Name Statistics Argument 10: Narratively Unnecessary Qualifiers

Now that we've talked about unnecessary clumps, what about more unnecessary disambiguations? Like Jesus of Nazareth and Lazarus of Bethany, these are additional places where there's no reason *within the narrative of a particular book* to give an extra qualifier with a name. Even if it's a popular name, if there's only one person in the book by that name, or if his identity is made amply clear by context, there's no need to add another qualifier. First of all I discuss evidential "noise," where the information in question would likely be given regardless of whether the name was popular or unpopular. This applies for example to titles like "the high priest" that are important to the story. It also applies to obviously interesting pieces of information like the fact that Manaean was brought up with Herod or the fact that Andrew was Simon Peter's brother. Using fairly stringent standards for "unnecessary," so as to filter out such "noise," I come up with eight narratively unnecessarily qualified names in the Gospels and Acts. In two cases we do have narratively unnecessary qualifiers for not-very-popular names: Levi son of Alphaeus and Nathanael of Cana. These may just be included as examples of unnecessary details more generally. But in six out of the eight (3/4), the first names are either Tier A or Tier B popular names, based on Bauckham's Table 6 of name popularity. (I designate Tier A as place 1-9, Tier B as place 10-12, and Tier C as anything lower.) The list is: Jesus of Nazareth Lazarus of Bethany Levi son of Alphaeus Nathanael of Cana John the Baptist James the Less Judas the Galilean (in Gamaliel's speech in Acts) Joseph of Arimathea (in particular in Mark) For further details, watch the video or listen to the podcast!