A reply to Peter Kirby about the Baptist Passage in Josephus

[Secret Alias]

Ugaritic and Akkadian

Like the priests and hearers of the Torah cared, knew or interpreted Ugaritic and Akkadian. I love when Biblical criticism is a creative writing exercise.

[perseusomega9]

Trobisch makes a good point that the nomina sacra have editorial intent behind them. That there is intent, and our surviving manuscripts are so ubiquitous such that when the name Jesus actually appears 0.5%* of the time it proves the rule, should set our spidey senses tingling, no matter how much the consensus tells us it's just itacism.

*this is hyperbole, but close to the actual number I'd wager ($5)

Sure there is editorial intent: because they were a sign of reverence for those terms. I don't see people arguing that the abbreviation of anthropos is anything other than anthropos. It is strange to me that we have around fifteen words consistently abbreviated, showing it applied to a wide range of words. And yet, the only one which people get up in arms about is Jesus... even though we have three variants of the abbreviation which all point to one single possible name: Jesus.

IMO, if one wants to make any argument about nomina sacra, they must account for all of them, every single one, before any alternative can be considered convincing. For instance, sure, the name Jesus doesn't appear frequently. But neither does "theos" or "God" which is instead ΘΣ. What is the code here? Should we be suspicious here that this is also a code for Julius Caesar... somehow?

The 15 words are not consistent, Trobisch narrows them to a fab four, perhaps you have better math? Perhaps other scholars disagree. It's still really, really weird. Especially when various groups had different names that could be subsumed under those abbreviations beyond pronunciation difficulties, which to be fair probably assisted the mashing of ideas in such a multi-cultural environment as the roman empire.

Signs of reverence for NS terms varies between different competing groups. The NT is a consensus document, probably coincides with Polycarps (cipher) trip to Rome when he and the 'Pope' agree to disagree except on some fundamentals which include not liking the gnostics, Jesus was really, real flesh and blood, something something about 12 apostles and tradition and presto whammo we all have a shared book, but they all celebrate the Resurrection (just day right?) separately.

Like you I think we'll never decode the NS, but they're there for a reason, in different MSS for different reasons, at different times. Have fun if you're satisfied with the current paradigm, it's just another variable to hold steady and move forward with hypothesis k.

ETA: One can be dissatisfied with the assumptions inherent in how the NS are interpreted and not be able to provide a satisfactory alternative to someone who accepts those assumptions and moves on to further an argument elsewhere. Those other assumptions might be a brick in the foundation of another's paradigm.

[Jax]

Okay... I know what I wrote. I never said Hurtado thought IH came first. I just noted that it is in our earliest sources which Hurtado also notes, as well as the other readings. Which puts a damper in basically every interpretation... except Jesus.

I don't concur. Hurtado also points out that IH = 18 is also the Hebraic word for life. There are a ton of possibilities in Hebrew, Aramaic, Egyptian, Syriac, Persian, Greek and Roman names and titles to have Iesous not be some kind of slam dunk.

Insisting that it is Iesous without actual proof is just special pleading to support a possible historical Jesus associated with the Gospel stories. Frankly, I am of the opinion that IAW as YHVH is rendered in the Septuagint is a better candidate. At least with Paul and the early letter writers. Especially as Paul says that it is all a mystery that he had revealed to him from the scriptures. It has been pointed out that his scriptures were in fact derived from the Septuagint and other Greek language sources making IAW a possible candidate with him.

[Secret Alias]

Again.

1. The af’el participle מישע and the Hebrew hif’il participle מושיע both mean “one who saves” or “saviour” from ישע.
2. The names יהושע Yehoshua’ (Samaritan pronunciation Yê’ûsha) and its shortened form ישוע Yeshua and the name הרשע Hoshea’ (anglice Hosea) all mean “the Lords saves” or “the Lord is salvation”
3. The origin of the name comes from to the last verses of Deuteronomy 33:

Blessed are you, Israel!
Who is like you,
a people saved by the Lord (נוֹשַׁ֣ע בַּֽיהוָ֔ה)?
He is your shield and helper
and your glorious sword.
Your enemies will cower before you,
and you will tread on their heights.”

The name 'Joshua' is rooted in this verse. There is nothing more to say except complete nonsense. The Torah is written with this primal understanding that 'Yah(weh) saves' or saved the people of Israel. This is the proper origin of the Hebrew name 'Joshua.' The early Church Fathers mention a Samaritan sect who understood that Joshua the son of Nun was the awaited 'one like Moses.' That the Torah was written with this interpretation in mind. There is something to this understanding. It is likely the original interpretation of the document. In short, Joshua was the living embodiment of the salvation or saving of Yah(weh).

[Jax]

Okay... I know what I wrote. I never said Hurtado thought IH came first. I just noted that it is in our earliest sources which Hurtado also notes, as well as the other readings. Which puts a damper in basically every interpretation... except Jesus.

I don't concur. Hurtado also points out that IH = 18 is also the Hebraic word for life. There are a ton of possibilities in Hebrew, Aramaic, Egyptian, Syriac, Persian, Greek and Roman names and titles to have Iesous not be some kind of slam dunk.

Insisting that it is Iesous without actual proof is just special pleading to support a possible historical Jesus associated with the Gospel stories. Frankly, I am of the opinion that IAW as YHVH is rendered in the Septuagint is a better candidate. At least with Paul and the early letter writers. Especially as Paul says that it is all a mystery that he had revealed to him from the scriptures. It has been pointed out that his scriptures were in fact derived from the Septuagint and other Greek language sources making IAW a possible candidate with him.

I have zero inclination to support the historicity of the Gospel stories, first of all. I think they are by and large fiction, in the actual academic sense of the word we use in creative writing... and also... if we have IAW... another explanation is still Jesus... you know... a name based on the theonym Yahweh.

And yeah, his scriptures were the LXX. Which doesn't really establish a whole lot and also does not explain why Paul never uses IAW for Yahweh proper, and always uses kurios, which he specifically claims is the name of Jesus in Philip. 2:10-11, specifying that people would understand that Jesus is "Lord." It also fails to explain the entire history of the name Jesus being attached to the figure, fails to explain the other nomina sacra (again, is TC not theos now?), etc.

It just creates more problems than it solves, and is convoluted, and frankly I've yet to see it make sense. Sure, it is possible. But I don't care for things that are "possible." I care for things that are probable and that I can use reasonable inference to access. IC meaning Julius Caesar or IH somehow related to IAW (which again, only one of those letters in the nomina sacra align with this either), doesn't seem to make sense.

I also fail to see the significance, because, again, IH = 18 (A) could be coincidence, (B) could just be clever wordplay using using nomina sacra for Jesus to be equivalent to life, or (c) could be your far more convoluted theory which doesn't seem to provide any symbolic depth to issue and creates even more problems and questions. Like, okay, now we have "life" (IH), "man" (IC) or "Julius Caesar" (IC), and then a whole bunch of others unexplained, and no clear link between IH and IC, and IHC is still unexplained as to its meaning.

Like, yes, we can suppose they didn't mean Jesus. But my issue is the "what then," what is your framework for reinterpreting them and making them cohesive and meaningful. Because, frankly, every single one of your suggestions of IH = life and IC = Man (or Caesar) could be true, and they could still stem from the name Jesus and just be clever wordplay. I've still yet to find a single reason not to consider it Jesus and something else, and I've yet to find something else that explains the data as well and easily. Yeah IH = life and IC = man/Caesar could be it... but on a hypothetical level, Jesus is the far simpler and more parsimonious explanation. It only requires one answer to explain all three variants of this nomen sacra. Your theory requires several answers for each one. Occam's Razor here. Don't multiply objects beyond necessity.

The "What Then?" is simple, just use the nomina sacra. If we can't show conclusively that IC etc = Iesous then simply use what we actually do know eg IC. My proposal is no more complicated than that.

I also propose that we use XC as well as there seems to valid arguments that it represents Chrestos instead of Christos. If there is any doubt, and there is, then we should stay with the known usage. So instead of trying to assign values to these abbreviations, simply use the actual abbreviations themselves. This seems to me to be a much more scholarly approach.

[MrMacSon]

Why do we keep doing this when all we have to go off is an abbreviation?

IC could be an abbreviation for IAW in Greek for all we know.

Hell for that matter IC was also the abbreviated form of Iulius Caesar. Is Paul talking about Iulius Caesar the Good?

In his recently published book, The Evil Creator: Origins of an Early Christian Idea, M David Litwa, in discussing how Hellenized Egyptians came to portray Yahweh as a form of Seth, their evil god, notes "the Greek word for Yahweh (Iaō) —with a perverse twisted the tongue—sound like the native Egyptian word for donkey (eiō or simply iō)."

[Jax]

Why do we keep doing this when all we have to go off is an abbreviation?

IC could be an abbreviation for IAW in Greek for all we know.

Hell for that matter IC was also the abbreviated form of Iulius Caesar. Is Paul talking about Iulius Caesar the Good?

In his recently published book, The Evil Creator: Origins of an Early Christian Idea, M David Litwa, in discussing how Hellenized Egyptians came to portray Yahweh as a form of Seth, their evil god, notes "the Greek word for Yahweh (Iaō) —with a perverse twisted the tongue—sound like the native Egyptian word for donkey (eiō or simply iō)."

And this is exactly why I feel that we should just use the most popular usage of the abbreviation IC.

[MrMacSon]

And this is exactly why I feel that we should just use the most popular usage of the abbreviation IC

I agree.

There were lots of things going on in those days : payback, satire, rhetoric, combining gods,* etc, etc.

Litwa notes

.

Interpretatio Graeca

Since the 5th century BCE (and probably earlier), there was a Greek cultural practise of identifying foreign gods now dubbed interpretatio Graeca. In short, Greeks would identify two different gods from two different cultures based on shared traits. For instance, the Egyptian God Toth was identified with the Greek Hermes because both were considered clever; Hathor was fused with Aphrodite because both were goddesses of love; Horus morphed with Apollo since both shared solar characteristics, and so on.

When it came to Seth, the Greeks had long identified him with Typhon, lord of chaos. Typhoon was more of a monster than a God. The archaic poet Hesiod had described him as hundred headed dragon with spark shooting from his eyes, roaring surreally. Another Greek poet described him as “enemy of gods.” Yet another said he withstood all of the gods, furiously hissing terror with his horrid jaws. Typhon, and unstoppable blitzkrieg, was known for boasting loudly against the great gods, and for a time he even overcame their king, Zeus, by stealing his sinews.
< . . a paragraph snipped . . >
Hellenized Egyptians capitalised on this cultural practise of translation by viewing the Jewish God Yahweh as a form of Seth. In this case, however, malice seems to have been the chief motive, and the translation of practise was part of a larger programme of mythmaking. Put briefly, Yahweh became see through Egyptians when they revised their historical memory to oppose the perceived political and cultural threat posed by Jewish law in Egypt.

The Evil Creator: Origins of an Early Christian Idea by M David Litwa; pp.19-20

The political and cultural threat posed by Jewish Law was largely perceived to have been posed by the Exodus story's negative portrayal of a [supposedly] hostile Pharoah and the stated Jewish deity's response of "unleashing ten horrific plagues against Egypt - epidemics that decimated the countryside, Egypt sacred river, and its youth. In the words of the Wisdom of Solomon (first century BCE or CE), the Egyptians were "whipped by foreign showers of rain and hail, pursued by relentless storms, and utterly torched by fire (16:16)"."

Beginning in the first century BCE, Hellenized Egyptian literati punched back to refute and reverse elements of the Exodus story using the resources of their own millennia-long cultural memory. In their retellings, the Egyptians were not plagued; it was the Hebrews who were affected by the leprosy and boils. Instead of the Egyptians drowned in the Red Sea, it was the Hebrews drowned in lakes on leaden rafts. Instead of the Hebrews bursting out of Egypt weighted with gold, that were disgorged into the desert—the realms off Seth—and left there to wander with nothing. The flight of the liberated people was retooled as an expulsion of a diseased and doomed tribe.

The Evil Creator: Origins of an Early Christian Idea by M David Litwa; p.22

[Jax]

And this is exactly why I feel that we should just use the most popular usage of the abbreviation IC

I agree.

There were lots of things going on in those days : payback, satire, rhetoric, combining gods,* etc, etc.

Litwa notes

.

Interpretatio Graeca

Since the 5th century BCE (and probably earlier), there was a Greek cultural practise of identifying foreign gods now dubbed interpretatio Graeca. In short, Greeks would identify two different gods from two different cultures based on shared traits. For instance, the Egyptian God Toth was identified with the Greek Hermes because both were considered clever; Hathor was fused with Aphrodite because both were goddesses of love; Horus morphed with Apollo since both shared solar characteristics, and so on.

When it came to Seth, the Greeks had long identified him with Typhon, lord of chaos. Typhoon was more of a monster than a God. The archaic poet Hesiod had described him as hundred headed dragon with spark shooting from his eyes, roaring surreally. Another Greek poet described him as “enemy of gods.” Yet another said he withstood all of the gods, furiously hissing terror with his horrid jaws. Typhon, and unstoppable blitzkrieg, was known for boasting loudly against the great gods, and for a time he even overcame their king, Zeus, by stealing his sinews.
< . . a paragraph snipped . . >
Hellenized Egyptians capitalised on this cultural practise of translation by viewing the Jewish God Yahweh as a form of Seth. In this case, however, malice seems to have been the chief motive, and the translation of practise was part of a larger programme of mythmaking. Put briefly, Yahweh became see through Egyptians when they revised their historical memory to oppose the perceived political and cultural threat posed by Jewish law in Egypt.

The Evil Creator: Origins of an Early Christian Idea by M David Litwa; pp.19-20

The political and cultural threat posed by Jewish Law was largely perceived to have been posed by the Exodus story's negative portrayal of a [supposedly] hostile Pharoah and the stated Jewish deity's response of "unleashing ten horrific plagues against Egypt - epidemics that decimated the countryside, Egypt sacred river, and its youth. In the words of the Wisdom of Solomon (first century BCE or CE), the Egyptians were "whipped by foreign showers of rain and hail, pursued by relentless storms, and utterly torched by fire (16:16)"."

Beginning in the first century BCE, Hellenized Egyptian literati punched back to refute and reverse elements of the Exodus story using the resources of their own millennia-long cultural memory. In their retellings, the Egyptians were not plagued; it was the Hebrews who were affected by the leprosy and boils. Instead of the Egyptians drowned in the Red Sea, it was the Hebrews drowned in lakes on leaden rafts. Instead of the Hebrews bursting out of Egypt weighted with gold, that were disgorged into the desert—the realms off Seth—and left there to wander with nothing. The flight of the liberated people was retooled as an expulsion of a diseased and doomed tribe.

The Evil Creator: Origins of an Early Christian Idea by M David Litwa; p.22

Cool! Maybe if you and I start doing this others will catch on and follow suit. Martijn Linssen already does it so that makes three of us now. And really it's just IC and XC so no real problem.