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Hello.

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Welcome to another episode of the Tyndale House podcast.

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This is episode six [five].

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In the second series of names in the Bible and the ancient World,

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which is series 4 overall. Are you keeping track of where we are in our

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podcasts?

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And today I'm joined by Peter Williams, who is Principal of Tyndale House.

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And we're going to be talking about names in the New Testament.

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So far in the last series and this series, our focus has been on names

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in the Old Testament, and we’ve just touched briefly on New Testament names.

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But now we're going to to look a little bit more

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at names in the Gospels and Acts in particular.

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And in the next episode, we've got an episode with, a conversation

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with Steve Walton,

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particularly looking at Saul and Paul and the patterns of Roman namings.

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So, looking forward to that.

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T: So good morning, Peter, good to have you with us P: Good to be with you

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T: nice to get into the New Testament at last.

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Absolutely.

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So you have written a little bit about names in your book,

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‘Can We Trust the Gospels?’

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And talked about it a little bit in series one of our podcast,

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which was quite some time ago now.

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One of the things you talk about in the book is that there are patterns

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of popularity of names that are seen to be right in the New Testament.

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P: Yeah. T: Can you just expand on that for us a little bit please?

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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So people are able to gather data on names from ossuaries –

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bone boxes – and from historians like

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Josephus and and so on, and gather a sense of of

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what were the most popular names at the time.

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It's worth saying that the time period

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that we measure names can often be quite wide.

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So we may be going from, say, 300 BC to, say AD 70.

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But what we can say is in that period,

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the sort of names we're getting in the New Testament are

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right.

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There is a change after the Maccabees

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P: in the second century BC T: Right.

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have a successful military revolution.

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Because that makes some of their names become more popular.

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And some of the names of the patriarchs, become quite popular.

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Say, say, Jacob becomes popular.

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Where, if you go through the Old Testament,

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it's it's there in the early period

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T: it disappears completely, yeah, right. P: and then nothing for a while, and then it revives.

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And what it falls out is some, some obvious results, for instance,

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is that Simon is the most popular

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male name for a Jew

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from Palestine.

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So Judea,

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and Galilee.

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And that's because of the, Simon the Maccabees?

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Yeah, I think so. Yeah.

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So it's, it's it's been around for a while.

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There have been other Simeons because Simon is simply

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a name like Simeon, although it's interesting

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because it also has a Greek meaning, snub nosed.

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So it doesn't mean that someone has to be that to get the name,

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but it's one of those, names that works in both languages.

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So I'm, I'm Peter, and I sometimes wonder, you know,

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when I go to France, should I be a Pierre or should I just say Peter?

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And you can do, you know, and you find people,

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can work either way on this, but it gives some flexibility.

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It's nice to have that with a name. And Mary becomes the most popular

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female name.

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Obviously, Mary

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is ultimately a form of Miriam, which is ultimately an Egyptian name.

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But it's, you know, it takes

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on a great deal of significance, and there are various ways of spelling, Mary.

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But what we're finding is, broadly speaking, the

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the names that we're getting in the Gospels, they're definitely,

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not Egyptian Jewish.

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They're not, Turkish Jewish,

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or Asia minor or anything like that, they’re not Roman Jewish.

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So they, they fit with the land.

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P: And that makes a lot of sense. T: Right?

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And the, the levels of popularity . . . the the numbers of names,

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the proportions of names within the Gospels, they pretty much echo

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the proportions of names within Palestine?

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They do.

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So although these don't reach what people call statistical significance.

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Right.

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That doesn't mean that it is not significant.

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So what I mean by that, that differentiation is

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the fact is, you could look at a very surface level,

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at a story from another country, and you would just have

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a different palette of names.

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Here you get the right sort of names.

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And then we get with the more common names, Simon being the most popular.

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Joseph the second amongst men.

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And a lot of the other ones towards the top

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of the list, that they have a tendency to add a disambiguator.

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So that's why Jesus has two disciples called Simon, one called Simon Peter,

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or sometimes Simon Cephas, although we never actually find the form

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Simon Cephas but we presume that what it was.

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Right.

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And another one, would be Simon the Zealot.

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And there's a question about does that mean

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zealot in a technical later sense of an actual revolutionary.

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Because certainly, by the time that there's a Jewish rebellion

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against the Romans in the year 66, there are zealot

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means you're actually a revolutionary

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But, he's got another name.

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Simon the Cananite.

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And we can often think of that as meaning like Old Testament

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Canaanite with a c, a, n, double a, n, i, t, e

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and really, it's not that name.

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It doesn't have that double ‘a’, it's to do with the

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P: Hebrew and Aramaic to be zealous, qanai T: Ah, I see

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So God is, so zealous and jealous relate.

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And so that's, that's what he's called.

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But again, he's got that extra bit added to his name.

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And you find this happening again with the Marys. Mary Magdalene,

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Mary from Magdala, Mary, the mother of James and Joseph.

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And this is happening in the narratives regularly.

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So it's exactly the sort of names that you would expect,

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if you're using local information and not really

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the sort of thing that would be easy to get

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if you weren't

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local, or had serious conversations with locals.

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Now, there are some people that push back on elements of that argument.

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If it's used too much as a sort of knockdown argument

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and you can whittle away at it.

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But I think, broadly speaking, it still stands

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and you got control samples and if you like, with,

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some of the apocryphal gospels, which don't seem to do so well.

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So the Coptic version of the Gospel of Thomas begins with,

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‘These are the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke, and which Didymus

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Judas Thomas wrote down’, and that is really twin Judas, twin

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which is not really a very plausible name at all.

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Yeah.

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And so you find that, yes, it's easy to get these things wrong.

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And so you, you would notice if they were wrong or if, for instance,

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you are reading Luke's genealogy of Jesus in Matthew,

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sorry in Luke chapter three, and you were to be, let's say, before the exile

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and you were getting a Herod or a Philip, you would suddenly think,

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that doesn't really work, you know, there weren’t Greeks around at that time.

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So so that's where we find the names just are

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very plausible.

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They work for their time and culture.

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They work for their time and culture.

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Yeah.

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So you mentioned that the, the two Simons.

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There's other ambiguation isn't there, in in the list of the apostles here

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in Matthew 10 so P: Yeah Matthew 10 is fascinating because basically you can find a correlation

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between whether there is a disambiguation and how popular the name is.

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So you got first Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew,

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his brother. Andrew is not that common a name, but he's explained in relation to

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his brother.

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Yeah it’s not a disambiguation is it

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James is a popular name, so it's the son of Zebedee and John

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his brother John, the popular name.

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But he's again disambiguated. Philip,

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actually, less popular.

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Bartholomew less popular.

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Thomas less less popular.

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So they, those all lack disambiguators. Matthew the tax collector.

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So Matthew was a fair,  you know in the top

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ten names.

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James quite high ranking.

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So again, the son of Alphaeus and Thaddeus, low ranking Simon

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the Cananite and Judas Iscariot.

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So, Judas was,

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you know, about the fourth most common name.

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And these statistics may vary a bit because there's new primary information

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to be found. So

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I should talk a little bit about the primary information

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here?

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So, there's a lexicon by Tal Ilan of proper names.

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Several, actually, but one for this period.

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And she's basing that on what other people have done.

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So the data are changing all the time because people are coming up

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with new inscriptions.

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Every time you find a new,

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thing with anyone's name on that's actually changing the data so that

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that will be change on a yearly basis.

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So just to go back to where you started, you mentioned that this data was coming

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from a text like Josephus

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and whatever, but also ossuaries and and other epigraphic material? P: Yes, yes

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So any, any anything written down any historical record will do.

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They will also include the New Testament in these texts.

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So you got to be careful, you know, when you can have a column of data,

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including New Testament compared with a column of data, which,

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is the New Testament.

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And so that's where you got to be careful. But,

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Dead Sea Scrolls, of course.

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Give us some figures as well.

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So, those are the sorts of things that are feeding into that.

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But it is changing, not dramatically, I think,

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you know, Simon's going to stay about in first place.

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For the men, and Mary first place for the women.

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I don't think that's likely to change with more data, but you never know.

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Yeah, sure. Yeah.

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Okay.

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That, tell us on the disambiguation thing,

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how the narrator of the gospels and the things that he,

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the speech that is recording how those differ because there's P: Yeah,

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T: there's some interesting differences there aren’t there? P: there is.

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So if you look at Matthew chapter 14, what you find is you've got the story of,

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John the Baptist, getting beheaded.

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And, you remember that Herod the tetrarch tetrarch has a,

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a feast for his birthday.

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And, then he makes a rash oath,

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and, then has to fulfill it.

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And what's interesting there is that every time someone talks about

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John the Baptist in the narrative, they say the Baptist.

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P: Because actually, John is quite a common name T: Right

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So you can't just say, well, you can't say about Jesus, for instance, in,

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Matthew chapter 14, verse two, he said to his servants, this is John the Baptist.

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He couldn't just simply say, this is John

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He's saying, you know John the Baptist, who,

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risen from the dead because that wouldn't make sense.

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You'd actually have to say which John, because they're probably several

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Johns working in Herod's palace, so that just doesn't make any sense.

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Okay.

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And likewise, when Herodias’s daughter asks for the head of John the Baptist,

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she doesn't say, just give me the head of John.

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Might have got the head of the wrong John, you know?

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So she actually is very specific in asking

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for the head of John the Baptist, but the narrator can simply say John.

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Now, the other striking thing is that happens with the name Jesus as well.

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And it happens basically in all four gospels that when you have

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people in speech context talking about Jesus,

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they say Jesus plus something extra Jesus, teacher, Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus,

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Son of David, all sorts of things that they add to disambiguate him.

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Two exceptions are, 

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John, chapter nine, when you've got a figure who's asked

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who healed you, man born blind and he seems actually in

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to be portrayed as sort of, half seeing spiritually at this point.

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Yeah.

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And he gives a half definition of, of, of Jesus by saying yes the man

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Jesus did it,

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which won't actually help you identify amongst all the various Jesuses in Jerusalem.

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And the other case is the thief on the cross.

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And again, people on crosses don't waste words.

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P: And it's not a crowd situation. It's, it's, you know, it's 1 to 1. T: Yeah. Right.

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But what you can find is, in the narratives for instance, if a, a servant

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girl comes up to Peter and says, you know, you were with him or you're one of them,

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she's, she's going to say you were with Jesus the Galilean, Jesus of Nazareth.

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T: Yeah. P: This is happening in, in

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Matthew 26 but straight afterwards, the narrator will simply talk about Jesus.

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Right.

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So you've got this interesting differentiation between, yes,

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the way the narrator speaks and the way the characters speak.

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Yeah.

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And of course, you've actually got a three fold differentiation, really,

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in the Gospels, because Jesus talks about himself as the Son of Man,

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Which no one else seems to do.

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And then the characters in the narrative talk about him as Jesus,

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plus something extra. Then

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the narrators just calling him Jesus.

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And so it's it's a very interesting, set of things that really, again, works.

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If Jesus really did call himself the Son of Man, cryptically,

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if he really is a figure who needs to be distinguished

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at the time, and it's describing the way people would have spoken.

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Yeah.

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You know, if you had been in Rome, you wouldn't have needed to disambiguate the name,

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Jesus.

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And if the Gospels were written 100 years into the spread of Christianity again,

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you see, people don't feel the need to differentiate Jesus.

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And it's quite clear which Jesus we're talking about.

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But at this stage it would be very different.

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P: I mean . . . T: does the name Jesus drop out of, of general use because of Jesus?

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Yes it does, I mean, so obviously nowadays, you know, today we find in the Spanish

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speaking world that Jesus is quite a popular

00:13:28:16 - 00:13:31:23
name sometimes in a compound,

00:13:32:01 - 00:13:36:05
but in most other settings, people aren't using the name,

00:13:37:07 - 00:13:37:16
Jesus.

00:13:37:16 - 00:13:40:06
And that's quite an interesting thing.

00:13:40:06 - 00:13:43:05
And, and so, yeah, I don't know anyone who's called their child

00:13:43:05 - 00:13:43:18
Jesus.

00:13:43:18 - 00:13:47:08
No, no, It just, it feels unthinkable.

00:13:47:13 - 00:13:50:00
And yet, it is, as you say, it is common in a Spanish culture

00:13:50:00 - 00:13:50:09
Yeah.

00:13:50:09 - 00:13:55:24
To which which for us in a non Spanish speaking culture can lead to some amusing

00:13:56:04 - 00:14:00:13
P: Yeah, yeah absolutely T: Some amusing situations but but yeah it seems, it seems an unthinkable thing.

00:14:00:22 - 00:14:02:23
P: Yeah. T: For, for a Brit to, to do that.

00:14:02:23 - 00:14:07:01
I mean if I can give a sort of opposite example is such a bad example,

00:14:07:01 - 00:14:08:24
but I can't think of anyone else

00:14:08:24 - 00:14:12:03
its like, if you had said in 1850,

00:14:12:03 - 00:14:15:20
in Germany, the name Adolf, again there were loads of them around.

00:14:15:20 - 00:14:17:23
T: Yeah right. P: And no one would know which

00:14:17:23 - 00:14:23:00
you were talking about it becomes almost unthinkable to call your child,

00:14:23:13 - 00:14:26:02
Adolf after the Second World War for understandable reasons.

00:14:26:02 - 00:14:29:00
So that's one of those things where you get a change,

00:14:29:00 - 00:14:32:12
where a name gets very associated with that one particular individual,

00:14:33:03 - 00:14:35:01
who becomes a well-known. Now obviously

00:14:35:01 - 00:14:37:23
very bad example because its just the opposite

00:14:39:01 - 00:14:41:04
I'm illustrating I'd love to have a better example,

00:14:41:04 - 00:14:44:10
but but that, you know, I think it gets the point across.

00:14:44:10 - 00:14:46:19
T: Yeah it does. P: The name Jesus becomes really popular.

00:14:46:19 - 00:14:49:16
And then at a later stage you don't need to disambiguate.

00:14:49:16 - 00:14:52:09
But as we are at this stage in the Gospels, they do.

00:14:52:09 - 00:14:54:06
And this is an amazing thing.

00:14:54:06 - 00:14:59:07
So you’re reading Luke's gospel, Luke 24 and you've got the two on the road

00:14:59:07 - 00:14:59:22
to Emmaus.

00:14:59:22 - 00:15:02:08
Along comes Jesus, they don’t recognize who he is.

00:15:02:08 - 00:15:04:14
And they say, well, haven’t you know what's going on?

00:15:04:14 - 00:15:05:10
He says what things?

00:15:05:10 - 00:15:08:01
And they say, oh, the things concerning Jesus of Nazareth.

00:15:08:01 - 00:15:10:23
And that they have to disambiguate who they're talking about.

00:15:10:23 - 00:15:13:14
And again, that's exactly the way people would have had to have spoken.

00:15:13:14 - 00:15:14:22
Yeah, yeah.

00:15:14:22 - 00:15:19:03
It occurs to me that one of the reasons why you can't think of a good example,

00:15:19:18 - 00:15:22:18
you have to use that negative example of Adolf, is because

00:15:23:03 - 00:15:27:00
when somebody is a very significant figure in the modern world,

00:15:27:06 - 00:15:31:12
people will name their children after them, so there’s been a rise in royal names

00:15:31:12 - 00:15:33:21
of George and Arthur and those kinds of things in recent years.

00:15:35:03 - 00:15:35:13
Whereas

00:15:35:13 - 00:15:38:13
they, they dropped out of use, but they're back in.

00:15:39:09 - 00:15:44:10
So is the reluctance to call children Jesus in in the

00:15:44:21 - 00:15:47:21
you know, within the Christian community in the early centuries

00:15:48:08 - 00:15:53:17
is that related to the whole idea of the holiness of the name of God and of . . .

00:15:53:22 - 00:15:57:11
T: those kind of things? P: I mean, obviously at an early stage in the New Testament, you get a,

00:15:58:14 - 00:16:01:14
P: Jesus called Justus. T: Yep.

00:16:01:14 - 00:16:04:03
And and you,

00:16:04:03 - 00:16:06:07
Bar-Jesus, not a particularly good example

00:16:06:07 - 00:16:09:21
in the book of Acts because he's a, he's a sorcerer.

00:16:10:23 - 00:16:13:05
But you can have others.

00:16:13:05 - 00:16:16:00
But, you know, over time, there's a sense of reverence.

00:16:16:00 - 00:16:17:01
I mean, as in,

00:16:17:01 - 00:16:17:16
you don't want to

00:16:17:16 - 00:16:21:18
claim this about yourself, so that's why people move away from that.

00:16:21:18 - 00:16:23:04
P: Yeah T: Yeah.

00:16:23:04 - 00:16:26:04
There's an article in the next issue of ink by

00:16:26:09 - 00:16:30:06
Dirk about writing the Name of God and and how it's,

00:16:32:10 - 00:16:33:11
the the

00:16:33:11 - 00:16:37:11
Yahweh becomes the Tetragrammaton is just written in the Old Testament

00:16:37:11 - 00:16:40:23
and that kind of thing happening in the New Testament manuscripts as well.

00:16:40:23 - 00:16:41:08
So, yeah.

00:16:41:08 - 00:16:44:08
So we find as we go through church history, of course, people will,

00:16:44:16 - 00:16:47:10
you’ll have, you know,

00:16:47:10 - 00:16:50:01
more than one Augustine, you’ll have more than one Gregory.

00:16:50:01 - 00:16:56:04
And you because once one’s successful, it sort of it takes off.

00:16:56:04 - 00:16:58:10
But people don't do that with, with Jesus.

00:16:58:10 - 00:16:59:11
And so you don't have a sort of

00:16:59:11 - 00:17:02:11
Saint Jesus halfway through the church history, you know?

00:17:03:12 - 00:17:04:10
P: No. T: Yeah.

00:17:04:10 - 00:17:07:10
Yeah, that's that's very interesting.

00:17:07:14 - 00:17:10:14
How does this is

00:17:10:14 - 00:17:14:06
this is going back a little bit, but one of the, the, the arguments

00:17:14:06 - 00:17:17:06
that’s sometimes leveled against the Gospels is that

00:17:18:08 - 00:17:21:08
somebody has invented all of this.

00:17:21:12 - 00:17:25:08
There are multiple lines of argument why that doesn't stand up.

00:17:25:08 - 00:17:26:07
And you've

00:17:26:07 - 00:17:30:20
you've outlined some reasons for this, but why could it not be that somebody

00:17:30:20 - 00:17:36:13
from another Jewish community say in Alexandria or Rome, why,

00:17:36:22 - 00:17:40:07
why would, could they not have written this stuff and and still had the right

00:17:40:07 - 00:17:41:23
T: kind of balance of names that you were talking about earlier? P: Well, I mean

00:17:41:23 - 00:17:45:14
So in Alexandria, certain names would have been popular, like Sabatius

00:17:45:14 - 00:17:49:19
P: Dosithius, Pappus, Ptolemias T: You don't see those in the New Testament

00:17:49:20 - 00:17:50:24
P: You don't see those in the New Testament.

00:17:50:24 - 00:17:53:24
So what you're finding is amongst the chart of the top names,

00:17:54:13 - 00:17:57:00
that they have there, those those aren't making it over.

00:17:57:00 - 00:18:00:11
Of course, in Alexandria, Jews were basically Greek speaking.

00:18:00:14 - 00:18:03:12
What we're finding with Jesus disciples, we've got two Greek names,

00:18:03:12 - 00:18:04:05
Andrew and Philip.

00:18:04:05 - 00:18:07:01
The rest are, Hebrew, Aramaic,

00:18:08:01 - 00:18:08:16
I mean,

00:18:08:16 - 00:18:12:14
it's interesting the way the, the names line up.

00:18:12:14 - 00:18:13:23
And of course, with our Gospels,

00:18:13:23 - 00:18:18:01
two of the four gospel names are Latin, Mark and Luke.

00:18:18:05 - 00:18:20:01
Which is fascinating.

00:18:20:01 - 00:18:22:06
So you've got this mixture of languages,

00:18:22:06 - 00:18:24:24
but it's it's just very difficult to falsify that.

00:18:24:24 - 00:18:27:09
And to have the mindset to do so.

00:18:27:09 - 00:18:31:02
And if you are going to falsify a story, you don't just have to falsify

00:18:31:09 - 00:18:34:03
and make sure you can get the right names to look plausible.

00:18:34:03 - 00:18:35:04
You need everything else.

00:18:35:04 - 00:18:38:04
You need the geography. You need

00:18:38:04 - 00:18:42:06
the coinage, the weather, the trees, the social stratification.

00:18:42:16 - 00:18:44:16
Now, this is not an easy thing to do.

00:18:44:16 - 00:18:47:14
And the reason why is because travel is difficult and potentially dangerous.

00:18:47:14 - 00:18:51:05
I mean, you know, you you can get robbed, you can get ill, you know,

00:18:53:04 - 00:18:53:19
what what

00:18:53:19 - 00:18:56:19
can go wrong when, when you're traveling?

00:18:56:22 - 00:19:00:12
It's not something you do just for no particular reason.

00:19:00:12 - 00:19:05:07
So people are generally traveling for for trade and these sorts of reasons.

00:19:05:20 - 00:19:08:20
And you find it, one of the greatest,

00:19:09:22 - 00:19:12:09
geographers at the time is Strabo.

00:19:12:09 - 00:19:16:01
And, yet, he can get fantastically confused,

00:19:16:21 - 00:19:21:08
well he gets confused about the Dead Sea and a lake in Egypt.

00:19:21:08 - 00:19:24:16
P: And you think, how can the top geographer do this? T: Wow

00:19:24:16 - 00:19:25:20
Yeah.

00:19:25:20 - 00:19:29:17
And it's again, it's because people haven't been to these places.

00:19:29:17 - 00:19:33:10
P: It's it's a really big deal T: they rely on secondhand information.

00:19:34:17 - 00:19:37:02
And so I think, you know,

00:19:37:02 - 00:19:40:14
I’ve been once to Australia, okay, I'm 53, once to Australia.

00:19:40:15 - 00:19:41:16
It was quite a big journey.

00:19:41:16 - 00:19:43:14
You know, I'd be glad to go back there again.

00:19:43:14 - 00:19:46:07
But but it's not something you do lightly.

00:19:46:07 - 00:19:49:19
And so a lot of the time people may be very well

00:19:49:19 - 00:19:52:24
educated, but they're getting the knowledge of geography from books,

00:19:54:01 - 00:19:56:01
and knowledge of culture and other things.

00:19:56:01 - 00:19:59:17
And that isn't enough, actually, to give them the ability

00:19:59:17 - 00:20:02:17
to write a story with all of the right details

00:20:02:21 - 00:20:06:05
in and actually, names are one of the things that you wouldn't

00:20:06:05 - 00:20:09:24
necessarily think you might think, oh, there are Jewish names.

00:20:10:04 - 00:20:14:06
You don't think, no, there are Jewish names for this land and for that land

00:20:14:06 - 00:20:17:06
and for that, and so this social stratification, that social stratification.

00:20:17:13 - 00:20:20:22
And to actually get a bit more subtle about it, it's like if I were to ask,

00:20:21:22 - 00:20:24:23
sort of, a typical Western person to write me

00:20:24:23 - 00:20:28:22
a story about Libya or Algeria or whatever it is to

00:20:29:00 - 00:20:32:14
for someone to be able to come up with the right sort of names

00:20:32:21 - 00:20:35:21
that would be incredibly difficult, they might have some vague idea.

00:20:35:22 - 00:20:38:22
Yeah, of some figures, from a land.

00:20:39:00 - 00:20:42:00
But getting the right mixture in Algeria of, of,

00:20:42:05 - 00:20:45:11
Berber and Kabyle names as opposed to the Arabic.

00:20:45:16 - 00:20:47:07
There's no way you're going to do that.

00:20:47:07 - 00:20:48:14
So I just think it's,

00:20:49:18 - 00:20:50:04
again, it's

00:20:50:04 - 00:20:53:22
not a knockdown proof that these accounts are true.

00:20:53:22 - 00:20:58:06
It it just fits very well, with true reporting,

00:20:59:03 - 00:21:02:04
and it's about the simplicity

00:21:02:04 - 00:21:05:04
of the hypothesis that this is straightforward narrative.

00:21:05:20 - 00:21:09:03
That's a simple hypothesis that's going to explain the data, now it's over to you

00:21:09:09 - 00:21:12:09
to try and give me something that's equally simple.

00:21:12:12 - 00:21:14:23
Yeah. Yeah.

00:21:14:23 - 00:21:17:13
Can we talk about the name Jesus and,

00:21:17:13 - 00:21:20:19
and his his use of the Son of Man?

00:21:20:21 - 00:21:21:12
Yeah, sure.

00:21:21:12 - 00:21:25:08
Because it's, it's a it's a fascinating term and . . .

00:21:25:10 - 00:21:27:13
Yeah,

00:21:27:13 - 00:21:28:22
we, people struggle with it

00:21:28:22 - 00:21:32:08
because, you know, is is it is is just Daniel 7?

00:21:32:11 - 00:21:34:23
But then why does Ezekiel keep,

00:21:34:23 - 00:21:38:11
why does God call Ezekiel, consistently through the book of Ezekiel,

00:21:38:11 - 00:21:39:03
son of man?

00:21:39:03 - 00:21:43:06
Is Jesus drawing on Ezekiel, is he drawing on Daniel? Why is he doing this?

00:21:43:06 - 00:21:47:01
So we find in the early church, and in a sense, in popular culture,

00:21:47:01 - 00:21:50:16
it's very easy to think of an opposition between Son of Man and Son of God.

00:21:50:18 - 00:21:53:14
That's that's that's the simple way it works.

00:21:53:14 - 00:21:58:14
But of course, Son of Man was often a, an expression just for a person.

00:21:58:20 - 00:22:02:19
So in Aramaic, son of man you might well just call there’s a son of man over there.

00:22:02:19 - 00:22:03:15
I mean,

00:22:03:24 - 00:22:04:20
it's got that,

00:22:04:20 - 00:22:08:15
but then you've got this fact that you've got Daniel 7:13–14,

00:22:08:15 - 00:22:10:17
which talks about one like a son of man

00:22:10:17 - 00:22:14:04
coming to the ancient of the days, receiving power and authority.

00:22:14:11 - 00:22:17:05
And all nations serving him.

00:22:17:05 - 00:22:20:15
And Jesus certainly seems to be using it sometimes in that sort of way,

00:22:20:15 - 00:22:24:24
he will pick up the language of authority.

00:22:25:14 - 00:22:28:15
Being, given, to the Son of Man

00:22:28:15 - 00:22:31:20
that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins, for instance.

00:22:32:03 - 00:22:34:07
So that's where it's interesting.

00:22:34:07 - 00:22:36:06
He seems to be

00:22:36:06 - 00:22:38:01
referencing

00:22:38:01 - 00:22:40:20
back to

00:22:40:20 - 00:22:42:19
Daniel.

00:22:42:19 - 00:22:44:07
Reference to Ezekiel,

00:22:44:07 - 00:22:45:16
that's that's a tougher one.

00:22:45:16 - 00:22:47:12
And I'm not sure I can solve that.

00:22:47:12 - 00:22:49:12
T: That's very disappointing. P: On the spot

00:22:49:12 - 00:22:52:12
But I'm really sorry to disappoint you there.

00:22:52:20 - 00:22:55:15
The I mean, the other thing is that you actually find

00:22:55:15 - 00:22:59:18
some of the features with the way the Son of Man phrase is used

00:23:00:04 - 00:23:03:00
where it actually works, not just for Matthew, Mark and Luke,

00:23:03:00 - 00:23:05:18
but also for John, which is a bit different as a gospel.

00:23:05:18 - 00:23:08:13
Right. Where you find it talking about,

00:23:09:21 - 00:23:11:09
the Son of Man being glorified.

00:23:11:09 - 00:23:15:18
And again, that that fits with the Daniel 7 sort of reference.

00:23:16:00 - 00:23:20:23
So, I think it's a carefully chosen term

00:23:20:23 - 00:23:27:22
because, Jesus is not proclaiming himself

00:23:28:08 - 00:23:31:21
publicly as the Messiah, because that would have been misunderstood.

00:23:32:21 - 00:23:35:21
And so he's able to point people to

00:23:36:18 - 00:23:40:05
Old Testament texts and expectation using this and

00:23:41:15 - 00:23:45:11
this third person locution which clearly, when you look at the end of things, is

00:23:45:11 - 00:23:47:10
P: referring to himself. T: Yeah, right.

00:23:47:10 - 00:23:51:05
And nobody seems to question it in the Gospels they, when he talks

00:23:51:05 - 00:23:54:18
about himself as the Son of Man, I can't think of any instance where people

00:23:55:04 - 00:23:57:21
T: question that use of the term P: There’s a ‘who is this son of man?’ isn’t there?

00:23:57:21 - 00:23:59:07
P: Yes. T: Yeah.

00:23:59:07 - 00:24:01:21
Whereas whereas when,

00:24:01:21 - 00:24:04:02
when he's identifying himself

00:24:04:02 - 00:24:08:00
more obviously with God or as God,

00:24:08:24 - 00:24:09:19
forgiving sins

00:24:09:19 - 00:24:12:19
for example, in the healing of the paralytic,

00:24:12:21 - 00:24:15:21
T: that's not so much of what he says, but what he does. P: Yes.

00:24:16:00 - 00:24:19:03
But but nevertheless, the Pharisees are up in arms about that. And

00:24:19:03 - 00:24:20:01
T: Yet P: Yes.

00:24:20:01 - 00:24:23:05
So the Son of Man seems to be able to work as a, as a title.

00:24:23:05 - 00:24:25:18
T: That can go under the radar. P: Yeah.

00:24:25:18 - 00:24:30:06
And I think some of what Jesus says actually works at two levels.

00:24:30:06 - 00:24:30:16
Right.

00:24:30:16 - 00:24:35:13
So you, you will see this in, in say, John chapter six where a modern translation

00:24:35:13 - 00:24:36:19
might be inclined to think

00:24:36:19 - 00:24:40:00
shall we talk about father with a capital ‘F’ or father with a

00:24:40:00 - 00:24:41:19
small ‘f’?

00:24:41:19 - 00:24:43:19
And of course,

00:24:43:19 - 00:24:46:19
that distinction didn't exist at the

00:24:46:24 - 00:24:47:21
time of Jesus.

00:24:47:21 - 00:24:49:04
And so,

00:24:49:04 - 00:24:52:08
you have possibility to misunderstand

00:24:52:08 - 00:24:54:15
what Jesus is saying when he's talking about my father.

00:24:54:15 - 00:24:55:17
I mean, this even happens,

00:24:55:17 - 00:24:58:05
You know, didn't you know, I had to be about my father's business.

00:24:58:05 - 00:25:01:05
In Luke chapter two, he says this, to,

00:25:01:09 - 00:25:03:18
Mary, Mary and Joseph, and they’re a bit puzzled, ‘What?’

00:25:04:15 - 00:25:06:09
‘What’s that?’, you know,

00:25:06:09 - 00:25:09:09
so so that's where I think there are,

00:25:10:07 - 00:25:14:07
yeah, there's possibility to read Jesus words at more than one level,

00:25:15:02 - 00:25:19:05
about, father and you do see this sort of thing going on in

00:25:19:07 - 00:25:23:16
John chapter six, not necessarily prepped to take, take you to it right now, but, yeah.

00:25:24:20 - 00:25:26:05
Yeah.

00:25:26:05 - 00:25:27:24
Okay.

00:25:27:24 - 00:25:30:03
Finally, what about the significance of some of the names

00:25:30:03 - 00:25:31:24
in in our Old Testament discussions,

00:25:31:24 - 00:25:36:18
we've we've seen a, a number of incidents, instances where people's names are,

00:25:38:02 - 00:25:40:10
the meaning of the name is highly appropriate.

00:25:40:10 - 00:25:43:05
T: And obviously that works for Jesus. P: Yeah.

00:25:43:05 - 00:25:45:09
P: Which I want to talk about. Yeah. T: Yeah. So.

00:25:45:09 - 00:25:46:08
So tell us about that.

00:25:46:08 - 00:25:48:15
And are there other examples, other names

00:25:48:15 - 00:25:53:02
T: in the New Testament? P: And it's interesting when you look at, Jesus's, family,

00:25:53:17 - 00:25:56:17
they get named in, Matthew chapter five.

00:25:57:09 - 00:26:02:05
Sorry, 13 verse 55, where they say, isn't his mother called

00:26:02:05 - 00:26:06:05
Mary and his brothers are James, Joseph, Simon and Judas?

00:26:06:12 - 00:26:08:16
Well, if you think of five

00:26:09:23 - 00:26:11:08
brothers,

00:26:11:08 - 00:26:14:08
Jesus, James, Joseph, Simon and Judas,

00:26:14:19 - 00:26:18:13
what's striking is there's only one of those that fits with a saviour.

00:26:19:13 - 00:26:20:01
Yes, it’s

00:26:20:01 - 00:26:23:19
You know, he's the one who's going to save. Jacob means trickster.

00:26:23:19 - 00:26:25:04
P: And it's interesting that he’s . . . T: Which is James P: James

00:26:25:04 - 00:26:28:04
James, that the,

00:26:29:02 - 00:26:31:23
on my understanding, they are Jesus's half brothers.

00:26:31:23 - 00:26:32:07
Okay.

00:26:32:07 - 00:26:34:14
I know their are other understandings about that. 

00:26:34:14 - 00:26:37:09
And so the first born after Jesus

00:26:37:09 - 00:26:40:11
is called Iakobos which becomes James.

00:26:40:11 - 00:26:40:21
Yeah.

00:26:40:21 - 00:26:43:23
And Iakobos is just the Greek ending of Iakob [Jacob].

00:26:44:18 - 00:26:47:06
And it's interesting that Joseph's

00:26:47:06 - 00:26:50:06
father in Matthew's genealogy is called Iakob [Jacob].

00:26:50:13 - 00:26:53:03
So it's the common thing of paponymy

00:26:53:03 - 00:26:55:02
of, when you call someone after their

00:26:55:02 - 00:26:56:22
Grandfather.

00:26:56:22 - 00:26:57:01
Yeah.

00:26:57:01 - 00:27:00:22
But you can't do it in the case of Jesus because he's actually been given

00:27:00:22 - 00:27:03:06
a different name by the angels. Are you going to call, 

00:27:03:06 - 00:27:05:18
You know, the first born Jesus.

00:27:05:18 - 00:27:07:20
And then they they go on to this,

00:27:08:19 - 00:27:12:14
Jacob. Joseph, Simon, and Judas.

00:27:12:14 - 00:27:15:20
Of course, they're all, sons of Jacob,

00:27:15:20 - 00:27:18:20
which is an interesting feature. And,

00:27:19:03 - 00:27:22:20
one's an outlier the name Iesus [Jesus] which is of course a form of the name

00:27:22:22 - 00:27:24:00
P: Joshua. T: Yeah.

00:27:24:00 - 00:27:27:00
But it is an outlier in terms of the naming pattern,

00:27:27:06 - 00:27:30:21
because there was a time when Jacob,

00:27:31:18 - 00:27:36:02
Joseph, Simeon and Judah would have been

00:27:36:02 - 00:27:39:22
in the tent together at one stage, you know, in the Old Testament.

00:27:40:02 - 00:27:42:12
And there's one outlier name, and that's the one,

00:27:42:12 - 00:27:43:05
Jesus. And I think

00:27:43:05 - 00:27:45:09
it's just a fascinating

00:27:45:09 - 00:27:47:11
P: thing you can try and T: It is isn’t it?

00:27:47:11 - 00:27:49:07
P: meditate on. T: Yeah.

00:27:49:07 - 00:27:51:24
Maybe that's a very good place to bring this to a close.

00:27:51:24 - 00:27:54:00
T: Pete, thank you very much for your time today. P: Thank you

00:27:54:00 - 00:27:57:00
That's been really interesting join us again for, as I said

00:27:57:02 - 00:27:58:14
at the beginning, conversation with Steve

00:27:58:14 - 00:28:02:18
Walton next time talking about the patterns of, of names within the Roman world

00:28:02:18 - 00:28:05:19
and particularly Saul, and whether he changed his name to Paul

00:28:05:19 - 00:28:10:02
or whether that's just a different use of, different versions of the same name.

00:28:11:04 - 00:28:12:02
No plot spoilers.

00:28:12:02 - 00:28:13:17
We'll leave that hanging for next time.

00:28:13:17 - 00:28:15:05
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00:28:15:05 - 00:28:17:18
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00:28:17:18 - 00:28:20:22
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