[B-Greek] QEOS as a proper name?

James Ernest jdemail at charter.net
Wed Jul 28 13:13:20 EDT 2004


Some suggested reading from the Hurtado tome (Lord Jesus Christ) on titles
and proper names:

pp. 98-101: In Paul's letters XRISTOS "has clearly become so closely
associated with Jesus that it functions almost like an alternate name for
him"; but even for Paul's gentile converts the "royal-messianic"
significance of the term was never so lost that it functions "merely as
another name for Jesus."

p. 305: In the Synoptics: "in an important sense of the word, 'the son of
man' is not a title. That is, it does not designate an office or figure
previously established and identified by this expression in the speech
patterns of pre-Christian Jewish circles/traditions.... It functioned ...
more in the way a name functions.... However, ... unlike proper names (at
least in some languages such a modern European ones), 'the son of man' also
had a semantic meaning, referring to Jesus as 'the' particular human
being/figure."

pp. 625-627: on nomina sacra (IHSOUS, XRISTOS, QEOS, KYRIOS). For the
purposes of Tony's question, one might extrapolate from the ms. phenomena
Hurtado here briefly mentions that for Christians of the second through
fifth centuries all four of these words came to be treated as (I wouldn't
say reduced to) proper names.

"Proper name" and "title" may be overlapping categories.

James

--------------------------------
James D. Ernest, Ph.D., Editor
Baker Academic
jernest at BakerAcademic.com
http://www.BakerAcademic.com
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