In both Classics as well as New Testament Studies, “textual criticism” is a tool for analyzing ancient texts through the lens of manuscripts, the data they present, and our accumulated knowledge of what often or rarely happened in the transmission of texts by scribes—given that they were all hand-copied and thus highly prone to distortion, both deliberate and erroneous. And this is not mechanically limited to, for example, variant readings we have in extant manuscripts. Because one thing textual critics across all fields have learned is that we actually don’t usually have access to such information; so most evidence will not survive in manuscripts, but only in their telltale effects on a text itself. This is not controversial in any other field than Bible studies; it’s just that in Bible studies, such knowledge is often uncomfortable or undesirable in application. “That might be a textual error for…” is a sentence often at once reacted to with guffaws and tut-tuts and mild outrage from apologists. And sometimes their skepticism is warranted. But often it is not; it is defensive rather than objectively rational.
This is itself a problem. Because even despite the large number of biblical manuscripts, relatively next to none derive from the first three centuries of their transmission (and those few almost entirely consist of mere scraps, a few paragraphs or even sentences at most), and none at all from the first century; and yet even those few from the second and third centuries exhibit every kind of transmission distortion we find across all ancient manuscripts in all fields—indeed, at an even greater pace and extent in some cases (on all these points and their significance, see my article Three Things to Know about New Testament Manuscripts). That means it is mathematically inevitable that there will be probably dozens more of each kind of error preserved in the text but not in any manuscript of it that we have. There will be a dozen or more altered or interpolated verses; a dozen or more deliberate harmonizations; a dozen or more deletions; etc. Because we can observe the rate of those in subsequent centuries even just from the tiny sample of ancient manuscripts that survive—which entails the rate was the same or higher in their first century of transmission. And yet we will not see any evidence of this, because we have zero manuscripts from then.
Yes. That should worry apologists. As I have said on this point several times before, if even the Annals of Tacitus were instructions for building a rocket, I would not get on that rocket. That’s how much we should not trust the complete accuracy of even that work’s transmission. The Bible is worse. This is not something you should be basing your life on. But lo, the bane of Christian apologists can also be their boon. Because there are cases where sound textual criticism can plausibly fix other problems for them. Today I will survey some examples I’m acquainted with because they reflect positions I have changed on myself after an application of text-critical methods.
Was Mark a Bad Geographer?
Even I have repeated the claim that you’ll find often affirmed across expert studies of the text of Mark (e.g. see On the Historicity of Jesus, pp. 470–74): that Matthew often had to correct Mark’s geographical errors. This was already exaggerated, as there are really only two clear cases in the extant text of Mark of an actual geographical “error” (as opposed to what could just be his being brief, or using different ways to refer to a place, or referring to places otherwise lost to history, and so on). The first (and most often mentioned) is the question of where Mark thinks the city of Sidon was (which could be based on Scripture rather than science: see a good article about this at Vridar for the whole skinny). Apologists will guffaw and spin entire “just so” stories to rescue Mark from errancy here. But the funny thing is that they armchair this with blarney they just make up, rather than going at it with a sound (rather than, say, specious or dubious) application of textual criticism.
We already know, for example, that the other supposed “mistake” of Mark incorrectly imagining that Gadara was anywhere near the Sea of Galilee (so that a herd of swine nearby could suddenly drown itself there) is in fact a textual error, not Mark’s. The earliest manuscripts of Mark don’t say “Gadara.” That came from later, corrupted manuscripts consulted when writing the King James Bible, launching the legend of the “Gadarene” swine into the English world. Whereas all the earliest manuscripts of Mark we have now say “Gerasa.” That also cannot be correct; but it is suspiciously similar to “Gergesa” (off by just one consonant and one commonplace vowel-shift), which is adjacent to that sea, and generally indeed where Mark imagines the event. (Meanwhile, manuscripts of Matthew are a garbled mess, some reading Gadara, others Gazara, others Garada; and of course yet others read Gerasa or Gergesa; as for Luke, Codex Sinaiticus reads “Gergesa,” while other early manuscripts say “Gerasa,” and again “Gadara” starts to appear a tad later.)
Both observations led the third-century church father Origen to argue that Mark wrote “Gergesa,” on the basis that such scribal errors are common, the two words look similar, and Mark “could not” make a mistake. Obviously he could have (and Origen says he saw some manuscripts of Mark in the third century already had transformed Gerasa into “Gadara”). But Origen’s suggestion fits text-critical considerations: an error in transmission transforming Gergesa into Gerasa (just as would then transform Gerasa into Gadara) would involve a very typical kind of scribal mistake we find thousands of examples of across even biblical manuscripts, as well as all the manuscripts of ancient extant literature. This even could simply be a plausible transliteration from a local dialect, Gerasa essentially meaning Gergesa. But even supposing a scribal error: in each case, scribes just garbled the spelling.
Possibly, even, one scribe misspelled it, mucking it up, then a subsequent scribe, faced with an unidentifiable jumble, figured best they could that it was supposed to have read “Gadara,” a town they had at least heard of—and thus, error crept in. Or, faced with “Gerasa,” a scribe did not recognize this was a form of Gergesa, and sought to “correct” it with “Gadara,” perhaps knowing Gerasa was too famously located elsewhere, but not knowing (or maybe not caring) whether Gadara was any more plausibly situated. We have so many examples of this (later scribes trying to “fix” garbled or even undesirable text in works they were copying, replacing words with their own preference or conjecture) that it bears a reasonably high prior probability. And the evidence matches. The kind of mistake that would erroneously get Gerasa out of Gergesa was quite common, even more so than the also-common kind of error that would get Gadara out of Gerasa, as clearly occurred later on. And Gerasa makes no sense even as an error—it is farther from the sea than even Gadara, and was more famously located on a river.
As Origen puts it:
In the matter of proper names the Greek copies are often incorrect, and in the Gospels one might be misled by their authority. The transaction about the swine, which were driven down a steep place by the demons and drowned in the sea, is said to have taken place in the country of the Gerasenes. Now, Gerasa is a town of Arabia, and has near it neither sea nor lake. And the Evangelists would not have made a statement so obviously and demonstrably false; for they were men who informed themselves carefully of all matters connected with Judea. But in a few copies we have found, ‘into the country of the Gadarenes’; and, on this reading, it is to be stated that Gadara is a town of Judea, in the neighborhood of which are the well-known hot springs, and that there is no lake there with overhanging banks, nor any sea. But Gergesa, from which the name Gergesenes is taken, is an old town in the neighborhood of the lake now called Tiberias, and on the edge of it there is a steep place abutting on the lake, from which it is pointed out that the swine were cast down by the demons.
Origen, Commentary on John 6.24
And so the famed “Gadarene” swine are supposed to have actually been the “Gergesene” swine. This was probably not Mark’s mistake; it was the scribes’. Mark probably correctly wrote Gergesa (or Gerasa, as a form of Gergesa), even though no very early manuscripts preserve “Gergesa” as a reading. Later ones do, but that could indicate knowledge of commentaries like Origen’s calling for a correction, as we have literally occurring in Codex Sinaiticus, where “Gerasa” was corrected by a later scribe to, indeed, “Gergesa” (although in that same codex, the Gospel of Luke already has “Gergesa,” suggesting its author saw texts of Mark closer to the original). In other words, on these text-critical considerations, it is more likely Mark wrote the correct city down, and it just got distorted in transmission; first to Gerasa, then to Gadara. This is entirely reasonable to believe. It requires no desperate apologetics. (And that matters. See my discussion of the effect of not knowing these things on Atwill’s Cranked-up Jesus.)
So we can’t really convict Mark here. Harder to explain away (or seemingly so) is Mark’s alleged error regarding Tyre and Sidon. In Mark 7:31 most manuscripts of Mark say “Jesus left the vicinity of Tyre and went through Sidon down to the Sea of Galilee and into the region of the Decapolis.” Matthew and Luke supposedly corrected this by just removing the confused itinerary and having Jesus go from “the region of Tyre and Sidon” to the Sea of Galilee (the correct direction), rather than taking the road north from Tyre to Sidon and as if by faerie magic ending up south, at the Sea of Galilee. It’s a fair point and often noted in the expert literature. And it’s often explained with implausible armchair apologetics (like “maybe Mark meant Jesus went north to tour Syria and then came back south!”). But there is a much simpler solution, offered by text-critical observations: that Mark didn’t write this. It’s a scribal error.
Mark has Jesus depart Gennesaret (6:53) and go “to the vicinity of Tyre” (7:24). But honest bibles will tell you: “many early manuscripts” say here “Tyre and Sidon.” This was a common moniker for the whole region, as we have at the corresponding point in Matthew 15:21, “Leaving that place, Jesus withdrew to the region of Tyre and Sidon.” Matthew tends to abbreviate Mark in places like this, with smoother literary transitions, whereas Mark tends to be a tad more prolix and repetitive. For example, Mark is exactly the kind of author who would write “Tyre and Sidon” twice (Matthew replaces the second with just a generic “he left there”). And if Mark originally wrote not that Jesus went to Tyre but “to the vicinity Tyre and Sidon,” as early manuscripts attest and logic suggests, then Jesus won’t have gone “from” Tyre “to” Sidon, but “from the vicinity of Tyre and Sidon” to Galilee (and thence the Decapolis), exactly as Luke and Matthew describe.
It thus matters that those earlier manuscripts of Mark don’t just say he went to the vicinity of Tyre “and Sidon” in verse 24, but some of those go on in verse 31 to replace “he went from the vicinity of Tyre through Sidon” with “he went from the vicinity of Tyre and Sidon.” One could explain this as a scribe correcting Mark. But it is more probable this is what Mark wrote and the mistake of distorting “and Sidon” into “through Sidon” was a scribal error. Again, this is a very common kind of error, and could suggest a sequence of events: that one scribe misspelled or garbled “and Sidon” (suggested also by the fact that the verb “went” also gets relocated in the sentence in these variants, so some confusion has occurred in transmission), and a subsequent scribe, trying to make sense of the jumble, guessed that it originally said “through” Sidon, a confusion of a kai for a dia, one three-letter conjunction for one three-letter preposition. And so an error was born.
I now think this is the more probable history of this text. Given the particular manuscript evidence we have here, and what we know from other textual corruptions across all ancient manuscripts, it is more probable that Mark wrote that Jesus went “to” and then “from” the “region of Tyre and Sidon,” and that he never recorded any impossible trek to Galilee “through” Sidon, traveling simultaneously north and south. This follows from sound text-critical data and information. It thus requires no implausible armchair excuse. (Though it does require admitting scribal errors are commonplace in the Bible. Which for some apologists might be a bridge too far.)
And in case you were wondering: does rescuing Mark as a geographer argue for the authenticity of what he reports? No. Everyone educated enough to compose stories in Greek then not only had a basic schooled grounding in geography, but knew how to consult reference books in geography, and would have had abundant access to them. All the more so if they were even from the region they describe, or had informants who were. On all that, particularly regarding geography, see my discussion in respect to Luke-Acts in How We Know Acts Is a Fake History.
Did Q Contain a Crucifixion Narrative?
We can’t answer this question, really. I mean, assuming there even was a Q source (I’m pretty sure there wasn’t). But let’s assume there was. Simply because Matthew and Luke didn’t copy any material in common from Q does not entail Q lacked that (or even other) material. It may have contained material Matthew used but Luke did not, or vice versa (and thus what scholars try to pass off as an M or L source is really just…Q; although, IMO, it’s really just them making their own shit up). Or it may have contained material neither liked and thus neither used. It could even have contained material used by Mark and then repeated in Matthew or Luke, maybe even in forms more original to Q than Mark’s version (since the belief that Mark did not use Q, or indeed isn’t just an abbreviation of it, or even that Q did not use Mark, is entirely based on circular logic and thus entirely invalid). But let’s pretend none of that somehow matters and that all we want to know is, “Is there evidence of non-Markan Q-material in the crucifixion narratives shared by Luke and Matthew?”
I have in the past argued in the affirmative. For instance, in On the Historicity of Jesus (p. 471):
For example, Mk 14.65a reads, ‘and some began to spit on him, and to cover his face, and to buffet him, and to say to him, “Prophesy!”’, which Mt. 26.67-68 expanded to ‘then did they spit in his face and buffet him: and some smote him with the palms of their hands, saying, “Prophesy unto us, Christ! Who is he that struck thee?”’ Luke 22.63-64 essentially combines Mark with Matthew, repeating the concluding text of Matthew verbatim: ‘and the men that held Jesus mocked him, and beat him; and they blind-folded him, and asked him, saying, “Prophesy! Who is he that struck thee?”’ Except for dropping ‘unto us, Christ’ to economize the passage, the Greek of Luke here is identical to that of Matthew (legontes, Prophēteuson [hēmin Christe]! Tis estin ho paisas se?). Luke then combines this with Mark’s detail that they covered his eyes, which Matthew omitted (or rather altered, having them spit ‘in his face’ rather than cover ‘his face’). Luke thus combined Mark with Matthew, recast mostly but not entirely in his own words, to make what he deemed to be a better passage. That Luke knows the details Matthew added, and even borrows his exact words, is sufficient proof that Luke knew and used Matthew. [And likewise] on no theory of Q is this element of the Passion Narrative a part of Q, so this cannot be explained by appealing to Q. Luke is using Matthew. And if here, so everywhere. There is simply no need of an imaginary Q.
Which is all true, as far as it goes. But what if, in fact, both Matthew and Luke are quoting or redacting Mark…because their copies of Mark said more here than ours do.
You can see the similarities:
- Luke 22:63–64: ἐνέπαιζον αὐτῷ δέροντες καὶ περικαλύψαντες αὐτὸν ἔτυπτον αὐτοῦ τὸ πρόσωπον καὶ ἐπηρώτων λέγοντες ‘Προφήτευσον, τίς ἐστιν ὁ παίσας σε?’
- Matthew 26:67–68: Τότε ἐνέπτυσαν εἰς τὸ πρόσωπον αὐτοῦ καὶ ἐκολάφισαν αὐτόν οἱ δὲ ἐράπισαν λέγοντες ‘Προφήτευσον ἡμῖν, Χριστέ, τίς ἐστιν ὁ παίσας σε?’
- Mark 14:65: Καὶ ἤρξαντό τινες ἐμπτύειν αὐτῷ καὶ περικαλύπτειν αὐτοῦ τὸ πρόσωπον καὶ κολαφίζειν αὐτὸν καὶ λέγειν αὐτῷ, ‘Προφήτευσον’.
And alas…there are manuscripts of Mark that contain all or part of the rest of that last line, τίς ἐστιν ὁ παίσας σε, “who is it who struck you?” In fact some contain features distinctive of Matthew (like the addition of ἡμῖν, the command that Jesus prophecy “to us”). This all could indicate scribal harmonization of Mark to Matthew. Or it could mean the rest of this line was in Mark when Matthew and Luke composed, and only is lacking in most of our manuscripts because a scribe accidentally dropped it, skipping ahead to the next sentence, not realizing they failed to copy several words. This kind of error is another that is very common across ancient manuscripts. In this scenario, that last line, expanding on what the soldiers said, will just be Matthew and Luke preserving the (now lost) words of Mark.
The rest is all just standard redaction of Mark, who already has the spitting, the covering of the face, the striking, and the questioning. Matthew drops the covering of the face (or else, scribes copying Matthew did), Luke drops the spitting (or else, scribes copying Luke miswrote “struck,” ἔτυπτον, for “spat,” ἐμπτύειν). But the rest is all just saying the same thing as Mark, if in slightly different words. In other words, the only thing that definitely would suggest Luke is using Matthew here is the completion of the “Prophecy” line, which does not exist in our critical text of Mark, only in some manuscripts of Mark. But that could easily be a scribal omission in our text of Mark.
So, maybe, in fact, Mark wrote the whole line; then Luke could be getting it from Mark. And if that’s the case, we needn’t posit Luke knew Matthew. And if that’s the case, Q theorists aren’t committed to this being evidence that Q contained a crucifixion narrative. Of course Q theorists could get to the same safe result by simply attempting to embrace a triple source theory for Luke, whereby he used both Q and Matthew; it’s just that when you start doing that, Q starts to look like, well, Matthew—so why do we need Q? And that’s where all the other evidence Luke knew Matthew comes in and spoils the game. We don’t need this one line to be evidence for that. But we can safely say it is more probable that Mark in fact had the whole line, and our version simply suffered a loss of those final words due to scribal error.
That could solve some problems for apologists while creating others. As I point out in There Are No Undesigned Coincidences: The Bible’s Authors Are Simply Changing Up Their Sources, once we recognize the high probability of this kind of error in the preservation of the text of Mark, any hope one might have had that Mark’s “omission” somehow entails that Mark preserved a real story unknowingly is certainly dashed. And such scribal errors are far too common to rule that out here. And for myself, I believe there’s a good chance that’s indeed what happened here.
Did Mark Say Barabbas’s Name Was Also Jesus?
In OHJ (p. 406) I point out this interesting tidbit, also featuring observations from Origen: that there were manuscripts of Matthew (that even he saw) where Barabbas is actually named Jesus Barabbas—and in both verses where Barabbas’s name is mentioned, ruling out error as an explanation: someone added the name in both places on purpose. And we have some of those manuscripts! Since Barabbas means “Son of the Father,” setting up a mythic Levitical Yom Kippur legend between two “Sons of the Father,” Jesus the humble hero and the other the murderous rebel, it is very notable that some manuscripts actually made this parallel clear by naming both men Jesus. This is clear evidence of mythmaking. But who came up with the idea?
[This is found not only in Greek but] also in several Armenian, Georgic and Syriac manuscripts, demonstrating that even in Greek the variant existed as early as the fourth century (we have it attested in several later Greek manuscripts as well), and Origen reports that he saw it in Greek manuscripts of the early third century. In these manuscripts Barabbas is named ‘Jesus Barabbas’ twice (in two distinct verses: 27.16 and 27.17), which cannot be accidental; therefore either a scribe deliberately changed his name to Jesus Barabbas in both verses (indicating the scribe understood the mythic symbolism and intended to make it even more clear) or that is what Matthew originally wrote. The latter is the more probable hypothesis [see my next point]. Matthew often improves on Mark in this way, though the copy of Mark that Matthew derived his text from may also have said ‘Jesus Barabbas’, since the evident tendency to delete them from Matthew could also have purged them from Mark. But even if Matthew added them, that entails Matthew understood the mythic symbolism (and thus intended to make it even more clear), since there would be no other reason to add them (either by Matthew or later scribes).
Origen [also] gives the reason why the name ‘Jesus’ was then being removed from manuscripts: it was considered inappropriate to associate the name ‘Jesus’ with a sinner. And indeed, the name ‘Jesus’ is conspicuously absent from the Gospels (apart from the Jesus), despite that being one of the most common names of the time (even in Acts only one other person is ever even mentioned as having the name: Elymas the Sorcerer’s father was supposedly named ‘Jesus’, according to Acts 13.6-8; and that is probably a literary invention).
OHJ, p. 406 nn. 43–44
Origen is probably right. And if that’s the case, and Matthew originally wrote “Jesus Barabbas” and the “Jesus” was scrubbed by scandalized scribes, then it’s as likely Mark originally wrote “Jesus Barabbas.” The only difference is that we have far fewer manuscripts of Mark, and there might always have been fewer, and so the scrubbing of his manuscripts was more effective and thorough. Origen’s observation matches what we know from text-critical studies to be a common enough phenomenon, particularly as all extant manuscripts reverently hide the divine name of “Jesus” (among other reverent words) under a form of abbreviation called a nomen sacrum, demonstrating the concern. Imagine the conundrum of a scribe, having to abbreviate the first name of the villain Barabbas out of reverence! Less vexing to just delete it. I think this bears a preponderance of probability. I think it is more likely Matthew was just copying Mark, than that Matthew (or even more improbably, a later scribe) came up with the idea of making Mark’s mythic parallel even more obvious by actually giving Barabbas the name of Jesus.
Apologists won’t like this one, though. It undermines their position, by establishing mythmaking as the ready mode of Gospel authors and whitewashing the common enterprise of scribes transmitting what they wrote. It also throws a wrench in more desperate apologetics like the one I call the Argument from Name Frequency (pro tip: that argument was bullshit from day one).
Did Mark Also Say Jesus Was a Nazorian?
A final example is the problem of what “Nazarene” means in the oft-repeated moniker “Jesus the Nazarene.” Because that’s largely a contrivance of modern scholarship. The manuscripts don’t quite vindicate this reading. Most Gospel texts don’t say “Nazerene” at all. They mostly say “Nazorian.” Which does not refer to someone from Nazareth. And how could dozens of verses all get switched from Nazarene to Nazorian? The collective evidence suggests, on text-critical grounds, that it went the other way around: only after it was decided that this word is supposed to refer to Nazareth did it start getting switched out for the correct form for that sense. Nazorian was probably everywhere the original reading. How else would Matthew never have heard of any other form of the word? Just as with “Jesus Barabbas,” it is more likely Mark also consistently wrote Nazorian, and that his text was “fixed” more successfully, owing again to their being fewer manuscripts to control (then and extant).
As I note in OHJ, even the author of Acts does not appear to know of the Nazarene appellation, imagining the Christians called themselves “the Nazōraioi (Acts 24.5), which in English corresponds to ‘Nazorian’, by analogy with Athēnaioi, ‘Athenian’.” Nazors (or Nazor) isn’t a town at all, much less the town of Nazareth. Epiphanius likewise knew the original Torah-observant sect of Christians by this same appellation, the Nazorians (OHJ, 281–82). This has serious implications (OHJ, 401–02; emphasis now added):
It should be clear that Nazōr– and Nazar– are completely different roots; and –eth and –ai are completely different terminations. The original meaning was probably not a town of origin but an attribute or label (a name with a secret meaning, as I show in Proving History some Christians in fact believed). This lack of connection between the terms is actually an argument for the historicity of Nazareth (at least when the Gospels were written), as there is no other explanation why Nazōraios would generate an assignment to Nazareth other than that there was an actual Nazareth and that sounded close enough (otherwise, if the evangelists were inventing the town, they would have named it Nazōrai).
Conversely, this also argues that Jesus did not come from Nazareth, as otherwise there is no good explanation why he was called a Nazorian (Mt. 26.71; Lk. 18.37; Jn 18.5-7 and 19.19) and his followers Nazorians, other than that this was a term originally unconnected with Nazareth and therefore preceded the assignment of that town to Jesus (it’s not as if Matthew, e.g., needed to find scriptural confirmation that he originated in Nazareth; Mark didn’t, and neither did Luke or John). Otherwise Jesus would have been called a Nazaretos (‘Nazarethan’) or a Nazaranos (‘Nazaran’).
Mark created the loosely similar word, Nazarēnos, for this purpose, unless that was a later scribal modification. And we have reason to believe it was, because Mk 10.47 originally agreed with the other Gospels in saying Nazōraios (e.g. in Codex Sinaiticus); Mk 14.67 may have (e.g. Codex Koridethi and Codex Sangallensis 48); as might Mk 16.6 (e.g. Codex Sangallensis 48 and Codex Regius); and there is significant confusion in the mss. as to the spelling in Mk 1.24, as also in those other three verses, leaving all cases accounted for—for Mk 1.24 alone [the manuscript concordance of Reuban] Swanson identifies no less than five different variant spellings …
[Meanwhile] Matthew knows no other spelling than Nazōraios (and he was using Mark as a source). John also knows no other spelling than Nazōraios. Luke uses Nazarēnos only twice, only one of which is a lift from Mark (Lk. 4.34, redacting Mk 1.24), the other introduced in a story unique to Luke (Lk. 24.19), but elsewhere, in another lift from Mark, he uses Nazōraios (Lk. 18.37, redacting Mk 10.47), and this spelling can’t have come from Matthew, who does not use the word at all in his redaction of the same story (in Mt. 20.29-34). It therefore must have come from Mark, which argues that Mark originally wrote Nazōraios.
Notably, in Luke’s one lift from Mark that reads Nazarēnos, the manuscripts again don’t agree on the spelling (some seven variants are known, including spellings similar to Nazōraios); and in his one unique use, a great many mss. in fact read Nazōraios. … [So] it would appear that Nazarēnos was a later scribal invention and might never have been in the Gospels of Mark or Luke originally.
So…
[It] should already be obvious from the fact that Christians were originally called Nazorians (Acts 24.5), and the originating sect of Christianity, which remained Torah-observant, continued to be so-named for centuries [per Epiphanius]. Yet Christians [themselves] neither came from nor were based at Nazareth. So the word clearly meant something else. And this is explicitly admitted in later Christian sources [as I document in Proving History; index, “Nazareth”]. In fact, that the messianic fable had to be set in Galilee was already established in scripture (Isa. 9.1- 7); and scripture likewise insisted the messiah had to be a ‘Nazorian’ (Mt. 2.23, obviously reading some scripture or variant we no longer have…
These facts obviously inspired the selection for Jesus’ home a town in Galilee with the nearest-sounding name, ‘Nazareth’. That this is what happened is supported by the fact that those two words (Nazōraios and Nazareth) are not at all related, yet Matthew reports that scripture said Jesus would be a Nazorian, and Acts says the Christians were called Nazorians, and Epiphanius confirms a Torah-observant Christian sect did exist in Palestine called the Nazorians, and Jesus is frequently called a Nazorian in the Gospels (in John and Matthew, he is only so called). So the scripture and the name came first; the Gospel narrators then forced a fit, as best they could, with otherwise unrelated background facts (like a town with a near-enough-sounding name).
Of course, a real man could have been assigned this town for scriptural and mythopoeic reasons; so the historicity of Jesus is not undermined by this revelation. But one of the favorite arguments for his existence is tanked by it. You can no longer deploy the Hitchens maneuver and claim Jesus “must” have existed because we can’t otherwise explain how he came to be “from Nazareth.” And thus it matters that text-critical considerations actually strongly argue for Mark and Luke consistently having used the unrelated word “Nazorian,” and all manuscripts ever attesting “Nazarene” are later scribal emendations to solidify the historicizing myth of his origin and get rid of the original esoteric meaning of what a “Nazorian” actually was.
Conclusion
So problems for your pet theories can both arise or vanish with credible textual criticism. Scribal error was so common, and the kinds of errors that were particularly common actually perform so very well as explanations of many difficulties or oddities in our surviving text of the Bible, that there is no need to resort to convoluted armchair apologetics or wild speculations about an author’s hidden intentions. And attending to the manuscript history as well as the text-critical context of any crux in the extant text can often be crucial to assessing what might actually have happened. You certainly don’t want to overlook it.
This does not mean just any text-critical theory you can come up with is therefore probable. You need a preponderance of evidence supporting it in each particular case. Manuscript evidence is nice, but you won’t always have it; and even when you do, it might not always be clear. But you can have evidence in the form of there being a definite problem with the text that needs some solution; plus the high probability of a text-critical solution at that point given the inherent and surrounding Greek (or even the variations found across the Synoptics, for example); and the lack of any evidence to the contrary; as well as what intelligent authors were back then more or less likely to do usually; and other considerations.
There are many examples I already explore in various other places, such as in On the Historicity of Jesus, where I discuss evidence that, for instance, Codex Bezae preserves more original readings of Luke-Acts than our critical edition does. Just two cases in point:
- Emmaus might have originally been Oulammaous (OHJ, p. 483). There are good text-critical reasons to think so. And they stem in part from recognizing that what we know as “the Emmaus narrative” is actually a mythic recapitulation of the story of the boy Jesus in the temple, the author of Luke deliberately inventing both tales as end-caps to his entire Gospel. Which is an observation now recently confirmed by a new study (yet without noticing the evidence in Codex Bezae) by Reverend Dr. Rob James, Professor of Anglican Formation and Studies at the Vancouver School of Theology: The Spiral Gospel: Intratextuality in Luke’s Narrative (James Clarke, 2023). To its results, which independently replicate and thus corroborate several of my own arguments, can now be added the manuscript evidence from Codex Bezae of Emmaus being a multi-step corruption for the correct Septuagint reading of Oulammaous, a.k.a. Bethel, a.k.a. “God’s House.”
- Codex Bezae also provided evidence that Luke’s empty tomb narrative might have originally said the stone covering Jesus’s tomb took “twenty men” to move (OHJ, p. 486). Because that would align Luke’s version of the story symbolically with the Antiquities of Josephus, wherein we learn it took “twenty men” to open the doors to the Jerusalem temple. Whoever wrote that line was clearly drawing from the Antiquities of Josephus in order to equate the tomb of Jesus with the temple of God, and thus Jesus leaving the tomb with God leaving the temple (thereby and therein inaugurating a new divine order). To suppose a later scribe “figured out” that Luke-Acts draws often from the Antiquities of Josephus and thus dug into that and found this detail and thus “added” this line to Luke to somehow improve its ingenious application of the Antiquities to improve on the mythical symbolism of the tale seems less likely than that…Luke is the one who did this, and all other manuscripts lack the line because it was lost in transmission, deliberately or by error. One of those theories requires more, and more improbable, coincidences than the other.
So there are many reasons, from the mundane to the scary, why textual criticism is an essential methodology for studying and understanding the Bible and its creation and transmission.
-:-
- For a more tentative but even more interesting example, see my discussion of what meddling may have occurred in 1 Corinthians 15 in Then He Appeared to Over Five Hundred Brethren at Once!
Is it reasonable or totally speculative to think that the later writers thought/assumed/wanted their writings to replace rather than supplement?
This seems, from my modern viewpoint, a reasonable thing to believe about John, but perhaps it’s unreasonable to assign such a motivation in hindsight?
Obviously the Christians keep saying, “the changes weren’t really really changes, they were just different “viewpoints.”
Certainly the writer of John knew he was changing things, so it seems easy to believe he did so to “correct” theology he found troubling, but is there any evidence that some early communities took the newer works to be the “correct” viewpoints and hoped/desired/sought to see the erroneous versions removed from history?
It is plausible. And it is my strongest suspicion. Matthew with respect to Mark especially (I think he wanted to erase Mark from history by passing off Matthew as the original and Mark the redaction; just as the forgery of 2 Thessalonians accuses 1 Thessalonians of being the forgery). Luke admits to there being earlier versions, but explicitly claims his is the most reliable. John mixes both approaches: he erases all prior Gospels but one, the one he invented, supposedly written by the Beloved (IMO, Lazarus in the original redaction), which he claims as a source, thus getting the best of both worlds. The intent seems obviously to claim superiority over and thus replace other versions.
I’m a bit confused on the Nazareth discussion. If I’m understanding you correctly, Mark may have never actually indicated that Jesus was from Nazareth. That could be a scribal interpolation. He calls Jesus, Nazōraios, which means something else. Mathew comes along and decides that Nazōraios means “from Nazareth” (even though as a native Greek speaker he would know better) and decides to explicitly state that Jesus was from Nazareth, but then proceeds to use Nazōraios even though that doesn’t mean “from Nazareth”. Luke-Acts and John follow Mathew’s lead in stating Jesus is from Nazareth, but still use Nazōraios as well. Later scribes don’t like the Nazōraios and start changing it to sound closer to Nazareth or they just screw up the copying.
If this is the case, would this be evidence that none of the gospel writers are historicists? (I don’t mean proof here, just evidence) I think Mark is not a historicist. He has Jesus kill a fig tree for no reason. He doesn’t care about real events, he just has theological points to make and needs a story to do so. Mathew here doesn’t care as he just grabs a town in Galilee that is similar to Nazōraios and calls it close enough. We couple this with Jesus riding two donkeys and Mathew seems to care about real events just as much as Mark does. Luke could be a wildcard here, but if he is third and late to the game, he needs a gimmick to improve his authority so he adds a historian feel to his gospel. John comes even later and feels compelled to rewrite the whole thing from scratch and specifically target Christians that started to believe in historicity, possibly under the influence of Luke, who was not himself a historicists.
Good questions.
First, the redaction history:
It is rather that Jesus begins scripturally a Nazorian, per Matthew (he is the first to mention this, but this was probably already church teaching decades before any Gospel was written).
When it came time for Mark to place Jesus on Earth in a mythology, he knows Isaiah 9 says this would all happen in Galilee, so he needs a home town for Jesus; so he looks at the scripture Matthew references that said he’d be a Nazorian, and picked the town in Galilee that sounded most similar (which was not hodunk: it was one of the cities that took in priests after the destruction of the temple, per the Priestly Courses inscription, so it clearly had means and amenities).
Later scribes then started trying to align Mark’s use of Nazorian into the more appropriate Nazarene, albeit imperfectly (hence the trail they left, in the manuscripts of Mark as well as the texts of Matthew, Luke, and John). Their intent was to make the Gospel sound more correctly historical and literal. Mark would not have intended that. He would have wanted the clue left in the text (per Mark 4).
All this is what happened if we conclude Mark 1:9 is authentic (the one verse that explicitly says Jesus came from Nazareth). There is no particular reason to think it is not, apart from the fact that it is only ever mentioned once and the rest of the text appears to act like Jesus’s hometown was Capernaum. But that’s too weak a case for me to conclude the line was added. So I go with the assumption Mark wrote it. In which case, it was contrived as above.
The other Gospels all followed suit (even John).
As to the question of the Gospel authors’ intentions:
That is not easy to suss, because we have from Origen the admission that both missions could be taken up simultaneously: to dupe the masses into taking these texts literally while reserving for the educated and sufficiently initiated elite the “real explanation” of the meaning (I cover this in OHJ; I also discuss the sequence of the Gospels in this regard in Jesus from Outer Space).
Mark seems very keen on the correct reading not being literal but outsiders not knowing that (Mk. 4). Matthew seems more keen on readers treating the text like any ancient scripture (which suggests a “take it as you like it” approach). Luke is the first to claim he is writing history, but even he is vague (he says he related what witnesses transmitted and did so with slavish precision—which is false, but even as a claim, it is ambiguous as to just what he means they transmitted and just what kind of precision he is talking about, mythic or historical; which suggests a “sell it as you need it” approach).
The only text we have that clearly proclaims itself a work of historical literalism is John (see OHJ, Ch. 10.7)—and it was multiply redacted, so what we have is its last redactor’s version, not its original text. So it is difficult to discern what its original author said or meant (or its second editor even). All we can be sure of is what its third and last editor wanted us to believe, which is clearly, that everything should be taken literally as history (in direct refutation of Luke in fact, cf. John’s reification of Luke’s parable of Lazarus).
But that final redactor was not meticulous in converting the text. They left in things like the obvious symbolism of the Cana-Samaria sequence, the Dionysian storyline (per MacDonald); they forgot to fix the text when they moved parts around (so it has obvious errors in sequencing, like having Jesus magically in different regions without explanation of how he got there, etc.); they left in a duplicated final verse (ending 20 and 21); and so on. This is also a hundred years later. By an author with no particularly evident understanding of Hebrew or Aramaic. So it’s possible they simply overlooked the incongruity of Nazorian and Nazareth, just as they overlooked so much else.
Hi Dr. Carrier,
Along the lines of this article, you’ve mentioned in the past that the line in Paul referring to Jesus appearing to 500 people at once (1 Corinthians 15:6) could be a mistranslation. Can you provide more detail in this regard?
Yes. I discuss that in my article on The Five Hundred.
Thank you, much appreciated!
Another good example, BTW. Albeit less certain in conclusion.
The Five Hundred article reminded me of Levenshtein distance. It wasn’t until this recent article that I went to see if it was ever used in New Testament studies and sure enough I found a paper on it. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/opth-2019-0004/html
I’m not sure exactly how or where it would be used, but it is interesting that someone took the time to come up with a way to apply it. It seems to have a limited application because you can only measure the distance between two correctly spelled Greek words. Your example about the five hundred includes a corrupted version of Pentecost. So you can only measure (“Pentecost” -> “Five Hundred”), when the hypothesis is (“Pentecost” -> “?” -> “Five Hundred”).
Side note: What kind of formatting does your comment section accept? (html, markdown,etc.) How do you make a hyperlink?
I found it’s available for reading here: https://repository.tudelft.nl/islandora/object/uuid:5316e3ae-1e43-42ef-973c-a462c3f5a078?collection=research
One thing that immediately stood out to me is that apparently no attempt was made to deal with abbreviations. Now I don’t have specific knowledge of the classical era, but in the medieval manuscripts I’m familiar with it’s abbreviations galore. (Which could also automatically generate the hypothesis that a mistake is the result of an incorrectly resolved abbreviation rather than a misreading/correction, though the end result is much the same.)
Good point to note here.
The medieval use of abbreviation was not the case in antiquity—nor even was Byzantine script, which, like the ubiquitous use of abbreviating syllables, was an attempt to economize text production (and the size of books). But that does create whole new vistas for scribal error, so it matters if we are talking about medieval manuscripts; although the Bible was not as subject to this abbreviation mania as much as secular books were. And really we are talking about circa 9th-12th century, mostly.
In ancient manuscripts (up to at least the 6th century), the only common use of abbreviation in Biblical manuscripts was the nomina sacra, which were a very specific set of revered words that had sacred significance, and they were treated like the name of God in the Hebrew scriptures: abbreviation being a way to avoid blasphemy by saying the Lord’s name in vain. These were almost standardized although a lot of deviation existed in respect to how far the practice was expanded (to how many words).
Wikipedia has a decent page on it.
It takes most simple HTML markup. For example, I linked to Five Hundred with a standard A HREF tag.
It also responds to Markdown codes.
I’ve struggled for a while to hypothesise what Mark could have actually believed about Jesus, since it seems pretty clear that he knows he’s not writing history, but he seems too invested to be just producing fictional art. Is it possible he actually believed in Paul’s celestial Jesus, but constructed the gospel to, as he says and you’ve mentioned, hide the ‘truth’ from outsiders? Like, is he writing an allegory about what he believes to be real celestial events?
Also, a few of typos:
“Translitteration”
“he want to the vicinity”
“scandalized scribed”
What does “lack the linat” mean?
Thanks! Fixed. It was “line,” not linat. Too many errors this time because I’m adjusting to a new theme and typography in my WordPress suite (the old one aged out and crashed). I’ll get acquainted with it in short order. 🙂
As to what Mark thought: we can’t tell because Mark isn’t anywhere talking about the cosmology of his beliefs (even allegorically; that’s why there isn’t even a Nativity narrative, and even when Matthew adds one it isn’t really concerned with cosmology as much as aligning Jesus more with Moses; etc.).
The Gospel is all about the gospel, which we would categorize as a moral-political theory (what people should do, how they should behave). For example, even when he discusses the apocalypse, he is vague on details (how exactly will Jesus himself be commanding armies of angels, what exactly will they do when they get here, and where will they all be in the meantime—like, the third heaven, the seventh, flittering about several heavens?), but focuses, rather, on how we should respond or behave, both with respect to the coming of it, and with respect to its arrival.
Another example is the demons all proclaiming him Lord. This directly contradicts not just Pauline but even Orthodox doctrine that the whole point was that the demons would not know it was Jesus until after they killed him, when it was too late. Mark “nods” to this element with his whole theme of “the messianic secret” (Jesus keeps commanding people not to tell anyone; they do anyway). But in no way is Mark being coherent to the theological model of salvation he surely believed in. This indicates he had no interest to be. Since it’s all post hoc allegory anyway, all he needs is a nod, not a coherently literal adherence to it. Just as with the fig tree episode, where Mark does not care that what he has written, taken literally, is wildly illogical (why would any sane rational entity expect figs on a tree out of season??); because it is the symbolic meaning that matters (it is no longer the season for figs = it is no longer the time for the Jewish temple cult).
Because of this, we can’t really extract things from Mark that we can’t find attested elsewhere. Like, what is he doing with the messianic secret? It makes no logical sense. Unless you know about 1 Cor. 2. What is he doing with this illogical fig tree story? It makes no logical sense. Unless you know about the Jewish War and the existential relevance of the temple cult. And so on.
And even then, the allegory is about behavior (how we should react to the temple being destroyed by heathens; how we should react to the messianic secret now), not technical doctrines about the cosmological system. Even when he has Jesus discuss one item of metaphysics, the nature of resurrection bodies and our ensuing life (will we be married in heaven? i.e. Mark 12:25), his focus is on behavior, how we should react to this understanding, what we should do. He doesn’t go into what it even means that “we will be like angels.” For Mark, the only important point is how it relates to behavior (in effect, “you will not claim wives in the afterlife so stop arguing about it”).
Another example is how Mark creates a deliberate symbolic connection between the baptism scene (which is a mock death and resurrection) and the death scene, where in both cases the heavens split (in the latter case, one will get that only if they know the temple curtain had the heavens depicted upon it and represented the barrier between God and men), and in one case the spirit descends upon him (as a bird) and in another it leaves him (he “expired” literally is the word “spirit left,” preserved even in the English: ex spir[it]). Okay, sounds like some cosmology maybe? And later spinoff sects tried to make technical hay over this. But really Mark is talking about behavior again; the literalism of his passages is not meant to even be logical, much less factual. What is a baptism? It is breaking the barrier between God and man by an indwelling of his Spirit, so you should go get one; it replaces the function of the temple cult, so you don’t need Levitical rules anymore; and so on.
Even at death, the message most likely is that the body is no longer relevant (the spirit leaves the shell because the shell has been cast off). That sort of contradicts a physically empty tomb, but again, Mark does not aim for literal coherence. It’s all metaphor. The empty tomb is itself a symbol of the empty (and thus irrelevant) body (hence “you will not find him here,” he’s somewhere else now). Which again is about behavior (how we should react to cadavers and tombs, what we should expect for ourselves in the end, what we should do, where we should look, etc.).
(Damn, I was about to complement the new website design, but somehow I lost my reply (twice), so I’ll hold the praise for now… I think it happens when clicking away from the reply box)
Keep that info coming, so I know what’s not working.
It is possible, because all this happened just recently, that what you experienced was a transient problem caused by my cache clearing (swapping themes was an arduous process of fixing and repair over a whole day, necessitating constant clearing of the server cache). Or it could be a persistent problem with my new theme.
Just so you are up to speed: my preferred theme, which I loved, was deprecated years ago (its designer was disintegrated by Klingons or something; for whatever reason, they vanished, and the theme was never updated since); this apparently was the cause of those annoying nonce errors, which were getting worse; until eventually, the theme was completely nonfunctional and my site went down. So I had to update my theme, and to one I could trust wouldn’t go out of business.
This resulted in replacing my old theme with one decidedly inferior until I can span the massive learning curve required to figure out how to use any of the tools I need to fix things up the way I want them. That may take years. In the meantime, WYSIWYG. We’re stuck with this inferior theme for a while. It’s glitchy, and IMO, ugly, but it will serve.
I also want to replace my entire comments system. But that will likely take days to accomplish, as any such switchover will inevitably break everything, taking days to repair, and will be massively complicated to program and thus take days to learn how to configure. So I won’t even try starting that until after the holidays.
But, stay tuned?
Anyway, I was going to say, you rarely have more than one or two typos, so it did seem unusual. I just realised that I typoed when I wrote “a few of typos”! I think I had written “couple” but it grew to “few”. 😉
So, do you think Mark was a theological descendant of Paul, or did they both share a common ancestor? And, how many copies of Mark would you guess were in existence when Matthew started (re)writing? 5? 20? 2?
When Paul says that Jesus was born of a woman, it’s mostly allegorical, but would he in any sense have believed that Jesus was literally born and had an adolescence in the sky? Greek gods did, right, but Jesus? I’m just thinking that if Mark didn’t have any beliefs around a baby and adolescent Jesus, maybe that’s part of the reason he never allegorised it into his gospel
Yes, I think Mark is a sectarian in Paul’s clade. Indeed, I think he’s his first mythopoeic advocate. That doesn’t mean they ever met, of course. I suspect not, but there is no way to know.
On manuscript distribution, that’s unknowable because we don’t know what the intentions were or the investment scale. For example, was this just for select churches to read out? Or was it a propaganda campaign seeking to flood the market of ideas? Or was it a literary exercise circulated only among certain literary houses and thus maybe aimed at certain library collections (per Walsh)? Etc. Since we don’t know (we have no reports at all from the period of their composition; the only thing close comes from Papias a generation or two later, and it’s obviously completely uninformed and gullible), we can’t say.
We can say more about the anti-Marcionite edition that included Mark (which will have been composed two average lifetimes after Mark), since that clearly appears to have had a propagandistic intent and appears to have had a lot of money backing it, and this is even evidenced by the fact that it succeeded: it flooded the market so conclusively, not a single extant manuscript comes from any text but it, and we are finding such manuscripts even within fifty to a hundred years of its publication (which means there were so many in the market by then that they appear in the record even after statistical wipeout).
Comparatively, therefore, we can say that Mark (original) was nowhere near that widely published. But that could be because of limited investment funds, not necessarily a lack of desire to win some propaganda war. But one can speculate it’s more likely Mark’s agenda was more in-house, and because he (and his backers) had no competition yet (assuming no prior Gospel existed), the need of scaling production would not have been as immediate. Even Matthew, which I think did intend to “replace” Mark, was aimed at a different market (Torah observant churches). Luke and John (or our redactions thereof) were written so close to the flooded Edition in time that even if they were scaled, it soon swamped them.
So, all that said, my guess would be somewhere between 10 and 100 copies were made in Mark’s lifetime. Whereas the Edition clearly was mass produced (and so rapidly as to even compromise quality; cf. link on the edition above). It must have generated something on a scale of 100 copies a year, if not 1000. And that sounds like a lot, but it really isn’t, as I discussed in respect to manuscripts of Daniel:
So it really comes down to purpose. Did Mark’s generation think it sufficient to have only one copy per church and thus not scale beyond that? If so, they could easily hit that mark within a year, much more so ten. But they might then not have continued, reserving resources merely for maintaining the copies they had.
On that last question, possible, yes, but very unlikely; so if we had to say that (if, for instance, Paul mentioned a boy Jesus), this would greatly reduce the probability of mythicism, probably by enough even to make it a less probable hypothesis (it would depend on exactly what Paul said about the boy Jesus; e.g. if he said he lived on Venus, well, that’s one thing, but if he said he lived in Galilee, that would end the matter, and if he was ambiguous, it would depend on how ambiguous and what other precedents in Paul we could adduce to assess it by).
As for Mark, I do not believe Mark had any idea of his book being taken literally by Christians. That intent seems to arise slowly after him (Matthew flirts with it by fleshing out the biography and saying it was all predicted by scripture, thus he is selling the myth as just like Deuteronomy or Exodus or any Life of Moses; Luke starts pretending it’s history; John then insists you take it as such or be damned). When Mark wrote, everything is allegory.
And he isn’t at all interested in expounding any cosmology of Jesus. As I expounded in my last comment, his book is all about behavior (what does Baptism mean and why should you get one? How should you react to the temple’s destruction? How should you market the gospel? How should you deal with enemies and doubters? Etc.) rather than metaphysics (Where does Jesus live? Who really killed him? Is Jesus an angel? What order of angel? What is his body made of now? What was his body made of then? Etc.).
So the birth of Jesus is simply irrelevant to Mark’s intentions. His book is not about any such thing as that. To Mark’s design, the Baptism is the Nativity (his mythical adoption as God’s son, and thus his “birth” is represented allegorically that way).
Is there a good summary anywhere defending the mainstream position that Nazōraios is a reference to Nazareth? I tried to find one in the past to compare with your thesis but really couldn’t find much. It seems to be one of those things that everyone just “knows”.
The best I found argued (and I’m going off memory here) that the corruption probably happened before it ever made it to the Greek. Since Hebrew doesn’t have vowels, the Greek authors may have had some kind of written reference to NZR and had to guess it’s meaning.
You are right. It hasn’t received a good write-up in the literature. It’s even sometimes one of those things scholars didn’t think to check and thus don’t even know about (and thus they are surprised to be told the word nazarene is nowhere in Matthew, for example, but repeatedly only nazorian). And the others just know it but don’t think very hard about it. But all will know, once they look, the grammatical point in Greek: nazôr- does not make sense for nazar-, and thus it’s a “crux,” a difficulty in need of explanation.
As to the possible transmission history, the authors clearly do know how to spell Nazareth, and thus were they only looking at a Hebrew spelling of NZR (which requires us to believe a Hebrew document was being consulted and not oral lore), and then assumed it meant the town, they would not translitterate it as Nazôraios but some appropriate Nazar- term (as later scribes started doing). So they clearly understood the word did not refer to the town, and yet that they had to preserve the long-o (omega) sound for some reason. So it remains to ascertain what that reason was. It wasn’t the town. So it had to be something else.
One can speculate on an older mistake, same as Isaiah’s “almah” (young lady) becoming the Septuagint “parthenos” (virgin), and then driving a whole Christian pesher construction of Jesus’s Nativity around that. Matthew says “he will be a nazorian” was in scripture somewhere. We know they were using different books than ours, and the same books with different readings than ours, so the passage he was looking at has been lost to us. But it must have been a key text probably even as early as Paul’s generation (he likely would have known what Matthew was talking about and what it meant vis Jesus). Could that have been a NZR that got rendered in a Greek (Septuagintal?) translation as Nazoraios when really it meant, say, just Nazirite?
I discuss this possibility (as others have noted it) in Proving History (index, “Nazareth”). This is all speculation. But “if” that’s what happened (and that’s “if”), then there are still two possible ways it could have gotten into Christian lore, either them reading the Greek as having some special other meaning (than Nazirite for example, or Netzer, “The Branch,” and so on; I discuss the options proposed), or the translators of the Scripture into Greek themselves having intended some special other meaning (which must be lost to us now) that the Christians then picked up on.
Anyway, that’s many levels of speculation at that point, so not much we can do with this information at present. Maybe someday someone will find a clue that sorts it all out. For now, all we can say is, the Christians clearly took it to mean something important, and whatever that was (it can be any of half a dozen things), it was not “a town.”
As to scholarship:
My treatment in Proving History and On the Historicity of Jesus (each case, index, “Nazareth”) is combined the most on-point. But I cite useful references in PH:
To which one could add the fuller study of Ray Pritz, Nazarene Jewish Christianity: From the End of the New Testament Period Until Its Disappearance in the Fourth Century (Brill 1988), esp. pp. 11-18.
I notice there is even a Wikipedia page, though I didn’t evaluate it. Likewise the discussion there under just the term. But they mention, I see, many of the proposals. I see Britannica has an entry, but it’s paywalled.
Re Nazareth/Nazorian: Last time I brought this up in random social media discussion, I got this reply:
“Nazorian could also be translated as Nazirite – a person who took a vow of purity for a defined period of time. The most famous Nazirite is Samson.”
Thoughts?
https://mastodon.murkworks.net/deck/@lePetomaneAncien@fosstodon.org/111270080612474607
That has been proposed (I mention it among other possibilities in my discussion in Proving History). But it would depend on what one meant by “could also be.” If one means, “maybe someone would incompetently mess that up and misspell it that way,” then, sure. But that would be improbable. So it’s not a “good” hypothesis by that metric.
In short, that isn’t how a competent Greek author would transliterate that word. And I am not aware of any examples in all of Greek literature (although I haven’t checked; so that would be the first thing to ask someone advocating that: can they give you examples of what they are claiming? I can only confirm there are zero instances in any non-Christian literature). If the Gospel authors meant Nazirite, they would use Naziraios, as is used in the LXX (indeed, that would be their model).
There is a very good paper on this by Christophe Lemardelé.
Since the format change, replies to replies to comments become narrower with each nested level, and are difficult to read from Safari on MacOS
Hm. That should already have been happening in the old theme. Are you saying, then, that the narrowing is steeper now? Because it should have been narrowing to unreadable spans even before the change (this is why I had to lock nesting at no more tan four levels). If so, I may have to accelerate my changeover to a new commenting system.
It seemed narrower than normal when I first commented, but it is not as extreme now.
Oh, you might be seeing dynamic formatting: as you change platform (mobile devices have different settings for different screen sizes and shapes; and those all differ from desktop as well), and frame (e.g. laterally shrink a web page window), the width of paragraphs will adjust to match (up to a programmed limit, depending on the theme).
That will affect comment fields as much as articles. So the size will vary for you. What’s more significant is the scaling of the indenting (if it is too fat, it quickly deteriorates as you noticed before; if it is too thin, people will have a hard time discerning what is in a thread and what isn’t).
Dr. Carrier, I recently noticed that Mandaeans priests actually call themselves “Naṣuraiia”, which is a word from the Mandaean language (a variation of Aramaic ) which means “guardian of knowledge”, with the literal translation to English being “‘Naṣoraeans”. According to their tradition, the Mandaeans claim that John the Baptist is the last prophet of their faith, and that Jesus was originally a follower of John and a Mandaean priest who perverted John´s teachings, and thus they see Jesus as a false prophet.
I wonder if this is a clue to what “Nazorean” actually meant and that the Synoptic Gospels (starting with Mark) tried to harmonize John and Jesus as a “ecumenical device” from an heteredox Jewish sect towards another one, in order to try and unite both into a common religious movement – just like in the Mandaean faith, John remains in Christianity as the “Final Prophet” (replacing Malachi), but he is also turned into the new Elijah that annoints Jesus – who is described as a follower of John (a “Nazorean”) – and to whom God “reveals” Jesus´ identity as the Messiah.
But on the other hand, the writings of the Mandaeans appear to be from a few centuries after the rise of Christianity, and thus it is hard to establish independence of the Mandaen scriptures/claims from the Christian ones. What do you think?
That is all centuries too late to indicate anything about the origins of Christianity. All the earlier discussions of the meaning of the word include no such concept but very different and more plausible ones (see “nazareth/nazarene” in the index to Proving History or OHJ).