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).

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?

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).

It seemed narrower than normal when I first commented, but it is not as extreme now.

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.

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?

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:

Every major city and base of leadership in Judea would have at least one copy within mere weeks of its promulgation. And from there, dozens of copies could be made a year. But if there were even just ten “initial edition” copies disseminated to elite centers, and then each was in turn copied only twice a year, after just ten years (much less forty), there would be over ten thousand manuscripts of Daniel in Judea (a relatively small geographic era I should remind you; little bigger than Vermont). I need not claim there were so many; my point is that it makes no sense to claim such a book couldn’t or wouldn’t be all over Judea in no time at all.

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).

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.

“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