There's some interesting commentary there that aligns with Richard Carrier's propositions about Zecharian and what Philo might have thought about that too, and some other interesting contexts -
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. . . . . As it is, we may at least argue for a connection between the Judaic "Jesus the Son" and the traditional "Jesus the Son of the Father".
Beyond conjectures we cannot at present go; but the significance given to the name Jeshua, the priest of the Return, in the book of Zechariah [Zech iii 1-6; vi, 10-12], at a time when the book of Joshua did not exist, tells of a Messianic idea so associated [with] when Messianism was but beginning among the Jews. And, as the Messianic idea seems to have come to them, as it fittingly might, during the time of exile, perhaps from the old Babylonian source of the myth of the returning Hammurabi -- who, in his own code, declares himself the Saviour-Shepherd and the King of Righteousness
4 -- or from the later Mazdean doctrine that the Saviour Saoshyant, the as yet unborn Son of Zathustra, is, at the end of time, to raise the dead and destroy Ahriman
6 ...
What is important in this connection is the fact that the doctrine of a
suffering messiah gradually developed among the Jews, for the most part
outside the canonical literature. For the doctrine that "the Christ must needs have suffered" [Acts xvii, 3; xxvi, 23; Cp. Luke xxvi, 26, 46] can be scriptually supported only from passages like the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, where our A. V. alters the past tense to the present, thus making a description of Israel's past sufferings serve as a mystic type. Cyrus, who is called Messiah in Deutero-Isaiah, was reputed to have been crucified, but not in his Messiah capacity. The presumption then is that the doctrine was extra-canonical, and was set up by Gentile example ... The first clear trace of the [Messiah doctrine] appears to be in the doctrine that of Messiahs, en Joseph and Ben David, Ben Joseph is to be slain ... there are clear Gentile parallels.
An obvious precedent ... lay in the Greek myth of the crucified Prometheus ... the most likely pagan prototype is..the slain and resurgent Dionysos, one of whose chief names was
Eleuthereos, the Liberator, who was specifically signalised as the God "born again". As the Jewish Messiah was to be primarily a 'deliver', like the series of national heroes in the book of Judges, a popular God so entitled was most likely to impress the imagination of the dispersed Jews and their proselytites. The same epithet, indeed, may well have attached to ancient deities such as Samson, who is a a variant of the deliverer Herakles, and was one of the deliverers of the pseudo-history, as well as to the 'original Jesus' whose myth is 'Evemerised' in Joshua .. // .. a proximate motive .. to account for ... the post-exilic or post-Maccabean revival of such conceptions in a cult form; and it is to be found in the prevailing religious conceptions of the surrounding Hellenistic civilisation, where, next to Zeus, the gogs most in evidence were Dionysos and Herakles, and the Son-sacrificing Kronos.
P
agan Christs : studies in comparative hierology by Robertson, J. M.. 1913; pp. 166-7.
https://archive.org/stream/paganchrists ... 6/mode/2up
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