IS XS: No Jesus or Christ spelled out in early MSS

[mlinssen]

Do we have any clues as to an etymological Coptic meaning for the word IS?

I don't, other than best guesses. They're all in the Commentary, Prologue section

People always are so eager to solve puzzles without pondering about the merits of doing so, or thinking ahead of what that would bring.
Take Michael Grondin for instance: in order to impress his father he decided to solve the Thomas puzzle, and spent over 4 decades on exercising numerological experiments on it. He could have made a decent translation instead, one that would actually be a solid basis for a forgery, for example. He could have translated words truthfully, for instance the boiling of the fountain, the colostrum instead of the leaven, to name a few.
But he decided to waste more than 4 decades on arguable arithmetic - and I inquired after that, asking him "what if you find all the numerological secrets that are hidden, Michael? That still won't bring you one bit closer to the meaning of Thomas. You haven't published anything on any of it other than some number games that deliver nice round numbers, likely because you fancy nice round numbers - but none of that is going to magically solve the entire puzzle of Thomas, or disclose even a shred of it"

I won't bother you with the response, but instead I'll ask you: what if you find any meaning at all behind IS - what would you be that on? Isn't the best person in the world to know why Harry Potter is called that way JK Rowling, the person who invented him?
You can read all her books and try to conjure a grand plan about it all yourself, but all in all what we the value be in that compared to the magnificent achievement of the books themselves, their great and grand message, the small messages, and everything together?

What would you be doing really other than practice some vain and futile quest, and a finical and trivial one at that?
What does IS stand for? Who gives a damn really, everyone already has his own version of the elephant in the room. Look at the pathetic attempts by Huller to root IS in Hebrew - if anything, that only tells us that Hebrew is the only expertise of the one-trick pony that Huller is. Does he try to base his fantasies on the very first original text? Of course not, he not only lacks any and all qualifications for that but mostly the modesty needed to do so - Huller world be the man who tells JK Rowling what Harry Potter stands for, because that is the person that he is: a claim-it-all, telling everyone what he thinks, as careless and scant the evidence and arguments that come along with that alleged thinking

The thing is, there are 102 occurrences of IS in Thomas, and 3 that say IHS: logion 13, 21 and 90. The superlinear in Coptic functions as a stress, as the vowel e, and in Thomas it covers either IS or HS - never the full word IHS.
I have lost interest in the meaning behind IS a few years ago, when I discovered how incredibly deep the text really runs

Trust me, it is of no significance at all, and it likely points to something like Conscience, Awareness, what Socrates called his eidon perhaps: or maybe it doesn't and it is just a joke to keep us all busy, leading to nothing but the discovery of how vain and trivial the quest into that actually was

[Leucius Charinus]

Do we have any clues as to an etymological Coptic meaning for the word IS?

Clues or guesses?

This from "Not in His Image: Gnostic Vision, Sacred Ecology, and the Future of Belief" by John Lamb Lash (2006):

IS could as well be translated in another way:

I(asiu)S, giving the name Iasius, “the healer,” a title rather than a common name.

[Jair]

Do we have any clues as to an etymological Coptic meaning for the word IS?

I don't, other than best guesses. They're all in the Commentary, Prologue section

People always are so eager to solve puzzles without pondering about the merits of doing so, or thinking ahead of what that would bring.
Take Michael Grondin for instance: in order to impress his father he decided to solve the Thomas puzzle, and spent over 4 decades on exercising numerological experiments on it. He could have made a decent translation instead, one that would actually be a solid basis for a forgery, for example. He could have translated words truthfully, for instance the boiling of the fountain, the colostrum instead of the leaven, to name a few.
But he decided to waste more than 4 decades on arguable arithmetic - and I inquired after that, asking him "what if you find all the numerological secrets that are hidden, Michael? That still won't bring you one bit closer to the meaning of Thomas. You haven't published anything on any of it other than some number games that deliver nice round numbers, likely because you fancy nice round numbers - but none of that is going to magically solve the entire puzzle of Thomas, or disclose even a shred of it"

I won't bother you with the response, but instead I'll ask you: what if you find any meaning at all behind IS - what would you be that on? Isn't the best person in the world to know why Harry Potter is called that way JK Rowling, the person who invented him?
You can read all her books and try to conjure a grand plan about it all yourself, but all in all what we the value be in that compared to the magnificent achievement of the books themselves, their great and grand message, the small messages, and everything together?

What would you be doing really other than practice some vain and futile quest, and a finical and trivial one at that?
What does IS stand for? Who gives a damn really, everyone already has his own version of the elephant in the room. Look at the pathetic attempts by Huller to root IS in Hebrew - if anything, that only tells us that Hebrew is the only expertise of the one-trick pony that Huller is. Does he try to base his fantasies on the very first original text? Of course not, he not only lacks any and all qualifications for that but mostly the modesty needed to do so - Huller world be the man who tells JK Rowling what Harry Potter stands for, because that is the person that he is: a claim-it-all, telling everyone what he thinks, as careless and scant the evidence and arguments that come along with that alleged thinking

The thing is, there are 102 occurrences of IS in Thomas, and 3 that say IHS: logion 13, 21 and 90. The superlinear in Coptic functions as a stress, as the vowel e, and in Thomas it covers either IS or HS - never the full word IHS.
I have lost interest in the meaning behind IS a few years ago, when I discovered how incredibly deep the text really runs

Trust me, it is of no significance at all, and it likely points to something like Conscience, Awareness, what Socrates called his eidon perhaps: or maybe it doesn't and it is just a joke to keep us all busy, leading to nothing but the discovery of how vain and trivial the quest into that actually was

It’s not so much about solving puzzles just for the sake of solving puzzles though, but more about learning about the origins, right? I would think that a lot could be learned about the history of all this if an answer could be found. Of course, that’s very much IF an answer can be found and from what you are saying, it sounds like there’s not much out there to go off of right now.

[mlinssen]

It’s not so much about solving puzzles just for the sake of solving puzzles though, but more about learning about the origins, right? I would think that a lot could be learned about the history of all this if an answer could be found. Of course, that’s very much IF an answer can be found and from what you are saying, it sounds like there’s not much out there to go off of right now.

Textual criticism undeniably points to Thomas as the source to the canonicals, so Thomas (or anything prior) could give us clues
Of course many would like to give meaning to IS first and then abuse that to disqualify Thomas without much more than even scanning it

Try Iusaas, that's my best shot. Fits perfectly with the helping hand of the Sower, with creating your own universe, and the task of IS: to guide the Seeker on his path to introspection and self liberation from the Ego and Self.
The thing is, most scholars are Christians. But I'd really appreciate someone independent to look at Egypt and Coptic and to give feedback on this

There is a lot of history behind all this, consisting of several phases - and in each of those opinions changed, directions changed, goal posts got moved.
Thomas -> Marcion -> Mark / Luke is the main history, with Matthew finishing it all off and highly likely redacting Marcion into Luke. John? Definitely Thomasine or Marcionite, heavily redacted yet also original - I really don't know what to do with it and try to stay away from it because I have enough to handle as it is already

[mlinssen]

Iusaaset, Iusaas, or, in Greek, Saosis, is a primordial goddess in Ancient Egyptian religion, a feminine counterpart to the male creator deity Atum.[1] Iusaaset was depicted as a woman with a scarab beetle on her head.[1] She was worshipped in the city of I͗wnw or Iunu, the Greek Heliopolis, as was Atum.[2] Iusaaset was associated with the acacia tree and acacias stood at the sanctuary dedicated to Iusaaset at Heliopolis.[3]

The process of creation was said to have begun when Atum masturbated, or copulated with himself, to produce the deities Shu and Tefnut, thus beginning the process of creation. The hand he used in this act was personified as a goddess, the Hand of Atum. She was equated with Hathor or Iusaaset and Nebethetepet, two other, more minor goddesses.[4] The earliest texts to mention them seem to treat Iusaaset and Nebethetepet as two names for a single goddess, but after the time of the Middle Kingdom (c. 2000–1700 BC) they were treated as separate, although similar, deities. The name "Iusaaset" means something resembling "She who grows as she comes" and "Nebethetepet" means "Lady of the Field of Offerings', so the Egyptologist Stephen Quirke suggests that they represented two aspects of creation: Iusaaset for growth and Nebethetepet for abundance.[5]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iusaaset

Huge hits in quantity and quality when your relate this to login 9.
I've honestly looked no further into this but a mere few hours, as it already fits perfectly

[mlinssen]

Do we have any clues as to an etymological Coptic meaning for the word IS?

Also a bit of a side question; doesn’t one of the DSS match the LXX “Virgin”? I seem to recall reading an analysis of one of the scrolls online, but I can’t remember which one or where I read it.

That's impossible, as the first LXX that we have dates to 4th CE with very optimistic paleographic dating

[mlinssen]

Fashioning Mark: Early Christian Discussions about the Scribe and Status of the Second Gospel

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals ... 0A177E046D

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Evidently Candida Moss, " English public intellectual, journalist, New Testament scholar and historian of Christianity, who is the Edward Cadbury Professor of Theology in the Department of Theology and Religion at the University of Birmingham. A graduate of Oxford and Yale universities, Moss specialises in the study of the New Testament and martyrdom in early Christianity." according to Wikipedia, has never read an NT manuscript in her entire life.
What's more, no one apparently has let her in on the common knowledge that no MS anywhere in the world ever writes out either "Jesus" or "Christ" in full.
Save for Coptic texts from the Nag Hammadi Library, of course...

I really have looked at this from every possible angle, I even asked her about it directly - yet only just now because I thought that I had, but I hadn't:

https://twitter.com/MartijnLinssen/stat ... 6443310082

This also pertains to the invaluable riches of professional and scholarly peer-review, of course.
What's more, it's a demonstration of the stunning cunning of Cambridge University

[Secret Alias]

I think she a great writer. Witty. Sounds like a nice person. She's brilliant in her field of expertise. But let's face it. She's the most attractive scholar to come along in some time. On the men's side you have James Tabor, Robert Cargill - the 'hunk' academic. I know female TV producers who wanted THEM as the 'go to' voice to answer questions about things which weren't even their field of expertise. As I tell my son, use all the weapons you got. These endnotes scream out 'I got a lot of help writing this.'

[MrMacSon]

Fashioning Mark: Early Christian Discussions about the Scribe and Status of the Second Gospel

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals ... 0A177E046D

CandidaMossNeverReadAManuscript1.png
CandidaMossNeverReadAManuscript2.png
CandidaMossNeverReadAManuscript3.png

Evidently Candida Moss...has never read an NT manuscript in her entire life.

What's more, no one apparently has let her in on the common knowledge that no MS anywhere in the world ever writes out either "Jesus" or "Christ" in full.

Virtually every early Christian and NT scholar would assume the nomina sacra IS and XS in early versions of NT books [and variations thereof] refer to [what we now refer to in English as] Jesus and Christ.

• Save for Coptic texts from the Nag Hammadi Library, of course...

  Isn't there just one full XRSTiANOS [or the like in the NHL? In the Gospel of Phillip?

I think what's significant is Moss referring to Günther Zuntz 'noting' that

References

8 "... for gentiles the appellation ‘Jesus Christ’ in the opening titular sentence of the Gospel would either have meant ‘Jesus-ointment’1 or something along the lines of ‘Jesus the painted one’1."

1 or perhaps 'Jesus-anointed' or 'Jesus-priest'


And, while it seems to be wrong wrt reference to Christ in the extant manuscript of Tacitus' Annals 15.44 (but may be right wrt Chrestianos therein), at least Moss has picked up on the theme that these points alludes to Chrest v Christ, a theme often discussed on this Forum.

Moss makes some other good points in those 'references' (in inverted commas b/c she's used them as more than references) :

7 Examinations of the presentation of Mark in early Christian literature have rightly stressed the way Mark is framed as an acolyte of Peter and the manner in which Peter serves to 'authenticate' and 'authorise' the Gospel of Mark, perhaps even ensuring its survival. Overlooked, however, is how the second-century framing of the Second Gospel as disordered and the presentation of Mark himself as the mere conveyer of Petrine tradition mutually reinforce one another. See, for example, Kok's excellent Gospel on the Margins, 185–227. A rare exception to this rule is A. Yadin-Israel, ‘“For Mark Was Peter's Tannaʾ”: Tradition and Transmission in Papias and the Early Rabbis’, JECS 23 (2015) 337–62.

8 This article takes its lead from an often-overlooked 1984 article by philologist Günther Zuntz, which examined the way that gentile readers of the Gospel of Mark would have understood the text. Among his many interesting insights, he noted that for gentiles the appellation ‘Jesus Christ’ in the opening titular sentence of the Gospel would either have meant ‘Jesus-ointment’ or something along the lines of ‘Jesus the painted one’. More probably, he argued, gentiles might have assumed that a typographical or pronunciation error had taken place and that the copyist or lector had intended to write ‘Chrestos’ rather than ‘Christos’ (cf. Tacitus, Ann. 15.44). On this assumption, the ‘reader’ would assume that the Gospel was about a Semitic slave (Jesus) who had been given the new name Chrestos. Zuntz's article was an elegant articulation of the ways in which descriptions of identity and status vary according to the cultural positionality of the reader. G. Zuntz, ‘Ein Heide las das Markusevangelium’, Markus-Philologie. Historische, literargeschichtliche und stilistische Untersuchungen zum zweiten Evangelium (ed. H. Cancik; WUNT 33; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1984) 205–22, at 205.

9 Even Matthew Larsen's thesis that Mark was incomplete and functioned as a ‘rough draft’ only grazes the question of how Mark himself is constructed. M. D. C. Larsen, Gospels before the Book (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018) and ‘Accidental Publication, Unfinished Texts and the Traditional Goals of New Testament Textual Criticism’, JSNT 39 (2017) 362–87. Moreover, Larsen is sceptical about the existence of ‘Mark’ at all: see his ‘Correcting Gospel: Putting the Titles of the Gospels in Historical Context’, Rethinking ‘Authority’ in Late Antiquity: Authorship, Law, and Transmission in Jewish and Christian Tradition (ed. M. D. Letteney and A. J. Berkovitz; London: Routledge, 2018) 78–103. See also the earlier important work of Kok, who uses similar language arguing that Clement views Mark as ‘rough notes’ in contrast to ‘the polished texts of Matthew and Luke’ (M. J. Kok, The Gospel on the Margins (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015) 210–11).

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals ... 0A177E046D

[Leucius Charinus]

What's more, no one apparently has let her in on the common knowledge that no MS anywhere in the world ever writes out either "Jesus" or "Christ" in full.

Virtually every early Christian and NT scholar would assume the nomina sacra IS and XS in early versions of NT books [and variations thereof] refer to [what we now refer to in English as] Jesus and Christ.

While that is certainly the case for modern (Christian) scholars, the question remains what assumptions (if any) did the educated / literate pagans make of IS and XS (and the rest of the nomina sacra) that saturate the canonical and the apocryphal (Greek and Coptic) literature? Imagine finding for the very first time these NT writings in a bookstore. Would it present as a puzzle book? IOW what did all these abbreviations actually mean? Who possessed the legend or key to the abbreviations? IDK.