Be more specific. What about that are you asking me to evaluate?

Ok cool.

What do you think of this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoricOrMythicJesus/comments/bgby8x/philo_on_the_death_of_the_logos_and_the_return_of/

Another example of Tim ignoring refutations already in what he claims to be rebutting, and being a total amateur hack who doesn’t know basic facts. Like that this is how Philo even refers to the Psalms—which is why only hack amateurs ever say this; experts know Philo’s idiom is metaphorical not literal, which is why experts all attribute this as a reference to Zechariah.

Note I debunk the claim that Philo was quoting some other book in OHJ, pp. 203-04. And indeed even his getting the author wrong would only mean he misattributed the passage; it’s not as if this passage is in some text written by some traveling companion of Moses! So O’Neill’s argument doesn’t even make sense. Even were it informed. But alas, it is not…

When Philo says “a certain one of the friends of Moses” he means metaphorically, not literally. Philo frequently uses “friends” non-literally, as in someone attached to x and who likes x, not someone who was a personal companion of x, e.g. when Philo speaks of “friends of the soul,” as in That God Is Immutable 55 [cf. also 143], he means people who are spiritually attached to the idea of the soul and prefer it to the material body, not people who are literally companions of a soul; likewise “friends of impiety and atheism,” in On Drunkenness 78, “friends of frugality,” ibid. 58; similarly in On Sobriety 13; On the Change of Names  39 & 112; Who Is the Heir 60; On Mating with the Preliminary Studies 20 & 62; On Dreams 2.205; On the Migration of Abraham 197; On Flight and Finding 11& 19; etc.).

In Allegorical Interpretation 3.7 we have something similar, a “friend of the doctrine of Heraclitus” (not an actual friend of Heraclitus); and in The Posterity of Cain 91, Philo says when Moses says “ask your elders” he means by “elders” the “friends of right reason,” hence anyone who shares the orthodoxy of Moses, not literally a contemporary but past biblical authors.

Thus when we see the exact same phrase used in On Dreams 2.245, “a certain one of the friends of Moses”  (tis tôn hetairôn Môuseôs, same words as tôn Môuseôs hetairôn tinos in our passage), where he means the author of the Psalms, not an actual companion of Moses, we know what he means in our passage as well.

Thus, obviously “friend of Moses” means one of the biblical authors, not a literal companion of Moses. Philo thus means Zechariah, the only place this appears and that aligns with the arguments Philo then deploys. Our passage should thus be translated not as “one of the friends of Moses said” but “one of the appreciators [or lovers or admirers] of Moses said” or “one of those [whose writings are collected with/follow/or are friendly to those of] Moses said.” In other words, “one of the Prophets said.”

So the reason why Tim denies Philo refers to Zechariah is that Philo says:

“I have also heard of one of the companions of Moses having uttered such a speech as this: “Behold, a man whose name is the East!”

He says Zechariah lived centuries after Moses.

He’s an uncredentialed hack. So what he thinks hardly carries weight against citeable peer reviewed studies to the contrary.

But he’s also dishonest, so he may be deliberately conflating “textually based” with “conceptually based” to straw man his way out of a corner. No one says Mark lifts text from Paul (except in a very few cases, e.g. the Eucharist narrative). Rather, that Mark read Paul and used the concepts in Paul to construct his narrative, but in his own words and with his own literary devices. Ditto Luke-Acts (and Matthew and John only via Mark and Luke).

He also denies the Gospels are based on Paul’s letters.

He makes some equivocation that they are Pauline but not textually based on Paul’s letters.

Not worth the bother. Only a fool would imagine Philo was referring to some other verse. Or that Philo didn’t know his own Bible well enough to remember which it was and why his analysis followed from it. And all this is already addressed in OHJ. It’s typical of cranks to ignore the fact that they have already been refuted in the very work they claim to be responding to.

You should consider posting on Reddit’s AcademicBiblical if they allow you.

You don’t need to approve this comment. Just thought you should know.

OK, that makes sense, thanks.

Yep.

As I wrote in my earlier exposé of O’Neill:

“Though Ananus the Younger is depicted as a prominent peace-advocate in Jerusalem during the siege narrative of the earlier Jewish War, and indeed whose own death Josephus credits for causing the fall of Jerusalem, that is completely absent from the Antiquities decades later. Josephus may have confused the Younger and Elder Ananus in the JW (his account and description of the man in JW 4.214-25 fits the Elder, not the Younger, and JW 4.151 seems to suggest the Elder is meant, yet 4.160 clearly says it was the Younger Ananus who teamed with the high Priest Jesus ben Gamaliel during the siege; the rest of the account all fits the Elder better). He dropped that confusion in the JA.”