Posted: Tue Feb 10, 2009 6:34 am
Kaviraj wrote:JasonPratt wrote: xrestos means one who anoints with a plaster for healing. The plaster would be sulphuric or mustard, and so be yellow (the more direct meaning for xrestos, or 'golden'); it would also smell terrible.But it would kill the infections and save the person from death. Sound familiar to any biblical language?
At the same time, because of its connection to gold/yellow, xrestos also connotated the sweetness of honey. (Which is what the 1 Pet reference is talking about.)
Hey Jason, could you give me some references on the above points that I can look into?
best
- Pat
Oy... I've picked those up over time from a bunch of different places. A biography of John Chrystostom should give you several pieces of information along this line. Justin Martyr makes a running play of words between "Christ" and "Chrestus" in one of his apologetic works, but I forget whether it's the apologia to the Emperors or whether it's in the Dialogue with Trypho. (Probably the former.) Modern disputation over references to Christ by Roman historians (possibly in the case of Suetonius, practically certain in the case of Tacitus) largely involves the question of the use of "Chrestus" instead of "Christos" (which Tacitus seems to be correcting the vulgar crowds about in his referencing: Xristos, not Xrestos.)
The details in the paragraph you quoted all come from one of those three situations. I'll try to remember to look up which biography of JohnChys I've recently read, when I get back to the house; Robert E. Van Voorst's Jesus Outside the New Testament is a good place to start on the dispute about Suetonius and Tacitus (though there are further references, pro and con, online in various places); and I'm sure there must be online reference works for both those apologetics by JustMart which should be relatively easy to search through for overt contemporary parallel usages between Christ and Chrestus.