Tag: Nazarenes

2011-05-31

Mythicist Papers: Background to Christian Myths – a 3 day Death, Nazarenes, the John the Baptist Sect. . . .

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by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Early Christianities
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Crescent Moon (NASA, International Space Stati...
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René Salm has translated the first two chapters of a fascinating study by Ditlef Nielsen, The Old Arabian Moon Religion And The Mosaic Tradition (1904) and made them available online at his Mythicist Papers resource page.

He has other resources there, too. Anyone interested in the origins of the “Nazarene” epithet [n-ts-r] applied to Jesus and early Christians, in the roots of the three-day death and resurrection concept in myth, of the (very early) background to what the later emergence of the Mandean or John the Baptist sect, the astrological basis for the Jewish sabbath and “magical” numbers, will find these resources indispensable. I have just completed the second chapter of Nielsen’s book and found it absolutely fascinating.

2011-05-11

Earliest Nazarenes: Evidence of Epiphanius

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Early Christianities
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This is a continuation of my earlier post on the Nazarenes. As with that earlier post, this is primarily preparation to for adding articles to my vridar.info site. Maybe I was just unlucky, but it was not easy for me to find an online translation of the relevant passage by Epiphanius, Panarion 29. So hopefully this can be a useful reference for others interested in this topic.

Here is the complete text of “Panarion 29” by Epiphanius as it appears in the translation published by Brill, copied from the nazarenespace.com page, with my own corrections and editing. Continue reading “Earliest Nazarenes: Evidence of Epiphanius”

2011-05-08

Earliest (pre-Christian) Nazarenes: Pliny the Elder’s evidence

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Ancient Literature, Biblical Studies, Early Christianities, History and Biography
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Pliny the Elder: an imaginative 19th Century p...
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Ray A. Pritz discusses in some depth the evidence extant for Nazarene Jewish Christianity (the title of his book, subtitled: “From the end of the New Testament Period Until Its Disappearances in the Fourth Century”). It was published 1988 so no doubt the scholarly discussion summarized by Pritz at that time has since moved on.

I post here the first of his discussions of a “pre-Christian” sect related to a name like “Nazarenes”. We know from Acts that early Christians were known (at least by outsiders) as Nazarenes — Acts 24:5.

I skip here the reasons (covered many times elsewhere) this term cannot refer (contrary to Matthew 2:23) to a person from the village of Nazareth. Maybe will do so in a future post. I only present Ray Pritz’s discussions, and the evidence he cites, for a pre-Christian group known as “Nazarenes” or something similar. Continue reading “Earliest (pre-Christian) Nazarenes: Pliny the Elder’s evidence”