Carrier proposes the NT Jesus based on Philo's Jesus angel

[Secret Alias]

branch out = rise

[Bernard Muller]

Q for Bernard: You say that the Greek passage should be interpreted as: and he[the Branch] shall spring up from his[Jesus, son of Josedec's] stem,

I never thought or written the "stem" refers to Jesus, son of Josedec. Actually, I think the "stem" most likely refer to the royal Davidic lineage of "Rises", alluding to Zerubbabel (from http://historical-jesus.info/17.html):
My third argument: In Zechariah 6, God is asking "Zechariah" that Jesus the high priest (ch. 3), son of Josedec, to be the keeper of crowns (on his head) and wait for a still undeclared man ("Rises") to "spring up from his stem" and then rebuild the temple and becoming the king (the temple of Jerusalem had been destroyed by the Babylonians and still not rebuilt yet).
Then the future (human) king (named the "Rises"), the one that Carrier thinks Philo referred to, is not Jesus (son of Josedec) but someone else. According to the context, Zechariah might have thought (or/and hoped) that Zerubbabel, a descendant of David, would be that one: "The hands of Zerubbabel have laid the foundation of this house; his hands shall also finish it;" (Zec 4:9).

Cordially, Bernard

[andrewcriddle]

There was an earlier thread viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1826 which may be relevant.

Andrew Criddle

[Ben C. Smith]

Many people have seen the parallels between the language of Philo and the language used in some New Testament documents.
However neither Zechariah nor Philo use the name “Jesus”.

You are correct about Philo. But Zechariah LXX uses Ἰησοῦς, which is the Greek rendering of Joshua, the Latin transliteration of which is Iesus, which gives us Jesus.

Ben.

[TedM]

Q for Bernard: You say that the Greek passage should be interpreted as: and he[the Branch] shall spring up from his[Jesus, son of Josedec's] stem,

I never thought or written the "stem" refers to Jesus, son of Josedec. Actually, I think the "stem" most likely refer to the royal Davidic lineage of "Rises", alluding to Zerubbabel (from http://historical-jesus.info/17.html):
My third argument: In Zechariah 6, God is asking "Zechariah" that Jesus the high priest (ch. 3), son of Josedec, to be the keeper of crowns (on his head) and wait for a still undeclared man ("Rises") to "spring up from his stem" and then rebuild the temple and becoming the king (the temple of Jerusalem had been destroyed by the Babylonians and still not rebuilt yet).
Then the future (human) king (named the "Rises"), the one that Carrier thinks Philo referred to, is not Jesus (son of Josedec) but someone else. According to the context, Zechariah might have thought (or/and hoped) that Zerubbabel, a descendant of David, would be that one: "The hands of Zerubbabel have laid the foundation of this house; his hands shall also finish it;" (Zec 4:9).

Cordially, Bernard

Guess I"m lost. It says 'his stem', who is 'his'? Surely it is Jesus, son of Josedec, right? So, how does Jesus relate to the stem?

In any case, other interpretations don't include 'stem' or anything that require a future king. I therefore can see some basis for Carrier's comment:

We know Zechariah meant this in some way to be Jesus ben Jehozadak, the legendary first high priest of the second temple (as I'll discuss shortly). But by implying this event may have occurred in heaven, interpreters could think differently. And we know some did

[Bernard Muller]

"And thou shalt take silver and gold, and make crowns, and thou shalt put them upon the head of Jesus the son of Josedec the high priest; 12 and thou [Zechariah] shalt say to him [Jesus son of Josedec], Thus saith the Lord Almighty;
Behold the man whose name is the Branch [better translated as "Rises" or "Rising" or "Dawn"]; and he shall spring up from his stem, and build the house of the Lord
Grammatically, "his" refers to the last person mentioned before. And that person is "Rises", not Jesus son of Josedec.
Furthermore, it is God, through Zechariah, asking to pronounce these words to Jesus, son of Josedec. If God wanted to attribute the "stem" to Jesus, son of Josedec, the 'his" would have been replaced by "your".

Cordially, Bernard

[MrMacSon]

Behold the man whose name is the Branch [better translated as "Rises" or "Rising" or "Dawn"]; and he shall spring up from his stem, and build the house of the Lord

Grammatically, "his" refers to the last person mentioned before. And that person is "Rises", not Jesus son of Josedec.

Carrier writes on pages 81-82 (Element 6), and pages 200, 203 (Element 40) of On the Historicity of Jesus:

[Element 6] In the Septuagint text, Zechariah is commanded in a vision to place the crown of kingship upon 'Jesus' (Zech. 6.11) and to say, immediately upon doing so, that 'Jehovah declares' that this Jesus is 'the man named ''Rising" and he shall rise up from his place below, and he shall build the House of the Lord'.

[TedM]

Ok, got it. Seems an odd phrase to me.

[Secret Alias]

I've mentioned this many times before at this and the previous forum. Anatolê does NOT mean the direction of east. It means the newly risen sun, or otherwise the first appearance of anything at all. It only means the east in the phrase anatolê hêliou literally “the appearance of the sun”, and even then only with the right preposition in front, e.g. en anatolêi hêliou “in the east”. It does NOT mean the East (as some translations have it), as anyone with any feeling for Greek will see.

The word can mean the time or point of rising of a constellation over the horizon; the Ascendant (as an astrological term); the first half of the morning; teeth coming through; the first sprouting of new grass above ground; the first appearance of a river above ground. The nearest I can get to an English equivalent for it in this passage is the upwelling or the first shining.

Yes, it does mean the Logos. Proverbs 8:22: The Lord acquired me (or brought me into existence, wrought me) as the first (or at the start of, reshit) his ways (not “his act of creation”).

Tsade-Mem-Ḥet does not mean a branch in Hebrew. It means a new shoot. There are two meanings of the root in Hebrew and in Aramaic. In Hebrew and Palestinian Aramaic it means to sprout, except here in Hebrew. In Syriac it means shining, but occasionally means sprouting or a sprout - cf. root Tsade-Mem-Ḥet in Syriac. Have a look at Malachi 3:20. It would definitely be a mistranslation to say either the Hebrew or the Greek word means the sun in Zechariah 6:12, but it would be correct to say that in the right context they can both mean the first appearance of the sun, and a suitable English equivalent in this verse would be “the newly-risen sun”.

[MrMacSon]

The Greek Septuagint has this for Zechariah 11:

"And thou shalt take silver and gold, and make crowns, and thou shalt put them upon the head of Jesus the son of Josedec the high priest;

SO, can we agree that the name Jesus appeared in the Greek version of Zechariah -- Yes or No?

Next, what was Philo quoting from?

"Behold the man whose name is the Branch" is found in Zechariah, and nowhere else in the OT. Philo used the OT writings, and not sparingly.

SO, was Philo referencing some OTHER text with the exact same wording, or is it likely that he was referring to the verse in Zechariah?

The argument that Carrier puts in On the Historicity of Jesus, as cited by Ben Smith, seems quite valid -

Carrier writes on pages 81-82 (Element 6), and pages 200, 203 (Element 40) of On the Historicity of Jesus:

[Element 6] In the Septuagint text, Zechariah is commanded in a vision to place the crown of kingship upon 'Jesus' (Zech. 6.11) and to say, immediately upon doing so, that 'Jehovah declares' that this Jesus is 'the man named ''Rising" and he shall rise up from his place below, and he shall build the House of the Lord'.

The key noun is anatole, which is often translated 'East' because it refers to where the sun rises (hence 'East'), but such a translation obscures the fact that the actual word used is the noun 'rising' or 'rise' (as in 'sunrise'), which was not always used in reference to a compass point, and whose real connotations are more obvious when translated literally. In fact by immediately using the cognate verb 'to rise up' (anatelei, and that explicitly 'from his place below') it's clear the Septuagint translator understood the word to mean 'rise' (and Philo echoes the same pun in his interpretation, and thus also understood: see Element 40).

We know Zechariah meant this in some way to be Jesus ben Jehozadak, the legendary first high priest of the second temple (as I'll discuss shortly). But by implying this event may have occurred in heaven, interpreters could think differently. And we know some did (Element 40).

If this 'Jesus Rising' were connected to the dying servant who atones for all sins in Isaiah (and perhaps also with Daniel or I IQI 3), it would be easy to read out of this almost the entire core Christian gospel. Connecting the two figures in just that way would be natural to do: this same 'Jesus' who is named 'Rising' (or, in both places, 'Branch' in the extant Hebrew, as in 'Davidic heir', or so both contexts imply) appears earlier in Zechariah 3, where 'Jesus' is also implied to be the one called ' Rising' (in 3.8).

Both are also called 'Jesus the high priest' throughout Zechariah 3 and 6, hence clearly the same person. And there he is also called God's 'servant'. And it is said that through him (in some unspecified way) all sin in the world will be cleansed 'in a single day' (Zech. 3.9).

Both concepts converge with Isaiah 52-53, which is also about God's 'servant', whose death cleanses the world's sins (Isa. 52.13 and 53.11), which of course would thus happen in a single day (as alluded in Isa. 52.6). And as we saw earlier, Jews may have been linking this dying 'servant' to the dying 'Christ' killed in Daniel 9 (in 11Qt3), whose death is also said to correspond closely with a conclusive 'end of sin' in the world (Dan. 9.24-26), and both figures (in Daniel and 11Qt3) were linked to an expected 'atonement in a single day' after a period of 490 years, whose starting point one needed only to discover in order to predict the end of the world (see Element 5).

These dots are so easily connected, and with such convincing force for anyone enamored of the thought process generating the Jewish pesherim as a literary genre, that it would be astonishing if no Jews had thought of this.

....

[Element 40] In fact, the Christian idea of a preexistent spiritual son of God called the Logos, who was God's true high priest in heaven, was also not a novel idea but already held by some pre-Christian Jews; and this preexistent spiritual son of God had already been explicitly connected with a celestial Jesus figure in the OT (discussed in Element 6), and therefore some Jews already believed there was a supernatural son of God named Jesus because Paul's contemporary Philo interprets the messianic prophecy of Zech. 6.12 in just such a way. This is the prophecy about a high priest crowned king in heaven named 'Jesus Rising', God's 'servant', who will 'rise' from below and be given godly authority and somehow be involved in cleansing the world of sin.

As discussed in Element 6, in Zechariah 6 we have a man named Jesus being crowned king, 'rising' from his place below, and building up God's house, which is a feasible description of our Jesus; and this same Jesus appearing in Zechariah 6 also appears in Zechariah 3, where he is given supreme authority over God's domain (just as our Jesus was), and somehow ends all sins in a single day just as 'our Jesus' does), and this same Jesus is in both passages called a high priest (as was our Jesus). Discussing this Jesus figure in Zechariah, Philo argues:

• "'Behold, the man named Rising!' is a very novel appellation indeed, if you consider it as spoken of a man who is compounded of body and souI. But if you look upon it as applied to that incorporeal being who is none other than the divine image, you will then agree that the name of 'Rising' has been given to him with great felicity. For the Father of the Universe has caused him to rise up as the eldest son, whom, in another passage, he calls the firstborn. And he who is thus born, imitates the ways of his father."

In the same book, Philo says that even if no one is 'worthy to be called a Son of God', we should still 'labor earnestly to be adorned according to his firstborn Logos, the eldest of his angels, the ruling archangel of many names'. Elsewhere Philo adds that 'there are two Temples of God, and one is this cosmos, wherein the High Priest is his Firstborn Son, the divine Logos' (whom Philo elsewhere identifies as the primordial 'image of God').

....

I have heard doubts whether Philo (or his source) was aware of the whole sentence he quotes from Zechariah and thus of the name 'Jesus' being in it. But such doubts are unwarranted. Nearly the whole sentence in Zechariah, in the Greek translation quoted by Philo, reads:

• "You shall make crowns, and set them upon the head of Jesus the son of Jehovah the Righteous, the high priest, and say to him, 'Thus says the almighty Lord, "'Behold, the man whose name is Rising (anatole)" and he shall rise up [anatelei] from his place below and shall build the house of the Lord, and receive power, and sit and rule upon his throne'" (Zech. 6.11-13).

The whole sentence (of which Philo quotes only the part here in bold thus identifies the man spoken of as both God's son and high priest, and in the very same sentence names him Jesus. This creates a series of coincidences far too improbable to imagine on any other conclusion than that Philo and Paul were talking about the same figure: Jesus the Son of Jehovah the Righteous, the image of God, God's agent of creation, God's high priest and firstborn son (see Elements 6 and I0).

(I cite these passages so as to present a fuller view of the argument at hand, not in order to endorse it). Carrier appears to be arguing that, because Zechariah "in some way" thought of Jesus/Joshua ben Jehozadak as the man named "East" or "Rising", therefore Philo must have thought this figure was named Jesus/Joshua.

Ben.