They do have independent material in them though.

That all indications are they made up. Embellishing a legend is not “having independent sources for the legend.”

No one is repeating, adding to or altering a narrative in which Jesus dies in a celestial realm.

You’re going in circles here. The Gospels are euhemerizing that, not replicating the secret they are euhemerizing. So they should not mention what they are euhemerizing.

The rest is already addressed in the corresponding studies.

So you are way behind the ball here.

I think you need to go back and start over and actually read the original study On the Historicity of Jesus. Then its defense against naive armchair critiques like yours in Questioning the Historicity of Jesus (get that by ILL at a local public library). Then see how things have turned out after ten years of thousands of experts having every opportunity to refute any of this in The Obsolete Paradigm of a Historical Jesus. Because right now, it doesn’t sound like you know what you are talking about anymore. You’ve lost track of what the argument even is.

We actually only have one: Mark. All the others are simply repeating Mark (they are not independent attestations).

They do have independent material in them though. For example, the set of ethics attributed to Jesus from Matthew 7.1-2 // Luke 6.36.38 // 1 Clement 13.2 // Polycarp 2.3 isn’t in Mark. Papias had an independent list of disciples (my position is the compositions he mentions of ‘Mark’ and ‘Matthew’ probably don’t correspond to the canonical gospels). 

But also it’s important to note what all these authors aren’t doing. No one is repeating, adding to or altering a narrative in which Jesus dies in a celestial realm. The available, extant evidence is such that it is wholly unclear if anyone, in all of Christian history, ever told the story that way. Of course we could find possible explanations for that. But one explanation that has to be taken seriously is just that they weren’t telling the story that way. I think the evidence points in that direction.

Except when the earliest texts mention stripes. This is the likelihood problem (OHJ 11).

Paul nowhere says Jesus’ death was in the firmament or in a celestial realm. Hebrews nowhere says that. 1 Peter and 1 Clement never say it either. Hebrews says Jesus endured antagonism from “sinners” (which is very commonly used to mean human sinners) and that he suffered outside the πύλης, which would have to refer to an earthly city in order for the comparison to the Day of Atonement to make sense.  

None of these epistles contain any of the stripes. 

The texts you ascribe as similar but historicizing you only can do so because they contain those qualifiers and indicators.

1, 2 and 3 John and Polycarp’s letter don’t have anything more explicit or more direct than what’s in Paul’s letters, Hebrews or 1 Clement. If there are ‘qualifiers and indicators’ in 1 John or Polycarp, then there are also qualifiers and indicators in Hebrews, Galatians, Philippians, Romans, 1 Peter and 1 Clement. 

On the language of AscIs in context, see OHJ 3

I’ve read through the analysis of Ascension of Isaiah a few times. I just strongly disagree with the interpretation. For instance, when you say, “Jesus is commanded to go straight to the firmament and die” – or “no mention is made of Jesus going anywhere else but to the firmament to die” – I think that’s not explicitly said in the text (especially with the inclusion of “and to that world” which, throughout the text, means the earth).

 The wording that the god of that world will “stretch out his hand” against Jesus is similar to what’s found in Job (” But stretch out your hand now, and touch all that he has, and he will curse you to your face.”). It’s not an explicit statement that Jesus’ death would be in the firmament, especially considering that it was often thought that demonic entities impacted affairs down on earth (something that Paul even refers to a number of times).

Plus there are a number of lines in the text where I think we are are actually informed Jesus will descend lower than the firmament down to earth: 8.10, 8.25-26, 9.5, 9.13, 10.8. 

Perhaps the argument could be made that these could also be consistent with (although I’d say not *expected by*) an interpretation in which Jesus descends only to the firmament – but the question is why should we be interpreting it that way given: A. That concept is nowhere made clear in the text and B. It’s entirely inconsistent with how the death of Jesus is usually told in our other narratives (again: horses vs. zebras). 

At a bare minimum, our expectation of finding a Christian narrative text that expresses the idea of Jesus dying on earth would be at least 4:1 (more when we add later Christian narratives and fragments of lost Christian Gospels). It’s what we *usually* find. Even when Christians are copying or rewriting earlier texts – they’re *not* rewriting celestial-death texts. Generally speaking we wouldn’t expect to find this sort of narrative. So we need compelling, positive evidence that this is actually that sort of a narrative in this instance – even though it’s not usually what we would expect a Christian author to compose. 

Do we have that sort of evidence in Ascension of Isiah? I’d say no, we don’t. The evidence just isn’t strong enough.

we have numerous, extant texts from various authors that clearly depict Jesus as being executed on earth

We actually only have one: Mark. All the others are simply repeating Mark (they are not independent attestations).

There was some other (now lost) text that did the same but set it not under Rome but Jannaeus a hundred years earlier (OHJ 8.1), which either Mark “changed” or (more likely) “changed” Mark, but is certainly not independent of Mark or the same ideas inspiring Mark to do it.

And that there was pushback against Mark doing this is now plainly evident in several independent sources which had been until recently misinterpreted into the modern invention of non-existent docetism (OPH 7).

“when you hear hoofbeats, think horses before zebras” – a celestial death would be the zebra.

Except when the earliest texts mention stripes. This is the likelihood problem (OHJ 11).

And also except when, in that context, zebras are more common than horses. This is the prior probability problem (OPH 6).

He also fits into a category of figures that we’d expect to be heavily mythologized.

As already demonstrated in OHJ and OPH. The question is not whether, but how often. The empirical frequency is “less often.” We have to follow the empirical frequency. Same with everything else you say, which is all addressed across several sections in OHJ 6.

Would authors write the way Paul and Hebrews do if they thought Jesus had been an earthly person? We clearly have examples of other authors doing just that.

No, we don’t.

The texts you ascribe as similar but historicizing you only can do so because they contain those qualifiers and indicators. That these are absent in the earlier texts is the problem. You can’t make that go away by citing later texts that do it the way we expect. That only further proves how unexpected the earlier sources are. And unexpected is another word for improbable.

On Ignatius, see OPH 7.

On the language of AscIs in context, see OHJ 3.

This has all been covered already.

It does. It’s located in all the oddities of this and the remaining evidence that don’t fit historicity well either. For which historicity must invent epicycles to explain.

I think I probably should have said “earthly-Jesus model” there, instead of “historical-Jesus model”. But what I meant was that we have numerous, extant texts from various authors that clearly depict Jesus as being executed on earth (in Judea specifically). We don’t have any that clearly say Jesus was executed in the firmament or a celestial realm. We *maybe* have a few that imply or hint at that, and possibly one (Ascension of Isaiah) that depicted it in a no-longer extant, earlier version. But even those are debatable. My contention here is if we consider the saying: “when you hear hoofbeats, think horses before zebras” – a celestial death would be the zebra.

We need evidence Jesus is an exception. Not evidence he’s just like all the other mythical men historicized.

He also fits into a category of figures that we’d expect to be heavily mythologized. He was thought to be Messiah. Jewish scriptures predict that the Messiah would be the adoptive son of God and exalted above ordinary humans. Theudas and the Egyptian were thought to have prophetic and miraculous powers within their own lifetime. It’s not strange that he was heavily mythologized. And of course, there are obvious parallels between Jesus’ movement and the other Jewish / Samaritan eschatological prophets – many of whom were also killed by Roman authorities. That there would have been another one really wouldn’t be that bizarre.

To the contrary, it is weird that that’s the state of the epistles. They should be full of historicizing information. 

I think the easiest way to test that (to my mind) is to compare the letters of Paul, Hebrews, 1 Clement and 1 Peter to other Christian epistles – later letters that are unanimously agreed to assume a historical Jesus. If this is true, then the latter letters should have considerably more historicizing information in them. But they really don’t.

Ignatius’ letters have some explicit references that come from the Gospels, but even those are relatively rare and some of his letters are absolutely just as implicit about the historical Jesus as Paul’s letters or Hebrews (Ignatius’ letters to Polycarp, the Philadelphians and the Romans all have no direct / explicit mention of an earthly setting for Jesus’ life).

The epistle from Polycarp quotes the words of Jesus, but so does 1 Clement – and both even quote the same set of ethics as the words of Jesus. But otherwise, Polycarp isn’t really any more explicit or direct about Jesus’ earthly existence than the others.

1, 2 and 3 John are also just as implicit. There are no stories of Jesus, no mention of the disciples, no mention of Pilate, Nazareth, Galilee or any reference to any earthly setting for Jesus’ human life in these letters.

Even the emphasis on revelation and evidence from scripture show up in these letters as well. Ignatius addresses opponents who say they’ll only believe the gospel if they find it in scripture; his response is just that it is in scripture (Philadelphians 8). 1 John 5.9 says that testimony from god is greater than human testimony.

When the Christian corpus is examined broadly, Paul’s letters, Hebrews and 1 Clement actually don’t stand out as odd in any way, and the ways they refer to Jesus are strikingly similar to how other Christian epistle authors refer to Jesus. For example: compare Romans 1.3 and Hebrews 7.14 with Revelation 5.5 and 22.16. Or compare Galatians 4.4 and Hebrews 10.5 with 1 John 4.9 and 4.14. Or compare Hebrews 2:3 with 1 John 1:5.

Would authors write the way Paul and Hebrews do if they thought Jesus had been an earthly person? We clearly have examples of other authors doing just that. So the answer to that has to be yes.

He does. But the text he is quoting doesn’t have that in it.

This is the issue I was first addressing. We don’t actually know that. We don’t have the text. We don’t know if he’s quoting it directly or paraphrasing it. Is he selecting a small section out of a much larger work? There’s no way to know. When Ignatius refers to events from the canonical gospels, he often paraphrases and leaves out significant context. Is he doing the same here? We can’t know.

And that you have to add that turtle to get that result is precisely the problem. Add no turtles and the sequence gets to no earth locale at all.

Actually there are no turtles needed here. This is just comes down to observing how Ascension of Isaiah uses “the world” or “that world”. It is frequently used to refer to the earth. 7.25, 8.11, 8.24-26, 9.5, 9.19-21, 9.23, 9.26 are all examples where “the world” or “that world” refers to earth. 8.26 refers to Jesus as “The one who will be in the passing world”, and 9.23 refers to believing Christians as “Many from that world”.

From my perspective, there’s a lot of turtles to stack to argue this refers to Jesus dying in the firmament. Here are a few of those turtles. We would have to hold that:

-None of the extant versions of chapter 11 reflect the original text

-“that world” in 10.8 refers to the firmament even though, elsewhere in the text, it commonly refers to the earth.

-10.8 refers to the firmament twice, and the wording “through the firmament” does not mean descending lower than the firmament down to earth.

-The “passing world” in 8.26 does not refer to earth.

-9.5 “will be called in the world Jesus” does not refer to Jesus existing on earth.

-8.10, 9.13 Jesus is to descend until he takes on appearance similar to Isaiah but still not descend to the level where Isaiah lived (earth).

-10.20-22 – Jesus appears like the angels in each of the lower heavens (“his appearance was like theirs”), but still does not appear like a human among other humans.

-The original narrative of Ascension of Isaiah sets Jesus’ death in the firmament, something that no other extant Christian narrative does.

Just compare that to the more simple alternative proposal:
Ascension of Isiah depicts Jesus descending down to earth, which:

-Is reflected in the extant translations of chapter 11

-Coheres with other Christian narratives of Jesus’ execution.

-Makes sense given the context of chapters 7-10, in which we are informed that Jesus will descend until he assumes human appearance.

Again: we’re thinking horses first before zebras. The horses are a descension down to earth. It would be the least surprising option. Maybe if we see some black and white stripes, we shift our position, but I just don’t see them in the text.

The problem I see is that the alternative (the historical-Jesus model) doesn’t have the same problem.

It does. It’s located in all the oddities of this and the remaining evidence that don’t fit historicity well either. For which historicity must invent epicycles to explain.

It’s either one set of assumptions or the other. The evidence tips when one set of assumptions makes the same evidence more expected (even if only slightly more) than the other does. This is how all evidence is scored. I explain why the scoring comes out differentially the way it does in the study itself (this is covered in Ch. 8 of OHJ).

there were Christians (even with vastly different theological beliefs) who told the story of Jesus as though he’d been a Jewish man

There were also pagans who did this with every mythical god. The Jews did it routinely with Moses and the Patriarchs. And so on. So this isn’t dispositive. It’s expected on both theories.

This is the point of all the elemental evidence in Chs. 4 and 5 that historicizing mythical heroes was the norm then. So it is 100% expected on both models.

If that society behaved differently and never or rarely historicized their mythical heroes we’d be in a different place. But we’re in the place we are. That’s why mythicism makes so much unexpected sense: it exists in a context where it was a common model. I do a one-to-one model comparison between Jesus and Osiris cult on this in Ch. 1 of Jesus from Outer Space. The mythicist model is one-to-one identical across those two neighboring sects. So we cannot tell apart mythical from historical heroes by whether they were historicized—except in respect to the frequency with which heavily mythologized heroes were in that era historical, which is empirically low. Not high. And all of them were historicized and heavily mythologized, so merely citing people who heavily mythologized historical rather than mythical people cannot change the frequency of one relative to the other. We need evidence Jesus is an exception. Not evidence he’s just like all the other mythical men historicized.

the argument that certain verses in Christian epistles are ambiguous and could be compatible with both a celestial-death model or an earthly-death model is really only useful to the degree that we can demonstrate groups of Christians subscribed to either model. But one is considerably better evidenced than the other; that has to impact how we consider those verses.

To the contrary, it is weird that that’s the state of the epistles. They should be full of historicizing information. And weird means improbable. I cover why this is, with examples, and math, in Ch. 11 of OHJ.

Historicists can only escape this by building piles of turtles to hold up the theory. Epicycles rather than facts. And that can’t work mathematically to recover the theory. It rather demonstrates the improbabilities latent in the theory. Once historicity has to stack more turtles than mythicism to explain all the same evidence, historicity has lost the argument.

Again, I cover this in detail in Chs. 11 and 12 of OHJ and in several chapters across Obsolete Paradigm now (I explain the math and how it cannot be escaped with words in Chs. 5 and 6, and detail extensive examples with the Epistles in Chs. 8, 9, and 10. (I also there show we actually do have quite a lot of evidence of mythicist Christians, despite the Christians provably having tried to suppress it, in Ch. 7; I cover the vast evidence of Christian censorship, forgery, and document control in Ch. 8 of OHJ but this now has a detailed treatment in Vinzent’s recent monograph on the history of Christian literature).

there’s a fair amount of precedent for the notion of Earthly humans ascending

Yes. All accounted for in my math, especially now with the update in Obsolete Paradigm (Ch. 6).

The question is not whether some historical people become heavily mythologized. It’s not even whether Jesus “could be” one of them. The only relevant question is how many heavily mythologized people were those people. The data show: not typically. Typically, heavily mythologized people were never historical.

This inexorably fixes the prior probability against historicity for any such person. So we need evidence that proves them to be one of the less common exceptions. Evidence that overwhelms that prior. And we don’t have that for Jesus—but do have that for everyone else who we agree existed (see Ch. 6 of Obsolete).

That doesn’t seem to be the view of the author of Ascension of Isaiah. 10.10: “You will be careful to resemble the appearance of the angels of the firmament as well as the appearance of the angels who are in Sheol.” This is odd if he meant Jesus’ human form here, especially considering there are other places where a specifically human appearance like Isaiah is emphasized (8.10, 9.13). I don’t think a human-like appearance what’s meant for when he is in the firmament.

The lower angels (and demons) wore mortal bodies. This is explained in detail by Philo. I quote it all in OHJ Ch. 5. Bodies suitable to the firmament are mortal flesh. Because everything below the moon is the realm of flesh and decay. Tons of evidence establish this as a common view. Those bodies might be supernaturally preserved, or even supernaturally replaceable (even human sorcerers were famed as able to resurrect). But they can in theory be injured and even destroyed (burned up “as in a great heat”). The realm of the dead was also then popularly held to be in and around the moon (per Plutarch, as cited and discussed).

Even the Ascension of Isaiah says the ones who killed him were none the wiser. So obviously they couldn’t tell he wasn’t mortal. That’s why they thought they could kill him. So obviously his form had to seem killable to them, and not a mere spacesuit worn by an angel, as then they’d know he was an actual celestial and not have killed him.

I cover this in detail in Ch. 3 of OHJ. Hence Asc. 8.6 predicts the “Lord shall one day descend in your form” and thus be crucified, as outlined in Asc. 9. In Asc. 10 the sequence is commanded by God to be: “resemble the form of the angels of the firmament and the angels also who are in the realm of the dead” and then death and resurrection—there is no middle stage where he changes form “again” into a human. So the human form is “the form of the angels of the firmament and the angels also who are in the realm of the dead.”

Hence in 9:

they will think that he is flesh and a man. [9.14] And the god of that world will stretch forth his hand against the Son, and they will lay hands on him and crucify him on a tree, without knowing who he is. [9.15] So his descent, as you will see, is hidden from the heavens so that it remains unperceived who he is.

No middle step. The demons of the air will think he is flesh and a man and kill him. And thus his descent is hidden “from the heavens” (not the people down on Earth, who never come up here, they are never involved in the plan). And then the risen Jesus remains in “that” world (the world he died in) for a year and a half. Which obviously does not mean on Earth. This is the clock on the revelations of Jesus to the earthlings below (from Peter to Paul and all the apostles in between).

This is why Asc 11 had to be entirely deleted (not fixed, but erased completely), and replaced with something that does not fit the instructions of God in Asc 10 or the sequence predicted by the angel in Asc 9. A straight historicity paragraph would not explain that. There would be no reason to delete that. At most one might mod it. But that’s not what happened, which makes more sense if it wasn’t an earthly death. Likewise all the other weird things (many more than this; all detailed in Ch. 3): historicists can only get all these things to work by piling more and more turtles under them to explain every oddity. In the end, historicity requires more turtles here than mythicism. And that’s why the scales tip in that direction. At least a bit. Not enough to carry the case; that’s why this evidence can’t prove anything by itself.

He starts off chapter 19 by saying: “Now the virginity of Mary was hidden from the prince of this world, as was also her offspring, and the death of the Lord; three mysteries of renown, which were wrought in silence by God. How, then, was He manifested to the world?” Then immediately after mentioning the star he adds: “Hence every kind of magic was destroyed, and every bond of wickedness disappeared; ignorance was removed, and the old kingdom abolished, God Himself being manifested in human form…” As I read it, he definitely seems to be making the connection between the star and Jesus’ human form and birth through Mary. The discussion of the star is sandwiched between those details.

No one knew he was born = no Matthaean star announcing he was born, even to have Satan using or watching Herod mass murder babies to stop it, entailing clear knowledge of the birth and its significance.

So, no possible way he is referring to the same story.

And the star comes after the death here. Again, no possible way he is referring to the same story.

The star is the great light that terrifies the demons in Asc 10 and 12, when they realize what they’d done (“he had not changed to their form” = he reverted to his original brilliant form: Asc 7.27, “the glory of him who sat on the throne was great, and the glory of the angels on the right hand and on the left was beyond that of the heaven which was below them,” and per Asc 8 the glory of the Lord in the pinnacle heaven was so great as to make that light seem like darkness).

He certainly believed Jesus was a human executed by Pilate (to the Trallians 9, to the Magnesians 11, to the Smyrnaeans 1). He seems to just be taking the gospel accounts for granted. Again, it would only be the significance or impact of the event that is revealed afterwards.

He does. But the text he is quoting doesn’t have that in it. That’s the oddity. Like any Christian, he is assuming this text somehow matches his other texts, via some interpretation (hence he assumes birth refers to Mary, death to Pilate). But we can see it only does so by interpretation—the text itself was saying something very different. It is saying a great star revealed to Satan all this after, not before. Which corresponds with the Asc. narrative. Not the canonical Gospels.

I think in 10.8 he actually is being told to continue descending past the firmament down to earth. And that really wouldn’t be surprising given our other available evidence.

And that you have to add that turtle to get that result is precisely the problem. Add no turtles and the sequence gets to no earth locale at all. The text as-is doesn’t have all the things you are adding. Without your turtles, it says what it says—which is what I am pointing out.

“That” world is the same world of the firmament and Satan’s demons: “descend into the world” where “the god of that world” will kill him; “he descended into the firmament where the prince of this world dwells” and then is killed there; then after resurrection he “remains in that world” a year and a half. These are not references to Earth, but the whole firmament, Earth to Moon: “this corrupted world” altogether.

You can only get it to say something else by adding suppositions not in the text. You can say “yes, but my suppositions are kind of maybe reasonable,” and that’s why the evidence is weak. The data is only slightly less predicted by H than ~H. But it is less predicted by H than ~H. We have to be honest about that.

“Indeed I rate direct evidence of that as weak (see my scoring). It can only be known by inference from circumstantial evidence.” 

We at least agree there. The problem I see is that the alternative (the historical-Jesus model) doesn’t have the same problem. At a minimum, we don’t need inference from circumstantial evidence to know that there were Christians (even with vastly different theological beliefs) who told the story of Jesus as though he’d been a Jewish man from the recent past and socially connected to the first apostles. That version spread widely and was often taken for granted. 

That significantly impacts how I weigh the available evidence. For example, the argument that certain verses in Christian epistles are ambiguous and could be compatible with both a celestial-death model or an earthly-death model is really only useful to the degree that we can demonstrate groups of Christians subscribed to either model. But one is considerably better evidenced than the other; that has to impact how we consider those verses. 

The weaker the evidence for any Christians, broadly, believing Jesus endured his incarnation and death in a celestial realm, the less chance there is of someone specific (Paul or the author of Hebrews for example) holding that particular view. Obviously that could be overcome by some really compelling evidence in their letters, but I just don’t think it’s there (we can get into the specifics in the epistles later if you’d like). 

“The only reason that is less likely is that all the precedent evidence we have is for celestial death..” 

 I know you meant in reference to competing myth models here, but it’s worth considering there’s a fair amount of precedent for the notion of Earthly humans ascending into Heaven both in the Jewish worldview (Enoch, Elijah) and in the Greco-Roman worldview (Apollonius of Tyana, Caesar Augustus, Antinous). It wouldn’t be surprising if Christians thought that’s what happened, and I think that’s indicated by Hebrews 9.24 and 1 Peter 3.22. 

“The reason Jesus has to assume a humanlike body at that level is that below the moon, the firmament, is the place of mortal flesh. So the “appropriate” body there is a mortal human.” 

That doesn’t seem to be the view of the author of Ascension of Isaiah. 10.10: “You will be careful to resemble the appearance of the angels of the firmament as well as the appearance of the angels who are in Sheol.” 
This is odd if he meant Jesus’ human form here, especially considering there are other places where a specifically human appearance like Isaiah is emphasized (8.10, 9.13). I don’t think a human-like appearance what’s meant for when he is in the firmament. 

“He conspicuously does not. That’s what’s peculiar.” 

He starts off chapter 19 by saying: “Now the virginity of Mary was hidden from the prince of this world, as was also her offspring, and the death of the Lord; three mysteries of renown, which were wrought in silence by God. How, then, was He manifested to the world?” 
Then immediately after mentioning the star he adds: “Hence every kind of magic was destroyed, and every bond of wickedness disappeared; ignorance was removed, and the old kingdom abolished, God Himself being manifested in human form…”
As I read it, he definitely seems to be making the connection between the star and Jesus’ human form and birth through Mary. The discussion of the star is sandwiched between those details. 

“Ignatius very clearly does believe that the incarnation and death of Jesus were unknown until after they happened.”

He certainly believed Jesus was a human executed by Pilate (to the Trallians 9, to the Magnesians 11, to the Smyrnaeans 1). He seems to just be taking the gospel accounts for granted. Again, it would only be the significance or impact of the event that is revealed afterwards.

“The Ascension of Isaiah says Jesus only went as far as the firmament” 

We’ll disagree about what’s meant in 10.8 by the statement “You will descend through the firmament and that world.” I don’t think he’s being told to only go as far as the firmament. The only place he’s specifically told to not go to is perdition. I think in 10.8 he actually is being told to continue descending past the firmament down to earth. And that really wouldn’t be surprising given our other available evidence. 

If Satan is the one crucifying Jesus, what would be hidden is the impact of the event, not the event itself.

Right. That’s in 1 Corinthians 2: to Satan he was just laughably crucifying some upstart human sorcerer sticking his nose in Satan’s sky business, not the Almighty Son of God. If he’d known that, he wouldn’t have crucified him, to prevent its effects.

I don’t think we have very convincing evidence that anyone thought there was a celestial death.

Indeed I rate direct evidence of that as weak (see my scoring). It can only be known by inference from circumstantial evidence. Hence the celestial death is the hypothesis, and the evidence is what that better explains than the alternative, and so I assess it that way across the gamut of evidence.

In my study I footnote the possibility that the hidden life and death occurred on Earth but somewhere unknown (like the terrestrial level of the Garden of Eden).

The only reason that is less likely is that all the precedent evidence we have is for celestial deaths: the Osiris model is an exact fit, as I show in Historicity Ch. 5 and Outer Space Ch. 1; now the Ixion model I discuss in Obsolete Paradigm; and all the related evidence basing Satan in the sky, also in Historicity Ch. 5, etc. So the background evidence strongly supports that being their solve; none really predicts a terrestrial secret. But that remains possible. It would otherwise have all the same effects on the data.

we’d expect that to happen in the human world.

The sky is the human world. Everything below the moon is. Both Philo and Plutarch have whole discourses on this, which I run through in OHJ Ch. 5. Humans traversed the sky by spells (it was a common claim about sorcerers) and flying helpmeets (demons or angels). So their being found there is odd only in the sense that very few humans can do that, but not none.

The reason Jesus has to assume a humanlike body at that level is that below the moon, the firmament, is the place of mortal flesh. So the “appropriate” body there is a mortal human. Anything else would give him away as a visitor from heaven, tanking the entire game.

Ignatius definitely seems to draw that connection between this star and Jesus’ birth through Mary.

He conspicuously does not. That’s what’s peculiar. He is not describing Matthew. He is very clear that the star only reveals everything after the fact, not during or before, which matches the ending of The Ascension of Isaiah, which similarly implies Jesus is that star. Ignatius appears to say the same thing. We have similar hints in Irenaeus and Justin.

Ignatius very clearly does believe that the incarnation and death of Jesus were unknown until after they happened. And he is getting this from a Gospel that sounds a lot like the Ascension of Isaiah. We know he probably knows Luke. But he must be reading that as mixed allegory, because while he believed Jesus revealed his risen flesh to the Disciples in secret, he can’t have believed Satan knew who Jesus was at the Temptation and didn’t know who he was until after he was dead. So there is an account of what Ignatius actually believed that Ignatius is not giving us. And it includes a text where the incarnation and death completely missed everyone’s radar until afterward.

Meanwhile, The Ascension of Isaiah says Jesus only went as far as the firmament and was killed by the demons there (“they” killed him, not someone else), and it says the demons are in the sky. The missing section therefore must have had the death in the sky. The preceding text does not telegraph anything but.

As far as the apocryphal Gospel papyri, be advised, those have all been redating c. 200 and thus are not pre-canonical. They also appear to be redactions of our Gospels (e.g. Egerton looks like an edition of John). And they contain none of the weird stuff Ignatius is talking about. Whereas all that weird stuff is in the Ascension. That Justin and Irenaeus know the same text entails there was a text. It wasn’t like any Gospel we have. And was most like what shows up in our redaction of the Ascension. Which didn’t have an earthly sojourn: the Latin-Slavonic removed the middle section and the Ethiopic added an obviously fake post-canonical heretical summary. So something was in there no one liked or wanted. The early portion of the text clues us in to what that was, especially along with 1 Cor. 2, which appears to refer to the same thing, whether in some pre-AoI text or lore or not.

So we can’t draw the kinds of conclusions you are. The data point in the other direction, even if only by a margin.

The mystery element could really only mean the significance of Jesus’ incarnation and death. That’d be true even in a mythicist interpretative sense. If Satan is the one crucifying Jesus, what would be hidden is the impact of the event, not the event itself.

When you say “these oddities correlate to a celestial death”, I don’t think we have very convincing evidence that anyone thought there was a celestial death. Even the surviving sections of Ascension of Isaiah chapters 9 and 10 don’t explicitly say Jesus’ death would be celestial. In 10.10, he’s instructed to take the form of the angels when he descends to the firmament. If the original text of depicted Jesus taking on human appearance (8.10), evidently that wasn’t in the firmament. And taking human form in the firmament would have been an aberration anyway. As he makes his descent, he appears like the other angels in each level (“his appearance was like theirs”). If the original included Jesus taking human form, we’d expect that to happen in the human world. Could there have been a celestial death in the original? Maybe, but considering what we have,we can’t ascribe a high level of confidence to the idea.

The primary question for me is whether the text Ignatius read mentioned Jesus’ human birth through Mary. If so, then it wouldn’t have been a text depicting Jesus as exclusively celestial, crucified in the sky by demons. It would have been just another text about Jesus’ human life on earth. We know there were a number of now lost Christian narratives about an earthly human Jesus because we have fragments of a few (Papyrus Egerton 2, Papyrus Merton 51, the Fayum Fragment, P. Oxy. 840, 1224). Ignatius may have just had another one.

Ignatius definitely seems to draw that connection between this star and Jesus’ birth through Mary. That’s more expected if he’s drawing this connection from a text that mentions Mary than from one that never has Jesus on earth at all.

It’s unclear what version of the star gospel they had, though. We already know it was being doctored in the early second century to suit various alternative takes. All we can know is that they had more of it than we do, and that it overlaps what we do have.

For example, what later shows up in the Latin-Slavonic tradition is the edition that cut the middle part—as opposed to the version that shows up in the extant Ethiopic tradition, which “added” a fake weird Gospel story in that gap, with the baby Jesus teleporting out of Mary’s womb and the adult Jesus being hung on a tree by some unnamed “king,” all in divergent discourse style and thus obviously not original. So, which version is Ignatius and Irenaeus looking at? They likely would have regarded the “inserted” version heretical. So, was it the “cut” version? That wouldn’t have anything contrary to their assumptions. So they could “insert” in their minds whatever they wanted.

So no further conclusions can be drawn from what we have. Which translates into indeterminate probabilities, rather than “highly unlikely” outcomes.

The only thing we know for certain is that they knew a text that said “the virginity of Mary, …her offspring, and the death of the Lord” were “three mysteries of renown, which were wrought in silence by God,” so secretly in fact that Satan never knew any of it was happening (Ignatius; OHJ, p. 320) until a star shone in the sky after death. Which is a strange thing to say of our Gospels.

Hence:

This ‘Gospel’ that Ignatius is describing has the very birth and death of Jesus being hidden from the world and revealed only in the bright light demonstrating his triumph (which could only be at his resurrection), and that was the event that granted men eternal life. Such a spectacle could hardly have been kept ‘hidden’ from the Prince of This World; it therefore must have followed and not preceded the death of Jesus.

So whatever this lost Gospel said, Ignatius thinks the stories in our Gospels were told only later, while all of it was kept hidden from everyone. Thus, he could believe those later stories real, and thus “reinterpret” this other Gospel as referring to them (just as everyone reinterpreted Paul as referring to the Gospels when he wasn’t, and thus “invent” a historicist Paul that doesn’t actually exist in the corpus of Paul).

We can’t rule that out. Or any of a dozen other possibilities. So we can’t say any of this is “unlikely” at all. It’s actually pretty typically what historicist Christians did all across the second century (see Chapter 7 of Obsolete Paradigm for more on this point). The same goes for the corroborating content in Justin and Irenaeus.

But what is unlikely (slightly; I score this pretty low) is that they got this version of the Star Gospel from an originally historicist text. They may be looking at a redacted version. But the original can’t have actually said what they assume. “Why” it doesn’t say the things they need (why this Gospel has no one know any of this happened until after the resurrection, and only by observing celestial events) is then open to explanation. The telltale content of the surviving text of the Ascension of Isaiah (either this being that Star Gospel or adapted from it or it adapted therefrom) indicates these oddities correlate to a celestial death.

So these four sources triangulate to lean slightly less likely on a historicist interpretation (which struggles a little to explain these odd features). Because given our background evidence (how Christians routinely reinterpreted and doctored and mutilated every text that they wanted to cite that said things they didn’t like), the mythicist explanation of all this evidence is at least slightly stronger.

If they really had a text that portrayed Jesus as exclusively celestial, shouldn’t they have recognized that this contradicted their own theology? I would expect they would regard the text as heretical, not authoritative.

Maybe the context was difficult to discern. The text could have been ambiguous. But that’s still a major problem, because we no longer have the text(s) and they did. We can’t read what Ignatius’ refers to; he may be paraphrasing and leaving out significant context. We may not even have anything close to a direct quote from the text. And my own reading of his Eph. 19, Ignatius seems to draw a connection between the star and Jesus’ human birth through Mary (“Now the virginity of Mary was hidden from the prince of this world, as was also her offspring” / “God Himself being manifested in human form..”). Did that connection come from the text he had? There’s just no way to rule it out unless we could read the text for ourselves.

Whatever lost text this may have been, the fact they considered it authoritative shifts the probability towards this likely being broadly congruent with their own theological views of Jesus. The only other viable option was that it was so ambiguous that Christians who read the text missed the context entirely. If the exclusively celestial context was that ambiguous even for people who read the text, our confidence level that this was actually the correct context should be nearly zero.

This is not to say it’s impossible. I just think it’s highly unlikely.