Or they are nicknames that have a specific meaning to the early Christian community. It would not seem unusual to me that two different people would want to have the same nickname/title as the "founder" of the group. Deciding have one called "rock" in Greek and one in Aramaic could be a compromise to settle that dispute.I think for the letter Galatians to have two contemporary persons from the same group, each with extremely rare personal names, one Greek and the other Aramaic, both of which, as a noun, mean rock or stone, would be extremely unlikely.
Cephas is an apostle according to GJohn and according to your theory this scribe knows that Cephas is "rock" in Aramaic and that he was also called "Peter", or he would not have been able to make that connection. Someone somewhere is making the connection, but the question I keep coming back to is "why change it to Greek?". Seemingly our Christians are not having a hard to associating Cephas with Peter because the names mean the same thing in two languages, so why bother? Sure, not every Christian knows that Cephas is Aramaic for rock, but you just say "Hey, Cephas means rock". We don't speak Aramaic and we are exactly having a hard time with that concept. It just seems like such a useless thing to do.“Wait a minute, the confused scribe would think --- Cephas wasn’t an apostle. There must be a mistake here, that’s got to be “Peter”.
Reading this again, I never recognized how repetitive it is.
As for those who were held in high esteem—whatever they were makes no difference to me; God does not show favoritism—they added nothing to my message. 7 On the contrary, they recognized that I had been entrusted with the task of preaching the gospel to the uncircumcised, just as Peter had been to the circumcised. 8 For God, who was at work in Peter as an apostle to the circumcised, was also at work in me as an apostle to the Gentiles. 9 James, Cephas and John, those esteemed as pillars, gave me and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship when they recognized the grace given to me. They agreed that we should go to the Gentiles, and they to the circumcised. 10 All they asked was that we should continue to remember the poor, the very thing I had been eager to do all along. - NIV
Statistics: Posted by jasonrollins — Tue Nov 19, 2024 8:06 pm