On the other hand, we have in the Nazarean sect or fraternity a movement which added both directly and indirectly to the Jesuist evolution. In the so-called Primitive Gospel, as expiscated by the school of B. Weiss from the synoptics, there is no mention of Nazareth, and neither the epithet "Nazarene" nor "Nazarite" for Jesus. All three names are wholly absent from the Epistles, as from the Apocalypse: Jesus never has a cognomen after we pass the Acts. The inference is irresistible that first the epithet "Nazarean," and later the story about Nazareth, were additions to a primary cult in which Jesus had no birth-location, any more than he had human parents. I have suggested [248] that the term may have come in from the Hebrew "Netzer" = "the branch," which would have a Messianic meaning for Jews. Professor Smith, who makes a searching study of Hebrew word-elements, has developed a highly important thesis to the effect that the word Nazaraios, "Nazarean," which gives the residual name for the Jesuist sect in the Acts and the predominant name for Jesus in the gospels (apart from Mark, which gives Nazarenos), [249] is not only pre-Christian but old Semitic; that the fundamental meaning of the name (Nosri) is "guard" or "watcher" (= Saviour?), and that the appellation is thus cognate with "Jesus," which signifies Saviour. [250] On the negative side, as against the conventional derivations from Nazareth, the case is very strong. More than fifty years ago, the freethinker Owen Meredith insisted on the lack of evidence that a Galilean village named Nazareth existed before the Christian era. To-day; professional scholarship has acquiesced, to such an extent that Dr. Cheyne [251] and Wellhausen have agreed in deriving the name from the regional name Gennesareth, thus making Nazareth = Galilee; while Professor Burkitt, finding "the ordinary view of Nazareth wholly unproved and unsatisfactory," offers "a desperate conjecture" to the effect that "the city of Joseph and Mary, the patris of Jesus, was Chorazin." [252] In the face of this general surrender, we are doubly entitled to deny that either the appellation for Jesus or the sect-name had anything to do with the place-name Nazareth. [253]