Name:Historybuff68 •
Title: Did early christians name their children after the saints? •
Date posted: 03/07/07 1:36
Q: I had recorded and watched it last night. I kept thinking in the back of my head, could these be infact followers of Jesus Christ in early christianity who were named after them? Was it common to name children after people whom they admired then ? Were there many girls being named after Mary Magdalene in the greek form who were early christians ?
Was there any one else's dna to test? Such as Judah's? The Matthew of the family? That of Joseph's and Mary's?
Name:KRS •
Date: 03/07/07 2:11
A: I would actually dispute that Mariamne is Mary Magdalene, the evidence they cited to identify her with Mariamne was from a historically unreliable source. Its possible in part, while the naming of children after saints (as such) had not occured yet, that type of thing was common in every age. Even many of the names common in the Bible were connected with Jewish Nationalist movement, Jesus is a form of Joshua, after the general of ancient Israel, Mary is the name of an important member of the Hasmonian, etc.
Name:Historian •
Date: 03/07/07 15:08
A: Historybuff, this form of tomb was not in use after the destruction of Jerusalem in about 70 AD (C.E.), and the "Jesus movement", if you will, didn't get off the ground until after that time, when Peter and Paul actively promoted it, so it is unlikely that these people were named after anyone other than their own family members. As for "Mariamne", it is likely that she was Greek. The idea that Philip's sister Mariamne is in any way connected with Mary Magdalene is too large a leap to be believed; plus, the Book of Philip was written down from "oral history", or folklore, some 300 years after Jesus' time, and has been consistently rejected by scholars as no more than stories of the time. A better hypothesis would be that Matthew was Maria's second husband (she was in her 20s when Joseph died and was buried in Nazareth), and that her relatives were buried with her, not they with Jesus. Mariamne, then, would likely have been Matthew's first wife, buried with Matthew's late son, and thus be unrelated to Jesus. Alternatively, Mariamne could have been the wife of one of the other two adult males in the tomb. We may never know, but we should definitely keep on wondering.
Name:KRS •
Date: 03/07/07 16:08
A: Historian, fairly good for the most part except, Peter and Paul were actively promoting Christianity long before the fall of Jerusalem (and according to second century records would have died before the fall of Jerusalem). Paul's first few letters Galatians are pretty early (AD 49, though some still date it to AD 54-56), 1 Thessalonians (AD 50-1) 2 Thessalonians (AD 51), and three other letters are pretty much accepted by everyone as having been written by AD 60, though there is a little more variation in the dating (Romans, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians).
