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Posts: 5945
Thu, 18-Aug-11 11:33:13
Something very similar had occurred to me, in terms of a better expression of what I think Sophiee had in mind.Since the Chrestians predated the Councils of Nicea and Constantinople by almost four hundred years, do we even know what the "Chrestians" believed?It appears to me that there were no "Chrestians" apart from Christians, and no "Chrest" as a person apart from ... That is, no "Chrest" as the central figure of a religion, apart from Christianity, either.Even the quotation from Lactantius seems to me to say as much, as also do portions of the First Science News article that Sophiee did not quote here.At this moment, it seems to me to be a question of what we today call homographs and homophones. Homophones are two different words that are pronounced exactly the same, and the First Science News article indicates that in the time frame in question, "chrest" and "christ" were pronounced exactly alike. Whether Koine Greek had anything like contemporary English orthogony (spelling rules), I don't know. If it did not, then people were free to spell a word however one might choose, as long as the spelling fit the pronunciation. So any given writer might freely use one spelling or the other, or go back and forth between the two. Orthogony did not come into English until the 17th century; in his own will, written in his own hand, Shakespeare spelled his own name four different ways.Homographs are two different words that are spelled exactly the same, such as "affect" the verb meaning "to influence" and "affect" the noun meaning "emotion;" or "lay" the infinitive meaning "put" and "lay" the past tense of "lie," meaning "reclined." Or "lie" meaning to tell a falsehood and "lie" meaning to recline. In that regard, we would have "chrest" as an adjective commonly used to describe slaves; and "chrest" a wholly different noun "by [which] the Jews were accustomed to call their kings," as per the "History Hunters International" article.(P.S. -- The link to History Hunters International does not work.)The bottom line is that the constituent texts of the GT, regardless of how the word was spelt, nonetheless clearly all date from the first century, and all clearly refer to that religion which is today called Christianity.
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