03.14.07.2000 (THE BIG 2K POST)
Regarding a thread started by felix dakat, there had been a long discussion about the veracity of a “historical Jesus” and what he most likely was like. There was a singular post that felix posted that caught my attention after I brought a couple book titles to his attention: found here, it gives a brief outline of the claims made by Robert E. Van Voorst in a book that makes an interesting case against anyone advocating the non-existence of Jesus. Take your time for a moment and read over his points… they’re really good; however, after thinking about it, the only claim he’s made that I found I couldn’t fully refute was his first claim. His other four claims don’t amount to much of a rejection against Jesus Mythologists (I could spend this post detailing the refutations to his claims, but they’re not important), but his first claim (that evidence of literary development and errors in the gospels do not mean wholesale invention nor prove non-existence) is a solid point that I thought twice about after reading an interesting concession from Robert M. Price himself…
So that got me thinking for a while. I’ve been reading the plethora of evidence that Price has accumulated in his book and so far, I’ve come to an interesting conclusion: While there is incredible evidence to support the non-existence of Jesus as being anything more than human, one thing is very clear and that is that if the Jesus of the bible really existed, then mostly everything we know about him is wrong.
One of the most fascinating points that Price issues in his book is in regards to Jesus being mentioned as “of Nazareth” or “the Nazarene”… very rarely will you actually find the designation “from Nazareth”. Because of the evidence that Price gives in the book (pg. 53), I was prompted to do a little research and start going through various translations of bibles to check the veracity of his claims (I wish he had the courtesy to name which translation he was using… the closest I came to was the Darby Translation which uses “the Nazaraean”). In the course of my research, one indisputable fact was that all the translations (even the much touted NIV) that DID NOT claim their translations were “literal” all used the universal designation “of Nazareth”… even were verses would have said “the Nazarene”. This I took as a sign that biblical scholars who did not give a “literal translation” made some kind of judgement call based on their overall belief of Jesus and thought: “Oh, he was from Nazareth, so when they said ‘the Nazarene’, they really meant ‘of Nazareth’ as in ‘from Nazareth’”. There’s a problem with that train of thought… even when designating Jesus as “of Nazareth”, even that does not definitively state that he was from the village of Nazareth.
Price explains…
Now… I haven’t found any translations so far that show the named passages list “Jesus the Nazorean” (the aforementioned Darby Translation is the closest to this designation). Despite this, his following points regarding the inflection of spelling between “Nazarene” and “Nazorean”… in the case where you can pick up practically any bible and find Jesus referenced as “of Nazareth” or “the Nazarene”, the evidence points out that Jesus was not “from” some village, but was already a member of a Jewish sect called the “Nazoreans” (meaning “the Keepers” of the Torah). The startling evidence to support such a claim can be found in any bible translation where John is referred as “the ringleader of the sect of Nazoreans” or “Nazarene sect” (any derivation is applicable) in Acts 24:5. If Jesus was a member of this sect, so were a number of early Christians (except they weren’t called Christians).
Price goes far enough to justify this evidence by citing it being nothing new to the bible…
More later…