There have been many prophets of the forthcoming catastrophe but they are not hailed and praised for their forethought—they are ignored or condemned as Jeremiahs.

Who Lies Sleeping?

Nazarene 2

The Meaning of Nazarene

Abstract

Origen of Caesarea (185-254 AD) lived thirty miles from Nazareth, but could not find it. He concluded that many places mentioned in the gospels never existed. Before Constantine, Nazareth was attested only by the New Testament evangelists. Yet “Nazarene” was a word people understood. In the Qumran scrolls, the Hebrew word “nasi” is a messianic leader. The Nasi had the role of the messiah at the sacred meal of the council of the Essene community. In Ezekiel, nasi means the coming Davidic prince, the messiah. The plural “nesiim” means clouds, enabling the Nasi to come in the nesiim, reminding us of Daniel, but logically it means “princes”—the saints and angels of the heavenly host. Nasi seems to be the origin of “Nazarene”. Nazarenes were followers of the messianic leader, the Nasi, either Essenes or their converts.

The Meaning of Nazarene

An example of biblicists being able to write endlessly on a subject and getting nowhere with it is the literature on the meaning of Nazarene. J A Sanders cites over 20 sources, in the first two paragraphs of his short article in The Gospels and the Scripture of Israel (1994), simply bringing up to date what E Schweizer had covered exhaustively only in 1960. Christians have no desire to reach a historical or scientific conclusion about anything to do with their religion because it might not be what they believe—or, rather, unless it confirms what they believe. Their constant aim is not to clarify contentious passages when they suspect clarification will run counter to their belief. Rather they want to obfuscate. A few biblical scholars seem not to realize this. These black sheep are the ones worth reading but they rarely have successful careers.

The biblicist consensus is that the title of Jesus, “Nazarene”, explained in Matthew 2:23 is a geographical reference. They think the Aramaic represented by “nasraya” converts quite naturally into the Greek “nazoraios”, the same as “nazarenos”, meaning “of Nazareth”. So far as Sanders is concerned, the door is now closed on this because it “can no longer be seriously questioned”. There is indeed no doubt what the author of Matthew intended to convey by it, but there is a great deal of doubt remaining about what it meant, so we have to suspect Sanders’ honesty as well as the author of Matthew’s. Matthew aimed to answer a criticism to the effect that Nazarene meant that Jesus was already a member of a sect called the Nazarenes. If that were so, it would cast doubt on the originality of everything he said or did. Matthew therefore wants to scotch the critics, and explain the surname as meaning simply that he came from Nazareth in Galilee.

Christians are called Galilaeans in the gospels and Nazarenes in Acts. Jesus spoke of his converts mainly as disciples. The Greek speaking Christians outside Palestine did not know what “Nazarene” (nazoraios or nazarenos) meant and their bishops did not want them to know. In an attempt to explain it innocently, the gospel writers describe Jesus as “of Nazareth” (apo Nazaret) in Galilee, but the gospels as ever are far from consistent. “Jesus of Nazareth” is never mentioned by Paul, and even in Acts Paul is made to prefer the expression “The Way” rather than admit directly that he is a Nazarene. Alfred Loisy, the heretical Catholic priest, excommunicated by the Church, confirms that the word “Nazarene” was that of a sect unrelated to a city of Nazareth. The word meant something that gentile bishops had to deny.

Matthew uses nazaret, nazara and Nazareth for Nazareth and twice uses nazoraios for Nazarene in his gospel. Mark uses nazaret once for Nazareth and nazarenos four times meaning Nazarene. Luke uses Nazareth four times in the birth stories but later uses nazara once for Nazareth and he uses nazarenos twice and nazoraios once for Nazarene. John uses nazaret twice for Nazareth and then prefers nazoraios for Nazarene. Luke in Acts of the Apostles uses Nazareth for Nazareth once then uses nazoraios. No other New Testament book refers to Nazareth at all! Overall nazara is used twice, nazaret is used four times, Nazareth is used 6 times, nazarenos is used 6 times and nazoraios is used 12 times.

The Greek form, nazoraios, might be derived from nazoriya, the Aramaic equivalent of nozri, the word used for Christians in Hebrew—Yeshu ha Nozri being Jesus the Nazarene. Accordingly, Christians said that nozri meant someone from Nazareth. But the Hebrew for Nazareth is nazrat and a person from Nazareth is then a nazrati. The name nozri lacks the final letter “tav” in nazrat so it cannot be derived from it. The Aramaic words behind the Greek, nazarenos or nazara and nazoraios might have been respectively nazarah or nazirah, as in the Arabic, explaining the absence of the final “tav” in nozri. The trouble is that the “tav” is reintroduced when the adjective is made from the name of the town. The Aramaic for a person from Nazareth, in Aramaic the feminine noun nazarah, would have been natzaratiya, the feminine ending -ah becoming -at- when the suffix -iya is added. So, whether the name Nazareth was an original Hebrew name or derived later from the Aramaic, people from the town could not have been called in Hebrew, nozrim.

If the Aramaic words behind the Greek were always collective nouns meaning a gang or a sect then nazarenos or nazara and nazoraios might have been the plural masculine words, nazarin or natzarah. Aramaic has a masculine plural in -ah as well as the one normally seen in -in. Furthermore in Aramaic and Hebrew feminine plurals end in -th. The basis in Aramaic collective plural nouns of all the Greek forms is evident. Grammatical infelicities could have yielded the forms seen in the Greek, and perhaps the Hebrew, if it derived from Aramaic.

Nazarene seems to have been or become a pejorative term. Indeed, so it might because it was associated with a man who was called “The Nazarene”, a title embodying several noble meanings, yet he failed in his purpose and was crucified. Not long ago communism was a world threat. Nowadays, anyone calling himself a communist would be regarded as a joke and deluded. The Nazarenes must have been similar. They had a period of success but finished up failures and a laughing stock.

A disparaging reference to the Nazarenes as a sect appears in Acts when the rhetor or barrister of the Jews, Tertullus, in Paul’s trial uses it.

For we have found this man a pestilent fellow, and a mover of sedition among all the Jews throughout the world, and a ringleader of the sect of the Nazarenes.
Acts 24:5

Paul seems not to dispute the accusation of being a Nazarene, indeed he “confesses” that he practises a heresy called “The Way”, an Essene description of themselves, implying that Nazarenes are Essenes.

But this I confess unto thee, that after the way which they call heresy, so worship I the God of my fathers, believing all things which are written in the law and in the prophets.
Acts 24:14

Paul seems not to want to use the word, Nazarene, and it never appears in his epistles though most are considered earlier than the gospels. If Nazarene simply meant from Nazareth, some tiny hamlet in Galilee, why should the writers of the epistles have wanted to avoid it. The reason was they had not thought of pretending that Jesus came from some imaginary village. Matthew was probably the one to do that. Mark mentions Nazareth only once (Mk 1:9). Now in Mark Jesus curiously bears the definite article almost exclusively, plainly indicating it was a title, not a name. He was “the” Jesus, “the” Salvation of Yehouah. Where this definite article is not used in Mark, some scholars consider an indication that the passage was inserted. On this basis the first two mentions of Jesus in Mark 1:1, the title of the book, and 1:9, the mention of his being from Nazareth, are both interpolations. Mark therefore never implied that “the” Jesus was “from Nazareth”.

The Jewish scriptures never mention Nazareth. There was no place called Nazareth in the time of Herod the Great attested by anyone other than writers of the New Testament. Nazareth at the time could have been little more than a milestone saying “Sepphoris 4 miles”. Josephus was a Jewish general in Galilee during the Jewish War, but, in his account of the military operations there, in which he mentions dozens of places ncluding a village just a mile from Nazareth, he never speaks of Nazareth itself. The much later Talmuds also name dozens of towns in Galilee but Nazareth is not among them. Yet Luke pretends that Nazareth was more than a hamlet, having workshops, that of the carpenter Joseph at least, and indeed important enough to have a synagogue, suggesting a reasonable population.

The earliest archaeological evidence of Nazareth, discovered by Franciscans, is third century. Near the modern Nazareth, there are Jewish remains, especially natural and rock-cut tombs, from the second temple period, and some going back to the Bronze age, but the site has not been identified by name. Nazareth apparently was a necropolis, Greek for “a city of the dead”—a cemetary. Jews have an aversion to dead bodies which they consider unclean, and Romans had a profound respect for the dead, and neither thought it proper to build cities where the dead were buried. It shows Nazareth cannot have been a town or city occupied by respectable citizens. It might have been occupied by outcasts, like lepers, or bandits, and has therefore been struck out of Josephus’s account by a Christian editor who did not want it known. Whether Jesus was born there or not, to have been called Jesus of Nazareth could not have been complimentary. No historian of Jesus’s time or of the early centuries of Christianity mentioned it. They could find nowhere with the name Nazareth until the fourth century AD, when Eusebius of Caesarea, in Onomasticon, a list of the places mentioned in the gospels, first mentions Nazareth as a real identifiable place, but he had plainly never been there to check the description of it himself. Nazareth today is set among gentle hills, not precipitous crags yet Jesus was almost thrown over a cliff at the edge of the city. Luke 4:28-30 tells a tale about Jesus infuriating the people of Nazareth who then want to throw him over a cliff. If there were sure a place as Nazareth in New Testament times, it was not where the modern town is. It was chosen by the earliest Christian pilgrims, including particularly Constantine’s Christian mother, Helena, to be Nazareth, and has remained it ever since.

Origen of Caesarea (185-254 AD) lived thirty miles from the site of modern Nazareth. He too was interested in working out biblical geography, and among other things wanted to know where Luke 4:28-30 happened. He concluded that places mentioned in the gospels never existed and the gospel stories were not literally true. Even so, Origen did not doubt that the symbolism was still God-sent and remained a Christian, suffering in the persecution of Diocletian, only to be posthumously declared heretical by his fellow Christians. Never trust them. No place called Nazareth was attested by anyone other than translators of the New Testament. If the town Nazareth existed at that time, it was so insignificant that it could never have been used as a helpful description. People would have said: “Jesus of where?” Nazarene was obviously a word which people understood. The best that can be done is to leave it as Jesus the Nazarene—whatever a Nazarene was, it was not someone from Nazareth.

Nazareth is called a city (“polis”) in several verses in Matthew and Luke, all in the birth narratives. The city called Nazareth did not exist when Jesus was born but the district of Gennesaret did. From at least the time of the Maccabees, the lake had been called the Sea of Gennesaret and the region Gennesaret, yet mostly the gospels call the region, Galilee. Galilee actually means “region” or “province”. “Galilaean” would then mean “provincial”. There are only two independent references to Gennesaret in the gospels. Luke refers to the Lake of Gennesaret while Mark and Matthew speak of the land of Gennesaret. Since Gennesaret is the region otherwise called Galilee, it is properly called a “polis” in Greek—a populated area, not necessarily a built up area. Since the birth narratives were added after the publication of Mark’s gospel, the identification of “Nazarene” as meaning “of Nazareth” seems to have come from Matthew or Luke, who took it from the local name for Galilee, which is Gennesaret—indeed a “polis”. The change was needed because some people remembered the Nazarenes as Palestinian rebels, but this explanation shows that Nazarene simply means the same as Galilaean. The bishops invented the city of Nazareth to explain the meaning of Nazarene, but it is a paper thin disguise. It means Galilaean, and Galilaeans were bandits.

The writers of the birth narratives sought to explain the description of Jesus in the Greek as Nazarene, a word of unknown meaning, by describing Jesus as “of Nazareth” in Galilee. Once the innocent explanation of Nazarene had been established, with the acceptance of the gospel accounts, Christians like Tertullian freely used Nazarene as a synonym for Christian.

The persistence of this pious lie is shown in the Revised Standard Version of the New Testament, widely accepted as being faithful to the Greek. What do we find though? Jesus is crucified above a notice saying “Jesus of Nazareth the King of the Jews”. According to the Greek, the notice read, “Jesus the Nazarene the King of the Jews”. The simple followers of the Christian faith believe that Jesus was Jesus of Nazareth not Jesus the Nazarene, so in their phenomenological philosophy, Christian leaders let it stand. It is true for the flock so it is true. Nevertheless, though it is rarely religious truth, there is such a thing as objective truth, and the translation “Jesus of Nazareth” is incorrect. If it were certain that Jesus the Nazarene really meant Jesus of Nazareth then the freer translation might be justified but, like much of the New Testament no one knows, whatever they might believe.

Page Tags: Jesus and Nazareth, Nazarenes, Call to All Israel in the Last Days, Jesus, New Testament, Meaning of Nazarene, Pre-Christian Nazarenes, Christians, Christianity, Essenes, Qumran, Messiah, Kingdom of God, Apocalypticism, Mystery

Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.