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

[Secret Alias]

But apologists aren't interested in truth beyond their presupposition or preconceptions of what truth is. I would have thought that atheists strictly speaking were supposed to be above that. My definition of 'atheist' (having grown up in an atheist household) was 'a belief that there is no God.' I naively associated 'disinterest' with any atheistic interpretation of religion. The apologist argumentation of Carrier and some others really speaks to antitheist or anti-Christian tendencies. It's no longer enough to simply say I don't believe there's a God or there isn't a God. You focus your attention on apologetic arguments because you are really at war with religion. Your horns are locked. The world of scholarship now is divided into those 'for' or (even secretly) 'against' the 'dominant' beliefs we 'inherited from religion.' It's a war. Objectivity is a distraction from 'the task at hand' which is to 'expose' the 'truth' about religion - the truth that religion is stupid or bad or destructive to the lives of human beings.

But there is a sense that 'the truth' is already known prior to any investigation. That's why there is this Godfrey-like tendency to scan through books looking for ammunition rather than to simply absorb the author's work in toto.

[Peter Kirby]

... simply absorb the author's work in toto.

There's a Latin phrase for that - sine ira et studio.

It comes from Tacitus' Annals. Learn something new every day.

[Giuseppe]

Here Carrier shows agains his proverbial certainty that Philo indirectly called ''Jesus'' the Logos.


http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/9710

What is new in his argument is the impressive evidence supporting the strict identity between the Jesus of Paul and the Logos/Anthropos of Philo.

As the Carrier's argument goes, it is so much an impossible coincidence, all the other ''coincidences'' being peaceful, which it is raised only the mere possibility that Philo called indirectly ''Jesus'' his Logos *, that this possibility becomes ipso facto a genuine probability, rather than resorting to the weak ''explanation'' of the coincidence-too-ipossibile-to-be-true.



* i.e. the mere possiblity of reading our evidence according to the specific way meant by Carrier, i.e. Johua ben Zechariah being the particular figure hailed as Anatole.

[MrMacSon]

Here Carrier shows agains his proverbial certainty that Philo indirectly called ''Jesus'' the Logos.

http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/9710

What is new in his argument is the impressive evidence supporting the strict identity between the Jesus of Paul and the Logos/Anthropos of Philo.

As the Carrier's argument goes, it is so much an impossible coincidence, all the other ''coincidences'' being peaceful, which it is raised only the mere possibility that Philo called indirectly ''Jesus'' his Logos *, that this possibility becomes ipso facto a genuine probability, rather than resorting to the weak ''explanation'' of the coincidence-too-ipossibile-to-be-true.

* i.e. the mere possiblity of reading our evidence according to the specific way meant by Carrier, i.e. Johua ben Zechariaha being the particular figure hailed as Anatole.

a do you mean Joshua/Yeshua ben Jehozadak/Josedak?

Note also that Carrier cites and discusses

• Stefan Nordgaard (2011) “Paul’s Appropriation of Philo’s Theory of ‘Two Men’ in 1 Corinthians 15.45–49” New Testament Studies 57, pp 348-365

and provided a link to the entire paper.

[Giuseppe]

ehm, yes, obviously I mean that idiot of Joshua son of Jozedek mentioned in Zech. etc.

Indeed a chopped and re-chopped topic, but I want to make sure that Peter and Secret Alias continue to think the same way again, you never know.

[Peter Kirby]

Here Carrier shows agains his proverbial certainty that Philo indirectly called ''Jesus'' the Logos.

http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/9710

What is new in his argument is the impressive evidence supporting the strict identity between the Jesus of Paul and the Logos/Anthropos of Philo.

As the Carrier's argument goes, it is so much an impossible coincidence, all the other ''coincidences'' being peaceful, which it is raised only the mere possibility that Philo called indirectly ''Jesus'' his Logos *, that this possibility becomes ipso facto a genuine probability, rather than resorting to the weak ''explanation'' of the coincidence-too-ipossibile-to-be-true.

* i.e. the mere possiblity of reading our evidence according to the specific way meant by Carrier, i.e. Johua ben Zechariaha being the particular figure hailed as Anatole.

a do you mean Joshua/Yeshua ben Jehozadak/Josedak?

Note also that Carrier cites and discusses

• Stefan Nordgaard (2011) “Paul’s Appropriation of Philo’s Theory of ‘Two Men’ in 1 Corinthians 15.45–49” New Testament Studies 57, pp 348-365

and provided a link to the entire paper.

Here Carrier shows agains his proverbial certainty that Philo indirectly called ''Jesus'' the Logos.

http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/9710

This new blog article discusses at length the fact that Philo called the Logos "man," Greek anthropos.

The only time that this blog article touches upon the beaten-to-death horse of the speculation that Yeshua ben Jehozadak was the same as the "Logos" for the Jewish philosopher Philo, it does so by a short quotation of an earlier blog article, according to my trusty CTRL-F skills.

As I wrote recently in Everything You Need to Know about Coincidences:

[W]hen we look for evidence that the Jewish scholar Philo understood a character named Jesus in Zechariah 6 to be the same archangel Paul thinks his Jesus is, [we note] that the alternative explanation requires so many coincidences to have occurred as to be extraordinarily improbable (On the Historicity of Jesus, pp. 200-05), including the fact that Paul and Philo assign all the same unusual attributes to the same figure, and the fact that Philo said he made the connection because the archangel in question was already known to him as the Son of God and the High Priest, and the only person in the Zechariah passage he quotes who is identified as the Son of God and the High Priest, is Jesus.

Indeed Carrier does "again" show his "certainty" here. And... so what? A stopped clock is wrong thousands of times every day.

[MrMacSon]

In the OP, I cited the NT passages that Carrier mentioned in the video presentation (that motivated me to post) -

• Romans 8:29
  2 Corinthians 4:4
  1 Corinthians 8:6
  Hebrews 2:17, 4:14

In this latest blog-post, Carrier has cited other Pauline-NT passages in support of his argument -

• Philippians 2:6-7;
  
• 1 Corinthians 8:6;
  
• 1 Corinthians 10:4

• "Paul believed Jesus was a heavenly man before he acquired a body that could die (Philippians 2:6-7; 1 Corinthians 8:6; 1 Corinthians 10:4)"
  
  http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/9710

• Galatians 1:11-12;
  
• Romans 16:25-26

• [Jews] imagined an angel putting on a mortal body first, so as to conform to Jewish expectations about death and resurrection. And that simply does not require an actual angel to actually do that, for any Jews to believe that it happened. Once the angel told them it happened (Galatians 1:11-12), and told them the scriptures confirmed it (Romans 16:25-26), no more reason to believe it was needed. No historical man was needed, any more than a historical eternal archangel was needed (Philippians 2:6-7).

• 1 Corinthians 15:35-53, etc, as cited in this quote -

  Paul says Jesus was not resurrected in a human body (1 Corinthians 15:35-53), nor did he have a human body before his incarnation (Philippians 2:6-7; 1 Corinthians 8:6; 1 Corinthians 10:4). He only was given a human body at one time so he could be subject to the elements and thus capable of dying (Philippians 2:7-8; Galatians 4; Romans 8:3 & 8:29). In no way does this require any of this to have actually happened. Paul and the Apostles need merely have believed it happened. And as Paul makes clear, only visions and scripture ever convinced them it had (Galatians 1:11-12; 1 Corinthians 15:3-8; Romans 16:25-26). This is the case even in the epistle of 1 Peter.

Moreover,

... a passage where Paul is referencing a theological doctrine we know was present in Judaism, because it is also discussed by the Jewish theologian Philo, a contemporary of Paul (yet who was writing in ignorance of Paul or Christianity or any of its innovations).

The key passage is 1 Corinthians 15:45:

• So also it is written, “The first man, Adam, was made into a living soul; the last Adam, into a life-giving spirit.”

and

the Jewish scriptures they [early Christians] revered and built their gospel on were not exactly the same as ours today, but included versions of books different from ours, and entire books no longer extant

Finally

Nordgaard points out that the “two man” theory Paul uses here actually comes from Philo (or predecessors of both who developed this theory), and Philo was perfectly comfortable talking about an earthly “man” and a heavenly “man,” even when the latter never had a mortal body of flesh at all nor ever resided below the heavens! So much for McGrath’s “expert” claim that no Jews would ever say that. Foot, mouth.

As Nordgaard explains:

• "Philo developed his theory of the two men on the basis of the creation narratives given in the book of Genesis. As is well known, Genesis offers two different accounts of the creation of the human species (one in 1:26-27 and another in 2:7). While this has suggested to modern scholarship that the text of Genesis has come down to us as a compound of different sources, it suggested to Philo that God had created two categorically different ‘types of people’ (Leg. 1.31): a ‘heavenly man’ (ouranios anthrôpos), ‘fashioned in the image of God’ (cf. Gen. 1:26-27), and an ‘earthly man’ (gêinos anthrôpos), ‘moulded out of clay’ (cf. Gen 2:7)." [Ibid. p. 353]

Philo in fact says this “heavenly man” is the first created being and viceroy of God, the “image” of God, God’s “firstborn son,” high priest of God’s celestial temple, the supreme archangel, whom God tasked with the rest of creation, and who governs the universe on God’s behalf. Philo says this Being is the Logos. The same exact being the Gospel of John says Jesus is. But Paul was already saying this.

There is quite a lot in Norgaard's article that show other people have published similar views.

.

[neilgodfrey]

Philo introduces his reflections on the heavenly firstborn Logos, a Jesus renamed Rises, or a Jesus who was a symbolic representation of the heavenly Rises, with this:

• I have also heard of one of the companions of Moses having uttered such a speech as this . . . .

It sounds like Philo is referring to one of the many Jewish interpretations and speculations about the biblical figures that in this instance happened to support his primary theme.

I will reserve judgment on what Philo means by this phrase until I've seen an actual analysis of what Philo would have meant by "one of the companions of Moses" here.

It’s an interesting mix: we have persons in the bible narrative being interpreted as allegories; we have a Jesus who is said to be the Rises/Dawn Rising in Zechariah,

The high priest Joshua is not said to be the 'Branch' or 'Dawn Rising' in the book of Zechariah or its Greek translation.

Joshua is at least strongly inferred to be the sign of the Branch/Rising, and given what we know of the way "midrashic" interpretations worked in the Second Temple era . . . .

in Philo

The high priest Joshua is not said to be 'Dawn Rising' in Philo.

We know Philo does not make the connection with Joshua explicit but he is drawing on a passage that does link the two -- and that's the history of Second Temple "midrashic" readings. In Paul we find the same sorts of interpretations -- concepts near source passages may not be explicitly cited but we know from the wider collection that connections were being made nonetheless (e.g. Jesus is both "seed" and "Isaac".) We are not suggesting Philo was a proto-Christian, but that he is evidence of the constellations of interpretations of the day.

and in the Gospel of Luke;

Jesus (Joshua) of Nazareth is connected to 'Dawn Rising' in Luke.

And Luke apparently took that image from Zechariah where it is linked with another Jesus.

he is the son of Josedec whom Spong and others have noted is close to “Joseph”;

This is why arguments like this are worthless. Carrier says it's "the Son of God" when it's actually the son of a particular man, in a Jewish world where lots of names include "God" in them. Godfrey says Spong say it's close to "Joseph." None of these strained observations get us closer to making Philo say what he does not say.

Worthless? Depends on what you are using them for, yes? Son of God is very often (mostly) a title or description of a human figure (unlike "Son of Man" which is, ironically, a divine title in Second Temple interpretations), so to say it refers to a particular man does not undercut the argument.

We are not interested so much in the precisely single correct grammatical reading but in what we now of how Second Temple Jews went about interpreting their texts. There was for them no one absolute authoritative meaning for their texts.

the same is said to be the firstborn Son of God and Logos (Word) with God from the beginning; there is also suggestion of this Jesus being an anointed one (messiah) and having been attacked by and rescued from Satan to be raised (from “below”) to glory.

A lot of interesting, if speculative at this point, stuff. What it shows is yet another set of passages that could have fed the ideas from which Christianity took root.

http://vridar.org/2012/08/01/a-pre-chri ... nly-jesus/

The speculation on roots of the Christian sect is interesting but not pertinent to the interpretation of Philo.

The point of interpreting Philo is to understand the context from which Christianity presumably emerged so there is relevance.

It's all very interesting, I'm sure.

Philo didn't name the Logos "Jesus" in any way, shape, or form.

There is no question. We know he didn't. But the implication of this comment misses the abundant evidence we have for how Second Temple thinkers played "midrashic" games with their Scriptures.

Agreed there is nothing hard and fast by way of black and white identification of a Jewish sect with specific views, but what we do have is much convergent evidence for the way the Scriptures were being interpreted by some Jews of the day.

These sorts of studies are par for the course (e.g. Hengel's identification of the Suffering Servant of Isaiah in both Daniel and Zechariah and in other noncanonical texts where he appears as a divine figure) but it seems there are sometimes different rules imposed on anyone using these sorts of details in the service of arguing for Christian origins in a way that makes the addition of a historical Jesus complete with his disciple's Easter experience unnecessary additions to the process.

It seems that everyone from apologists to critical scholars can explore the pre-Christian Second Temple "midrashic" sectarian interpretaions of motifs and texts so long it is understood however tacitly that they all point to the Church's interpretation of the resurrection experiences of the disciples. But let's not ever skip that middle man . . . .

[Peter Kirby]

Joshua is at least strongly inferred to be the sign of the Branch/Rising

We know Philo does not make the connection with Joshua explicit but he is drawing on a passage that does link the two

Philo didn't name the Logos "Jesus" in any way, shape, or form.

There is no question. We know he didn't.

But the implication of this comment

What implication did you read into it? I did not intend there to be any strong implication of the comment. At the outside, I intended the reader to understand only the implication that Philo not only did not name the Logos "Jesus" explicitly in the extant writings we have but also, in all likelihood, did not consider such a name to belong to his Logos concept. That was basically the flashpoint for this thread.

What happened in this thread is that your post was called upon as support for a very specific, tenuous proposition. I did not interact with the post for the sake of interacting with the post on its own terms (which would have resulted in a very different emphasis in the reply). I interacted only on the basis of the question of whether it supported the contention that others were/are making.

I am not interested in staking out any implications larger than the very modest ones that were defended in this thread (nor do I really have time). If that doesn't seem meaningful to you or if it isn't relevant to your own interests, that's okay. So far as I can tell, you haven't offered to take up the other side of that argument, so we don't even seem to be in disagreement (though I welcome correction on that point, of course).

[Secret Alias]

Wouldn't it be amazing if these people adopted opinions and positions from time to time which contradicted their life obsessions? Enough already with Philo.