I have to confess that Carrier reads into my thoughts, when he says:
Effectively Hurtado seems only committed to slander mythicism & mythicists. I like only two things about what he has said:here is how this [debate] would have gone, had Hurtado been a professional historian who cares about the truth, rather than an apologist who only cares about what people believe, even if it’s false:
1) the anti-mythicist use of the Argument From Silence about post-Gospel mythicist sects.
2) the (welcomed!) recognition that Richard Carrier is the Emperor of the mythicists of all the world (with the implicit corollary that global mythicism will fail if Carrier's case will fail).
The point 2 is really welcomed. For example, Ehrman had the bad habit of calling G. A. Wells (sic) the best proponent of the Argument from Silence about the HJ in Paul, and not Doherty and not Carrier. I think that the point 2 is an effect of the great resonance gained by Carrier after his last interesting articles (as this).
Frankly, I (or better, the mythicist who is in me) likes also the slandering etc, because it seems really a sign of weakness. Something as: "fuck, I know who is the king of the mythicists but I don't know how to confute him definitely".
I see a progress also in Carrier's view about the presumed Logos-Jesus of Philo. He concedes:
And surely I agree 100% with what follows :There can remain disagreement on whether Philo meant the archangelic Son of God High Priest was the Jesus Son of God High Priest in Zechariah 6. Because that all hinges on how the evidence is interpreted (per above).
(my bold)But what can’t be disputed is this: whatever this archangel is named, he still has all the same peculiar properties as Paul’s Jesus. Which coincidence remains effectively impossible, unless indeed, the earliest Christians believed their Jesus was this archangel. Even if indeed they had to rename him (as Philippians 2:9-11 suggests they did). So arguing over which name Philo would have regarded as applicable, is not even the primary point relevant here. And it looks like Hurtado is trying to conceal that...
This absence of dogmatism in the words of Carrier (since it seems in my eyes that he concedes the possibility that Philo was interested more to Anatole than to the name 'Joshua') fits perfectly with the conclusion of the great mythicist Rylands about the same presumed existence of a pre-christian Logos-Jesus:
(Did Jesus ever live?, p. 95-96, my bold)There is no absolutely certain proof that any of the Gnostic sects in pre-Christian days named the Logos Jesus; but the occurrence of the name in the Naassene hymn, the early use of the term “Lord Jesus” by Gnostics and the identification of Jesus and Joshua by Origen, the Epistle of Jude and the Sybilline Oracles, render the supposition highly probable. If one of the constituents of the united Christian Church had been a Gnostic Joshua-Jesus cult, by the time when Christian writers began to
interest themselves in heretical Gnostic sects it had long ceased to have a separate existence. Consequently it is not likely that we should have heard anything about it.