A superstition is a relic of a religion that has survived (Latin supersteterit) the death of its religious framework.

Nazarene 4

The Semantics 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 Semantics of Nazarene II

Epiphanius (b 367 AD) tells us that besides Nazarenes the early Christians were known as Jessaeans. David, the great king of the Jews, the model of the warrior messiah, was the son of Jesse. So it seems that the Jessaeans were simply followers of Jesus because he was the heir of David (before he became the son of a virgin). The truth is slightly more extended. The identification Jessaeans comes from Isaiah 11:1 (explained further in 10) which records:

And there shall come forth a rod (a twig) out of the stem of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of its roots and bear fruit,

a quotation much revered by the writers of the scrolls and by Christians (Isaiah like Jesus means God’s Saviour!) referring to a descendant of David who realizes all that God has promised to David (2 Sam 7:lff). A portion of a Scroll (4QFor 1:10-12) gives a mesianic interpretation to 2 Sam 7:11-14, ending with:

I will be a father to him and he shall be a son to me! This is the Branch of David who will arise with the seeker of the law and will sit on the throne of Zion at the End of Days.

The Branch of David (Jer 23:5; 33:15; Zech 3:8; 6:12) is a messianic title and is thus interpreted in the Targum of the Rabbis. Though the Targum does not see anything messianic in these passages in 2 Sam 7, the authors of the scrolls, presumably the Essenes, already saw it as messianic at, or even before, the time of Jesus. Luke draws heavily in his infancy narrative on the Septuagint accounts in 2 Sam 7 (Lk 1:31, 2 Sam 7:9; Lk 1:32-33, 2 Sam 7:13-16, in the Greek). The Aramaic fragment, 4Q246, closely prallels the account of Luke 1:32-35. Luke was therefore drawing on an Essene exegetical tradition. It stretches even as far as the woman, Anna, in Luke who is Hannah in 1 Sam 2:1-10, where she sings an apocalyptic praise (so presented in the Targum) used by Luke but probably already part of a liturgy.

The branch, then, is an alternative name for the messiah. The word “neser” (nsr), vocalized “netzer”, means “a branch”—it is equivalent to the word Nazarene. This is surely what was spoken by the prophets when we read…

…and came and dwelt in a city named Nazareth, that it might be fulfilled what is spoken by the prophets: that he should be called a Nazarene.
Matthew 2:23

Matthew refers to what is said in the prophets (plural) in this passage whereas elsewhere he uses the singlar, in one place (Mt 2:17) specifying Jeremiah, but nowhere in the Jewish scriptures is the messiah prophesied to be a Nazarene. Nazareth—in the Christian sense of a place—was not mentioned in the scriptures because it did not exist or was totally insignificant. Some suggest it must be inferred from a prophetic expression, not a precise quotation, but even so what expression was it? For Sanders, E Schwiezer’s 1960 explanation that the reference is to the birth of Samson, is a favourite (Jg 13:7; 16:17). In the Septuagint, the reference is to the Holy One (hagios) of God but could be equally the Nazirite of God, (naziraios), both translations of “nzyr” in the Hebrew. Mark interprets Nazarene as the Holy One of God (Mk 1:24) but Matthew is more cryptic. In 1907, Alfred Loisy called this a pun (jeu de mots). Loisy refutes the idea that the evangelists were scrupulous about their word usage, and that they did not use the Septuagint. Judges is classified among the Former Prophets so Matthew was right to attribute his source to “the prophets”.

The reference, recognizable to messianic Jews, is to Isaiah’s “netzer”—the branch of the stem of Jesse—which gives us both Nazarenes and Jessaeans. As if to explain that the followers of the branch, the Nazarenes, are the Essenes, “neser” is used also in Isaiah 60:21:

Thy people also shall be all righteous, they shall inherit the land forever, the branch (netzer) of my planting, the work of my hands, that I may be glorified. The little one shall become a thousand and the small one a strong nation.

The Essenes would clearly have seen this as a reference to themselves and their duty to recover the land and make the people righteous. The many were given the name of the branch, whom they hope to emulate and perhaps invoke. It also shows that the followers of the branch, the Nazarenes, had the duty of building up a strong nation. To do this they had to redeem the men of the land, the simple of Ephraim and the sinners.

Since they were also interested in calendars and astrology, there is an even more amazing pun on Nazareth—“mazzaroth” is the Hebrew word for Zodiac! Since Jesus came to be seen as a sun god in the Roman Empire, and there is little doubt that Joshua was a sun god to the children of Israel, this seems significant. The punning went deep into Christian myth because such a saviour must also be a carpenter’s son (bar nasar, in Aramaic), and so, in Samaritan midrash, the Redeemer was to be a second Noah, preparing a new ark of salvation.

God’s elect were evidently keen on punning as we have seen from their interpretation of scripture and their adoption of the word Nazarene with its multiple roots. They loved punning and delighted in the many puns on their own names for themselves. Indeed, in view of their esoteric investigations into the scriptures which depended in good measure on punning, they evidently regarded words with multiple meanings via puns as evidence of God’s work and they favoured them. H Raschke in the mid-twentieth century proposed that the Essenes deliberately used the susceptibility of Aramaic and Hebrew to punning to deliver double meanings and thereby conceal real meanings. It is surely true.

The word, Essene, is apparently similar. Besides its plain reference of salvation it has several other meanings. “Osh” means a foundation and they considered themselves the foundation of heaven on earth. “Esh” meant a flame or fire, while “isseh” meant an offering by fire and they believed that the earth would be offered for purification in a refiner’s fire, representing judgement. “Hesed” meant holiness, lovingkindness, piety and purity and the hasidim were the holy ones or the saints. Essenes were interested in healing people of their spiritual ills and, in Aramaic, a healer or doctor was “assaya”. Furthermore, the Hebrew word may be “ossim”, meaning “Doers of the law” because the Essenes were strict in their observance of the Torah. Jesus refuses to allow a “jot or tittle” of the law be erased!

Supposed scholars, apparently believing Semitic grammar is as hard a science as physics, are quite lost in all this. Judith Romney Wegner claims that Nazarene and Nazirite are not the same because the roots do not have the same Hebrew consonants—Nazirite is Hebrew “nazir” (nzr, with zayin), while Nazarene (whether related to the town of Nazareth or the Hebrew root meaning “protectors”) is “n(tz)r” (nzr, with tzaddi), the middle root consonant, zayin and tsaddi, being different, and not generally conflated, she maintains. However, she then declares she is open to the possibility of a connexion between nazoraios and nezer, though they are pronounced differently and therefore evidently are conflated.

These scholars are sticklers to show that Jews were always highly literate and could tell their “zayins” from their “tsaddis”. Doubtless they are quite right in thinking thus, but they fail totally to recognize what is evident to a schoolboy—that they loved to pun. Even the rabbis did it!

The rabbis revelled in multiplicity of meanings and the playfulness of the text long before these were discovered by modern critics.
Tamara Cohn Eskenazi, Old Testament Interpretation

G R S Mead, in his book on the Gnostic John the Baptist (1924), noted specifically on the passage we have analysed above:

The prophecy (Isa 11:1) about the “sprout” from the root or stem of Jesse gave rise to much speculation, helped out by that word-play which exercised so powerful a fascination over the imaginative minds of the Jews of that day.

Puns do not need the same root, but merely similar sounds. Proof is everywhere but one plain one is the names of the leader of the second rebellion—Simon bar Kosiba, or is it Kochba or Kozba? A letter found in a Murabba’at cave is signed “Simon ben Kosiba”. Yet he has always been known as “Simon bar Kochba”—Son of the star. Others that thought his adventure was insane, called him “son of the lie”—Kozba. The root words and consonants in these puns are quite different, but Jews had no trouble formulating them and using them as puns. Far from showing them as ignorant of Hebrew, it shows them as better at it than modern scholars with their degrees in ancient languages and biblical literature. “Scholars” like Wegner are talking through their hat in insisting that etymological links were always correctly maintained even when Jews were joking. Indeed, Jewish sages said every word in the Torah had fifty meanings but the last one was known only to Moses. If that is not an incitement to verbal creativity, it is hard to know what is.

The punning explanation expressed here is suggested by more orthodox commentators. Davies and Allison’s commentary asserts that word play has several ramifications in the identity of Nazarene and Nazirite:

The Septuagint equates naziraios“ theou” in Judges 13:5,7 with “hagios theou”, and also in Isaiah 4:3, “He will be called holy” where the same equation is implied.
Isaiah 11:1, as we have seen: “A shoot will come forth from the stump of Jesse, and a ‘branch’ will grow out of his roots”.
Matthew used Isaiah 7:14 (in Mt 1:23) and identified the “branch” of Isaiah 11:1 with the “Immanuel” of Isaiah 7:14.
“Neser”, the branch, was used of the Messiah in 4QpIsa 3:15-26 and the Testament of Judah.
“nsr” might have been pronounced Nazar in the first century according to some authorities.
Nazarene is then punned on nazirite as in Mark 1.24: “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? We know who you are, the holy one of God”—Jesus the Nazarene is Jesus the Nazirite!

The refusal of many scholars to accept or even consider such matters can only be explained politically or theologically, not scientifically. These interpretations begin to take us too close to the truth. Both Judaism and Christianity are large edifices, and to crack their weak foundations by actually discovering the truth is something that their ethics do not include. For these scholars, there is an eternity of comfortable life in obfuscation whereas the truth might render their sinecures finite.

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.