Re: Thiering FUQ (Frequently Unanswered Questions)

Engineer wrote:
Marshall Price wrote:

Why should I get down on my knees and beg you to take the website's
advice: to study the glossary, chronology, calendar discussions, names
and places, historical and physical evidence, etc.? I couldn't care
less whether you look into it or not.

The reason I'm convinced that the method works is precisely because I
*have* looked sufficiently into it to be persuaded. I might not have
tackled it with the rigor you seem to demand, but I'm no fool; I took
this business very seriously.

I can tell when somebody's simply refusing to do his homework. Do your
homework, Engineer. Get whatever it takes and dig in! If you come up
with a *cogent* objection, write to Barbara Thiering herself and see
what she has to say. It can't hurt; it can only help us understand better.

Actually, you CAN"T tell whether somebody's simply refusing to
do his homework. I am more than willing to do any anmount of
homework. You aren't.

Again I challenge you to demonstrate how Thiering's pesher
method works as she applied it just three words in the Bible.
Or to point to a place where she reveals how to do it that
someone more skilled than you can do it. Why do you refuse?

Here, once again, is my FUQ (Frequently Unanswered Question):

Start with this partial verse in any translation you prefer:

"Mary stayed with her about three months."
- Luke 1:56

Which is, in the original Greek (with english translation
below the greek) as follows:

Meno de Maria sun autos hos men treis
stayed and Mary with her about months three

kai hupostrepho eis ho oikos autos
and returned to that house her


Where did you get that from?

On
http://www.ellopos.net/elpenor/greek-texts/new-testament/luke/1.asp
.... it says:
56 Ἔμεινε δὲ Μαριὰμ σὺν αὐτῇ ὡσεὶ μῆνας τρεῖς καὶ ὑπέστρεψεν εἰς τὸν
οἶκον αὐτῆς.
...., which is somewhat different. For example, they have ὡσεὶ, not ὡσ
(/hos/), and Μαριὰμ, rather than Maria.

See also
http://www.verselink.org/bibletext3/b42c001.htm#56

I have prsonally verified that Thiering is correct when she
says that the original Greek words translated as "about three
months" are Hos (about) Treis (three) and Men (months), but
feel free to confirm it yourself if you wish.

"stayed and Mary with her about months three and returned to
that house her" (Greek word order) is "Mary stayed with her
for about three months and then returned to that/her house."
(Greek word order).

This is an extremely simple and clear biblical passage.
Nobody except Thiering disagrees about what it means.

Barbara Thiering claims that she applied her pesher method
and found the birth date of Jesus in those three words:

"The actual birth date of Jesus is given earlier in Luke, in 1:56.
[...] It means Julian month 3, March, and the 1st of the month.
- http://groups.yahoo.com/group/qumran_origin/message/1373

All I am asking is for you to explaim how she did it. Which Greek
word means "Jesus?" Which one means "month?" Why can't anyone,
including Thiering herself, explain how to start with "Mary stayed
with her about three months", apply Thiering's pesher method, and
get the result "Jesus was born on March 1st of the year 7 BCE?"

Do your homework, Marshall! It's only three simple words! Show
me how Thiering got her "explanation" of what those three words
mean! Tell me how "studying the glossary, chronology, calendar
discussions, names and places, historical and physical evidence,
etc." moves me even slightly closer to being able to look at those
three Greek words and see what Theiring claims to see, and I will
"study the glossary, chronology, calendar discussions, names and
places, historical and physical evidence, etc." all day and all
night. Three itty-bitty words!! How hard can it be?



Let's start with the basic pesher rule that cardinal and ordinal numbers
are interchanged (my words, not hers), so that "three months" means
"third month."

That said, it gets more complicated. In _The Book That Jesus Wrote_,
p305 (The Lexicon), s.v. "about":

-----
*about* (/hosei/ [with a macron over the o, indicating omega]). The time
unit before, used especially by Luke. In Luke 3:23, 'about thirty years'
means 'about year 30', AD 29, a year before AD 30, already called year
30 using the Christian millennium. In Luke 22:59, 'about one hour' means
'about hour 1', the uncorrected 6 am, an hour before 7 am. In Luke 9:28,
'about eight days' means 'about day 8', Sunday; the word order, with
noun first, meaning Saturday, 6 pm (see day), so the expression means
Friday at 6 pm, Friday the Day of Atonement.
-----

Under "day" (in order to understand "about"):
-----
*day* (/hemera/ [macron over the first e]). A feast day, a day with
special significance. With a number, a day of the week. 'Two days' means
'Day 2', Monday; 'three days' means 'Day 3', Tuesday, and so on. The
word order is significant. If the numeral is placed first, it means the
morning start of the day in question, but if the noun is placed first,
it means the evening before, as a day began the evening before in normal
Jewish practice. Hence /treis hemerai/ means 'Tuesday morning', /hemerai
treis/ 'Monday evening'. A further variation arose from different views
on when the day started. For villagers it began at 3 am, hence
/tesseras...hemeras/ in John 11:17 means Wednesday at 3 am.
Correspondingly, the previous evening would begin at 3 pm. In the usage
of John's gospel, the start of a day was at the Julian midnight, hence
the earlier version was at noon the previous day. In John 20:26 /hemeras
okto/ means Saturday at noon, as 'day 8', Sunday, began at midnight
Saturday. But with /meta/ the phrase means Sunday at noon; see *after*.
-----

I'm sorry if I've flooded you with too much information, but I wanted to
transcribe the entries completely -- for no good reason! ;-)

Somewhere (outside the lexicons, but I forget where), she goes into
great detail about words like /hos/, /hosei/, etc., in conjunction with
all the different "time units" (day, month, etc.), and the exact
significance of the word order, but the point here is simply that those
three words give "March."

It's her mode of expression (she seems to be implying that those words
indicate precisely March 1, 7 BC -- Jesus's birthdate, according to her,
which they don't) that makes her terribly hard to follow, IMHO. As for
why she says the words are referring to Jesus's birth, I don't know,
without digging further. However, one of the basic rules is "/all
events in narrative are consecutive./ There are no "flashbacks", going
back to a previous event." (from "Rules for the pesharist" in /Jesus the
Man/.) Also in the same section:

-----
The special meanings come from many different sources: plays on words,
pseudonyms, nicknames, names of classes, common words with an
institutional meaning, associations, titles derived from incarnational
theory, universals with a particular meaning, slogans, loose terms made
precise, Old Testament allusions, hierarchical terms, items in a chain
of symbols. All of them come from special experience, that of a man who
has been a member of the ascetic community for long enough to have
learned its distinctive terminology and practices.
-----

(Which might explain why, when the New Testament was first published,
they took three months to study each of the six books.)

All three of these Thiering books are around 500 densely packed pages,
and there's no Greek index, so it's hard to find the stuff about word
order I'm thinking of.

Incidentally, the καὶ is very significant. It's used as a stop-word in
the pesher, altering things such as the application of the "Rule of last
referrent". I don't know how that affects this passage, but perhaps
it's the fact that nothing comes after "March" (because of the /kai/)
that makes it mean "March 1," if that indeed is what it does. I don't
know. But it does end the sentence, pesher-wise. Kai always acts that
way, according to the rule.

(/loc. cit./, p255):

-----
*and* (/kai/). A word used simply as punctuation, to indicate a new
sentence in the pesher. When it or one of the other sentence markers are
not used, the sentence must continue, even if it appears to make little
sense, as the continuation is important for the pesher. Conversely, a
new sentence must begin at /kai/, even if it appears to break the sense.
-----

--
Marshall Price of Miami
Known to Yahoo as d021317c
.

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