The Last Word on Richard Carrier

probably, G-d willing.

This post has been edited for clarity and additional detail.

Carrier has finally published two responses on his blog to my work, which I should probably address. The first is a very bizarre pre-response, obviously poisoning the well prior to his response to my longer and more exacting criticisms of his use of the Rabbinic literature. There’s little to say here, other than a couple of points which demonstrate that it is a non-response which betrays a fundamental ignorance of the sources in question and the scholarly literature on the topics he is diving head-first into.  

Firstly, he excoriates my treatment of his old paper in The Empty Tomb. In his treatment of this there is not a single word on my primary point of criticism: the numbers he’s using in OTHOJ are drawn from this paper, which in turn extracts those from Patristic sources, many from the third to fifth centuries, which he takes as accurate in their reporting on 1^st-Century Jewish sectarianism. Most of these are written as internal Christian polemics, making clear theological points while also operating in the Adversus Ioudaios tradition. It’s very telling that he has not a word to say about this.

Likewise, he says that I “argue that some Rabbis after the Jewish War were Sadducees. None of Simone’s cited sources say this. Simone cites Mishnah Yadayim 4.6, but that is describing a pre-war Sadducee (Yochanan Ben Zakkai) whom the Mishnah (and hence the post-war Rabbinate) is arguing against.”

This has since been corrected to “is describing a pre-war authority (Yochanan Ben Zakkai), not post-war, and whose point the Mishnah (and hence the post-war Rabbinate) is arguing against” but even this is not accurate, as R Yochanan’s words are quoted to prove the uniquely Rabbinic position that “the scriptures render the hands unclean.”

I would also direct Carrier to Mishnaot Avot 2:8, Rosh Hashana 4:1 4:3, 4:4, Sotah 5:5, 52, 9:9 and 15, Eduyot 8:7, Sukkah 2:5, 3:12… I could go on, but the point is that Yochanan ben Zakkai is one of the most quoted authorities in the Mishnah, hence him being called “Rabban,” “our Rabbi.” He was the teacher of R Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, who taught R Akiva. He is also the subject of the foundational myth of the Rabbinic tradition, in BT Gittin. And, needless to say, the Mishnah is compiled after the war. All of this could have been easily ascertained had Carrier consulted the Wikipedia article he linked to. My point was that the Rabbinic tradition represents a radical recalibration of Judaean religious culture following the two revolts, and is not simply a continuation of the previous culture in which the Rabbis are basically just Pharisees. Daniel Boyarin devotes a significant portion of a chapter in his Borderlines volume to this exact question, that the text of M Avot (that Carrier would be familiar with, if he had any knowledge of the Rabbinic literature at all) is evidence of a kind power shift in which the house of Gamaliel, positively identified with the Pharisees, at some point between the 2^nd Revolt and the closing of the Mishnah around 200CE, takes over institutional power from the line of Yochanan Ben Zakkai, who is later recuperated into the narrative of origins that the Rabbis use to legitimate their social leadership. Textual evidence (including the different place in the order of succession that R Yochanan takes in Avot d’Rabbi Natan) evidences that this was a process, and not perfectly achieved.¹

Likewise, while he says, “Simone seems inclined to believe whatever Josephus says” Carrier does the same when he says “Mishnah Sanhedrin 10:3 declares that [there is no place in the world to come for ] one who says: there is no resurrection of the dead,’ as the Sadducees fundamentally did.”² Our only source for that is Josephus (and Acts, on which I am tentatively in the camp of those who think the author used Josephus, as is Carrier), and that the Qumran community identified themselves with the lineage of Tzadok (the origin of the term – Sadducee being the Greek transliteration of Tzadoki) and believed in the resurrection of the dead adds some necessary nuance to this.³ Also, that should be M Sanh. 10.1, not 3. But I did mistype that Josephus reference, so that can be forgiven.

Lastly, Carrier announces “even Simone ends up admitting the Pharisees ‘are generally considered the largest of the sects.’ So, which is it?” It is an agreement with the broad consensus that the majority of the Judaean population had no sectarian allegiance at all, despite popular, often religiously motivated beliefs about the period. They wouldn’t have had the literacy required for the kinds of theological disputes that characterize sectarianism, when a sect is, as Carrier himself defines it “a group of people that has separated from a larger group.” Naturally, the majority of Judaeans were not engaging in such, because if they were then there would be no “larger group” for them to separate from. They were probably far too busy trying to eke out an existence in a highly stratified society under often oppressive Roman taxation. The appeal to a lack of a normative core is primarily an apologetic device appealed to either to normalize later Christian belief as “authentically Jewish” even in documents that clearly oppose themselves to hoi Ioudaioi, or to anachronise Rabbinic Judaism as being normative in the pre-Rabbinic period. The former is a product of the theological milieu of late 19^th and early 20^th Century Lutheran scholars, invested in the idea that the Reformation was a return to the authentic, true religion later corrupted by the Catholic Church. Likewise, the assertion of Pharisaic social dominance is largely predicated on taking the self-Justifcation of the Rabbinic literature at its word. To my knowledge, Gamaliel being mentioned in Acts is the only external attestation of any authority cited in the Rabbinic literature prior to the Mishnah. The more reasonable position is the model of E.P. Sanders’ “Common Judaism” which, with various nuances, has been standard in historical modelling of Judaean culture for decades now. The point is that while Judaism is internally diverse at this time, that internal diversity occurs within a broad normativity which is reflected by the entirety of the textual and archaeological record.  The very idea of “Judaism” requires normativity, without which it is unable to be delineated. This is attested by the evidence: ample archaeological evidence of a population adhering to a limited set of religious norms, and a bunch of arguing about the details of this. But just as Greek and Roman sources recognised a limited set of behaviours and cultural values that were distinct, the literature that we have from Jewish sources reflects something similar. Carrier should know this, as he recommended Adler’s book on this subject (while misinterpreting it as arguing “Torah law did not even exist” prior to the 2nd C BCE, rather than the far more limited claim regarding widespread population-level adherence to religious norms). He also cites E.P. Sanders’ book on the historical Jesus in OTHOJ, I would suggest also looking at his other works, for which he is better known.

In his second response, things get weirder. There is a strange inconsistency in Carrier’s reportage of what I say, which, while accusing me of missing his point, consistently avoids both what I am actually criticising (which is, explicitly, not the mythicist thesis, but rather the treatment of the Rabbinic literature) and the implications of what I am arguing for his argument, frequently dismissing them out of hand.

I suppose it’s easy to miss if one is not reading carefully, but these should be taken seriously if one is making an incremental argument. I am, and I assume Carrier is given his focus on probability. Conversely, he also seems utterly convinced that I am making these criticisms as an attack on mythicism when I have specified multiple times that I simply don’t care about that and have no investment in Jesus whatsoever. My sole interest in Christianity is historical and sociological, and my criticisms of Carrier are methodological: the broader argument is entirely auxiliary to anything I am saying. I doubt there is much historical content in the Gospels at all, would be very interested if Jesus could be demonstrated to not exist, but am as yet unconvinced.

My invocation of the provenance of the Rabbinic literature is dismissed out of hand as irrelevant, but it is relevant to one key part of Carrier’s statement that he doesn’t re-quote:

There is no plausible way later Jews would invent interpretations of their scripture that supported and vindicated Christians. They would not invent a Christ with a father named Joseph who dies and is resurrected (as the Talmud does indeed describe). They would not proclaim Isaiah 53 to be about this messiah and admit that Isaiah had there predicted this messiah would die and be resurrected […] The alternative is to assume a rather unbelievable coincidence: that Christians and Jews, completely independently of each other, just happened at some point to see Isaiah 53 as messianic…⁴

Carrier is explicitly citing the Talmud as independent evidence of a pre-Christian tradition. That the Talmudic version might be dependent on the Christian tradition is not even considered. The provenance of these documents, and the demonstrable fact that they are aware of and polemicizing against Christian messianic claims directly contradicts these sources being independent evidence. Whether this is primary, secondary or supporting evidence doesn’t matter, the question is whether they can be considered evidence of what Carrier is claiming at all. The more time passes and the more familiar neighbouring communities are with each other’s beliefs, the more elaborate the polemics that define group-identity will become. Hence my conclusions about BT Sukkah, which I strongly believe to be a 6^th-7^th century (or later, even) Stammaic polemic specifically inverting Christian claims about Jesus. Sefer Zerubbabel is likewise polemic. This matters and cannot simply be brushed aside. Despite me being absolutely clear on this, that I believe the Talmudic tradition of a dying messiah to be both very late and dependent on Chrisitanity Carrier appears unable to comprehend this, as his replies to me in the comments on his blog make clear.

Likewise, Carrier later splits hairs about his phrasing regarding Isaiah 53 but doesn’t address the actual import of my identification that the dying messiah is only prooftexted from Zechariah, and Isaiah 53 is only read as suffering, not dying by the Rabbis. This is important, as this tradition extends (as I wrote) all the way from the Amoraic period into early modernity, where the Messiah suffers from a leprous disease (again, reading this bit of Isaiah 53 literally) but does not die from it. That this passage, if read very literally, describes the servant as dying is not acknowledged by the Rabbis. Their prooftexting of various messianic beliefs emphasises different points. The Rabbis emphasise leprous disease and ignore death, and the Christians do the opposite. The consistently literal reading of Isaiah 53 is not reflected in the Rabbinic corpus but is also not reflected in the Christian writings. Jesus, very obviously, is not presented anywhere as covered in leprous sores.⁵ Thus, the consistently literal meaning of Isaiah 53 matters little to either community, as it is not taken up wholesale by either. Arguing that “the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53 is a figure who most assuredly dies” says literally nothing about how the Rabbis read it, as likewise “the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53 is a figure who is most assuredly stricken by deformative leprous illness” says precisely nothing about how Christians utilised the passage. Reading this passage as messianic (itself a jump from the plain meaning of the text) does not necessarily entail taking up all elements described, and this is proven by the use of the text by Christians, not just by the Rabbis.

Carrier cannot have his cake and eat it too. While he says, quoting himself, “It is far more likely that Christians united two figures already imagined in earlier Jewish apocalyptic thought than that rabbinical Jews took a novel messiah from the heretical sect of Christianity and elaborately split it into two messiahs” the latter is closer to what Boyarin thinks happened. But Boyarin himself admits there is no concrete evidence this is pre-Christian, which is where we get to the meat of the issue.

While Carrier protests about “triangulation” of a “dying messiah concept” in pre-Christian Judaism he fails to acknowledge the dearth of evidence, despite this being readily acknowledged by both Hengel and Boyarin. Both writers hedge their conclusions, and both explicitly allow for the alternative – the evidence is, in the final analysis, inconclusive. Hengel’s clearest evidence for the Messianic reading of Isaiah 53 is, in fact, the book of Zechariah, set in the late 6^th or early 5^th century BCE and probably written not long after.⁶ This idea then disappears from the textual record, until a possible reemergence in the book of Daniel⁷ and the marginal possibility of representation in some heavily contested readings of documents from Qumran.⁸ Hengel presents no other evidence,⁹ is tentative in his conclusions, and likewise doesn’t consider the Talmudic passages in question to be in any kind of significant continuity with these earlier ideas.¹⁰

Hengel summarizes his findings:

The motif of vicarious atoning death in the Hebrew text of Isaiah 53 recedes more or less into the background in the other pre-Christian texts. It is perhaps hinted at in Daniel 11-12, is completely absent in the Similitudes and Wisdom, but appears clearly by contrast in the Septuagint of Isaiah 53, despite the strengthened motif of the passio iusti. It perhaps plays a role in the Aramaic Apocryphon of Levi (4Q541), but it is not visible at all in the Self-Glorification Hymn (4Q491).¹¹

He goes on to say:

I believe we are not entirely without grounds for the hypothesis that already in the pre-Christian period, traditions about suffering and atoning eschatological messianic figures were available in Palestinian Judaism.¹²

Not entirely without grounds, perhaps, but also without anything but the most circumstantial of evidence to point in that direction, particularly as the interpretation of the Qumran material presented here is uncertain readings of highly fragmentary material, often hinging on the interpretation of whether an obscure letter is this or that, extrapolation of what precisely an ambiguous word might mean, or the order in which the fragments are presented. One could, perhaps, consider it a matter of faith.

Likewise, Boyarin’s argument for the pre-Christian existence of these ideas is drawn from circumstantial evidence and extrapolation, based largely on reading Mark as documentation of events that actually occurred: It is predicated on Mark accurately recording Jesus himself seeking out his own execution in order to fulfil preexisting prophetic beliefs.¹³ I do not expect that Carrier shares this opinion, which is the basis for Boyarin’s. Even then, Boyarin is clear that it is entirely possible that he’s wrong, and he shouldn’t be taken as arguing anything conclusive: as per his qualifying footnote that I cited.¹⁴ I expect I can be forgiven for leaving out the context of why Boyarin thinks what he thinks, and instead focusing on what evidence and qualification is provided, as I doubt that Carrier would share those beliefs.

The overwhelming majority of Rabbinic scholars date the dying Rabbinic Messiah as emerging, at the earliest, in the mid-2^nd Century, following the failure of Shimon bar Koseba’s messianic revolt, and have done so since Klausner.¹⁵ Any deviation from this has been toward a later dating rather than earlier. Carrier has found himself a couple fringe representatives, but they have been extensively criticised by Himmelfarb and with substantially less weight, myself.¹⁶ The sole reason of Boyarin’s dissent is given above, and he is excoriating of David C Mitchell.¹⁷ There is no continuity between this and the dual-Messiah tradition in the Qumran literature, as the two Messiahs don’t map onto each other at all (Qumran’s second one is a priest) and, at Qumran, neither of these are described as dying in any of the major, uncontested documents that describe them.

Thus we get to the question of Carrier’s representation of the scholarly consensus, and his implication that the tide is turning. You would think from Carrier’s description that the absence of a pre-Christian dying messiah was a hoary old position, only held to by dogged nay-sayers like John J Collins, in the process of being overturned by the likes of Hengel and Boyarin. This is the opposite of the case. In terms of Collins and Hengel, Hengel represents the old guard (he died in 2009), whose opinions have been overturned by more recent work by scholars interested in the Dead Sea Scrolls independent of the question of Christian origins. While the Hengel paper that Carrier cites might be more recent, Hengel is one of the targets of Collins’ corrective that I cited.¹⁸ The fact that Carrier can list those who adhere to this older position is evidence of how little support his position has. “Literally dozens of other experts in the Talmud and the Dead Sea Scrolls” does not weigh against the hundreds (or more!) of others in the field, particularly coming from a classicist who cannot read the texts, and thus has no grounds for favouring one reading other than a pre-investment in the outcome of said reading. Carrier’s opinion on this matter cannot be based on the actual textual evidence as he is incapable of assessing it. Thus, he has no rational grounds for asserting anything other than agnosticism on the question – yet contra the only opinion he could reasonably hold, he considers Collins’ caution to have been “already rebutted.” I cannot account for this by any explanation other than motivated reasoning.

This is clearly the case in his assessment of Hengel over Collins, but another example is his repetition of George Brooke’s extremely tentative reading of 4Q541, breathlessly cited as evidence that the tide is turning in Carrier’s favour. The reason for Brooke’s qualifications, his “could be” and “possibly even” is clear if one just looks at the fragments in question and considers the variables involved. This is the fragment in question:

The reading of צצא as “nail” is only attested in significantly later Syriac, and not in Jewish or Imperial Aramaic. In the image above I have highlighted that word. But, crucially, death or execution is based entirely on hypothetical reconstruction the other highlighted passage where half of the letters are missing, and the others only partially survive. Even this requires further interpretation of what this means in context.¹⁹ There are multiple competing reconstructions and interpretations of this.

Caution is clearly required. Brooke himself says “to understand this fragment completely satisfactorily is impossible” and that his readings are “offered tentatively.”²⁰ If even those scholars to whom Carrier appeals call drawing definitive conclusions such as these impossible, Carrier is in no position to make any judgement. The only possible reason for favouring this interpretation over any of the others proffered or simply abstaining is that this particular reconstruction supports the conclusion he wants to draw.

This is entirely in keeping with his general approach, in which he reflexivly proclaims that the Rabbis oppose one of the most cited halachic authorities in Mishnah on the basis of my suggesting he might not be a Pharisee, asserts that my historical-methodological points have no bearing on his conclusion, that he didn’t make any arguments about manuscripts (while failing to understand basic terminology),²¹ and going to great lengths to not address the fact that he did, in fact, claim that the Talmud was independent attestation of the dying messiah idea, did give three entirely different dates for the Talmud,²² that he produces a translation of 1QIsa^a which is not found in 1QIsa^a,²³ that he did extrapolate that the Qumran community

conducted itself like a mystery religion, complete with four levels of initiation, including a baptism at the first of them, a communal meal, and swearing to keep the secret of their mysteries even under pain of death (and, of course, a belief in their personal salvation through resurrection),²⁴

based on vocabulary in a verse paraphrase of the Qumran Hodayot by Robert Price, when that vocabulary literally doesn’t exist in the Hebrew or any academic English translation;²⁵ and that he did assert, contra all evidence that the Babylonian Rabbis knew no other form of Christianity than that of the Nazorean sect, despite the fact that a simple survey of the evidence for the spread of Christianity correlated with the dating of Babylonian Rabbinic activity renders that an absurdity.²⁶ Carrier claims:

Simone seems to have mistaken me for saying these Rabbis were unfamiliar with traditional Christian chronology; I never said that.

I quote his own book, where immediately following outlining Ephiphanius’ statements about the time of Alexander Jannaeus he writes:

The Babylonian Talmud not only confirms this, but its Jewish authors appear to have known no other form of Christianity.²⁷

What Carrier considers my “impertinence” is honest incredulity that someone, with a PHD no less, could make such claims without doing the minimum of research required to find out they simply can’t be true. All Carrier’s protestations about modal logic or peer review are meaningless in the face of impossibility.

Bibliography

Boyarin, Daniel. Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.

———. The Jewish Gospels : The Story of the Jewish Christ. New York: The New Press, 2012.

Brooke, George J. The Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament : Essays in Mutual Illumination. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005.

Carrier, Richard. On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2014.

Collins, John J. Daniel: A Commentary on the Book of Daniel. Hermeneia: A Critical and Historical Commentary on the Bible. Edited by Frank Moore Cross. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993. doi:10.2307/j.ctvb936s4.

———. The Scepter and the Star : The Messiahs of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Other Ancient Literature. The Anchor Bible Reference Library. 1st ed. New York: Doubleday, 1995.

Hengel, Martin, and Daniel P Bailey. "The Effective History of Isaiah 53 in the Pre-Christian Period." In The Suffering Servant : Isaiah 53 in Jewish and Christian Sources, edited by Bernd Janowski and Peter Stuhlmacher. 75-146. Grand Rapids, Mich: Eerdmans, 2004.

Himmelfarb, Martha. Jewish Messiahs in a Christian Empire: A History of the Book of Zerubbabel. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2017.

Klausner, Joseph. The Messianic Idea in Israel, from Its Beginning to the Completion of the Mishnah. New York,: Macmillan, 1955.

Price, Robert M. The Pre-Nicene New Testament : Fifty-Four Formative Texts. Salt Lake City, Utah: Signature Books, 2006.

Schuller, Eileen M., and Carol A. Newsom. The Hodayot (Thanksgiving Psalms) : A Study Edition of 1qha. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2012.

Shemesh, Aharon. "Introduction: In the Beginning." In Halakhah in the Making. The Development of Jewish Law from Qumran to the Rabbis. 1-20. University of California Press, 2009.

1. Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 74-88.

2. An additional note: What the Mishnah actually says here is not the same as what Carrier quotes. It says האומר אין תחית המיתים מין התורה: “the one who says the resurrection of the dead is not from the Torah.” The doctrine being condemned is exegetical - that this point cannot be derived from Torah. The gemara on this Mishnah emphasizes this point, providing prooftexts from the Pentateuch for the resurrection of the dead.

3. For the complicated state of the field on these issues, see Aharon Shemesh, "Introduction: In the Beginning," in Halakhah in the Making, The Development of Jewish Law from Qumran to the Rabbis (University of California Press, 2009), 9-19.

4. Richard Carrier, On the historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason For Doubt (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2014), 73-4. The only alternative possibility he provides in the following paragraph likewise doesn’t account for the possibility of Christian influence on this idea.

5. 52:14 (part of the same servant-song): בן-משחת מאיש מראהו מבני אדם “so disfigured was his appearance, unlike a man, his visage unlike a human.”

53:3-4: וידוע חלי וכמסתר פנים ממנו נבזה ולא חשבנהו אכו חלינו הוא נשא ומכאבינו סבלם ואנחנו חשבנהו נגוע מכה א-להים ומענה - “he was known to disease, and hid his face from us, was despised, we did not think of him. Yet our sickness was his burden, our suffering he bore, we thought he plagued, smitten and afflicted by G-d” - the word “plagued” here is very commonly used to describe leprosy, in keeping with the disfigurement in the previous verse.

Likewise, 53:10: וה’ חפץ דכאו החלי - “and [G-d]’s will was to crush him with disease.”

The plain meaning of this is clear. The metaphorical interpretation is extrapolated entirely from “we thought” in v4, generalized to all the other material, and motivated by Christian apologetic concerns (thus it is translated less than literally in many Christian bibles). The Hebrew here is clear on this matter, and variants attested in 1QIsa^a both do not change the overall meaning of this passage, and are not attested in 1QIsa^b. This text, with this meaning, existed before the 1st Century.

6. Martin Hengel and Daniel P Bailey, "The Effective History of Isaiah 53 in the Pre-Christian Period," in The suffering servant : Isaiah 53 in Jewish and Christian sources, ed. Bernd Janowski and Peter Stuhlmacher (Grand Rapids, Mich: Eerdmans, 2004), 77, 85-90.

7. Ibid. 90-98. Note that the clearest parallels between Daniel and Deutero-Isaiah here are outside of the servant-songs (some entirely reasonable and supported by other scholars, others more contestable). The relationship between these documents is clear, but the uptake of this precise idea is far more difficult to demonstrate in anything other than the far broader conception also supported by John J. Collins, Daniel: A Commentary on the Book of Daniel, ed. Frank Moore Cross, Hermeneia: a critical and historical commentary on the Bible, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 385, 403-4.

8. Hengel and Bailey, "The Effective History of lsaiah 53 in the Pre-Christian Period." 106-118, 140-5.

9. On this specific point, a far broader influence, as per the above note, is present in the Maccabean literature and Wisdom of Solomon. Collins agrees on this point, as noted.

10. Hengel and Bailey, "The Effective History of lsaiah 53 in the Pre-Christian Period." 77.

11. Ibid. 146. Note that Targum Jonathan is not conclusively pre-Christian, and probably dates from the 2^nd Century CE.

12. Ibid.

13. Daniel Boyarin, The Jewish Gospels : the story of the Jewish Christ (New York: The New Press, 2012), 135-45. This is clear from the phrasing used, e.g:

This all makes the most sense if we assume that Jesus is alluding to the Son of Man figure from Daniel and his fate, which is to be crushed for a time, two times, and half a time before rising triumphant. Jesus had a very clear sense of his messianic role and fate, and that this role and fate were what had been predicted for the Son of Man in Daniel 7. Jesus first is identified as Messiah by others and then refers to himself as the Son of Man, thus establishing the identity of the Messiah and his ultimate fate as that of the Danielic Son of Man. Jesus is also clearly claiming that identity for himself. (136-7).

The only way to avoid the implication that this is ex eventu is to assume that this belief existed in Jesus’ own lifetime and is uncomplicatedly reported by Mark. Otherwise, the fact that it is recorded significantly after the events describes logically requires it to be ex eventu. Boyarin’s position is predicated on historicity.

14. Ibid. 190 n26, see also 186 n10.

15. Joseph Klausner, The Messianic Idea in Israel, from its Beginning to the Completion of the Mishnah (New York,: Macmillan, 1955), 483-501.

16. Martha Himmelfarb, Jewish messiahs in a Christian empire: a history of the Book of Zerubbabel (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2017), 101-5.

17. Boyarin, The Jewish Gospels : the story of the Jewish Christ 188 n19. I actually don’t know of any credentialed rabbinic scholar other than Boyarin who holds this position. Everyone else is a biblical scholar, and the overwhelming majority are Christian NT scholars.

18. John J. Collins, The scepter and the Star : the Messiahs of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Other Ancient Literature, 1st ed., The Anchor Bible reference library, (New York: Doubleday, 1995) 123-6, with Hengel cited at 133-4 n111.

19. Collins himself accepts the reconstruction of “hanging” but points out that even if this describes execution the person addressed is being told “not to afflict” others in this way as per the previous part of the line. Ibid. 125. Brooke’s translation supports this, George J. Brooke, The Dead Sea scrolls and the New Testament : essays in mutual illumination (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005), 146.

20. Ibid. 146-7.

21. He did. Carrier, On the historicity of Jesus, 282 n4: “When we look at more reliable manuscripts, 'Jesus of Nazareth' is repeatedly and explicitly identified as 'Jesus ben Pantera' and 'Jesus ben Stada', leaving no such doubts as Van Voorst voices about their equivalence.” Van Voorst asserts they are not identified with each other by the Tannaim, specifically. It appears at the time of writing he didn’t understand what that meant. No manuscript evidence indicates anything contrary to Van Voorst’s point.

22. Ibid. 73, “fourth to sixth century;” 274, “completed in the fifth century;” 283, “was compiled… from the 3rd to 5th centuries.” None of these accord with the actual time of composition, which extends from the mid-third century through to as late as the 8^th Century. Some editorial activity may be later than that, but this is disputed.

23. Ibid. 91 n62. I assume this is extrapolated from Hengel, as Carrier cites no one else on 1QIsa^a. The word-order here is completely wrong, if it is based on Hengel he’s both misunderstood which words are subject to variation, and extrapolated “nailing” from this which is completely unwarranted. He has also failed to consider the multiple other vocalizations these present consonants support, which favour outcomes like disease or impurity/profanation.

24. Ibid. 107.

25. Ibid. n100, 111, incl n114 citing Robert M. Price, The pre-Nicene New Testament : fifty-four formative texts (Salt Lake City, Utah: Signature Books, 2006), 887-928. The 2nd footnote bases this on “‘babes’ and ‘adults’ and ‘milk’ and ‘meat’ distinction in 14.21 and 21.1-2.” These distinctions are the Product of Price’s imagination. cf. Price: “My version of the hymns paraphrases the English translation of Wilfred Watson. a It is necessarily loose because I feel it best to try to convey a sense of the poetry of the original.” Cff. Col XV, 6ff, XIX, 18-23, in Eileen M. Schuller and Carol A. Newsom, The Hodayot (Thanksgiving Psalms) : A Study Edition Of 1QHa (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2012), 48-50, 60-61, and any other English translation available. In the commonly used Vermes these are found on p282 and 293-4.

26. Carrier, On the historicity of Jesus 282.

27. Ibid. emphasis mine.