Jesus The Nassraya

A reader writes:

I too have been enjoying your posts on Aramaic in the New Testament. While my Hebrew is fairly good, my Aramaic is non-existant except for the Mourner’s Kaddish.

But in this latest post it looks like you’ve opened a real can of worms. You state that in the Pshitta Acts Jesus’ name is literally rendered at "Jesus the Nazirite". This would tend to confirm the view that Jesus was originally a member of the ultra-ascetic sect of Judaism known as the Nazirim. And he may not have been from Nazareth at all, and that some archaeologists even have doubts as to Nazareth’s existance 2000 years ago.

For more on the Nazirim, please see: http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=142&letter=N

Any thoughts on the matter?

A few. First, I’m glad you’ve been enjoying those posts. I hope you find this one useful as well.

Second, what the text of the Pshitta actually calls Jesus in Acts 2:22 is a "Nassraya." In Aramaic, –aya is a common gentilic suffix, meaning that you use it to turn a noun into a word describing a group of people. For example, the word for a Chaldean is Kaldhaya (kal-THY-ah), the word for a Christian is Mshihaya, the word for a Catholic is Qatoliqaya. –Aya is thus similar to the –i gentilic suffix that one finds in Hebrew and Arabic, resulting in words like Israeli ("a person from Israel") and Suri ("a person from Syria").

(Indeed, it seems to be the same ending, spelled –ay since there is no simple letter /i/ in these languages, only with Aramaic’s characteristic –a noun ending stuck on it since Aramaic routinely uses the emphatic state even for non-emphatic words.)

While nassraya sounds similar to the word for Nazarite, and some have speculated that’s what was meant in this passage, I don’t think that’s what’s going on.

The Nazarites weren’t quite a sect (i.e., a group of folks who held religious views different than others). They were more like a religious order. They took the Nazarite vow either temporarily or permanently as a form of consecration to God. Samuel is the best known instance of a Nazarite from birth that most folks are aware of.

I have no problem with saying various New Testament figures were Nazarites–John the Baptist, for example, would be a good contender. Indeed, John is known for honoring one of the things that was part of the Nazarite vow: abstinence from wine (Luke 7:33).

This, however, is in marked contrast from Jesus, who in the very next verse is said to drink wine (Luke 7:34). He also made wine central to the Eucharist. It thus does not seem to me that Jesus was a Nazarite in the sense of one who had taken the Nazarite vow or who was made a Nazarite from birth like Samuel.

It seems to me that the origin of the word nassraya is more likely to be an attempt to form a gentilic noun based on the place-name nassrath ("Nazareth"), which is given in Acts 10:38. It’s thus nassrath + -aya = nassraya = "a person from Nazareth." (-ath being a feminine ending on the place name that would drop out when making a masculine gentilic noun.)

Unfortunately, when I was composing the post I was doing it quickly and my mind locked onto "Nazarite" as a translation of nassraya without remembering the Nazarite vow.

Sorry for the confusion. I hope the clarification is enlightening.

As to the idea that Nazareth didn’t exist in the first century, I frankly don’t hold much truck with that notion. It proceeds form a hermeutic of skepticism that wants to say everything in the New Testament is false unless it can be proven from independent sources. That is a criterion applied to no other historical text (except the Old Testament). Historians simply do not hold their sources in such contempt.

First, we have New Testament documents clearly and explicitly referring to it on multiple occasions. That of itself is evidence that can’t be dismissed. When folks were dating books like Acts absurdly late, it would have been easier to claim that Nazareth didn’t exist in the first century, but as archaeology has moved the dates of the books earlier and earlier, the claim gets harder and harder to sustain.

First, an unbiased look at the evidence strongly suggests that Acts dates to A.D. 61 or 62 and that Luke is earlier (possibly by a year or two), or about 65-70 years after Jesus was born. It also was written by a gentleman who was a close associate of one of the major apostles and who clearly interviewed a number of people in the apostolic community (and likely Mary herself) to obtain his material. The idea that a town called Nazareth could have sprang into existence in that 65-70 year interim and then got so famous that it could be so quickly confused with the hometown of a man whose followers regarded him as the Messiah simply strains credibility.

It is far more likely that, since Nazareth was apparently a pretty humble place, it simply didn’t show up in the independent records that we do have until later on (maybe because it became more significant and noteworthy to people and even more populous on account of its famous Resident).

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live." View all posts by Jimmy Akin