A reply to Peter Kirby about the Baptist Passage in Josephus

[Giuseppe]

http://www.mythicistpapers.com/2021/12/ ... phus-pt-1/

Salm is John-historicist and Jesus-mythicist. He has not considered that the contrary may be true: Jesus existed and John didn't exist.

[Secret Alias]

Jesus does not mean Savior but God saves.

[Secret Alias]

Jesus does not mean Savior but God saves. An interesting tangent on why the rabbinic tradition says that Meir's original name was Mayesha. The af’el participle mesha’ מישע and the Hebrew hif’il participle מושיע both mean “one who saves” or “saviour”, from the root ישע in both cases

[Chrissy Hansen]

Actually, a recent analysis may indicate that the name Joshua does not mean "Yahweh saves" at all. A new analysis indicates it means "Yahweh is lordly" or similar. https://journals.co.za/doi/10.10520/EJC-ff5bd8a45

Which kind of puts a bit of a damper in the symbolic reading of his name for mythicists and that whole "well isn't that a convenient name" bit.

[MrMacSon]

Actually, a recent analysis may indicate that the name Joshua does not mean "Yahweh saves" at all. A new analysis indicates it means "Yahweh is lordly" or similar. https://journals.co.za/doi/10.10520/EJC-ff5bd8a45

That might have implications for the LXX apparently having κύριος / kū́rios / Lord in many places (but not all) where the Pentateuch had YHWH and, iirc, for Paul doing so where he quoted, cited or used those LXX passages about YHWH.

In the LXX, YHWH was often or overwhelming replaced with κύριος, Kyrios ie. Lord (500+ times). Conversely, every time the word Κύριος is used is in the place of the Tetragrammaton. Whether that happened from the get-go or evolved, I'm not sure.

Philo of Alexandria also apparently followed this practice of using κύριος for YHWH (see Genesis 3:23 LXX in Legum Allegoriarum 1.95-96, Exodus 6:3 LXX in De Abrahamo 121, and elsewhere (Philo also associated YHWH with λόγος).

Paul seems to have followed suit, often applying LXX references to YHWH to Lord Jesus Christ eg. Joel 2:32 in Romans 10:9-13, Isaiah 45:23 in Romans 14:8-11; Philippians 2:10-11, Isaiah 40:13 in 1 Corinthians 2:15-16, etc.

Some scholars have said κύριος was at the center of the evolution of early Christians understanding of Christ and that use of the title κύριος helped define the relationship between Jesus belief in him as Christ.

In the LXX, YHWH was often or overwhelming replaced with κύριος, Kyrios ie. Lord (500+ times). Conversely, every time the word Κύριος is used is in the place of the Tetragrammaton. Whether that happened from the get-go or evolved, I'm not sure.

Nobody is sure, so you stand in good company. Iaо̄ (Ἰάω) plays into things at some stage, and of course so does κύριος, as well as simply writing the name out in Hebrew letters or, apparently a bit later, in the nonphonetically related ΠΙΠΙ in Greek (to mimic the look of יהוה on the page). Uniformity seems to have taken a while to impose itself:

Robert J. Wilkinson, Tetragrammaton: Western Christians and the Hebrew Name of God, page 88: 88 As it is, then, we can with some confidence say only that the Tetragrammaton, both in Hebrew and in other forms in Greek (iaô), might be found in manuscripts of the Greek Scriptures; that kurios may well also have been found as a substitute; and that the evidence is insufficient to establish a universal practice. In short: it appears prudent to conclude that there was no one way of way of presenting the Tetragrammaton or its substitutes in the Greek biblical texts of the time of the Apostle Paul. But importantly, the evidence of anticipations of the Palestinian Qere in the LXX Prophets and the usage of Philo prevent us from excluding tout court the presence of kurios in Jewish Greek biblical manuscripts.

... He [Wilkinson] is writing only of what the very earliest Christians (such as Paul) would have found in their manuscripts. The LXX/OG preponderance of instance[s] of using Lord for Yahweh comes a bit later. Early on it is harder to tell exactly what was there. Less evidence, and the evidence is more mixed.

So it seems the changes in the LXX/OG may have happened as Pauline theology was being developed.

Well, maybe, but there is some evidence that people started speaking substitutes for the divine name before they started writing them. And there is also evidence both for Ἰάω and for κύριος as substitutions before early Christianity. What there is not unequivocal evidence for is a uniform custom at that early date, nor for which practice came first.

It's as if Paul is literally substituting the name "Iesous" for YHWH.

Yes, exactly.

[Chrissy Hansen]

I personally think the LXX is just using κύριος as a replacement for Yahweh's name, following convention of calling him "adonai" or "lord" elsewhere.

I think here the implications are more for Paul. The Philippians Hymn, imo, should be read as κύριος being the name above all names, not Jesus, and so Jesus achieves the name κύριος upon his death. So in this case, it is reflecting the belief of the (imo likely historical) Jesus being properly deified upon death.

[Secret Alias]

Whatever. Joshua and savior are two separate words developed from yesha. Just because you're familiar with what circumcision looks like up close doesn't make you an expert on Hebrew.

מישע https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesha_Stele

[Chrissy Hansen]

Whatever. Joshua and savior are two separate words developed from yesha. Just because you're familiar with what circumcision looks like up close doesn't make you an expert on Hebrew.

מישע https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesha_Stele

Read the paper, it actually indicates that the ending of the personal name "Joshua" does not actually stem from ישע (yesha). Based Ugaritic and Akkadian evidence, it likely stems from a theophoric appellative (perhaps even personal name) indicating a "lord" or "master," ultimately derived from proto-Semitic ṯʿ not from ישע (yesha). The comparable evidence (Ugaritic ṯʿ and Akk. šuʾûm / šuwāʾum) simply does not support the view that the words "Joshua" and "savior" derive from the same word. This explains why we have ושע which is probably more linked to שוע indicating high status, it is likely a biform.

So they are not related words, and have different roots, and mean different things completely.

[Irish1975]

Should be kept in view that both Sirach and Philo teach that Ἰησοῦς connotes ‘salvation.’

Sir. 46:1 Ἰησοῦς ὅς ἐγένετο κατά τό ὄνομα αὐτοῦ μέγας ἐπί σωτηρία ἐκλεκτῶν αὐτοῦ, of Joshua, the successor of Moses;
Philo, nom. mutat. § 21 Ἰησοῦς ἑρμηνεύεται σωτηρία κυρίου

A separate point about Phil 2:10 (sorry if this is familiar but I just noticed it)—

ἵνα ἐν τῷ ὀνόματι Ἰησοῦ

is that Ἰησοῦ could, as far as morphology goes, be either the dative or the genitive case of Ἰησοῦς. If the dative, it is in apposition to τῷ ὀνόματι (“so that at the name ‘Jesus’”); the conventional reading (see e.g. the interlinear at biblehub.com) is that it is genitive: “at the name of Jesus.”Interpreters who want to negate the idea that ‘Jesus’ is the name above all names, for obvious reasons, insist that it must be genitive, and only the type of genitive that does not parse ‘Jesus’ as the name itself. And then one has to take the extra step of parsing “Lord” as a name. But I have never understood what the warrant would be for taking κύριος, an extremely common Hellenistic title, as somehow a “name.” The acclamation at 2:11 ἐξομολογήσηται ὅτι κύριος Ἰησοῦς Χριστὸς is straightforwardly a predication of the title onto the being that is named Ἰησοῦς Χριστὸς, as everywhere else in the Pauline epistles.

[Jax]

Why do we keep doing this when all we have to go off is an abbreviation?

IC could be an abbreviation for IAW in Greek for all we know.

Hell for that matter IC was also the abbreviated form of Iulius Caesar. Is Paul talking about Iulius Caesar the Good?