It’s “plausible” in the sense that it fits the context (it’s not crank like Atwill’s stuff).

But IMO it does not fit the evidence (Philo attests the Therapeutae, for example, predate him and he had nothing actually to do with them himself; and his Logos angel material appears assumptive rather than presumptive, i.e. he is relating existing Jewish exegesis, not his own new ideas, which would explain how Paul and he overlap so much without any direct evident knowledge of each other).

And it is over-speculative (too many things are being assumed here without evidence; and we just can’t do that as historians).

I was looking up some things on Philo, and found this thread. The OP claims to not have known your work, and claims to be some kind of Orthodox monastic. He speculates on a similar train of thought as you.

https://earlywritings.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=202476

Synopsis: The Joshua movement was originally a Jewish monastic movement based in Alexandria, Egypt, where the monks would go into the desert and wilderness to wrestle with the passions. They allegorically interpreted the Hebrew Bible and believed God sends Jesus/Joshua to help saints overcome the passions of the flesh. This movement eventually got very popular and expanded to other areas. Once it expanded new teachers such as Paul, Marcion, and written Gospels come in. But the root of the movement goes back to Philo. Interestingly, monastic places like Mount Athos and Saint Catherines Monastery carry on this ascetic tradition as the Joshua movement was originally supposed to be for monks.

and later on:

Thanks, I have honestly never heard of Dr Richard Carrier or Neil Godfrey. But it is interesting that we came to similar conclusions separate from each other. As a monastic orthodox Christian myself the thing that led me to Philo is the allegorical Interpretations of the OT, but thats a long discussion. By the way why do you think we are on the wrong track? What is your position?

And apparently he actually is a “mythicist” but believes the myth:

That is interesting. Why are you a theist, but not Christian? Researching this stuff honestly makes my faith stronger because it reveals the ancient Christianity. To answer your question. The pre-existent angel is what later became literalized as Joshua/Jesus. “The pre-existent angel, who created the world, was sent down in the form of man to represent God.” Basically, doctrine continued to develop and more aspects were added overtime to him. Doctrines like an incarnation, a genealogy, virgin birth, miracles, teachings, betrayal, etc. But these aspects are not necessary. As people were able to see him without him incarnating in the flesh like Paul and other early mystics. Gospel’s like Matthew help provide historicity for people that need some form of historicity to believe. But it is not necessary.

Kind of interesting.

Is his theory something that could be plausible? Ie, could Peter and the gang actually been from that sect?

Or is this bogus. There’s not much easily available online, so I have no way of competently vetting this.

Do you believe they are correct? Or do you think they are incorrect in discarding the Coptic “Testament of Jacob” and the Latin/Slavonic “Ascension of Isaiah” as earlier works and possible source for 1st Corinthians 2:9? Honestly, this is such an interesting subject that it deserves an entire article of it´s own – a suggestion for a possible future article.

I agree with their and your analysis: they are probably right; but you are correct to note all that other evidence. I think the situation is too much of a mess to solve and so probably warrants no article as yet. All we have right now is a long contradictory list of mere possibilities, with no evidence to sort any of them as the more probable.

Note among the possibilities is that this is simply a citation of canonical Isaiah 64:4 (or some other similar passage), but with a variant verse or reading (just as Matthew finds a “Nazorian” passage, which could as well be in such a normal location, through the mechanism of a lost variant). We just don’t know.

Dr. Carrier, some days ago I was reading Chapter 3 from “OHJ” and you refer to the possibility that in the mysterious verse of 1st Corinthians 2:9, Paul might have been quoting an earlier redaction of the “Ascension of Isaiah” (11:34) or a different lost apocryphal scripture that might have an earlier version of the saying (p. 48 of “OHJ).

This intrigued me, and by doing some research on the scholarship, it appears there is an apocryphal work titled “The Testament of Jacob”, with 2 versions of this “Testament” available for reading: one in Charlesworth´s “The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, Vol. 1”, which is translated from an Arabic manuscript, and another one which is on Sparks´ “The Apocryphal Old Testament”, which is translated from a Coptic manuscript (Sparks refers to the fact there are 3 known variations of the text, which are in Arabic, Coptic and Ethiopic), and this last one that has a saying simillar to 1st Corinthians 2:9 (located in Chapter 8, verse 8 of said version of that “Testament”).

In Joseph A. Fitzmyer´s introduction and commentary on 1st Corinthians, he claims – as do the authors in an article from 2015 titled “On the Source and Rewriting of 1 Corinthians 2.9 in Christian, Jewish and Islamic Traditions” – that the Coptic “Testament of Jacob” cannot be the origin for it. Fitzmyer states that it is a later work and it itself is dependent on the writings of Paul. On the other hand, the authors of the mentioned article say that a very simillar saying is repeated in Chapter 34 of 1st Clement (1st Clement 34:8) and on the “Biblical Antiquities” by Pseudo-Philo (L.A.B. 26:13), with the author of 1st Clement claiming it as “scripture” (just as Paul). Since it would be very unlikely for the author of 1st Clement – writing before the Jewish War and a few years after Paul´s death – to consider 1st Corinthians as “scripture” that early, it seems they are refering to a common source held both by Paul and by the pre-Jewish War Christian communities in both Rome and Corinth as “scripture”. Early commentaries on this passage by Origen , Ambrosiaster and Jerome claim such passage has it´s origins in the Ascension of Isaiah or on a apocryphal work titled “The Apocalypse of Elijah” (which is unrelated to the 2 versions of such “Apocalypse” that we have access to, because nothing simillar to 1st Corinthians 2:9 appears in them).

By citing previous scholarship, the authors of the mentioned article (Clivaz, C., & Schulthess, S. (2015), reject any existing scripture as the origin of Paul´s saying, discarding both a lost “Apocalypse of Elijah” (because it does not exist and because Origen might have actually confuseed Elijah with Isaiah – simillar to his confusion with Josephus and Heggesipus on the “James passage”) and discarding as well both the Coptic “Testament of Jacob” and the “Ascension of Isaiah”, by claiming they are later works dependent on Paul. They conclude also that an oral source is also out of the question and that Paul and Clement are both quoting an unnamed lost source unknown to us today.

(One thing to note about the authors of the article is that they assume both 1st Clement and the “Ascension of Isaiah” are from the late 1st century, and not earlier.)

Do you believe they are correct? Or do you think they are incorrect in discarding the Coptic “Testament of Jacob” and the Latin/Slavonic “Ascension of Isaiah” as earlier works and possible source for 1st Corinthians 2:9? Honestly, this is such an interesting subject that it deserves an entire article of it´s own – a suggestion for a possible future article.

All the best to you.

Actually, removing the letters of Paul would remove the best evidence we have for mythicism on the a judicantiori margin; but remove the best evidence for historicity on the a fortiori margin. The result would simply be narrowing the error margins. But it would keep the same general result (“more likely than not, myth”).

Formally, I would then be personally less certain of myth, but still doubtful of historicity (as my lower error margin would substantially move toward historicity, indeed about sixteen fold, but remain below 50%, while my upper margin would drop from 1 in 3 to something like 1 in 8, which is lower but still not confidently).

But Detering’s hypothesis is not plausible. It depends on too many possibiliter fallacies. See The Historicity of Paul the Apostle and How Do We Know the Apostle Paul Wrote His Epistles in the 50s A.D.?.

Nevertheless, unknowns like this are actually what probabilities take into account. Thus this “possibility” is already accounted for in my error margins. It just doesn’t operate as evidence generating those margins. Because it is a possibility, not a probability.

Your book suggests that Paul represented the theology of early Christianity and that Mark (or his predecessors) developed this theology further, including into a historical Jesus. Now there is the German theologian Hermann Detering, who advocates the thesis that ALL of Paul’s letters were forged and were probably only written in the second century. If he were right, the probability of the historicity of Jesus Christ would increase significantly, right? Have you ever heard of Detering’s theories?

FYI, my final comment to Kipp was this: Rather than argue with you about how solid Carrier’s scholarship is, can I ask you this: what do you think of Raphael Lataster’s book Questioning the Historicity of Jesus? Do you also consider him a hack?

Only answer was silence.

You are quite right.

But it’s worse than that.

Because this is what I wrote in my peer reviewed study—proving Davis never read it and doesn’t know what he is talking about:

The name ‘Jesus Christ’ literally means ‘Savior Messiah,” which actually just means ‘Anointed Savior’. The author of the Gospel of Matthew was well aware of this, and even made a point of it [Mt. 1:20-21]. Jesus is an English derivation from the Greek spelling of the Hebrew name Joshua (Yeshua), which means ‘Yahweh saves’. Christ is from the Greek christos, meaning ‘anointed’, which in Hebrew is masiah, ‘messiah’.

So he is literally making a point I myself already made.

-:-

In colloquial contexts I will just abbreviate that to “God’s savior.” But obviously I well know the precise form. Davis didn’t check and thus made a false claim about me. Davis has said a lot of things about me that are of dubious honesty. This just adds to the list. I would never trust him. But even just a rhetorical analysis of what he said is unflattering.

It’s silly of Davis to nitpick whether Yahweh is the same thing as God. Even Bibles will translate it that way for a reason. Just as Allah just means God.

Obviously I am not making some sectarian point about the true name or ancestry of God. I’m an atheist. It doesn’t matter what the name of God is. He’s still God.

So a Jew saying “Yahweh saves” is saying “God saves.” This is not a Masked Man Fallacy. It’s a tautology.

It’s also silly to nitpick whether “God saves” means the same thing as “God’s savior.” Obviously the name is a noun; and it describes the person being named (that’s the point of a name). And that’s simply a savior. That’s what it means.

I am sure that as creative Hellenistic Jewish readers of the Bible Christians undoubtedly imagined this connection…

…is literally my only point. So if he said that, he even agreed with you that his nitpicking was irrelevant to anything I actually said, and in fact he actually agrees with exactly what I meant.

For Hebrew I follow the expert literature. It all agrees with me that it can designate the named as an instrument of God’s salvation and thus a savior (and that Yahweh is just a name for God).

I made no fine point about the Hebrew for Kipp to criticize. Indeed, I correctly parsed the Hebrew in the very place I made this point. All I did was repeat what the expert literature says, in the context of the use of the word I am talking about.

The tedious and pointless digression on why “An Ancient Canaanite Storm God Named Yahweh Will Save” simply means, in practice, God’s savior, would serve no academic point. Certainly none Davis tried to make—as he ended up just agreeing with the very point I made with it, and made no other point that contradicted any point I did make.

This is kind of childish of him, to be honest. It is certainly rhetorically vacuous.

I challenged him that he was being picky about challenging the use of “God” instead of “Yah” since you were presumably using the capitalized version rather than a generic “god”. He wrote back: no. It is translated just as I said. “Saviour” is a noun, but the form in the name is a verb—”Yah will save.” If Carrier knew a lick of Hebrew, then maybe he would recognise simple things like this.

I wrote back: So, you don’t think there is an implication that the person bearing the name is involved in God’s salvation process? Likely not in the original coinage of the name, but certainly in the imagination of the early Christians. I think it is unlikely Carrier doesn’t know the grammar here but rather is speaking somewhat loosely to get this point across.

He backed off somewhat while still speaking dismissively of you: I am sure that as creative Hellenistic Jewish readers of the Bible Christians undoubtedly imagined this connection, but that is not precisely what the name means. And I am sceptical that Carrier is aware of the precise meaning, since he does not know Hebrew. This is just another example of his sloppy scholarship.

I would love to hear you comment on this. The likelihood that you do not know the precise meaning – even though you are admittedly not a Hebrew scholar – seems very low to me. In any case, do you think it matters one whit?

I would also be interested in whether you know where Kipp’s hostility comes from. He is an OT scholar, not a NT one, so I wouldn’t expect him to be personally invested in Jesus historicism like Ehrman and other scholars (Christian or not). And he is, as far as I can tell, a very solid scholar as well. You do rub a lot of people the wrong way since you are not nearly as polite on your blog as you are in person …