No Evidence for 1st Century Nazareth

[angellous_evangellous]

I'll help you with that bottle dude.

He who has a good scotch has many friends. :yes:

Anyway, we'll get to the bottom of a bottle or two and see who believes in Nazareth then.

 

[Jayhawker Soule]

It's really not to my detriment, ...

Yes, it is.

 

[Viker]

He who has a good scotch has many friends. :yes:

Anyway, we'll get to the bottom of a bottle or two and see who believes in Nazareth then.

First one to see Jesus wins!

 

[Jayhawker Soule]

So, to summarize ...

So the 'theory' is:

• one or more fringe Hebrew schismists sloppily, foolishly, and unnecessarilly fabicates Nazareth.
• a group of fringe Hebrew schismists certainly weren't going to go tromping across the desert to simply go check if the place existed.
• and, fortunately, none of the opponents of these fringe Hebrew schismists knew enough or cared enough to expose this sloppy, foolish, unnecessary fabrication.

I'm not sure that the intent is to attack the church so much as to posture as a skeptic. It truly does have a childish quality to it. There is also the unbridled arrogance of those - wholly unschooled in the fields of history and historiagraphy - who deem themselves qualified to adequately judge, embrace, and then promote [but not defend] fringe positions simply because they align with their presuppositions. Its a process that weds intellectual fraud with a contempt for scholarship.

All joking aside: it's shameful.

 

[fallingblood]

I think I can help shine some light on why no one checked to see if Nazaerth existed. It was on a hill and people back then couldn't climb because of their short arm hair. That and there hats may have fallen off and expose their bald spots. So they played it safe.

And even though there were other towns right around that area, they had walls and no one could figure how to get out of them without being eaten by the camels that guarded the city. That is why Jesus said that not even a man from Sepphoris could enter the desert but through the camels mouth.

 

[angellous_evangellous]

I think I can help shine some light on why no one checked to see if Nazaerth existed. It was on a hill and people back then couldn't climb because of their short arm hair. That and there hats may have fallen off and expose their bald spots. So they played it safe.

And even though there were other towns right around that area, they had walls and no one could figure how to get out of them without being eaten by the camels that guarded the city. That is why Jesus said that not even a man from Sepphoris could enter the desert but through the camels mouth.

No excuse. They could have braided their butt hair into rope.

 

[sandy whitelinger]

No excuse. They could have braided their butt hair into rope.

But that was prohibited in the OT book of II Prohibitions.

 

[sandy whitelinger]

I think I can help shine some light on why no one checked to see if Nazaerth existed. It was on a hill and people back then couldn't climb because of their short arm hair. That and there hats may have fallen off and expose their bald spots. So they played it safe.

And even though there were other towns right around that area, they had walls and no one could figure how to get out of them without being eaten by the camels that guarded the city. That is why Jesus said that not even a man from Sepphoris could enter the desert but through the camels mouth.

They also did not have GPS so why bother?

 

[godnotgod]

You people certainly subscribe to the false mantra that my criticism, or that of others, is hate. Live in delusion if you like. Your ad homs are certainly a form of it.

There is something of a psychological nature that is a well-understood phenomenon in psychology known as the Five Egotistical States but which these people simply do not understand. The one Egotistical State which applies to them is known as: 'Apparent Love of Others: Idolatrous Love', which is not really love at all, but a projection of one's ego onto an imaginary idol, in this case, 'Jesus Christ', in which one gives one's all to the idol. One is nothing; the idol everything, a case in which one is willing to sacrifice oneself, even die, for one's idol. If another comes along and does not worship the idol as the idolater does, then the stranger automatically becomes an enemy of the idol. Such a person is now seen as hating the idol, and all that the idol represents to the idolater. Any criticism of the idol or the doctrine surrounding him is seen as unfounded, irrational, ignorant, and even hateful, with an intent to destroy the idol and the idol's doctrines.
*****


I. APPARENT LOVE OF OTHERS BY PROJECTION OF THE EGO

This is Idolatrous Love, in which the ego is projected onto another being [eg.; "Jesus"]. The pretension to divinity as "distinct" has left my organism and is now fixed on the organism of the other. The affective situation is one in which the other has taken my place in my scale of values. I desire the existence of the other-idol, against everything that is opposed to him. I no longer love my own organism except insofar as it is the faithful servant of the idol; apart from that I have no further sentiments towards my organism, I am indifferent to it, and, if necessary, I can give my life for the safety of my idol (I can sacrifice my organism to my Ego fixed on the idol; like Empedocles throwing himself down the crater of Etna in order to immortalize his Ego). As for the rest of the world, I hate it if it is hostile to my idol; if it is not hostile and if my contemplation of the idol fills me with joy (that is to say, with egotistical affirmation), I love indiscriminately all the rest of the world. If the idolized being rejects me to the point of forbidding me all possession of my Ego in him, the apparent love can be turned to hate.


from ’Zen and the Psychology of Transformation: The Supreme Doctrine’, by Hubert Benoit; Pantheon Books, ISBN 09281-272-9

 

[angellous_evangellous]

mmmmm spam

 

[godnotgod]

Let us hope that he has compassion for us - not only to show us the error of our beliefs in Nazareth - but to perfect us in every way.

My old Zen teacher would call your persistent belief, in spite of the evidence to the contrary right under your nose, a 'substantive, delusive idea'.

You cannot be perfected. You are already perfect; it is just that your vision which would show you that has become distorted, and because it is so distorted, you follow the path of imperfection, thinking it will somehow lead you to perfection. So on and on you go.....

it's all in the wrist, you know...all in the wrist...

 

[angellous_evangellous]

My old Zen teacher would call your persistent belief, in spite of the evidence to the contrary right under your nose, a 'substantive, delusive idea'.

You cannot be perfected. You are already perfect; it is just that your vision which would show you that has become distorted, and because it is so distorted, you follow the path of imperfection, thinking it will somehow lead you to perfection. So on and on you go.....

it's all in the wrist, you know...all in the wrist...

My Nez teacher wouldn't even pay attention to you.

 

[godnotgod]

Out of curiosity, has godnotgod explained why the Gospel writers would foolishly fabricate a village and why the pagans and Jews never attacked the fabrication?

That a false Nazareth is the case was not apparent until recently, and we do not know if some of the attackers are pagans, Jews, or otherwise, at least not officially.

The notion of the Gospel writers pointing to a 'town' or 'city of Nazareth' as a fabrication is not the idea; but rather that it is an outright mistake, a mistranslation:


Jesus is known to the world as “Jesus of Nazareth”. It is an almost formulaic
description of the historical Jesus, and frequently features as the sine qua non
for such a character. Even the minimalist identikits for a real Jesus, which
strip out the supernatural events and the Old Testament copy, leave behind a
bare-bones historical ‘Jesus’ who carries this plain heading on his ‘wanted’
poster: “Jesus of Nazareth”. Jesus, the minimalist theory goes, may not have
been a divine miracle-worker, but he was from Nazareth, preached, and was
crucified by Pilate. Such a process is based on the same flawed premise as
reconstructions of the Testimonium Flavianum obtained by subtracting the
most implausible elements. However, the inclusion of the Nazarene element
in the gospels – like so many ‘historical’ aspects missing from the Pauline
epistles - raises more fundamental issues which throw some dim light on the
mythologizing and historicising processes of early Christianity.

Every reference in the gospels to “Jesus of Nazareth” – including the gospel
equivalent of our ‘wanted’ poster, Pilate’s iconic inscription above the cross
(John 19:9) – says something quite different: Ἰησοῦς ὁ Ναζωραῖος - ‘Jesus
the Nazōraios’, or Ἰησοῦς ὁ Ναζαρηνός - ‘Jesus the Nazarēnos’. Does this
phrase really just mean ‘Jesus of Nazareth’? Or does it have a distinctive
religious significance that was originally tied to a mystical idea rather than a
place?

Ehrman favours the historicity of anything in the gospels that early Christians
had no obvious reason to make up – and to him the idea that Jesus came from an insignificant town such as Nazareth is not a detail that would
advance Christian vested interests (Ehrman, Disk 6, 11-3). According to Ehrman such details survive in our tradition because they were real. The so-called Criterion
of Embarrassment, also known in more philosophical language as the
criterion of contradiction (Meyer 2002) or more portentously as the
“movement against the redactional tendency” (Porter 2000, p.162) is
particularly popular with historicists. Meier (2001, p.168) suggests that
“embarrassing material coming from Jesus would naturally be either
suppressed or softened in later stages of the Gospel tradition". However,
neither the embarrassment felt, nor the compulsion to include such
“embarrassing” details, has been satisfactorily explained. The results of
applying the criterion are hardly convincing: details considered ‘authentic’
due to embarrassment include supernatural events such as the cursing of the
fig-tree (Barnett 2009, p.223). And in terms of embarrassment, it is hard to
top the accounts in the infancy gospel of Thomas (which Ehrman dates as
early as 125CE) of the child Jesus petulantly killing children for petty
sleights: it is clear from the reaction of the other townspeople that the
embarrassment factor spans the ages – and by the logic of this criterion, these
episodes would be particularly authentic. Given the extraordinary deeds and
events reported in the gospels, the proposition that anyone living at the time
of writing would have called the writers to account for things that they knew
to be untrue or that they had omitted, seems implausible. It can be said that
Jesus fed 5000, turned water into wine, walked on water, resurrected the
dead, and so on – yet somebody would be sure to pull the evangelist up if
they left out a few details? If compulsion applied, it would be to church
leaders in relation to the feasibility of significantly altering texts which were
widely circulated - not to the gospel authors, for whom any hidden agenda of
embarrassment can only be speculation.
Nazareth is one such detail commonly allowed as ‘historical’ under the
Criterion of Embarrassment. Ehrman maintains that Nazareth is a feature
which is both random and embarrassing, and that it must thereby be real.
Christians, Ehrman says, would have had him come from somewhere like
Bethlehem to fulfil a prophecy and "wouldn't have made up the idea that he
came from a little one horse town like Nazareth" (Ehrman, Disk 6, 11-3).
However, Ehrman ignores the fact that Jesus was said to come from Nazareth
precisely so that a prophecy might be fulfilled. Matthew explicitly frames
Jesus’ coming from Nazareth in these terms: Joseph, having been warned in
a dream about returning to Judea, decides to go to Galilee instead, and makes
his home in a city called Nazareth, “ὅπως πληρωθῇ τὸ ῥηθὲν διὰ τῶν
προφητῶν ὅτι Ναζωραῖος κληθήσεται” – “so that it might be fulfilled what
was spoken through the prophets, that a Nazōraion he shall be called”
(Matthew 2:23). Ναζωραῖος is almost universally translated here as ‘a
Nazarene’ – but when used elsewhere in conjunction with Jesus, as “Jesus of
Nazareth”. Matthew 2:23 raises two connected questions: what does
Nazōraion mean, and what is the prophecy? These questions stand regardless
of whether or not the phrase is an interpolation - and Scaliger, cited in Jonge
(1996, p.182) believed that it was, and an inept one at that (“additiones sunt
veterum christainorum ineptae” – though neither Scaliger nor Jonge indicate
why it would have been interpolated, and the devout Scaliger deemed it
interpolated only because of its foolishness).

The prophecy can potentially inform the meaning of Nazōraion, but may just
as well raise further questions concerning its fulfilment. Given that there is
no Old Testament reference to a city or town called Nazareth, it seems that
the embarrassment may well lie in the quality of a prophecy that depends on
word-play. Kittel et al (1985, p.625) insist that the term derives from “the city
of Nazareth as the hometown of Jesus” and that there is no obstacle to such a
proposition. On the face of it, however, the word Nazōraion does not and
cannot mean ‘of Nazareth’: it is not the natural word to describe a citizen of a
place variously named as Nazara, Nazaret and Nazareth. If we take Nazareth
as the most common spelling of the place-name (5 times in the gospels,
against four for Nazaret and two for Nazara), a Nazarene would have been a
Nazarethnon (Ναζαρέθνό&#962, Nazarethenon (Ναζαρέθένό&#962, Nazarethaion
(Ναζαρέθαiό&#962, or possibly (based on the word at Mark 1:5 and John 7:25 for
people of Jerusalem) Nazarethiton (Ναζαρέθιτό&#962 – but certainly not a
Nazōraion or a Nazarēnon.
Yet the most natural way to refer to Jesus being from Nazareth would simply
be to say what the translations insist on saying: Jesus of, or from, Nazareth.
When Acts refers to Paul being a native of Tarsus, it is as Saulon Tarsea
(Acts 9:11 Σαῦλον … Ταρσέ&#945. The title Nazōraios (and its variant
Nazarēnos) is mentioned much more frequently than Nazareth. Jesus is
repeatedly called 'the Nazōraion' and 'the Nazarēnon’ (ὁ Ναζωραῖος and ὁ
Ναζαρηνό&#962, where people like Paul are simply described as being from
Tarsus (at least when he's not also being described as a Nazōraion). While
there are frequent references in translations to “Jesus of Nazareth”, they are
all essentially mistranslations of ὁ Ναζωραῖος and ὁ Ναζαρηνός. On only one
occasion in the gospels is Jesus identified (by the people of Jerusalem) as
“Jesus the prophet from Nazareth” (Matthew 21:11 Ἰησοῦς ὁ ἀπὸ Ναζαρὲ&#952 –
a more elaborate rendition. Mark 1:9 refers to Jesus physically travelling
from Nazaret: Ἰησοῦς ἀπὸ Ναζαρὲτ…. – and John refers to Joseph as being
ἀπὸ Ναζαρέτ.

http://www.nazarethmyth.info/Mckenna2010HM.pdf

The facts that Nazareth is never mentioned in the OT, nor in any lists of Galilean towns, nor by Josephus, nor by the Talmud, nor was shown on any map of the time, and exists only in the vacuum of the NT, support the idea of a mistranslation.

 

[godnotgod]

My Nez teacher wouldn't even pay attention to you.

Yes, of course: we call it 'ignorance' and 'intellectual arrogance', qualites of your teacher you seem to accurately reflect. He would be proud.

Imagine that: smug ignoramuses (ignoramusi?...where's my lexicon?). For shame!:slap:

 

[godnotgod]

mmmmm spam

Let's give AE a rubber stamp so he can go apeschit, labeling anything that does'nt agree with his distorted view as 'SPAM'.

'More Ink!...Gimmee more ink, or I'll smear bananas all over my cage...nyaaaahh,...:

 

[godnotgod]

He who has a good scotch has many friends. :yes:

Anyway, we'll get to the bottom of a bottle or two and see who believes in Nazareth then.

Right...you've got to be stone, cold drunk in order to do so with a straight face!:biglaugh:

(You see, folks, the idiots need to get you to turn off your higher faculties before you would take something like that seriously, and only then when you're scared schittless by the Devil, Jesus, God, and eternal Hellfire!)

 

[godnotgod]

My Nez teacher wouldn't even pay attention to you.

Then he was a fake. Everyone knows that a Nez teacher worth his salt pays attention to EVERYTHING.

 

[Heathen Hammer]

I'm so glad for all this spam; it certainly clears up all this 'truth' flooding the forum.

 

[godnotgod]

I'm so glad for all this spam; it certainly clears up all this 'truth' flooding the forum.

:angel2:

 

[angellous_evangellous]

I'm so glad for all this spam; it certainly clears up all this 'truth' flooding the forum.

When you find it, let me know.

But seriously, is anyone paying attention to godnotgod's spam?