does get some reverence

And then, at a very great distance, some texts mention one single stupid place names, and most of that gets abbreviated - and perhaps that shares similarities with a certain STROS

And that's the story of the NHL, and it is an entirely different one from what we know, and it is evidently much (much) earlier thn any other story that would appear to be related to this, and we haven't even looked at the very partial way that this so-called nomina sacra are covered - because what Miosi is showing here is far, far besides the truth, and certainly not as neat (or full) as suggested
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Re: Some Observations on the Nomina Sacra of the First Three Centuries

Post by mlinssen »

Jax wrote: Wed May 12, 2021 6:47 am blabla, just a ping Lane
https://ntvmr.uni-muenster.de/community ... ormat=html

Get that: hundreds of transcriptions, all according to Gregory numbering. Simply change the number and the book and off you go

Nomina Sacra pr0n like you've never seen, effortless, and you can even download the transcript: check the API description

Try

https://ntvmr.uni-muenster.de/community ... Empty=true

and you'll get the gist.
If you're no longer interested in NS at all whatsoever - well sorry dude, you're hooked for life now
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We can close the forum (again / still): all Xrhst/Xreist ever in all MSS ever

Post by mlinssen »

I have gone full in, and decided to do it all: every uncial, majuscule, minuscule, fragment - every single inch ever found
[ETA: updated 2023-01-31]

For a change I will present a table with the MSS for each verse - but first, volumetrics regarding sample size:

Code: Select all

Verse: Coverage% MSS Hits
Mat 24:24:  26%	508	133
Mar 13:22:  36%	461	168
Act 11:26:  48%	274	131
Act 26:28:  46%	269	123
1 Pet 4:16:  4%	138	  5
1 Joh 2:18: 13%	133	 17
1 Joh 2:22: 12%	131	 16
1 Joh 4:3:  12%	130	 15
2 Joh 1:7:   9%	179	 17
All has been taken from the Kurzgefasste Liste where not every transcipt is readily available, but we may very freely extrapolate on the gospels and Acts

A pic, because nothing really renders here:

1. Verses are on top
2. MS numbering is by the Liste, identical to Gregory
3. The bold italic is the deviation: is the stem xrhst, xreist (or sumtin else)
4. Then it's all neatly ordered by presumed date which sometimes is a century
All MSS Ever.png
All MSS Ever.png (14.63 KiB) Viewed 540 times
Conclusion:

A. We can close the forum, Christianity has been debunked as piggy bagging on Chrestianity
B. Xrhstianiyy to be precise, as the eta just couldn't be rooted out, evidently
C. And the odd Xrest-xyz was Christianity struggling with (re)branding the icon and the followers, all of which didn't last long, by the looks of it
D. And all the iotacism nonsense has now really been thoroughly debunked for good, period. Funny thing is that I encountered a few MS that hadn't been "fixed" but this timeline and the blatantly obvious propensity for Xrhst-xyz bring in the old "make no mistake" adage: there was no confusing or mistaking anything, ever. Falsifying and foobarring, yes - but that is at the very core of Christianity, and to be honest IT IS its very core

What do the sample sets look like? An overview, sorted by date, can be found here:
All MSS Ever-Sample set.png
All MSS Ever-Sample set.png (82.77 KiB) Viewed 540 times
For those of you expecting great research into the very first millennium, well I'm sorry: only a handful there for each of these verses, no matter the hundreds of each of them - this will teach anyone very little about early Christianity, the bulk (if not all) serves NT research alone
Last edited by mlinssen on Mon Jan 30, 2023 6:55 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: We can close the forum (again / still): all Xrhst/Xreist ever in all MSS ever

Post by Leucius Charinus »

mlinssen wrote: Sat Jan 28, 2023 11:28 pm I have gone full in, and decided to do it all: every uncial, majuscule, minuscule, fragment - every single inch ever found
That's impressive. Are these mss all Greek? Or do they include Latin as well?
For a change I will present a table with the MSS for each verse - but first, volumetrics regarding sample size:

Code: Select all

Verse: Coverage% MSS Hits
Mar 13:22:  43%	310	133
Mat 24:24:  31%	324	102
Act 11:26:  50%	211	106
Act 26:28:  48%	209	101
1 Pet 4:16:  3%	138	  4
1 Joh 2:18: 14%	111	 15
1 Joh 2:22: 13%	110	 14
1 Joh 4:3:  13%	109	 14
2 Joh 1:7:   9%	149	 14
All has been taken from the Kurzgefasste Liste where not every transcipt is readily available, but we may very freely extrapolate on the gospels and Acts

A pic, because nothing really renders here:

1. Verses are on top, abbridged
2. MS numbering is by the Liste, similar yet not identical to Gregory
3. The bold italic is the deviation: is the stem xrhst, xreist or just xrist (or sumtin else)
4. Then it's all neatly ordered by presumed date which sometimes is a century (when it's a nicely rounded date)

All MSS Ever.png

Conclusion:

A. We can close the forum, Christianity has been debunked as piggy bagging on Chrestianity
Not so fast. I'd like to know who dunnit and when and ...

The categorical trinitymeans, motive, opportunity—provides a structure for detection method that has become either an expressed or subliminal convention in narratives that present the sleuth at work in a world ..
https://www.oxfordreference.com/display ... 28D209EFDD

B. Xrhstianiyy to be precise, as the eta just couldn't be rooted out, evidently
That's the problem with written records and the consequent downstream problem faced by people in an organisation or an industry who are incentivized to enforce damnatio memoriae
C. And the odd Xrest-xyz was Christianity struggling with (re)branding the icon and the followers, all of which didn't last long, by the looks of it
No it didn't by the look of those stats.
D. And all the iotacism nonsense has now really been thoroughly debunked for good, period. Funny thing is that I encountered a few MS that hadn't been "fixed" but this timeline and the blatantly obvious propensity for Xrhst-xyz bring in the old "make no mistake" adage: there was no confusing or mistaking anything, ever. Falsifying and foobarring, yes - but that is at the very core of Christianity, and to be honest IT IS ITS very core
We are informed by the author of Acts that the disciples were first called Chrestians in Antioch. It was to the audience at the Council of Antioch 325 CE that the newly triumphant and supreme military commander, sole emperor and sole Pontifex Maximus Bullneck first announced the Good News of the New Kingdom. It may be presumed that at this point he almost certainly attracted a new coalition of willing disciples. Especially from the upper classes of the eastern empire.

Chrestian origins can be approached by two different logical pathways:

1) from when we think we know Chrestianity existed -- by means of the ecclesiastical tradition -- by starting with the 1st century historical fiction of Acts, gospels and Dear Paul, and then by working forwards into the later centuries, or

2) from when we know with absolute certainty that there were Chrestians (i.e. 4th century) and then by working backwards through the earlier centuries.


Both pathways are valid.
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Re: We can close the forum (again / still): all Xrhst/Xreist ever in all MSS ever

Post by mlinssen »

Leucius Charinus wrote: Sun Jan 29, 2023 8:08 pm That's impressive. Are these mss all Greek? Or do they include Latin as well?
They're all Greek as well as NT, and the texts number in the thousands, all in the process of being fully digitised in every aspect

https://ntvmr.uni-muenster.de/intfblog/ ... kurzgefass
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Re: Some Observations on the Nomina Sacra of the First Three Centuries

Post by Leucius Charinus »

mlinssen wrote: Sat Jan 28, 2023 7:50 am We see a Nag Hamadi Library that breaths the spirit of Spirit above all: this is a spiritual collection

///

And what we find ourselves looking at it a Story about Spirit, with an IS and / or XS operating as some kind of agent ...
The Christian-centric nature of almost all of the translations of the NHL tracts may not be recognised by everyone. Nevertheless your research on "Chrestos" and his runes ("nomina sacra") will assist this process. Good stuff.

DAIMON: Guardian Spirit of the Platonists and Stoics

It's possible that another example of this Christian-centricism may be identified in the translation of "daimon" within the NHL. Consider the following:

NHL search for "daimon":
https://cse.google.com/cse?cof=LW%3A467 ... 3039712j14

About 1 results (0.46 seconds)

Asclepius 21-29 -- The Nag Hammadi Library
gnosis.org › naghamm › asclep
Immediately, he (the daimon) will surround this one (masc.), and he will examine him in regard to the character that he has developed in his life

and

NHL search for "demon":
https://cse.google.com/cse?cof=LW%3A467 ... 5j175515j5

About 38 results (0.40 seconds)

The Testimony of Truth -- The Nag Hammadi Library
gnosis.org › naghamm › testruth
And the leaven is the errant desire of the angels and the demons and the stars. As for the Pharisees and the scribes, it is they who belong to the archons ...

The Secret Book of John (Apocryphon of John)
gnosis.org › naghamm › apocjn-davies
Another font (font color 3) distinguishes a long list of demons' names that are associated with specific body parts, a magical text apparently taken from an ...

The Gospel of Philip -- The Nag Hammadi Library
gnosis.org › naghamm › gop
the unclean spirits and the demons. For if they had the Holy Spirit, no unclean spirit would cleave to them. Fear not the flesh nor love it. If you fear it, ...

The Paraphrase of Shem -- The Nag Hammadi Library
gnosis.org › naghamm › para_shem
A tower came to be through the demons. The Darkness was disturbed by his loss. He loosened the muscles of the womb. And the demon 30 who was going to enter the ...

The Apocryphon of John - Frederik Wisse - The Nag Hammadi Library
gnosis.org › naghamm › apocjn
But if you wish to know them, it is written in the book of Zoroaster. And all the angels and demons worked until they had constructed the natural body. And ...

ETC
ETC
ETC

However consider these results:

The Non-Canonical Gospels
edited by Paul Foste

p. 100


Of the Gnostic books from Nag Hammadi, I have located about 50 occurrences of the word daimon or its cognate. In every case, the word refers to an Archon or one of his demonic assistants." [19]


[19]

Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit 57.10-20; 59.25;
Apocalypse of Paul 19.5;
Apocalypse of Adam 79.15;
Authoritative Teaching 34.28;
Trimorphic Protennoia 35.17; 40.5; 41.6;
Testimony of Truth 29.17; 42.25;
Apocalypse of Peter 75.4; 82.23;
Concept of Our Great Power 42.17;
Zostrianos 43.12;
Paraphrase of Shem 21.26; 21.36; 22.7; 22.25; 23.9; 23.16; 24.7; 25.9; 25.19; 25.22; 25.26; 25.29; 27.24; 28.7; 28.15; 29.10; 29.17; 30.1; 30.8; 30.23; 30.32; 31.16; 31.19; 32.6; 32.16; 34.5; 35.15; 35.19; 36.27; 37.21; 40.26; 44.6; 44.15; 44.31; 45.17; 45


https://books.google.com.au/books?id=9f ... on&f=false

On the basis of this it appears that the existing Christian translations of the NHL are perhaps in many cases inaccurately translating the technical philosophical term "daimon" (Guardian Spirit) by the Christianised pejorative term "demon".
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