It was also within Jewish intellectual tradition to discuss Greek philosophy in Greek, like St Paul who discussed philosophy with the philosophers of Athens and other matters with Greek-speaking Jews.
I am not quite sure what we are debating here. Jesus was neither a diaspora Jew nor was he concerned with non-religious philosophy.
Are you happy with 1300 years (up to Rishonim era) or even 1000 years (Arabicisation of Levant)? What's the difference? Still 3000 thousands alleged loans is nothing compared to tens of thousands of Aramo-Hebrew words in the Rabbinic texts (for reference, a third of English words have Latin roots and its not yet 1000 years after Norman conquest). There were significant changes in every major language of the region (Iranian, Indian, Semitic, Latin, Greek, etc.) shifting roughly from their "old" to "middle" stage or equivalent.
Please stop copy-pasting instead of thinking. "Byzantine period" ended in 1400s (tho here it may mean until 7th c.). This very sentence in your quote envisions a span of time from 140BC (start of Roman era) to 650AD (end of Byzantine military control), meaning 75% of the loaning time was after Paul. Math is not the enemy.
One more time, in case you hadn't seen previous posts:
Of course there were changes. But when changes are caused by influence from another language indicating bilingualism, then this shouldn't be denied.
Yeah, I think I've heard that before. Unfortunately, no evidence has been provided to back it up.
I agree that she wasn’t necessarily an Ethnic Greek. Not everybody drew a sharp distinction between race and culture. So, Ἑλληνίς Ellenis could have meant something like “foreigner”.
We know next to nothing about Luke except that he knew enough Greek to write that text.
We pretty much all agree on that. It is you who over-analysing things and try to convince us of absurdities like that a travelling preacher in late second Temple period Eretz Israel would teach in Greek.
Paul was a diaspora Jew from Asia Minor. That was never an issue in this thread. It was basically him who converted Christianity from a Jewish sect into a full-blown religion with global ambitions.
To be entirely fair, that preacher might occasionally employ Greek. The main language of his preaching, however, would naturally be Aramaic.
You're puzzled because you don't read and only copy paste the first thing you see. In this case, please read just seven verses (2.15) or one page further (3.23, 3.24). Is the puzzle solved? So, I repeat once again:
To be precise only garden, not garden of Eden. But dropping the en Edem and saying just paradeisos is a very short step, especially because it isn't the ordinary Greek word for garden.
Beekes also mentions these meanings: "enclosed park with animals" and "garden".
Exactly. You had to change "translation" to "rendering" because Greek paradeisos isn't a translation of "Garden of Eden" but of "garden" (gan) only, full stop.
That would depend on the audience, among other things. If Greek was the lingua franca of Roman Palestine and you were addressing a crowd of people speaking different languages, I think the obvious option would be Greek.
Correct. Greek παράδεισος paradeisos first occurs in Xenophon in reference to the parks of the Persian kings < Persian pairi-daeza, “enclosure”, “surrounding wall”, “enclosed park/garden” where daeza is cognate with Greek τεῖχος teikhos, “wall (especially one enclosing a town or city)”.
Well, I retract my retraction because appreciating details doesn't matter if the other side can't even see the outlines in the context:
Look for it yourself and then copy paste it here. If you really cared about the topic, you would have two days ago when I mentioned it.
And for 'inscriptions' one often means the script used for names: "two thirds... in Hebrew/Aramaic... one third... in Greek, or a combination [for 233 ossuaries]" (p. 12). On page 24, a population estimate of 82,500 by 70 CE, for Jerusalem. Different estimates for the Levant seem consistent with "more genetic influence from the eastern Mediterranean than elsewhere in the Empire" and some "Aramaic and Hebrew" in Rome (Science).
We were through this before. With probability bordering certainly it is. See #110.
In the LXX.
There is a broad consensus that there is no Hebrew original but that the original is Aramaic.
My feeling is that some people just don't like Greek. I doubt this was the case in the first century AD:
It is. It's just not the literal translation but the contextual translation. It was understood in the context as Garden of Eden, and that was more than enough. By the way, did you find the idea of paradise in Book of Enoch, or are ostriching yourself into convenient oblivion? This video explains how the whole concept of paradise in Christianity (or even Christianity itself) rose from some of the inmost layers of Judaism.
Of course. The secret "Zoroastrian" sect pretending to be Jews. Great idea, for sure. But I've got better things to do.😉
Like making such claims?
Zoroastrianism, Judaism and Greek Philosophy developed similar concepts and there were certainly cross-influences. But how exactly these influences worked and how they ended up in Christianity remains speculative.
And that green line (Science) follows the rise of Aramaic, before that "~125-year... megadrought." Almost back for that 2000.
That's exactly what I'm saying. Christianity was really Judaism, Judaism was Zoroastrianism and Zoroastrianism was a form of Neo-Marxism in disguise.
No you are not. You are proposing the following rules:
No. it is not. You keep confusing the Levant with Asia Minor and Alexandria. Seleucid rule of the Levant, with the exception of parts of Syria, lasted not much more than 100 year and Persian cultural influence, especially Aramaic as lingua franca, remained very strong. Widespread Hellenisation came very late, with the introduction of Christianity towards the end of the 4th century (this cas, e.g., the time when the Nabateans, who probably spoke Arabic, switched from writing Aramaic to writing Greek.
By diaspora Jews. The centres of Hellenistic Judaismus were Alexandria, Antiochia and surrounding areas in Syria and Asia Minor.
The passage you quoted states that "Rabban Gamliel allowed half of this household to study Greek wisdom". The question here is if Jewish scholars should be permitted to study secular matters or whether they should only be allowed to study religious (that is Jewish religious) topics. In the context of Jesus that is completely irrelevant.
Learning more, but that does seem the unfortunate case, i.e. after the Romans conquer Jerusalem and place a client is when the contrast comes, from Hasmonean inscriptions to post-Herodian. With 'two generations' for different language changes, and repressions, I can also see how you talk of a different world by 70 AD, when Jerusalem is destroyed.
Yes, those where exactly the kind of things that led to the Maccabean revolt that ended Seleucid rule over the country. His successor as Cohen Gadol, who advocated even stronger Hellenisation, was killed after the revolt by the Seleucid king because the king made him responsible for the revolt. Sadducees remained the leading sect in Judaism until the destruction of the Temple but the fact that the sect just disappeared from history almost immediately after the destruction of the Temple shows that their authority relied almost entirely on the control the Sadducees and Cohanim had over the temple and not because their ideas resonated with the Jewish people. The Jesus as portrayed by the NT has no respect or sympathy for the Sadduceans and the Cohanim and vice versa.
Yes, after Paul et al. made the teachings of a Jewish traveling preacher into a separate and expansive religion. And then we are back at what I said:
Like what? That Jesus should have used a Greek term when lecturing common people on topics of Jewish religion is not plausible (that is why it is irrelevant if Gamaliel might have used Greek when not talking about Jewish religion but "studying Greek wisdom").
This is a good argument against the Jews borrowing the concept of paradise from the Greek. If true, this means Jews were probably not against Greek language and philosophy, but somewhat against Greek religion. If the concept of paradise was originally a Greek theme, Jews wouldn't have borrowed it because it was a religious concept.
I think it ought to be obvious that “alternative possibilities” in the context means any possibilities other than the one presented in my post, including your own hypothesis. It has always been my position that the Aramaic hypothesis is a possibility, but that it remains unproven.
I never said Jews borrowed the concept of Paradise from the Greek in the first century AD. Now that you mention it, though, they may have done so centuries earlier.
Then we are back at my two alternatives, which both assume that paradeisos is a translation of Gan Eden. Any alternative theory should show evidence that paradeisos in the sense of dwelling place of the righteous dead has developed in Greek independently of Jewish or Christian influence or is borrowed from another source.
Lol. You were the one contrasting religion and wisdom in that post, with emphasis on the Jewish affinity with the Greek language and wisdom so that you could infer the borrowing because of the latter.
They did, probably even before the Persian era. It was just different (it was only for the very righteous select people). The development from the very righteous to normal righteous is not that of a great leap to require foreign influence. But the great leap was by Paul, considering that non-Jews could go to heaven too, something that he associated with his Jesus vision. Of course, what was in his subconscious that he imagined Jesus saying this to him would be relevant, but there is no way to know because, like dreams, the reason could range from a delicious kebab given to him by a Gentile on that day, to intense study of the subject ten years earlier.
😃 Well, I honestly appreciate your sense of humour. But I think you ought to re-read and re-write your post because it makes no sense whatsoever.
Exactly. And while, at the time of Luke, paradeisos had long been established as a translation of Gan Eden, we haven't seen any evidence yet that paradeisos had ever been used in a similar meaning in Greek tradition.
Of cause many things are "logically possible" but that doesn't mean the are credible theories. The evidence we have points at paradeisos in the sense how it is used in the said passage of the NT to be a translation of Gan Eden (either directly from Hebrew or indirectly via Aramaic) in line with the translation in the LXX.
So was Hades the abode of all dead. The Greek idea that a normal human can go somewhere else than Hades doesn't seem to predate the same in Judaism by a considerable margin (in fact the idea of a normal human going to heaven seems to be older in Judaism than in the Greek religion).
No, it didn't. Dios kepos referred to any green area owned or blessed by Zeus, literally or metaphorically, as there were many other garden owned by other deities (Hera, Phoebus, Aphrodite, etc.). It was not as remotely important as gan-eden, and is barely mentioned in ancient Greek literature (3.5 times, with one (Pindar) referring to Libya, another (Euripides) in the island of Delos in the Aegean see). There is no Dios Kepos as a proper noun, AFAIK.
and there is still nothing to add. Greek had developed a similar concept (Elysian Fields) independent of Jewish influence but Luke used a different term and the question is where the term comes from, not where the concept comes from.
