[In] our discussion grasping the distinction between
(1) our determining what the author of Zechariah originally meant
and
(2) our determining what Philo (and any other Jewish exegetes sharing his view)
believe Zechariah meant.
The original meaning we know is
not that this Jesus is an incorporeal archangel, but rather the first high priest of the second temple—an actual, and entirely ordinary, historical person; and possibly the passage originally said Zerubabbel, the first king of that era, is whom Zechariah was declaring this of, although if so (and that’s still only conjecture) that reading had been lost centuries before Philo and thus cannot inform our reading of Philo. To the contrary, the evidence conclusively proves Philo does
not believe that Zechariah meant what we think Zechariah meant. He believes Zechariah was claiming this weird mystical thing that in no way was even on Zechariah’s mind. And in Philo’s time, that was typical; Jews rarely read their Bible as saying things they originally said, but as containing cryptic mystical messages wholly bizarre by our modern standards. Indeed, read all of Philo’s works (as Neal claims he has done) and you’ll see this in spades: Philo almost never reads verses in their original sense. He almost always extracts some bizarre interpretation instead.
So
it is a complete waste of time arguing what Zechariah “originally” meant here. That’s irrelevant. Philo has no such interest as we have in determining that, nor any analogous skills for doing it. All we can determine is what Philo
thought this passage in Zechariah meant. And all the evidence we have as to that points to it
not being what Zechariah originally meant, but something altogether else—especially if the passage has become corrupted, a fact Philo would then have no knowledge of; that’s purely a modern conjecture, based on modern methods of paleography and literary analysis. Otherwise the passage as we have it is plain in its meaning:
there is only one person said to be present that Zechariah could be telling all to behold, and that’s Jesus. Philo thought Jesus was the Anatolê.
Philo obviously uses entirely different methods for interpreting the Bible, ones that allow him to imagine, and with total confidence, that Zechariah 6 was talking about an eternal incorporeal archangel; an angel who was the “son of god” and celestial “high priest”; and who created and governed everything, including God’s celestial temple, at God’s behest (thus entailing how Philo
might even be reading verse 6:13). Once you admit this, Neal’s attempt to replace what Philo thought with the conjectures of modern scholars as to what
Zechariah thought makes no logical sense. It’s entirely a non sequitur. And it ignores entirely my whole argument. His theory requires an improbable coincidence. Mine does not. The more probable theory prevails. There is no other.
In the end, Neal, like most lazy critics who don’t spend any time actually trying to understand the arguments of scholars they want to disagree with, didn’t even grasp that
it is a fact (not some theory we have to argue for, but an established fact) that this archangel Philo mentions here is the same being the first Christians believed Jesus to have been an incarnation of. To deny this is to rest your case on a coincidence, of the conjunction of peculiar assigned attributes, so improbable that the fact as otherwise stated is hundreds of times more likely.
This is true no matter what Philo thought the angel was named. The bulk of my Element 40 in
OHJ is establishing this, not its name. I then add
an argument (not a “sneaky assertion” or any of the false nonsense Neal claimed) that Philo also must have thought this angel was named “Jesus” (among its many other names). I am explicit that this is
an argument and not a plain fact, and something we can infer about what Philo
believed, not something Philo explicitly
said. So it is slander to claim I didn’t make all this clear in the peer-reviewed work I summarize in my podium talks. And it is morally irresponsible not to consult the work being summarized in a brief.
--Carrier (22 November 2022). "The Curious Case of Gnostic Informant: Reaction vs. Research". Richard Carrier Blogs.
I asked him some questions aimed at getting him to explain some of the weak points in this theory, with the aim of highlighting said weaknesses. (I think this counts as Socratic questioning, but perhaps that’s too high-minded a term.)