Kipp Davis recently published a kind of analysis of the fourth chapter of my academic study On the Historicity of Jesus: “How (Not) to Read the Talmud: Reviewing Richard Carrier’s On the Historicity of Jesus, Part 1.” It’s a weird one, because almost nothing in it actually responds to what I wrote in that chapter; and what does either ignores what it actually said or confirms that what it said is correct! Thanks, Kipp! Let’s check it out.
General Interpretive Errors
Davis spends many early minutes of that video explaining that almost everything I say in Chapter 4 is correct, and indeed exactly what it says it is: a summary of (often standard) conclusions already reached by experts in the field. Where there are disagreements, I note them. Where evidence needs to be cited against common assumptions, it’s cited. Where arguments to a point are needed, they’re given. And contrary to Davis’s polemical posturing, at no point in that chapter (or indeed the whole book) do I ever make an original argument from the ancient Hebrew or Aramaic—I always rely on actual published experts in those languages, and follow what they say.
Davis only wants to take issue with what really amounts to just a handful of sentences in nearly a hundred pages of heavily footnoted material. In fact, he implies he agrees with the previous three chapters as well—so, over a hundred pages of material. Which is fine. If there are even minor or incidental errors, I want to correct them.
At this point Davis makes three general interpretive mistakes in describing the contents of Chapter 4, which he would do well to heed in his future installments as he goes through my book:
- Some of the Elements in Chapters 4 and 5 are modal arguments, not factual. That is, some are arguments to a plausibility or possibility, not an argument to a probability or a certainty: the “results…in some cases is ‘maybe’ (meaning: more than merely possible, but still not certain) and in others is ‘certainly’ (meaning: not absolutely certain, but certain to a very high probability), or some degree in between. I have carefully worded my claims in each element to reflect this.” (OHJ, p. 65.) So I am not in every case arguing for something being a fact; sometimes I am arguing just for something to be plausible. For example, on p. 74, my exact wording is: “So we have evidence here of a Jewish belief that possibly predates Christian evangelizing.” Take note. Davis skips over my warning to heed my exact words, and often ignores my exact words.
- Some of the arguments Davis thinks are missing from Chapter 4 are actually in Chapter 5. For example, Elements 23 through 29 present facts that render plausible the notion of spiritualizing rather than militarizing the victory of the messiah, illustrating that this isn’t weird, but would have fit Jewish thinking in that context. In light of the first point, again, this is not an argument that “they did this,” it’s an argument that it would make sense if they did.
- Finally, no Element or Definition anywhere in Chapters 4 or 5 directly affects the probability that a historical Jesus existed. All are equally compatible with both—as long as you are taking them all into account when building your model, whether of a historical or imaginary Jesus. For example, Davis really doesn’t like being told that many scholars concur with me that there is ample evidence the Jews may have already had an idea of dying eschatological messiahs before Christianity (I’ll cite a whole list of peer-reviewed experts concurring on this point below). But this would as easily explain how a historical Jesus could be converted into a messiah without any military victories (by spiritualizing his victory and drumming up pesher-like scriptural support for it). So this isn’t evidence Jesus didn’t exist. It’s just evidence your theory of a historical Jesus needs to take into account.
There are a few other places where Davis’s complaining makes no sense coming from a scholar. For example, he mildly complains about the page length of the book, then complains that it didn’t survey the “10” to “30” plus sects of the Jews we have evidence of, when—obviously—to save word count I just footnoted where that survey can be found, wherein I literally say: “For a summary of the evidence and sources collectively establishing this element see Carrier, ‘Spiritual Body’, in Empty Tomb (ed. Price and Lowder), pp. 107- 13, with support in” and I proceed to list eight other scholarly studies pertaining to the point. Scholars know this is how scholarship works: we often make our arguments concise by citing where evidence is surveyed for some point we make. Davis has a relevant PhD. He has to know this. So why he would complain about a standard scholarly practice escapes me. The more so as his words then imply I didn’t provide any support or evidence for this claim—when in fact I cited nine studies. This is kind of disingenuous and a practice Davis would do well to refrain from in future.
First: Definitions
By minute 15 in the video Davis is framing the rest of his forty-five-minute video as about how I make mistakes in Hebrew or Aramaic, after which he presents zero examples of my doing that. As I already noted, there are no arguments pertaining to those languages in OHJ that aren’t from existing experts. How Davis tries to get around this is by inventing arguments I never made, and then complaining about errors in those arguments. But since I never made those arguments, this can’t have anything to do with me. Sure, if someone ever made those arguments, they’d be wrong in just the ways Davis illumines. But since I am not that someone, he doesn’t have any actual criticism of my study. We’ll see examples as we go. Often his practice is to ignore what I actually wrote, and sometimes even invent things.
Davis’s first major error (toward the end of minute 15) is when he quickly goes over my section defining terms in Chapter 4 and mistakenly acts like I am explaining how those words were defined in antiquity. Since I explicitly state I am not doing that, nothing in this section of his critique actually pertains to anything I wrote there. This is what it says:
These definitions are not intended to be normative. So there is no sense in arguing whether my definitions are ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. They merely specify what I mean when I use those terms, regardless of what anyone else might mean, or what any dictionaries say, or any other conventions. As long as you treat my definitions as nothing more than explanations of what I mean, confusion will be forestalled.
OHJ, p. 60
And yet Kipp gets confused. Even though I just told him how to not get confused, in the very book he is supposed to be reading. Davis wants to claim I am somehow being misleading, but that is impossible when I am explicit about what I am doing when defining these words. That’s the opposite of being misleading. I was careful. Davis was not. Since his every complaint that follows relates to what he wants to say about the use of corresponding words in antiquity, and since nothing I am doing in defining these words in English relates to that (remember these words I am defining are English words, and English didn’t exist back then), none of his complaints pertain to anything I actually said in Chapter 4.
For example, I discuss how I am choosing to define “crucifixion” based on the fact that that English word did not exist in antiquity, and explain how my definition is meant to capture the actual meaning of several Greek words and phrases we now translate that way. Hence in that case I defer to the ancient meanings only of the ancient words. And I am clear about this. I also cite several scholars agreeing with me on this point. Davis never complains about this. But I produce it as an example of what’s going on in this section that Davis seems to miss. Hence what he does complain about reflects the same mistake.
For example, in minute 17 Davis says of my definition of messiah that “he’s not wrong” (so, actually, Davis is confirming what I said is correct) “but the primary problem here is this is not so narrowly how Jews understood the term meshiach.” Well. Guess what? That’s exactly what I say: “All Jewish kings and high priests were, of course, ‘messiahs’ in the basic sense of being anointed to represent God. But here I shall mean a messiah conforming to” something more specific (p. 60). So, I said exactly what Davis says; he then disingenuously says it as if I didn’t even know it (much less in fact actually said it!); and yet what I did say makes clear I am only referring to how I shall employ the word throughout the rest of the book, so that you will know what I am referring to. I do not claim this is the only way it was used anciently. I explicitly say it wasn’t. Davis therefore has no complaint against what I actually did say. He agrees that’s a recognized meaning. And he never mentions any folly resulting from my specifying that. Instead, he invents something I didn’t say, and complains about that. That’s not a very clever way to critique a study. You might want to actually read the study before blundering like this.
Davis then not only puts his foot in his mouth here, he pushes it in further when he explains that the authors of Daniel were only referring to the beloved Onias III, whom they call a messiah in the sense of a high priest, and claiming his death would foretell the end of the world. Yeah. Well. That’s exactly what I say:
Modern scholars are generally agreed that its authors were saying that the then-high-priest Onias III was a Messiah (a Christ) [i.e. not the messiah, but a messiah—ed.] and his death would presage a universal atonement, after which would come the end of the world—effected by the coming of the angel Michael. That’s already just one or two tweaks away from the Christian gospel.
OHJ, p. 78
I go on to point out that modern scholars also widely agree that later interpreters of Daniel started reading this differently, particularly the Christians—to which Davis agrees. So I never said anything Davis disagrees with here. I said literally the same things he is saying, yet he is posing as if I didn’t say them and thus need to be corrected. But I did; so I don’t. Davis has no real complaint here.
The same happens when Davis complains about my applying the word “gospel” to any comparable message of salvation (whether Christian or not), starting in minute 19. He notes that we don’t have any evidence of the Greek word (euaggelion) underlying that English word being used by mystery cults. But I never said it was. After explaining (as quoted above) that all my definitions refer to my uses of the English words, not any ancient uses, I say this again in respect to that:
I shall use gospel for the general idea of the ‘good news’ or ‘salvific message’ that any group of Christians (or other savior cult) may have preached (and which may have varied in content from group to group), and Gospel for the actual written books of that title or genre (which attempted to convey ‘a gospel’ in some fashion or other).
OHJ, p. 63
“I” shall use. Not “they” used. This should not have provoked any complaint. Davis should know that the idea of gospel as a message of salvation, using indeed euaggelion, is Greco-Roman political vocabulary coopted by Christians, as Davis himself admits—as when he says “early Christian usage of Evangelion was influenced by the use of the plural form of the noun in relation to Royal Imperial propaganda especially in connection with the benefactions of Augustus.” His wording is misleading; actually the word was used specifically to mean not just benefactions but salvation. The “good news” of the Priene Inscription, for example, was that Augustus had secured their salvation (literally, line 49: σωτηρίᾳ; for symmetry many scholars also reconstruct a lost portion of line 35 as declaring him a savior). This is indeed exactly what the Christians are coopting.
Davis complains that this term didn’t come from Judaism. But I never said it did. He and I agree it came from Gentile political propaganda. So Davis invents something I didn’t say (that the word comes somehow from Judaism and that the word was used by other savior cults), and then complains about that thing I didn’t say. When in fact what I actually did say (which was solely about how I will use an English word and why) he has no complaint about. I had thought Davis incorrectly said the word euaggelion “literally means announcement or an announcement,” when in fact it means “good announcement,” given the eu- in front of the aggelion. In other words, it literally means “good news.” But I must have misheard; on second hearing, he correctly notes this. This is important. Because this is why politicians could use it in reference to salvation, and thus why the Christians coopted it: they are putting Jesus in the place of Caesar.
But “message of salvation” is a thing all mystery religions taught, and beyond—for example Romulus is related as conferring much the same message as the Priene Inscription, conceptualizing promised salvation in terms of military success rather what the Christians inverted it to be. It does not matter (especially to any argument I make) that they didn’t use specifically the word euaggelion for that message or any other. Any message of salvation held the same functional role as what the Christians designated with euaggelion (just as in the Priene Inscription), and the mystery cults were selling something even more similar: not military salvation, but salvation in the afterlife. They were thus, in our English usage, marketing their own “gospel.” And they did it with their own functional equivalent of “Gospels” (mythical tales of their Savior illuminating the teachings relating to whatever kind of salvation they were selling). This does not require them to have used the word euaggelion. And I never imply they did. So again Davis has no complaint here against anything I actually said.
Thus, when Davis worries about “problems” with my definitions, he not only gets wrong what my definitions are, he never presents any example of them causing any problem he is worried about.
The Suffering Messiah Tradition in Judaism
The only other complaint Davis has in this video is something about my discussion of the evidence for a dying messiah tradition. Again, Davis never correctly describes what I actually say, and this error renders irrelevant his every criticism.
For example, Davis wants to take issue with Element 5 in Chapter 4 which simply says:
Even before Christianity arose, some Jews expected one of their messiahs heralding the end times would actually be killed, rather than be immediately victorious, and this would mark the key point of a timetable guaranteeing the end of the world soon thereafter.
OHJ, p. 73
Notice what I don’t say here: that they believed this messiah would themselves bring about the end of the world, or rise from the dead. As Davis admits, this sentence is an accurate description of Daniel 9 and the way it was being reinterpreted already at Qumran: that this messiah somehow related to the eschaton (and thus is a messiah as I said I will employ the term). He was anointed and would “play a part” in God’s plan of liberation. Davis ignores the fact that this is all I said and skips to the rest of the element where I back this up further with yet more evidence, in particular from later Jewish traditions indicating a rather mainstream belief in the idea of a dying messiah signaling the end of the world. Indeed, I make clear my case is for this being “exactly what some Jews were thinking—or could easily have thought.” Remember my warning about modal facts and Davis confusing those with more affirmative declarations?
Davis can’t dispute that Daniel 9 already establishes this Element as stated. So he glosses over that and tries to take issue with my take on Isaiah 53 influencing mainstream (Talmudic) Jewish traditions. Much of what he then says though gets wrong what I said, invents things I didn’t say, and complains about arguments I never made. But it also weirdly ignores my entire argument. For example, around minute 27, Davis says “the tradition” found in the Talmud that expressed not even surprise or skepticism at the assumption that the first messiah would suffer and die but took it as rote, which even “cites Isaiah 53 verse 4” to that effect, “cannot date any earlier than” the earliest Rabbis we know who referenced it. As a genuine scholar (with real expertise in the subject), Davis should know that the first extant mention of a tradition is actually not likely to be the first, because we lack all prior documents that would inform us. So there is no possible way it “cannot” date earlier than the mention we have. So Davis is misinforming his audience even from the start.
But worse than that is that Davis barely mentions, and never really answers, my actual argument that it likely does predate them, but instead gives the false impression that I didn’t tell people this is a late source, when in fact I very clearly did:
Modern scholars are too quick to dismiss this text as late (dating as it does from the fourth to sixth century), since the doctrine it describes is unlikely to be. For only when Jews had no idea what Christians would do with this connection would they themselves have promoted it. There is no plausible way later Jews would invent interpretations of their scripture that supported and vindicated Christians. They would not invent a Christ with a father named Joseph who dies and is resurrected (as the Talmud does indeed describe). They would not proclaim Isaiah 53 to be about this messiah and admit that Isaiah had there predicted this messiah would die and be resurrected. That was the very biblical passage Christians were using to prove their case. Moreover, the presentation of this ideology in the Talmud makes no mention of Christianity and gives no evidence of being any kind of polemic or response to it. So we have evidence here of a Jewish belief that possibly predates Christian evangelizing, even if that evidence survives only in later sources.
The alternative is to assume a rather unbelievable coincidence: that Christians and Jews, completely independently of each other, just happened at some point to see Isaiah 53 as messianic and from that same passage preach an ideology of a messiah with a father named Joseph (literally or symbolically), who endures great suffering, dies and is resurrected (all in accord with the savior depicted in Isaiah 53, as by then understood). Such an amazing coincidence is simply improbable. But a causal connection is not: if this was a pre-Christian ideology that influenced (and thus caused) both the Christian and the Jewish ideologies, then we have only one element to explain (the rise of this idea once, being adapted in different ways), instead of having to believe the same idea arose twice, purely coincidentally. Two improbable events by definition are many times less likely than one. That means the invented-once theory is many times more likely than the invented-twice one.
Conversely, if we choose instead to fall on this sword of improbability and insist, against all likelihood, that yes, the same ideas arose twice independently of each other within Judaism, then this entails the idea was very easy for Jews to arrive at (since rabbinical Jews, independently of Christians, clearly arrived at it), which then entails it was not an improbable development in the first place. And thus neither will it have been improbable for Christians (or their sectarian predecessors among the Jews), any more than it was for Talmudic Jews. Clearly dying messiahs were not anathema. Rabbinical Jews could be just as comfortable with the idea as Christians were.
OHJ, pp. 73–75
Davis ignores that I made a probabilistic argument for this notion being early, and an a fortiori argument that even if it wasn’t, this still proves there was no implausibility to the idea of Jews coming up with the notion, as (on that view) they later clearly did. This was my actual argument, and what I actually used these references in the Talmud (and Daniel and elsewhere) to argue. Davis basically ignores this argument, and invents another one I never made, and complains about that instead. The most he has to offer in response (around minute 37) is a possibiliter fallacy: that “it is possible” these improbable things happened. But possibly doesn’t get you to probably. That’s my point.
Another of Davis’s complaints is that the detail the Rabbis cited Isaiah 53:4 for is incidental. But I never said it wasn’t. What they were citing it for doesn’t matter to my argument. What their cite demonstrates is that they thought that Isaiah 53:4 contained citable information about the messiah—which means they believed that passage was about the messiah. Davis has no argument against this, and yet this is the only argument I actually made. He instead goes on about what that Rabbinical dispute was about, but that has nothing to do with anything I said. So he’s not complaining about anything in OHJ here.
By contrast, contrary to Davis trying to fabricate a false narrative of my incompetence, my point in Element 5 has considerable scholarly support:
- In OHJ, in support of my point I cite rabbinical scholar Daniel Boyarin, The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ (2012), pp. 129-56.
- I also cite Martin Hengel, “The Effective History of Isaiah 53 in the Pre-Christian Period,” in The Suffering Servant: Isaiah 53 in Jewish and Christian Sources (2004), pp. 75-146.
Davis never mentions either. And he offers no arguments against Boyarin or Hengel. Since I published, we can list a plethora of scholars concurring, new and old—and that’s besides my own study, which passed peer review; and Raphael Lataster’s, likewise: Questioning the Historicity of Jesus, pp. 94–95; so two more in addition to all the rest. How many times does the same claim have to pass peer review before Kipp Davis will acknowledge it? Is it, say, twelve?
Because a thorough literature search produces…
- Israel Knohl, The Messiah Before Jesus: The Suffering Servant of the Dead Sea Scrolls (2000).
- Michael Wise, The First Messiah: Investigating the Savior Before Jesus (1999).
- David Mitchell, “Rabbi Dosa and the Rabbis Differ: Messiah ben Joseph in the Babylonian Talmud,” The Review of Rabbinic Judaism (2005), pp. 77–90 (cf. 89–90).
And:
- Jason Staples, The Idea of Israel in Second Temple Judaism: A New Theory of People, Exile, and Israelite Identity (2021), p. 163. Which BTW reproduces a dissertation that was approved by none other than Bart Ehrman.
And Staples himself cites concurring:
- William Brownlee, “The Servant of the Lord in the Qumran Scrolls,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 132 (December 1953), pp. 8–15.
- Harold Luis Ginsberg, “The Oldest Interpretation of the Suffering Servant,” Vetus Testamentum 63 (October 1953), pp. 25–28.
- John Goldingay, Daniel (World Biblical Commentary, 2019), p. 300.
- Anathea Portier-Young, Apocalypse against Empire: Theologies of Resistance in Early Judaism (2014), pp. 272–76.
That’s now Boyarin, Hengel, Carrier, Lataster, Knohl, Wise, Mitchell, Staples, Brownlee, Ginsberg, Goldingay, and Portier-Young. So, Dr. Davis, is everyone incompetent? Or do we maybe have a point? It’s one thing to try and argue that twelve different scholars are all somehow wrong. But one thing you can’t plausibly claim is that we (and all our peer reviewers, which will amount to two dozen more experts, and includes Bart Ehrman) are all incompetent.
Davis does another weird thing at this point (around minute 30 to 31). He spends a lot of minutes trying to find a reference to Isaiah 53 in one of my two citations of the Talmud and complains that it’s not there and makes up a weird vocabulary argument he thinks I must intend yet never made and complains about that instead. But any scholar should know that when you write a sentence like “[The Talmud] explicitly says the suffering servant who dies in Isaiah 53 is the messiah (and that this messiah will endure great suffering before his death)” (OHJ, p. 73) and two passages are immediately cited thereto, one passage is for the first claim (the Isaiah connection) and the second passage is for the second claim (that they believed the messiah will suffer greatly before his death). Instead of reading this in the way any scholar normally would, Davis scours the second passage for evidence of the first point and freaks out when he doesn’t find it, and then makes up some other argument he says I must have meant and critiques that. When all along I only cited the second passage for the second claim, of the messiah’s suffering, which Davis never challenges. Golly gee. So many minutes wasted on a rudimentary mistake in reading a source citation. Maybe Davis needs to start acting more like a scholar and less like a ragevlogger?
Note that still at no point has Davis ever mentioned any argument I made that errs on the Hebrew or Aramaic. His claim in the opening that he would present examples of this is never satisfied. He never produces one, anywhere in the video. Even when Davis rants about the convoluted versions of the dying-messiah myth I note in later sources (around minute 33), he never raises any issue pertinent to what I argued. Around minute 35, he agrees b.Sukkah 52a attests a dying messiah, just as I say, then argues over unrelated semantics that never come up in my argument. Then he acts like I didn’t mention the last source I cite is late or account for that. But I did. I did both things: I said it was “the seventh-century Apocalypse of Zerubbabel” and then said:
The narrative in this text was adapted to contemporary political circumstances of the later Middle Ages, but it is clear from the Talmud that the outline of it long predated that period, and thus long predates this redaction of it.
OHJ, p. 75
In other words, what this latest source shows is that we have multiple divergent traditions with a common theme. I then argue (per above) that this common theme (not the elaborate, and ever-changing, accoutrements Davis burns clock on) is unlikely to have been invented after Christianity, and even less likely to have been invented in parallel to it unless inventing dying messiahs was indeed an easy and common move for Jews, and not “impossible” or “inconceivable” as scholarly myth maintains.
Similarly, around minute 38 Davis complains that I didn’t discuss other documents at Qumran that he thinks I should have even though he argues they’d fail to carry my point (yes, follow that circle around a while). But that’s what I myself already said:
The Dead Sea Scrolls also speak of two messiahs, one ‘Messiah of Aaron’, who would be the ‘true high priest’, and a ‘Messiah of Israel’, who would be a kingly warlord figure… . But it’s debated whether these are actually two messiahs, or what kind of messiahs they are … [and]… It’s also debated whether one of the Qumran fragments says one of these messiahs ‘will be pierced’ and killed, or whether he will pierce and kill someone else, and I consider that question presently unresolvable (the manuscript is too damaged to tell).
OHJ, p. 75
All while citing experts for every point. And yet this is literally everything Davis himself goes on to say: such evidence is too ambiguous and fragmentary. So I actually did exactly what Davis tried to take me to task for not doing: I didn’t use such documents because, as he himself says, they are too ambiguous and fragmentary. That Davis missed me saying that is more evidence that he is not acting like a scholar in reviewing my book, but only rageskimming it, and thus getting incorrect everything it does and doesn’t say.
In the end, since everything Davis says here is what I myself also said, he can have no real complaint left. And this concludes his video.
This Is Where We End Up
Regardless of the particulars, the broader point, that the Jews had notions of suffering and dying messiahs before Christianity, has wide scholarly support. As I just noted, it’s a claim that has passed peer review twelve times now. Davis might want to start taking it seriously, instead of trying to falsely claim dozens of experts are somehow coincidentally incompetent.
Davis also didn’t mention another argument I made in this section, which is peculiar, because it illustrates all the correct ways to use existing expert scholarship when you aren’t yourself an expert in the material:
We might have evidence of a strand of that prior tradition in the early-first-century Targum of Jonathan ben Uzziel on Isaiah 53 (a kind of paraphrastic commentary in Aramaic; Jonathan ben Uzziel was traditionally a student of Hillel, who died c. 10 CE, and a contemporary of Shammai, who died c. 30 CE), which explicitly identifies the suffering servant there as the Christ—but otherwise transforms the narrative to suppress or downplay the element of his dying. But anyone who read this Targum, and then the original Hebrew (or Greek), could put two and two together: ‘this servant is the messiah’ plus ‘this servant dies and is buried and then exalted’ = ‘the messiah dies and is buried and then exalted’, the very doctrine we see in the Talmud, which just happens to be the same doctrine adopted by Christians. This Targum was multiply tampered with over the years, however (see Bruce Chilton, The Glory of Israel: The Theology and Provenience of the Isaiah Targum [Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1982], e.g., p. 94), so nothing conclusive can be decided by it (even though, again, it is unlikely Jews would change the Targum to make Isaiah 53 messianic after Christianity started using Isaiah 53 to support their cause), although Jintae Kim makes a case for the reading being early in ‘Targum Isaiah 53 and the New Testament Concept of Atonement’, Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism 5 (2008), pp. 81-98.
OHJ, p. 75
Notice how I handle this: I describe the facts correctly; I cite experts for my own conclusions. And at no point do I make any argument “from the Hebrew or Aramaic” for Davis to complain about.
Kipp Davis has a reputation for doing this: making false, misleading, or unreliable claims about my work, criticizing whatever false thing he just invented as evincing my “incompetence,” and then (I guess?) counting on no one checking so as to notice that nothing he said was true. I’ll close with an example outside this video illustrating this is a trend.
In comments elsewhere, Kipp Davis tried to claim I was “incompetent” because I “didn’t know” that in Hebrew Yeshua means “God saves” and not “God’s savior.” Here is what I actually wrote in OHJ:
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’.
OHJ, pp. 239–40
So…I literally said the word means “Yahweh saves,” and that the understanding of this as “God’s savior” was simply readily apparent to all concerned (which Davis could not challenge). So he invented a false claim (that I didn’t know the correct grammatical parsing of the word) and used that false claim to slander my competence as a scholar. When in reality, I correctly parsed it, and so by his own reasoning, I am thereby confirmed by his own argument to be entirely competent. Yay!
Davis does this again, in the same pedantic argument, by insisting I “didn’t know” that Yahweh does not mean “God” but is the name of a god. Obviously I know that (cf. OHJ, pp. 303, 315). 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. Davis really had to struggle to invent something to accuse me of here, because this absurdist pedantry has nothing to do with reality. I never claimed Yahweh wasn’t the name of a god. I never claimed Yeshua didn’t parse out as “Yahweh saves.” I outright said both things. So it would appear Davis is the one who is incompetent here.
These examples (and the ones above) illustrate that Kipp Davis has a tendency to be wholly unreliable. You should heed that going forward. You now know you can’t trust anything he says to be accurate, and therefore you have to fact-check him. Not necessarily his incidental fact-claims (he usually gets those fine), but in whatever he claims I supposedly did or did not say or argue. Which means his incompetence is limited to personal bias, not quackery. You simply can never trust anything he says about me or what I have written. Which indicates he has lost all objectivity, and is letting his emotions subvert all his skills. You should take care to notice if he treats anyone else the same way.
-:-
On Part 2 of Davis’s series, where he makes all the same mistakes and worse, see And Then Kipp Davis Fails to Heed My Advice and Digs a Hole for Himself.
Hi Dr. Carrier. Thanks for this response. This is for your info; doesn’t need to be posted here. Dr. Kipp’s video (v=LG6jY3yP96c) is today listed as being uploaded Monday morning, July 25 (but your reply is July 20). I did not see the video previously so don’t know why the upload date was changed. Best Wishes. Patrick (met you at 2 events in Chicago).
So, not everyone follows my Twitter and Facebook feeds where this was all explained. When I posted, I was operating from a URL someone sent me. That URL was to a private video that was not supposed to be available to the public.
I won’t get into the technicalities of how the internet is badly designed and is an ad hoc kluge of “fixes” held together by duct tape and string. Suffice it to say, anyone who wants to earn a living as a creator has to deal with bad design like this, and they have to invent workarounds. One of those is the “secret URL.” Davis is a content creator funded by Patreon patrons, and one of his patron perks is early access to videos.
I respect that. I don’t believe in mucking up someone’s business. So he asked to remove the URL at least (until it went public) and I decided it made more sense to de-publish my response until his video was available to the public and not just patrons, so the secret URL wouldn’t spread, scooping his patrons’ privileges, and so readers won’t be confused about what I am responding to that they can’t find.
Davis then republished the video to a not secret URL, as always planned. Then I could re-publish my response, with the updated URL. The private version was correspondingly removed. And so here we are.
I told Kipp that I’d wait to comment on his video until your blog and both (or however many there are) of his videos have posted.
I’ll do the same here. Thanks.
“”” Davis also incorrectly says the word euaggelion “literally means an announcement or an announcement,” when in fact it means “good announcement,”
Davis actually says “an announcement of good news” @ 19:35
Gosh. I must have missed that somehow. I’ll correct my article.
To be fair, he also looks for evidence of the first claim in the first passage and doesn’t find it there either.
He did find it there. That’s the part where he complains they are only discussing trivia of the messiah (his name) not his death; but they cite Isaiah 53:4 for information about that which proves they believed Isaiah 53 contained information about the messiah, which proves they agreed with his predicted suffering and death (because that’s what Is. 53 says happens). That conclusion is then corroborated explicitly by other passages in the Talmud, like the one about Messiah ben Joseph dying (as Davis admits; which is why he tries to “front-date” the invention of that idea to get rid of it). And so on.
This is why paying attention to my carefully chosen wording is important. I tend to choose words carefully for that very reason. Hence it matters that I wrote the Talmud “explicitly says the suffering servant who dies in Isaiah 53 is the messiah” and not “explicitly says the messiah dies as foretold in Isaiah 53.”
The other passage that says he dies doesn’t link it to Is. 53, and I correctly identify it that way, but this other passage makes clear they did regard Is. 53 as describing the messiah, and the figure there does indeed die. So this all operates as converging evidence toward my conclusion.
Davis knows this is how scholarship works. I doubt he acts this way toward any other book making arguments the same way, with convergent evidence. I doubt he atomizes every argument he reads and takes issue with pieces of it as if the rest didn’t exist. He only does this when it’s me for some reason (so far as I know; if he does this to anyone else, I would like to know).
I think many scholars would seperate the two claims, and make it clear that one citation refers to the first claim and the second citation refers to the second claim. When a reader misunderstands one explanation is that the reader is a fool. Another explanation is that what was written was confusing.
Or that the reader didn’t read charitably or in reference to their experience with other scholarship.
I am sure had Davis encountered this in any other study, he’d immediately resolve his own confusion with “Oh, I see, two claims, two references, just like often happens. Got it.” And that would be that.
The only explanation for why he forgets all these standard skills and procedures here is because he is emotionally crippled by his inexplicably hateful attitude toward me. Thus deleting on the fly all his usual skills and assumptions. Resulting in error.
This is why it’s important to remember emotion can be a liability to objectivity.
I’m not sure what Dr Davis wanted to accomplish with the video.
Those chapters are about establishing the preexisting idea of a dying messiah. And that isn’t really disputed. So even if everything he said had been correct, that wouldn’t really argue against anything.
And he’s doing a series of videos on this?
He’s doing a series on OHJ. I don’t know what future installments will focus on (I suspect neither does he; he seems to be winging it, as indicated by the fact that in this video he doesn’t even know what’s in following chapters, which means he hasn’t actually gotten to them yet).
The claim that the Jews had pre-existing notions of dying messiahs is disputed, but not soundly. Indeed usually the party line is not just that they didn’t, but that it was impossible (this is a component of standard Christian resurrection apologetics, which is why it’s ironic to see atheists defending it).
So what I set out to do was prove the claim that it is impossible false, by showing it’s eminently possible. I think there’s a preponderance of evidence that in fact they did. But even if someone is so biased as to not agree with that (employing an excess of skepticism), no rational operator can disagree with the possibility argument (the modal argument component of Element 5).
They also can’t honestly do what Kipp is trying to do and claim this is just Crazy Richard Making Shit Up. With twelve peer-reviewed studies now reaching essentially the same conclusion, I really do think this is a dead argument now. The field is just resisting based on stubbornness and emotion, not evidence and reason.
What I suspect Davis wants to accomplish is to somehow ragevlog against me personally, and thus is ragereading OHJ “looking for” mistakes, rather than slowing down and calmly reading it like any other piece of scholarship so as to correctly catch what it says and take its arguments seriously and steel man rather than straw man them before dismissing them.
What he has against me I don’t know. But he indicates he clearly gets emotionally triggered every single time I am mentioned at him (even to the point of acting childishly in comments; examples accumulate, like vowing never to read anything by “that hack,” i.e. me, while claiming to spend hours reading and vlogging OHJ, while then making up excuses not to read my criticisms of his claims, like complaining about wordcount, which is classic avoidance behavior, not rational action).
What would it take to get yourself and Dr. Davis in a discussion together (Mythvision, MDD, wherever)? I saw his video first. Though there were a few snide comments, it also felt like he was trying to be charitable and went out of his way to mention many things he agreed with. And he brought up something that is certainly true for me: I am not well-versed in these subjects enough to understand where either side may be going wrong (because you are both experts).
It wouldn’t need to be a debate. I’d love to see something akin to a live peer-review. Obviously this would work best after Dr. Davis finishes the OHJ. But to have both of you be able to say, “it sounds like you are saying this, which I have disagreements with.” And both can respond, “Ah, well actually this is what I’m meaning to say,” or “I understand that disagreement and these are the reasons I don’t accept that interpretation or supersede that disagreement.”
Davis seems too emotional for that. He flames out whenever I am even mentioned. I cannot imagine how lid-flipped he’d be in person.
But assuming he could control himself and act like a scholar and a gentleman, I’m all for it.
And indeed, I did’t find this video crank and dishonest like I did Gnostic Informant’s or DadPool’s, just a bit lazy and careless, and with an evident cause (his emotional triggering). His methodology is backwards (he starts by claiming I make mistakes in Hebrew and Aramaic, then proceeds to give no examples, suggesting he wrote the first part of his script before the second and didn’t fix it once he found no actual examples of what he was sure he’d find). But he does charitably grant things, and indeed once you subtract all his digressions where he is complaining about something I never said, his video basically just affirms my entire Chapter 4 as correct.
I also think those digressions are great for anyone who wants to know that material. It doesn’t relate to anything I argued, but it’s still correct, and if someone wants that kind of background, he’s the best YouTuber to go to for this. I also noticed (and noted) that rather than just claim I said things I didn’t (like Gnostic Informant did), Davis foregrounds his thought process and explains he only thinks I must have meant something. How he gets there is not a rational methodology, and evinces the laziness I think he’d do well to curb here on out, but he does honestly say that, so viewers at least know he is making inferences. Which is what earns more respect in my book.
Which reminds me: I’ll add remarks in my article making clear I do think Kipp knows what he is doing. His laziness is here selective; it isn’t indicative of any general incompetence, but a situational one unrelated to his professional skills.
Kipp Davies looks like a fine biblical scholar to me; I enjoy his videos and interviews (I haven’t read his scholarly work). But on the issue of Jesus’ historicity he is biased and stubborn: he seems annoyed every time anybody mentions mythicism or your name. Recently he said (in a youtube video, or in the comments section of the video) that the issue of Jesus’ historicity was SETTLED 40 years ago!!! I thought about replying that 40 years is a long time in scholarship to keep dogmas like this one unchallenged. But he is just not rational on this topic, so I decided not to argue with him.
This has been my observation as well (I now have numerous data points on that; both to his being a capable and legit scholar and emotionally dropping all that legitimacy, for whatever reason, when it’s me).
Though I’d be curious what he has in mind by “40 years ago.” What peer-reviewed study was published in the 1980s that he has in mind here? I know of none. There remains: none.
The last peer-reviewed study of historicity that found for historicity was published in 1912 (rev. 1928). The only peer-reviewed studies of historicity published since both found against (Carrier 2014 and Lataster 2019, neither of which could have psychically been refuted in the 1980s).
Usually that decides the matter; not appeals to decades obsolete work (much less a century obsolete). See my recent discussion of this point.
-:-
When cornered, usually what people like Davis will desperately cite are just studies of the historical Jesus, which simply presume historicity. They are not studies of historicity as a question. At best they might devote a few pages to why they embrace that assumption (though even that is rare), but that does not constitute “a study,” least of all one capable of anticipating real studies.
It’s not like Lataster and I didn’t check and thus account for all possible defenses of historicity before us. Even if somehow we hadn’t, our peer reviewers would have made sure we did.
That’s how the process works, and why it matters that our studies are not just amateur pop-market stuff (like Wells or whoever Davis must have in mind), but serious and vetted academic monographs. The first in a hundred years. There is no legitimate reason for him to not be taking that seriously. Only bias can explain why he won’t.
Yes, 40 years is a very specific (and biblical) number. He didn’t elaborate. Maybe he just meant “decades ago”, but I assumed he referred to the time when many biblical characters started to be seriously questioned or deemed to be non-historical/fictional (such as the Patriarchs)… but Jesus was “saved from the flames”.
I found the exact statement (History Valley youtube channel, The Isaiah Scroll With Dr. Kipp Davis, May 23, 2022):
min 42: …I take it as similar to the mythicist arguments for Jesus, where the legwork behind the scholarship is so long-standing and so robust… that you can’t do anything but just kind of roll your eyes and throw up your hands and go: come on! i mean, didn’t we didn’t we pretty much, emphatically, debunk and dismiss all this stuff 40 years ago?
Yeah. Still mysterious. What studies is he talking about?
He seems to have in his head this idea that studies were published “40 years ago” on this specific question. There weren’t any.
The best I can guess is that, since that’s the 1980s, and the 1980s were when George Wells published his thoughts on the subject—none of which under peer review—and scholars just waved that off as uninformed, that therefore that counts as having “debunked” the idea.
But there was no academic study to debunk (Wells didn’t pursue peer review, and was himself underqualified, and as always happens when those conjoin, his work was a mixed bad of bad and good ideas). And no academic study debunked it. Scholars just said “Meh.”
There was no systematic academic study of the historicity question, by either Wells or his dismissers.
I should also add that, if this is what’s going in in Davis’s mind, it’s self-contradictory.
If I debunk an amateur Christian apologist’s version of the historical Jesus (like Lee Strobel, say), and then claim to have debunked any possible historicity for Jesus, Kipp would rightly not accept I had done that. He would agree Lee Strobel’s Jesus didn’t exist. But point out that still leaves many more plausible historical Jesus models, ones not built by amateurs.
But this means consistency requires he cannot reverse this logic when it’s G.A. Wells. If I debunk G.A. Wells’ uninformed and amateur defense of mythicism, I cannot claim to have debunked “all possible mythicism.” Any more than debunking Strobel debunks “all possible historicity.”
Just as Davis would insist we look to credible, peer-reviewed models of a historical Jesus, and not “Strobel,” to be consistent he must insist that he himself look to credible, peer-reviewed models of a mythical Jesus, and not “Wells.”
But there hasn’t been any of those in a hundred years. Carrier 2014 and Lataster 2019 are it. And so far, we have no competing studies. Because the last study defending historicity against serious academic attack was also a hundred years ago. Not “forty.”
I watched the video you and Godless Engineer did responding to Kip Davis. You and GE had a disagreement about whether Davis thinks the Talmud is atomizing Isaiah 53:4 or if Davis is misquoting you about the messiah dying. I think I’ve deciphered what Kip Davis is saying. If you remove the confusing parts Davis said from the surrounding context (I’m being even more charitable than you here), the context suggests he thinks the Talmud is atomizing Isaiah 53:4, but not in the way that GE thinks. Davis isn’t saying the Talmud says the suffering man in Isaiah 53:4 isn’t the suffering servant of the rest of Isaiah, he’s saying that the Talmud says that what Isaiah 53:4 says about the messiah is his name, and that it’s not saying the suffering man in 53:4 is the messiah, like despite the passage talking about a suffering man, the passage actually contains some secret code about the messiah’s name unrelated to the suffering servant. To show this, I’ll quote Davis but I’ll put in brackets the confusing parts so that you can ignore those parts and make sense of the rest:
“You’ll notice there are several scriptures cited in rabbinic tractate. I hope you will have also noticed that where these texts are cited this is not with reference to larger sections, rather to only individual keywords and phrases that appear within these fragments of the text. [Carrier claims that the suffering servant who dies in Isaiah 53 is the messiah and that this messiah will endure great suffering before his death. No.] You’ll notice that only this one verse from Isaiah chapter 53:4 is quoted. This means that the rabbi’s were only interested in what this one verse had to communicate about the messiah [and you’ll also notice that this one verse about the messiah has nothing to do at all with the suffering servant presented in Isaiah 53]. This tractate concerns the name of the messiah, nothing more.”
If I am correct about what Davis is arguing, I’d love to get your response to this. You did say in the video that the rabbis do not atomize the texts from their scriptures. Could you expound on this to show that Davis is wrong? Are the other citations of scripture that concern the messiah’s name in that same passage of the Talmud taking the surrounding context of those scriptures into consideration, and if yes, can we infer more information about what they expected of the messiah from those other passages (Genesis 49:10, Psalms 72:17, Jeremiah 16:13, Lamentation 1:16 etc.)?
That’s as plausible an interpretation of Davis as any.
But it’s still non-responsive for three reasons (pretty much the same ones):
(1) The verse reads (emphasis added): “Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted.” There is no way for any Rabbi to think the name of the messiah can derive from this without also thinking the messiah is the one being talked about here, and thus believe that the messiah is the “he” who will “suffer” for God’s purpose, a.k.a. God’s suffering servant. The verses before and after simply continue the paragraph with the same pronouns, extending the problem.
There is no evidence any Jews “atomized” texts to the point that you could extract data from a passage that ignores the rest of the passage (even authors of pesherim; and the Talmudic rabbis aren’t necessarily following specifically that procedure rather than just standard exegesis anyway, as the Midrashim and Haggadot demonstrate).
There is no logical way to do that either. You can’t look at this passage and say, “Okay this word describing this man refers to the messiah, but this man isn’t the messiah.” That would be illogical; and inexplicable—how would they then ever arrive at the conclusion that this refers to the messiah, if they conclude it isn’t talking about the messiah? Indeed, the only reason to think 53:4 refers to the messiah, is that the figure it refers to in those other verses of that same description describe that person doing messianic things.
(2) There is also no evidence any Jews atomized texts even to single verses, much less single words. It is common for scholars to assume they are atomizing to verses (I’ve never seen any scholar claim it’s even to words), but like many assumptions in this field, it rarely stands on evidence. Just because, for example, the authors of the Melchizedek scroll linked single passages in Daniel 9 and Isaiah 52-53 does not mean they did not understand that the context also tracks in. Indeed, the context is the best explanation for why they think these verses connect in the first place. Single verses are being cited only as abbreviated notation—reference marks.
For example, in one translation of the Melchizedek Scroll, we see pesher logic arrive at this conclusion:
You can see each line uses a single verse as notation, to indicate to the reader that these sections of text refer to the same person (so they are concluding). They are not saying these verses are to be taken out of their context. When they say one thing or another “is the one about whom it is written” they more likely mean the whole person written about, and then give a single verse just as an index marker.
Apart from the fact that there is no evidence they are doing otherwise, this is the only thing that explains all the resulting coincidences. That “the messenger” of Is. 52:7 is the “anointed of spirit” of Daniel 9:25 (or whichever) tracks in a lot of coincidences with the rest of the commentary (the “messenger” in Is. 52 does a lot of the things they are talking about the messiah doing elsewhere; the “anointed” of Dan. 9:25 was being calculated to be the future messiah using the timetable in the rest of Daniel 9; and so on). It is hard to imagine they took all this other material, but then suddenly forgot they were doing that, and took these isolated verses as not talking about the agents in their respective contexts but, inexplicably, entirely different people (before switching back to their respective narratives).
There is no evidence they ever read these texts that way; and it is improbable they would, given all the inexplicable coincidences that would then entail.
(3) This is all corroborated by converging evidence. Davis himself is “atomizing” evidence, isolating a piece and trying to remove it while ignoring all the other evidence, and then switching to the next piece, and so on. When as a whole, the convergence of all this evidence argues against his entire project.
He admits the dying messiah ben Joseph is in Sukkah, for example, and can’t deny there is a dying messiah in Daniel 9, and he can’t claim the pesher author thinks Daniel 9 is talking about Onias III because they clearly think Daniel is talking about a future, not a past, event (this is evident across many scrolls; also Josephus). And there are also the links between Wisdom of Solomon 2 and 5 and Isaiah 52-53 (again a common argument in the scholarship Davis will have to not ignore but answer). And the other passage in the Talmud affirming the messiah would suffer (exactly as the rest of Is. 52:4 says—gosh, where do you think they got that idea?). And there is the evidence in the targum of Isaiah. And there is all the other evidence (this dying messiah motif pops up across medieval Judaica, clearly in connection with the same ideas in the Talmud, and so on). And now twelve scholars have come to this same conclusion: the convergence of evidence is on this being a thing.
To get all this to go away, Davis has to refute all the arguments and evidence of all twelve scholars, including all the evidence in my section (not just what he cherry picks), and he has to produce evidence (not assertions; “argument to authority” is a fallacy: if an authority he cites has no evidence to present for their assertions, then Davis has no evidence for the assertion—so he has to present the evidence) that Jewish interpreters (even in the Talmud!) atomized even just passages, much less single words in single passages (where somehow a word is about someone in that passage but they read it as magically, inexplicably, about someone else, switching between subjects mid-sentence and back again, as if they thought scripture was riddled with equivocation fallacies).
He also has to overcome the improbability of coincidences. For example, the author of the Melchizedek scroll believed Isaiah 52:2 and Dan. 9:25 referred to the same person. The authors of that and other scrolls routinely thought Daniel 9 was about a future messiah and used other verses in 9 to that end. So Davis needs it to be the case that the author of the Melchizedek scroll magically forgot all this, and inexplicably thought only verse 25 related to the future figure he is talking about, even though that would chafe against logic as it would then contradict the fact that they thought the rest of it did, too. Likewise the fact that the rest of Isaiah 52-53 connects with things they are saying (see my Element 6 and Element 18, which Davis glossed over, though he might tackle them, and Melchizedek in his next video, or so he has hinted).
And all that, with zero evidence for the converse thesis (there is no passage anywhere where any Jewish author says “no one believes the messiah will suffer and die,” that is entirely an inference of modern scholars).
This all looks like apologetics—an effort to make something go away—rather than looking at the convergence of evidence and triangulating all of its trajectory to detect what all this evidence is pointing at. “Don’t look up” as the movie has it.
But keep one thing in focus: Davis is slanderously implying this is just me, that I am making all this up. But I am following expert scholarship and just relating it to my readers. There are even more I could cite than I did in OHJ. Hence my list in the present article. Davis isn’t arguing with me. He is arguing with his entire field.
Dr. Carrier you stated:
Followed by…
I’m a bit confused here. In the first statement you seem to be acknowledging that there is a belief among modern scholars (albeit a false one in our opinion) that concurs with Davis’ position on this point. But you then conclude that he is “arguing with his ENTIRE field”.
That seems to be a contradiction.
Wouldn’t have been more accurate to say something like “Davis is in agreement with other modern scholars in his field on this topic, but they are all mistaken”?
Granted. I did not mean literally the entire field. I meant that his field approved my conclusion twelve times, and thus he isn’t arguing just with me, but with an entire field that considers this conclusion credible. This does not require the entire field to share the same conclusion. It only requires the entire field to agree it’s a plausible position and not “a failure to read Hebrew” or whatever ridiculous accusations of incompetence he is leveling at dozens of experts.
I don’t want to be a shit stirrer … but, Kipp Davis has been quite active in the comments section and has made a fairly specific, non-specific accusation that might deserve a rebutal.
“I have discovered that the problem with depending on Carrier’s citations in his footnotes is that he pathologically misrepresents what the scholars in his references are actually saying. For example, I was surprised to see an article by one of my good friends, Marty Abegg, appearing in support of Carrier’s reading of 11QMelchizedek in a footnote. And yet, Abegg’s reading is exactly opposite to what Carrier wants to argue. He is consistently “padding” his citations and bibliography in this manner.” – @DrKippDavis
In reply to @vetamur
Scroll down to the post marked with “Highlighted Reply”.
Having checked the cites in OHJ, assuming he’s refering to that and not some other work of yours, this seems at best a wildly careless accusation on Davis’ part.
It is. He has been slandering me pretty regularly. It’s enough that discerning people like you check and find this out. Now you know which of us you can trust—and which you can’t.
I don’t waste time on shittalking comments myself. He’s proven himself consistently unreliable in that venue (the article you are commenting on here even closes with an example of exactly that, as proof of concept). If he says something in videos I’ll address it (if I haven’t already). But I’m wasting no more time on him than that.
I do have a major research trip this month. I’ll be spending a week at the UC Berkeley libraries (as an almunus) and their neighboring Graduate Theological Union (my old stomping grounds; a lot of OHJ was researched there). I have a lot of targets to acquire (I’m researching several new articles for peer review); but on my list is to collect quotations across the peer reviewed literature disagreeing with Davis, to publish on my blog, just for special kicks.
He can’t claim I’m misrepresenting these scholars when their actual words will be there for all to read.
Dr Carrier. On a completely unrelated note I’m curious what you take is concerning the meaning of Jesus “scribbling in the sand” as told in the story in John 8.
It is unclear to many the significance of Jesus (or the Jesus character) in that story. Of course that hasn’t stopped apologists from coming up with all kinds of reasons that fit their narrative.
I found this link to such an apologist explanation which points to some “Oral Law” which supposedly requires that both the man AND the woman would be brought to the Nicanor temple gates and accused.
And secondly that the priest was required to then stoop down and write the law that had been broken, along with the names of the accused, in the dust of the floor of the Temple (which Jesus did).
https://preachitteachit.org/articles/detail/what-did-jesus-really-write-in-the-sand/
I’m curious what you can make of this scribbling in the sand and if this or some other explanation possibly explains it.
I always thought that maybe the author had just added that to the story for dramattic effect in some way.
Finally someone suggested that the fact that this is even in the story is evidence that the story must be true. That there must’ve been some reason that has long since been forgotten makes sense, whereas someone writing a fable would have no reason to add that element to a story which didn’t add to the story in any meaningful way.
What would your response be from that aspect as well?
I haven’t looked into it. I wouldn’t trust Christian apologists to tell the truth or get anything right. And he cites no sources. And that’s not a good sign. But that doesn’t mean he’s wrong. It just means you can’t trust him. You’d need to see if this is covered in any proper peer reviewed study anywhere.
Since John is hopelessly late, rewritten by three different authors over decades, and they didn’t even write that (it is an interpolation after all that, so by a fourth author, latest of all), I’ve never seen any value in researching its construction or meaning. So I’m least informed about what the scholarship says about that as far as the contents of John goes.
One common tactic that I see from a apologists (e.g. Pastors) is to make reference to “Oral Law”, or sometimes “Church Tradition”.
Firstly this seems a bit hypocritical to me as Chistians will commonly ask out loud “Is it Biblical?” (meaning actually in the Bible) when someone proposes something about ultimate truths. That appears to be their litmus test. But they seem to have no problem giving authority to some things outside the Bible (e.g. “Oral Law” or “Church Tradition”) when it seems to suit their purpose or narrative.
And as we know “Church Tradition” doesn’t really amount to anything. Al that it means is that at some point some church/religion proposed or attached themselves to some supposed historical fact or idea and it has managed to stick over the years.
But they like to use it to fill in any dogmatic gaps or try to give some authority to their particular religous narrative or ideology.