* Sure, nomina sacra represent revered words, but could they depict words co-opted to be revered?The “nomina sacra“, a set of words given special treatment by copyists in ancient Christian manuscripts, continues to be a subject of debate about what the practice signifies and how it originated. The words in question are written in a unique abbreviated form with a curious horizontal stroke placed over the abbreviation. The earliest and most consistently treated words are the Greek words for “God,” “Lord,” “Jesus,” and “Christ. These words are written as nomina sacra in the earliest clear instances of them in Christian manuscripts, which take us as far back as the second century CE.
Most scholars (this one included) think that (1) they originated in early Christian circles, and (2) they originated as an expression of reverence* for the words so treated. A few scholars (e.g., Robert Kraft today) propose that the practice originated among Jews and was taken over and elaborated by Christians. Perhaps the major difficulty with this position, however, is that there is no instance of nomina sacra in any early and unambiguously Jewish manuscript. (We have one or two manuscripts that may be of Jewish origin in which it appears that nomina sacra forms are present, but it’s not clear that they are Jewish manuscripts, and not instead manuscripts that may come from Jews who are also Christian believers.) In no pre-Christian Jewish manuscript (e.g., from Qumran) do we find any instance of nomina sacra.
Larry Hurtado https://larryhurtado.wordpress.com/2010 ... ng-debate/
Nomina sacra are consistently observed in even the earliest extant Christian writings, along with the codex form rather than the roll, implying that when these were written, in approximately the second century, the practice had already been established for some time. However, it is not known precisely when and how the nomina sacra first arose.
The initial system of nomina sacra apparently consisted of just four or five words, called nomina divina: the Greek words for Jesus, Christ, Lord, God, and possibly Spirit. The practice quickly expanded to a number of other words regarded as sacred.
In the system of nomina sacra that came to prevail, abbreviation is by contraction, meaning that the first and last letter (at least) of each word are used. In a few early cases, an alternate practice is seen of abbreviation by suspension, meaning that the initial two letters (at least) of the word are used; e.g., the opening verses of Revelation in P18 write Ἰησοῦς Χριστός (Jesus Christ) as ΙΗ ΧΡ [with horizontal lines over each pair of letters]. Contraction, however, offered the practical advantage of indicating the case of the abbreviated noun.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomina_sa ... evelopment
Metzger lists 15 such expressions from Greek papyri: the Greek counterparts of God, Lord, Jesus, Christ, Son, Spirit, David, Cross, Mother, Father, Israel, Savior, Man, Jerusalem, and Heaven.[1] These nomina sacra are all found in Greek manuscripts of the 3rd century and earlier, except Mother, which appears in the 4th.[2]
- 1 Bruce Metzger, Manuscripts of the Greek Bible, pp.36-37
2 Text of the Earliest New Testament Greek Manuscripts - Philip Comfort & David Barrett (1999) pp.34-35
it is possible this practice owes something to the fact that early Jews were not only reluctant to say the OT name of God (regularly using circumlocutions for it) for fear of mispronouncing the holy name, but there was even the practice of combining the consonants from one sacred name with the vowels of another— which is where the term Jehovah comes from, which in fact is not a Biblical name for God per se (not one found in the Hebrew text as originally written without vowel pointing) but rather a synthesis of two names.
In any case, we find in numerous early Christian papyri and codexes the use of nomina sacra, and it will be well to spell out a few things. Firstly, scribes realized the frequency with which words like God, Lord, Father, Jesus, Christ show up, and often in combination with terms like savior,son,spirit,Israel, Jerusalem, David, man, mother,father, and heaven, or in isolation. Thus a system of abbreviating such words was devised, in two forms. Sometimes the abbreviation involves the first two letters of a word so for example IH for IHSOUS (Jesus) or XP for XPRISTOS (Christos). Unfortunately this was not the only form abbreviations took, as sometimes a scribe would use the first and last letter of a word to abbreviate it— so for example Iota Sigma for IHSOUS. Fortunately the presence of an abbreviation was signaled in the text by a little horizontal line above the abbreviation. It is interesting but odd, that in secular Greek manuscripts that same horizontal line is used to indicate letters being used as numbers. It seems likely to me that Christian scribes were following numismatic principles of the abbreviation of names on coins, thatn that they were following the numerological practice.
Ben Witherington - http://www.patheos.com/blogs/bibleandcu ... nuscripts/
The early use of "nomina sacra" indicates a canon was recognized
1. The external identifying characteristics of the witnesses to the text of the Christian Bible --the types of abbreviation of the nomina sacra, use of the codex, a common pattern of names for the individual books ("Gospel according to . . . "; "General Epistle of. . . "; "Epistle of Paul to . . ."), and a uniform name for the two parts of the whole collection ("New Testament" and "Old Testament")-- all go back to the earliest stage of transmission. They show the work of a single redactor who produced the canonical edition of the New Testament as part of a total Christian scripture . (Lee Martin McDonald, James A. Sanders, Editors: The Canon Debate; Everett Ferguson, Factors Leading to the Selection and Closure of the New Testament Canon, p 311, 2002)
2. Recently David Trobisch proposed that a second-century editing process produced and published the twenty-seven-book New Testament we have today, in the order: Gospels; Acts and the Catholic Epistles; fourteen letters of Paul, with Hebrews located between 2 Thessalonians and 1 Timothy; and Revelation. Evidence is found in the choice of authors to whom New Testament books are ascribed, in editorial remarks in the New Testament writings themselves (including in Acts, 2 Timothy, 2 Peter, and John 21), in the widespread use of the nomina sacra in early manuscripts of the New Testament, and in the codex form.
2. Although the individual gospels do not contain the names of their authors, it is probable that the inscriptions naming them (for example, "According to Mark") were attached as soon as people knew about more than one gospel or, at latest, when they were published together in a codex. TC Skeat has suggested that Christians adopted the codex in order that they could copy the four gospels together. The consistent system of abbreviating certain words (nomina sacra, fifteen in total) in Christian biblical codices points to the likelihood of recessions, i.e., editions of the New Testament that aimed at a standardized text for Christian worship. This may have happened in the second century, and at latest in the third century. (Lee Martin McDonald, James A. Sanders, Editors: The Canon Debate; Peter Balla, Evidence for an Early Christian Canon: Second and Third Century, p 376, 2002)
Steve Rudd -- http://www.bible.ca/b-canon-nomina-sacra.htm
http://www.mountainman.com.au/essenes/n ... cra.htm#A6
- Christ from XS (or XRS)
... The code for Christ is XS or sometimes XRS, which could as well indicate Christos, or even Chrestos.
Scholars fill in XC so that it reads “Christ,” never “Christos”, even though “Christos” is more consistent with the final S.
- In Coptic it looks like this:
XC, with a bar over the letters.
X is the Greek letter chi
and C is the Coptic S.
Where XC appears in the Apocryphon of John, for instance, scholars put the Greek Christos in parenthesis but translate the coded word as “Christ.”
Doing so, they immediately equate XC with the well-known entity of Pauline and Johannine theology.
... this is poetic license.
Considering all the Gnostic material that argues against the Pauline-Johannine redeemer, this equation is extremely dubious.
http://www.mountainman.com.au/essenes/n ... cra.htm#A2
- Marcellus of Ancyra Fragment 4
Fragment number Klost. 1 -- Rettb. 1 -- Vinz. 4
Source Eusebius, Against Marcellus 1.2;
GCS: Eusebius vol. 4 (3rd ed.), pp. 9-10.
Modern edition M. Vinzent, Markell von Ankyra:
Die Fragmente (Leiden, 1997).
Translator's Notes:
The Greek word “Jesus” is used in the Old Testament to translate the name Joshua,
(and in the New Testament for Jesus of Nazareth).
Marcellus declares the name Jesus to be the greatest name upon the earth.
To prove this, he quotes the angel’s statement to Mary in Luke as well as a passage in Zechariah.
The Old Testament hero Joshua was given the same name as the Savior because he was a type,
i.e. one foreshadowing a future person, in this case Jesus who leads 'true believers' into the heavenly Jerusalem.
Extracts from
Nomina Sacra: Scribal Practice and Piety in Early Christianity by K. Solomon
"Regardless of how or where the nomina sacra originated, a significant precedent would still be needed in order for all Christian scribes everywhere to begin employing this practice. This precedent would need to be early, prolific and authoritative. Paul and his group of coworkers are the most likely group to have set this precedent. By employing the use of nomina sacra in Trinitarian reverence for God, Paul and his fellow authors and scribes would have set a precedent for all later authors and scribes to follow.62"
- Evangelical Theological Society 2008;
Midwest Regional Meeting 'The Church Convergent, Divergent, and Emergent: 21 st Century Ecclesiology'
http://www.mountainman.com.au/essenes/n ... ra.htm#A10
DeConick then comments on the use of the nomem sacrum 'XPC' in proposed textural reconstructions that mean 'the excellent one'."...the epithet of this Archon [Athoth] [is] "Excellent" (Xρηστός ["Chréstos"]), and it's placement in the list corresponds to Athoth elsewhere in the Sethian literature. .... the title Excellent (Xρηστός), identified by the standard abbreviation 'XC' or 'XPC', ...is often confused with Χριστός ["Christós"]. In the Apocryphon of John, Athoth is the first Power, "Excellence 'XPC' " ... " --p.259-60
