Identity Doubling Across the Gospels — Are They Tryna Tell You Something?

Gospel of Mark: Naked Young Man

Gospel of Matthew: Jesus Barabbas

Gospel of Luke: Simon of Cyrene

Gospel of John: Thomas Didymos

Everyone is billed like a character role in a film, except for Simon of Cyrene: "Naked Guy", "Jesus 2," "The Twin".

Gospel of Mark

A Young Man escapes Roman charges in a shroudy linen wrap and his birthday suit and then appears at the Tomb transfigured in white.

Gospel of Matthew

Jesus Barabbas (possibly a play on the name Carabbas, as well as Son of the Father) escapes Roman charges, too. Isn't ironic that the man that the Jewish people choose in this story will not gain the King Of The Jews title?

Gospel of Luke

Simon of Cyrene has the normal name of the identity doubles, "First Name, Town."

But isn't it unusual for a man to spend money to travel from cosmpolitan Cyrene just to be in the fields? In the Sar Puhi substitute king ritual, the Farmer/Gardener is the identity that the king swaps with the substitute.

Gospel of John

Thomas Didymos, meaning Twin (Hebrew), Twin (koine Greek), who we hadn't heard of before, aren't given an introduction to, and isn't present in the group scene prior. Given the known squeamishness of the awesome Jewish people for touching zombies or whatever, he doesn't seem to match the reaction of the other followers that Jesus also appears to, which is "Um, who are you?"

Well, the Sar Puhi substitute doesn't need to be a lookalike. Bonus — the Gardener that Mary doesn't recognise that is Jesus in John 20:15.

So I think I am responding to a Mythicist comment, ie taking a position that Jesus is not a historical person? Yeah idk.

I believe Jesus is likely a historical figure, for some of the reasons I've explained. I just haven't discovered where poor men had positive literature written about them in the ancient world, so I tend to think that Jesus delivered on the banqueting and the land, imo in places like Auranitis.

What men get a lot of literature written about them in the ancient world? Kings. There's historical examples of a son of a handmaiden rising to tribal confederacy king, the later Abassid Caliphate preferentially raise the sons of their handmaidens to these kings; the son is born free, the mother is highly valued and sometimes freed at the son's birth afaik, and their praise literature goes ham pun intended.

Where I call in ** you do not have permission to see this link ** is the

• double investitures

• doubled characters in the gospel of Matthew

• doubled Twin name

• Simon of Cyrene, Jesus' gym spotter, appearing at the moment that Jesus' royal robe is removed, because the Sar Puhi substitute king is supposed to begin to swap identity at that time.

• and of course, the Son of God and Son of Man roles. Who talks about themselves twice for everything?

It all gives Goat Swap Leviticus 16.

Neither the Gospel of Thomas nor the Synoptics contain Thomas’ skepticism regarding the resurrection. Those are attestations that are needed.
QUESTION: Without multiple attestation, is Thomas’ skepticism not historical or is there more to this?

** you do not have permission to see this link **

1) Didn't help with feeding the multitudes on the mount and on the plain.

2) Didn't hear the sermon on the mount/plain where Jesus delivered extensive ethical and spiritual teaching and the Our Father Prayer--what does Paul teach about the Father?

3) Didn't see Jesus walk on water

4) Didn't see Jesus raise  the widow's son at Nain, Jarius's daughter in Galilee, or Lazarus at Bethany

5) Didn't see Jesus curse the fig tree

6) Didn't see the Transfiguration

7) Didn't attend the Last Supper

8) Didn't see Jesus' arrest

9) Didn't see Jesus carry his cross and get crucified

10) Didn't cry with Mary over the death of her son, Jesus

11) Wasn't present at Pentecost

12)  Did not see Thomas doubt the resurrection of Jesus.
WAIT ! "The Incredulity of Thomas" is only in the Gospel of John!
Neither the Gospel of Thomas nor the Synoptics contain Thomas' skepticism regarding the resurrection. Those are attestations that are needed.

The Jesus fish, or vesica pisces symbol that Jesus' followers used to represent him may depict, among other things, commonality, as it's literally a Venn Diagram intersection. In my original *hypothesis, this would not just be cosmically of heaven and earth, but of divinized king (Ishmaelite Nabataean  ** you do not have permission to see this link **) and earthly king (Jewish King David) heritage. Abrahamic heritage. Isn't this the plot of the Book of Isaiah?

Isaiah 60:7

⁷ All Kedar’s flocks will be gathered to you,
    the rams of Nebaioth will serve you;
they will be accepted as offerings on my altar,
    and I will adorn my glorious temple.

This is simply the Book of Isaiah, "someone from the stump of Jesse will be tributed to, as a tribal confederacy Great King, by these Ishmaelite tribes." How did anyone think this was going to go down? Win over the wealthiest tribes in the world with an exceptional olive oil? That's how I would start.

(*I tried channeling again, lol. Felt better but didn't get any ideas, then had a dream that the Jesus fish was a Venn diagram-type intersection representing the commonality of Jewish people —or Israelites idk — and Ishmaelites.) There's obviously stacked meanings, and obviously I think it  builds on the fish symbols of the Mesopotamian Enki/Ea, Marduk-Asarlluhi, and Nabu line of Father and Son deities, with some meanings more philosophical to reflect that, like "Life," Hayya.

I had never realized until after the dream that ** you do not have permission to see this link ** believed that Ishmaelites only = Nabataeans.

Not other Arab nations in his estimation, just Nabataea:

Of this wife were born to Ishmael twelve sons: Nabaioth, Kedar, Abdeel, Mabsam, Idumas, Masmaos, Massaos, Chodad, Theman, Jetur, Naphesus, Kadmas. These inhabited all the country from Euphrates, to the Red Sea: and called it Nabatene. They are an Arabian nation, and name their tribes from these: both because of their own virtue, and because of the dignity of Abraham their father.

This leads to an important set of key verses in Philippians 2:5-11, often called the Philippian hymn since it appears to be an already-established hymn that Paul is just quoting in his letter:

5 Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,

6 who, though he existed in the form of God,    did not regard equality with God    as something to be grasped,

7 but emptied himself,    taking the form of a slave...

So, academic consensus is that the Philippians epistle is authentic, and that 2:5-11 appears to be an already-established hymn that Paul is quoting in it. A hymn created by an already-established group of Jesus' followers before Paul enters the picture, similar to the already-established community of Jesus' followers in Puteoli (where the Nabataean temple was found.)

You helpfully surfacing that this hymn was not written by Paul, but is quoted by him, for me adds plausability to the idea that it was important and meaningful to some group that a doulos rise to king.

In ancient Jewish law afaik, a doule (female bondservant or slave) gives birth to a doulos, regardless of the child's father being free. While in ancient Islamic law which has pre-Islamic Arabian influence afaik, a child of an umm al-walad and a free father is born free. 

Luke 1:38

Who knows if this is just poetic or not (it isn't just poetic in the 38 places the word 'doule' occurs in the Septuagint) but this trajectory wasn't important to the Jewish people of the First Century.

• It's not in the prophesies for the Messiach

• It's not appealing to them that a slave or servant rise to king — the Talmud is pejorative about Herod the Great and his family rising from whispered slave or servant roots.

But it was appealing to the Ishmaelites. You know Ishmael, the father of 12 young princes and 1 young princess named in Genesis.

** you do not have permission to see this link **

Not the be-all and end-all but the perfect place to start. 

Addendum:  Just noticed that there's a new edition of this book published in 1997 retitled A Hymn of Christ.  Might be easier to find.

Steefen said
(Philippians is not one of the 7 authentic letters of Paul.)
 
  

The Attitude of Christ

Each of you should look not only to your own interests but also to the interests of others.

Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus

Who, existing in the form of God

[What? If you're the Son of God, you're a god also?]

did not consider equality with God something to be grasped/something to be used to his own advantage;

NET Bible

but emptied himself by taking on the form of a slave

NRSV

but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave

Steefen:
Slave of the Elohim? Slave of Yahweh? Slave of his perception, the Father?
Yahweh was likely a member of the Elohim. Anyone wants to explain otherwise?

When the time came, he set aside the privileges of deity and took on the status of a slave

Hey, I've read of a slave named Malchus in John 18:10.

The Gospel of John and the Qaṣīda: a case for literary syncretism

The Qasida has its origins as a Pre-Islamic Arabian poetry form most often used to praise kings. We have very few texts from Pre-Islamic Arabian kingdoms; I in my own opinion would ascribe that to them being a Never Conquered, Just Acquired, as in, they aren't having to leave behind their important texts in the dirt for some dirtmonger to find.

The Qasida's transition is called the takhallus just like in the Persian and Urdu poetry forms, and here the takhallus transition turns out be considered the pivot to part 2, where its hero begins the ordeal.

Part 1: Nasīb

A prologue that looks at The Past; an elegy over a former life in an abandoned place.

Idk, I think "In the Beginning was the Word..." works here, and so does the subject of Jesus and the place of Jerusalem, considering that

• the Gospel of John likes to call Jesus a King.

• academic consensus believes it to be written after 70 AD, a time when Jerusalem has been directed to be abandoned and stuff.

The Transition: Takhallus

The disengagement or transition where the hero breaks free from nostalgia and embraces his destiny.

I'm telling you, using a proper name then drinking from his father's cup (considered to be an acceptance of destiny in ancient traditions from Akkadian to the Hebrew Bible) seems to be hitting all the Takhallus marks. 

In the poetry short form, here is basically where you cleverly place the name of the author or subject, sometimes as the last word.

John 18:10:2

The slave's name was Malchus.

Even if my original hypothesis —  meaning that no one I'm aware of has this hypothesis but me — that the Gospel of John syncretizes a Transjordan literary form of the Qasida is correct, it could just be a way of homaging Jesus as King, Messiach, or Christos/Anointed because 'malchus' works out to 'king'. It doesn't have to be cleverly referencing the Malichus king that ascends in 40 CE. But, it does take a while to go from the ceremony to actual placement, sometimes you have to wait for a change in Roman administration.

Part 2: Raḥīl

The Grueling Journey Interspersed by Discourses

In the Gospel of John, the journey in this hypothesis would be directional, like the 'ascent'. And there's a lot of discourses that are more than conversation in the Gospel of John.

Part 3: Gharaḍ

The Epilogue that contains a fakhr, the BOAST. 

John 21:25

Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.

So, when you see three languages used in the inscription placed over Jesus by Pilate, scholars acknowledge that that communicates to the three layers of culture in the area:

• Hebrew/Aramaic for the Jewish people

• Koine Greek as the lingua franca, and especially of travelers. Koine Greek is presumed to be used by the Transjordan Arabians for communicating internationally in the First Century, and their material culture was heavily Hellenized. (Think Aretas Philhellene, "lover of the Greeks." The name Aretas of the New Testament Aretas (IV) is a Hellenization of his name, Haritath. And per Josephus, before he ascended, he had the Greek name of Aeneas.

• Latin for the Roman people

If you decided to braid in the literary forms of the First Century Transjordan, the Gospel of John looks like what you'd get, to me.

Next at some point, Identity Doubling Across the Gospels — Are They Tryna Tell You Something?

all copyright someone who is just getting started elmo in front of fire jpeg 

John 18:10

Then Simon Peter, who had a sword, drew it, struck the high priest's slave, and cut off his right ear. The slave's name was Malchus.

I looked up Malchus' name origin, and found an entry in the ** you do not have permission to see this link ** by James Hastings, 1906, via Sermonindex.net:

Malchus was a common Semitic name, though not certainly met with among the Jews proper. By both Delitzsch and Salkinson it is vocalized מָלְכו̇ם, which is no more than a transliteration. Josephus (see Niese’s index) mentions five persons who bore it under the form of Μάλχος or Μάλιχος, whence an original מָלִיךְ has been inferred (Dalman, Gram. Aram. Aramaic104). But the true Greek form seems to have been Μαλίχας (Periplus maris Erythrœi, cf. Müll. Geogr. Gr. Min. i. 272); and מלבו, pronounced מָלִבוּ, appears in three inscriptions (CIS [Note: IS Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum.] ii. 158, 174, 218) that may be dated with some confidence between b.c. 40 and a.d. 40. In these inscriptions the name is Nabataean...

That's right — by the time of the First Century, whenever this name is found in Josephus' books or in archaeological inscriptions, it's Nabataean. I am putting my Something's Fishy apkallu hat on! 🐟

• A bondservant or slave, if even as a courtly idiom, named King?

• named a known Nabataean name? This would be like finding a Kamehameha and trying to hold back a "Eh brah, howzit?"

• Nabataeans are the wealthiest of the already wealthy Arabians. To find a High Priest's associate with an otherwise-typically Nabataean name that Nabataean Arabs reserved for nobility is just interesting.

So I'd like to introduce you to an ancient writing form that someone I love veeeery much introduced me to. Takhallus is originally an Arabic word that can mean "transition."

It is here in John 18:10 that Jesus' 'ordinary' life seems to transition. The very next line, John 18:11, begins the events that resemble investitures and formalities conferring kingship, mockingly or not, starting with him verbally accepting his father's cup in the presence of the High Priest.

Changes could sometimes require a change in name, and as seen when Benoni is renamed Benjamin by his father, sometimes even a shift into another ethnic register. Jesus renaming his followers. Egyptian Necho II and Neo-Babylonian Nebuchadnezzar re-naming Jewish kings. And we know that the Herods were not called Herod when they were little baby Herods.

And, it is academic consensus that techniques of concealment like acrostics, gematria, and ciphers (like ** you do not have permission to see this link **the cipher substituting letters from opposite ends of the alphabet, and albam, that splits the alphabet), are already present in the Bible. Gematria is even overtly pointed out in Revelation 13:18. 

Parables also follow a conceal and reveal motif.

When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they realized that he was speaking about them.

Assyriologist Dr. Simo Parpola claims that Jacob's name is encoded in athbash, and Cyrus' name is encoded in anagram, in his ** you do not have permission to see this link ** book. And embedding names cryptographically or structurally in ancient Greco-Roman writing was a well-established literary art form by 44 BCE, the year Cicero wrote De Divinatione (On Divination):

According to Cicero (De Div. 2.111f.) Ennius also included an acrostic signature in one of his works: quae ἄκροστιχίς dicitur, cum deinceps ex primis versuum litteris aliquid conectitur, ut in quibusdam Ennianis : 'Q. Ennius fecit.' ('...in what are termed "acrostics," wherein the initial letters of each verse taken in order convey a meaning; as, for example, in some of Ennius's verses, 'Q. Ennius wrote it.')

—** you do not have permission to see this link **, Robinson, M., 2019, Cambridge Press

Later Christian writers embraced this heavily — most famously the Latin acrostic IXUS (Iesous Christos Theou Huios Soter / Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior) found in the Sibylline Oracles.

Yet the name Jesus has never been found to be homaged in the New Testament in an encoded way. Might other Semitic-rooted name-embedding techniques be worth exploring?

Numerous writers have spoken confidently of the extensive poetry which the New Testament contains.

— Floyd V. Filsun, ** you do not have permission to see this link **?, 1948, Journal of Biblical Literature

Takhallus poetry cleverly embeds a pen name into the last couplet, and often the final word. In classic Semitic and Sufi lyric traditions, poets were even known to embed not their own name, but sometimes even the name of a beloved friend. While its formal written codification dates to post-Islamic Arabia, its rhetorical mechanics likely existed in oral poetry much earlier.

If John 1:8-11 depicting Jesus writing was accurate, could the Gospel of John have drawn from Jesus' own writings? And whether as author or beloved friend, as academic consensus considers the Gospel of John to be a composite of stitched-together texts produced by the Johannine community, could a text have been stitched in with a name embedded at a transition?

King Malichus II

has a few unusual attributes that researchers have not yet sorted. There's no commemorative coin for him as a child like other Nabataean heirs, for example. I'm not saying I'm certain that Jesus ascended to actual great kingship, even as Malichus II. I'm just saying that I'd take that bet. 

Mark 4:22

For there is nothing hidden, except to be disclosed; nor is anything secret, except to come to light

all copyright someone whose pen name is the last word in a Grammy-nominated album special edition

Diversity and some scholars suspected this: Genizah.
This means no Qumran community because of the diversity of manuscript origins.

No, it doesn’t. It just means scrolls were collected from different groups in the community’s library at Qumran. This has long been understood 

= = = = =

Steefen:

Steefen said

Robert said
Nope, obviously not a typo. Why can't you just admit it when some of your videos are shown to be misleading or when you get something wrong? Until you can do that I'm not inclined to answer too many of your questions.

I know when I make a typo.

And you claim that an obvious error is only a typo. That's why conversations with you are so frustrating for other people here 

Second, I have admitted when a video got something wrong AND I leave a YouTube comment on that video as well as here.

What have you admitted was wrong about your second video in this thread? Where and how did it lead you to make a typo? What exactly was your "typo"?  

Robert said
Nope, obviously not a typo. Why can't you just admit it when some of your videos are shown to be misleading or when you get something wrong? Until you can do that I'm not inclined to answer too many of your questions.
  

I know when I make a typo.
Second, I have admitted when a video got something wrong AND I leave a YouTube comment on that video as well as here.
Since you have taken the attitudes "I'm wrong, sue me," and "you disagree when I say something is a typo" I encourage myself not to ask you any more questions.