An excerpt from the first chapter of BEHOLD THE MAN! CHRIST IN THE ILIAD, CLASSICAL GREEK DRAMA, PLATO, AND GREEK LITERATURE FROM HERCULANEUM: In The Jesus Papyrus Carsten Peter Thiede and Matthew D’Ancona submit an important discovery regarding Christian manuscripts written in the first century AD. They reveal that gospel writers such as Matthew abbreviated certain words. “Jesus”, for instance, which is spelled Ιησους/Iēsous in Greek, was shortened to Is, the first and last letters in the name. These abbreviations, Thiede and D’Ancona assert, became popular in early Christianity. . . . The sudden and general adoption of this new system seems to have been a conscious attempt to emulate the Jewish custom of abbreviating the name of God. It was a momentous decision for . . . it implied a dramatic theological claim about the nature and role of Jesus. (106) Thiede and D’Ancona go on to cite examples of abbreviations where either the first two letters and the last letter or the first letter and the last two letters are used. The authors stress that the scribes of the first century did not employ abbreviations for “idle reasons or simply to save space on a sheet of papyrus”. Rather the use of abbreviations “reflected a theological position” (125). One example of the Jewish or Hebrew abbreviation of the name of God is El, which is how it appears in Genesis 14:20. The two Hebrew letters are ’Aleph and Lāmedh. El is the abbreviation of the Greek word Εμμανουηλ/Emmanouēl, using the first and last letters. Emmanouēl is translated as “God [is] with us” (James Strong, The New Strong’s Complete Dictionary of Bible Words 614, entry # 1694; like Liddell and Scott, Strong uses italics in his definitions, but the italics are deleted in this work). We find Emmanouēl being used in Matthew 1:23 as a name for the child to be delivered by the woman who would become the mother of Christ, the Anointed One, the God who would be with the descendants of Jacob (for the Greek text of the New Testament The NKJV Greek-English Interlinear New Testament, translated by Arthur L. Farstad et al., is used throughout this work).
Posted on: Sun, 08 Sep 2013 16:51:09 +0000