Kipp Davis recently published a kind of analysis of the fourth chapter of my academic study On the Historicity of Jesus: “How (Not) to Read the Talmud: Reviewing Richard Carrier’s On the Historicity of Jesus, Part 1.” It’s a weird one, because almost nothing in it actually responds to what I wrote in that chapter; and what does either ignores what it actually said or confirms that what it said is correct! Thanks, Kipp! Let’s check it out.

General Interpretive Errors

Davis spends many early minutes of that video explaining that almost everything I say in Chapter 4 is correct, and indeed exactly what it says it is: a summary of (often standard) conclusions already reached by experts in the field. Where there are disagreements, I note them. Where evidence needs to be cited against common assumptions, it’s cited. Where arguments to a point are needed, they’re given. And contrary to Davis’s polemical posturing, at no point in that chapter (or indeed the whole book) do I ever make an original argument from the ancient Hebrew or Aramaic—I always rely on actual published experts in those languages, and follow what they say.

Davis only wants to take issue with what really amounts to just a handful of sentences in nearly a hundred pages of heavily footnoted material. In fact, he implies he agrees with the previous three chapters as well—so, over a hundred pages of material. Which is fine. If there are even minor or incidental errors, I want to correct them.

At this point Davis makes three general interpretive mistakes in describing the contents of Chapter 4, which he would do well to heed in his future installments as he goes through my book:

  1. Some of the Elements in Chapters 4 and 5 are modal arguments, not factual. That is, some are arguments to a plausibility or possibility, not an argument to a probability or a certainty: the “results…in some cases is ‘maybe’ (meaning: more than merely possible, but still not certain) and in others is ‘certainly’ (meaning: not absolutely certain, but certain to a very high probability), or some degree in between. I have carefully worded my claims in each element to reflect this.” (OHJ, p. 65.) So I am not in every case arguing for something being a fact; sometimes I am arguing just for something to be plausible. For example, on p. 74, my exact wording is: “So we have evidence here of a Jewish belief that possibly predates Christian evangelizing.” Take note. Davis skips over my warning to heed my exact words, and often ignores my exact words.
  2. Some of the arguments Davis thinks are missing from Chapter 4 are actually in Chapter 5. For example, Elements 23 through 29 present facts that render plausible the notion of spiritualizing rather than militarizing the victory of the messiah, illustrating that this isn’t weird, but would have fit Jewish thinking in that context. In light of the first point, again, this is not an argument that “they did this,” it’s an argument that it would make sense if they did.
  3. Finally, no Element or Definition anywhere in Chapters 4 or 5 directly affects the probability that a historical Jesus existed. All are equally compatible with both—as long as you are taking them all into account when building your model, whether of a historical or imaginary Jesus. For example, Davis really doesn’t like being told that many scholars concur with me that there is ample evidence the Jews may have already had an idea of dying eschatological messiahs before Christianity (I’ll cite a whole list of peer-reviewed experts concurring on this point below). But this would as easily explain how a historical Jesus could be converted into a messiah without any military victories (by spiritualizing his victory and drumming up pesher-like scriptural support for it). So this isn’t evidence Jesus didn’t exist. It’s just evidence your theory of a historical Jesus needs to take into account.

There are a few other places where Davis’s complaining makes no sense coming from a scholar. For example, he mildly complains about the page length of the book, then complains that it didn’t survey the “10” to “30” plus sects of the Jews we have evidence of, when—obviously—to save word count I just footnoted where that survey can be found, wherein I literally say: “For a summary of the evidence and sources collectively establishing this element see Carrier, ‘Spiritual Body’, in Empty Tomb (ed. Price and Lowder), pp. 107- 13, with support in” and I proceed to list eight other scholarly studies pertaining to the point. Scholars know this is how scholarship works: we often make our arguments concise by citing where evidence is surveyed for some point we make. Davis has a relevant PhD. He has to know this. So why he would complain about a standard scholarly practice escapes me. The more so as his words then imply I didn’t provide any support or evidence for this claim—when in fact I cited nine studies. This is kind of disingenuous and a practice Davis would do well to refrain from in future.

First: Definitions

By minute 15 in the video Davis is framing the rest of his forty-five-minute video as about how I make mistakes in Hebrew or Aramaic, after which he presents zero examples of my doing that. As I already noted, there are no arguments pertaining to those languages in OHJ that aren’t from existing experts. How Davis tries to get around this is by inventing arguments I never made, and then complaining about errors in those arguments. But since I never made those arguments, this can’t have anything to do with me. Sure, if someone ever made those arguments, they’d be wrong in just the ways Davis illumines. But since I am not that someone, he doesn’t have any actual criticism of my study. We’ll see examples as we go. Often his practice is to ignore what I actually wrote, and sometimes even invent things.

Davis’s first major error (toward the end of minute 15) is when he quickly goes over my section defining terms in Chapter 4 and mistakenly acts like I am explaining how those words were defined in antiquity. Since I explicitly state I am not doing that, nothing in this section of his critique actually pertains to anything I wrote there. This is what it says:

These definitions are not intended to be normative. So there is no sense in arguing whether my definitions are ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. They merely specify what I mean when I use those terms, regardless of what anyone else might mean, or what any dictionaries say, or any other conventions. As long as you treat my definitions as nothing more than explanations of what I mean, confusion will be forestalled.

OHJ, p. 60

And yet Kipp gets confused. Even though I just told him how to not get confused, in the very book he is supposed to be reading. Davis wants to claim I am somehow being misleading, but that is impossible when I am explicit about what I am doing when defining these words. That’s the opposite of being misleading. I was careful. Davis was not. Since his every complaint that follows relates to what he wants to say about the use of corresponding words in antiquity, and since nothing I am doing in defining these words in English relates to that (remember these words I am defining are English words, and English didn’t exist back then), none of his complaints pertain to anything I actually said in Chapter 4.

For example, I discuss how I am choosing to define “crucifixion” based on the fact that that English word did not exist in antiquity, and explain how my definition is meant to capture the actual meaning of several Greek words and phrases we now translate that way. Hence in that case I defer to the ancient meanings only of the ancient words. And I am clear about this. I also cite several scholars agreeing with me on this point. Davis never complains about this. But I produce it as an example of what’s going on in this section that Davis seems to miss. Hence what he does complain about reflects the same mistake.

For example, in minute 17 Davis says of my definition of messiah that “he’s not wrong” (so, actually, Davis is confirming what I said is correct) “but the primary problem here is this is not so narrowly how Jews understood the term meshiach.” Well. Guess what? That’s exactly what I say: “All Jewish kings and high priests were, of course, ‘messiahs’ in the basic sense of being anointed to represent God. But here I shall mean a messiah conforming to” something more specific (p. 60). So, I said exactly what Davis says; he then disingenuously says it as if I didn’t even know it (much less in fact actually said it!); and yet what I did say makes clear I am only referring to how I shall employ the word throughout the rest of the book, so that you will know what I am referring to. I do not claim this is the only way it was used anciently. I explicitly say it wasn’t. Davis therefore has no complaint against what I actually did say. He agrees that’s a recognized meaning. And he never mentions any folly resulting from my specifying that. Instead, he invents something I didn’t say, and complains about that. That’s not a very clever way to critique a study. You might want to actually read the study before blundering like this.

Davis then not only puts his foot in his mouth here, he pushes it in further when he explains that the authors of Daniel were only referring to the beloved Onias III, whom they call a messiah in the sense of a high priest, and claiming his death would foretell the end of the world. Yeah. Well. That’s exactly what I say:

Modern scholars are generally agreed that its authors were saying that the then-high-priest Onias III was a Messiah (a Christ) [i.e. not the messiah, but a messiah—ed.] and his death would presage a universal atonement, after which would come the end of the world—effected by the coming of the angel Michael. That’s already just one or two tweaks away from the Christian gospel.

OHJ, p. 78

I go on to point out that modern scholars also widely agree that later interpreters of Daniel started reading this differently, particularly the Christians—to which Davis agrees. So I never said anything Davis disagrees with here. I said literally the same things he is saying, yet he is posing as if I didn’t say them and thus need to be corrected. But I did; so I don’t. Davis has no real complaint here.

The same happens when Davis complains about my applying the word “gospel” to any comparable message of salvation (whether Christian or not), starting in minute 19. He notes that we don’t have any evidence of the Greek word (euaggelion) underlying that English word being used by mystery cults. But I never said it was. After explaining (as quoted above) that all my definitions refer to my uses of the English words, not any ancient uses, I say this again in respect to that:

I shall use gospel for the general idea of the ‘good news’ or ‘salvific message’ that any group of Christians (or other savior cult) may have preached (and which may have varied in content from group to group), and Gospel for the actual written books of that title or genre (which attempted to convey ‘a gospel’ in some fashion or other).

OHJ, p. 63

“I” shall use. Not “they” used. This should not have provoked any complaint. Davis should know that the idea of gospel as a message of salvation, using indeed euaggelion, is Greco-Roman political vocabulary coopted by Christians, as Davis himself admits—as when he says “early Christian usage of Evangelion was influenced by the use of the plural form of the noun in relation to Royal Imperial propaganda especially in connection with the benefactions of Augustus.” His wording is misleading; actually the word was used specifically to mean not just benefactions but salvation. The “good news” of the Priene Inscription, for example, was that Augustus had secured their salvation (literally, line 49: σωτηρίᾳ; for symmetry many scholars also reconstruct a lost portion of line 35 as declaring him a savior). This is indeed exactly what the Christians are coopting.

Davis complains that this term didn’t come from Judaism. But I never said it did. He and I agree it came from Gentile political propaganda. So Davis invents something I didn’t say (that the word comes somehow from Judaism and that the word was used by other savior cults), and then complains about that thing I didn’t say. When in fact what I actually did say (which was solely about how I will use an English word and why) he has no complaint about. I had thought Davis incorrectly said the word euaggelion “literally means announcement or an announcement,” when in fact it means “good announcement,” given the eu- in front of the aggelion. In other words, it literally means “good news.” But I must have misheard; on second hearing, he correctly notes this. This is important. Because this is why politicians could use it in reference to salvation, and thus why the Christians coopted it: they are putting Jesus in the place of Caesar.

But “message of salvation” is a thing all mystery religions taught, and beyond—for example Romulus is related as conferring much the same message as the Priene Inscription, conceptualizing promised salvation in terms of military success rather what the Christians inverted it to be. It does not matter (especially to any argument I make) that they didn’t use specifically the word euaggelion for that message or any other. Any message of salvation held the same functional role as what the Christians designated with euaggelion (just as in the Priene Inscription), and the mystery cults were selling something even more similar: not military salvation, but salvation in the afterlife. They were thus, in our English usage, marketing their own “gospel.” And they did it with their own functional equivalent of “Gospels” (mythical tales of their Savior illuminating the teachings relating to whatever kind of salvation they were selling). This does not require them to have used the word euaggelion. And I never imply they did. So again Davis has no complaint here against anything I actually said.

Thus, when Davis worries about “problems” with my definitions, he not only gets wrong what my definitions are, he never presents any example of them causing any problem he is worried about.

The Suffering Messiah Tradition in Judaism

The only other complaint Davis has in this video is something about my discussion of the evidence for a dying messiah tradition. Again, Davis never correctly describes what I actually say, and this error renders irrelevant his every criticism.

For example, Davis wants to take issue with Element 5 in Chapter 4 which simply says:

Even before Christianity arose, some Jews expected one of their messiahs heralding the end times would actually be killed, rather than be immediately victorious, and this would mark the key point of a timetable guaranteeing the end of the world soon thereafter.

OHJ, p. 73

Notice what I don’t say here: that they believed this messiah would themselves bring about the end of the world, or rise from the dead. As Davis admits, this sentence is an accurate description of Daniel 9 and the way it was being reinterpreted already at Qumran: that this messiah somehow related to the eschaton (and thus is a messiah as I said I will employ the term). He was anointed and would “play a part” in God’s plan of liberation. Davis ignores the fact that this is all I said and skips to the rest of the element where I back this up further with yet more evidence, in particular from later Jewish traditions indicating a rather mainstream belief in the idea of a dying messiah signaling the end of the world. Indeed, I make clear my case is for this being “exactly what some Jews were thinking—or could easily have thought.” Remember my warning about modal facts and Davis confusing those with more affirmative declarations?

Davis can’t dispute that Daniel 9 already establishes this Element as stated. So he glosses over that and tries to take issue with my take on Isaiah 53 influencing mainstream (Talmudic) Jewish traditions. Much of what he then says though gets wrong what I said, invents things I didn’t say, and complains about arguments I never made. But it also weirdly ignores my entire argument. For example, around minute 27, Davis says “the tradition” found in the Talmud that expressed not even surprise or skepticism at the assumption that the first messiah would suffer and die but took it as rote, which even “cites Isaiah 53 verse 4” to that effect, “cannot date any earlier than” the earliest Rabbis we know who referenced it. As a genuine scholar (with real expertise in the subject), Davis should know that the first extant mention of a tradition is actually not likely to be the first, because we lack all prior documents that would inform us. So there is no possible way it “cannot” date earlier than the mention we have. So Davis is misinforming his audience even from the start.

But worse than that is that Davis barely mentions, and never really answers, my actual argument that it likely does predate them, but instead gives the false impression that I didn’t tell people this is a late source, when in fact I very clearly did:

Modern scholars are too quick to dismiss this text as late (dating as it does from the fourth to sixth century), since the doctrine it describes is unlikely to be. For only when Jews had no idea what Christians would do with this connection would they themselves have promoted it. 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. That was the very biblical passage Christians were using to prove their case. Moreover, the presentation of this ideology in the Talmud makes no mention of Christianity and gives no evidence of being any kind of polemic or response to it. So we have evidence here of a Jewish belief that possibly predates Christian evangelizing, even if that evidence survives only in later sources.

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 and from that same passage preach an ideology of a messiah with a father named Joseph (literally or symbolically), who endures great suffering, dies and is resurrected (all in accord with the savior depicted in Isaiah 53, as by then understood). Such an amazing coincidence is simply improbable. But a causal connection is not: if this was a pre-Christian ideology that influenced (and thus caused) both the Christian and the Jewish ideologies, then we have only one element to explain (the rise of this idea once, being adapted in different ways), instead of having to believe the same idea arose twice, purely coincidentally. Two improbable events by definition are many times less likely than one. That means the invented-once theory is many times more likely than the invented-twice one.

Conversely, if we choose instead to fall on this sword of improbability and insist, against all likelihood, that yes, the same ideas arose twice independently of each other within Judaism, then this entails the idea was very easy for Jews to arrive at (since rabbinical Jews, independently of Christians, clearly arrived at it), which then entails it was not an improbable development in the first place. And thus neither will it have been improbable for Christians (or their sectarian predecessors among the Jews), any more than it was for Talmudic Jews. Clearly dying messiahs were not anathema. Rabbinical Jews could be just as comfortable with the idea as Christians were.

OHJ, pp. 73–75

Davis ignores that I made a probabilistic argument for this notion being early, and an a fortiori argument that even if it wasn’t, this still proves there was no implausibility to the idea of Jews coming up with the notion, as (on that view) they later clearly did. This was my actual argument, and what I actually used these references in the Talmud (and Daniel and elsewhere) to argue. Davis basically ignores this argument, and invents another one I never made, and complains about that instead. The most he has to offer in response (around minute 37) is a possibiliter fallacy: that “it is possible” these improbable things happened. But possibly doesn’t get you to probably. That’s my point.

Another of Davis’s complaints is that the detail the Rabbis cited Isaiah 53:4 for is incidental. But I never said it wasn’t. What they were citing it for doesn’t matter to my argument. What their cite demonstrates is that they thought that Isaiah 53:4 contained citable information about the messiah—which means they believed that passage was about the messiah. Davis has no argument against this, and yet this is the only argument I actually made. He instead goes on about what that Rabbinical dispute was about, but that has nothing to do with anything I said. So he’s not complaining about anything in OHJ here.

By contrast, contrary to Davis trying to fabricate a false narrative of my incompetence, my point in Element 5 has considerable scholarly support:

Davis never mentions either. And he offers no arguments against Boyarin or Hengel. Since I published, we can list a plethora of scholars concurring, new and old—and that’s besides my own study, which passed peer review; and Raphael Lataster’s, likewise: Questioning the Historicity of Jesus, pp. 94–95; so two more in addition to all the rest. How many times does the same claim have to pass peer review before Kipp Davis will acknowledge it? Is it, say, twelve?

Because a thorough literature search produces…

And:

And Staples himself cites concurring:

  • William Brownlee, “The Servant of the Lord in the Qumran Scrolls,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 132 (December 1953), pp. 8–15.
  • Harold Luis Ginsberg, “The Oldest Interpretation of the Suffering Servant,” Vetus Testamentum 63 (October 1953), pp. 25–28.
  • John Goldingay, Daniel (World Biblical Commentary, 2019), p. 300.
  • Anathea Portier-Young, Apocalypse against Empire: Theologies of Resistance in Early Judaism (2014), pp. 272–76.

Not counting Carrier and Lataster, that’s now Boyarin, Hengel, Knohl, Wise, Mitchell, Staples, Brownlee, Ginsberg, Goldingay, and Portier-Young all agreeing it’s likely. [I have since found we can add Lim, Boccaccini, Angel, Bergsma, Johnson, Wise, Martinez, Puech, Rosenberg, Chilton, Beckwith, Starcky, Kim, Ulrich, and even Brooke, Kipp Davis’s own dissertation advisor, for a total now of more than two dozen experts; plus almost a dozen more agreeing it’s at least plausible]. So, Dr. Davis, is everyone incompetent? Or do we maybe have a point? It’s one thing to try and argue that twenty-five different scholars are all somehow wrong. But one thing you can’t plausibly claim is that we (and all our peer reviewers, which will amount to dozens more experts, and includes Bart Ehrman) are all incompetent.

Davis does another weird thing at this point (around minute 30 to 31). He spends a lot of minutes trying to find a reference to Isaiah 53 in one of my two citations of the Talmud and complains that it’s not there and makes up a weird vocabulary argument he thinks I must intend yet never made and complains about that instead. But any scholar should know that when you write a sentence like “[The Talmud] explicitly says the suffering servant who dies in Isaiah 53 is the messiah (and that this messiah will endure great suffering before his death)” (OHJ, p. 73) and two passages are immediately cited thereto, one passage is for the first claim (the Isaiah connection) and the second passage is for the second claim (that they believed the messiah will suffer greatly before his death). Instead of reading this in the way any scholar normally would, Davis scours the second passage for evidence of the first point and freaks out when he doesn’t find it, and then makes up some other argument he says I must have meant and critiques that. When all along I only cited the second passage for the second claim, of the messiah’s suffering, which Davis never challenges. Golly gee. So many minutes wasted on a rudimentary mistake in reading a source citation. Maybe Davis needs to start acting more like a scholar and less like a ragevlogger?

Note that still at no point has Davis ever mentioned any argument I made that errs on the Hebrew or Aramaic. His claim in the opening that he would present examples of this is never satisfied. He never produces one, anywhere in the video. Even when Davis rants about the convoluted versions of the dying-messiah myth I note in later sources (around minute 33), he never raises any issue pertinent to what I argued. Around minute 35, he agrees b.Sukkah 52a attests a dying messiah, just as I say, then argues over unrelated semantics that never come up in my argument. Then he acts like I didn’t mention the last source I cite is late or account for that. But I did. I did both things: I said it was “the seventh-century Apocalypse of Zerubbabel” and then said:

The narrative in this text was adapted to contemporary political circumstances of the later Middle Ages, but it is clear from the Talmud that the outline of it long predated that period, and thus long predates this redaction of it.

OHJ, p. 75

In other words, what this latest source shows is that we have multiple divergent traditions with a common theme. I then argue (per above) that this common theme (not the elaborate, and ever-changing, accoutrements Davis burns clock on) is unlikely to have been invented after Christianity, and even less likely to have been invented in parallel to it unless inventing dying messiahs was indeed an easy and common move for Jews, and not “impossible” or “inconceivable” as scholarly myth maintains.

Similarly, around minute 38 Davis complains that I didn’t discuss other documents at Qumran that he thinks I should have even though he argues they’d fail to carry my point (yes, follow that circle around a while). But that’s what I myself already said:

The Dead Sea Scrolls also speak of two messiahs, one ‘Messiah of Aaron’, who would be the ‘true high priest’, and a ‘Messiah of Israel’, who would be a kingly warlord figure… . But it’s debated whether these are actually two messiahs, or what kind of messiahs they are … [and]… It’s also debated whether one of the Qumran fragments says one of these messiahs ‘will be pierced’ and killed, or whether he will pierce and kill someone else, and I consider that question presently unresolvable (the manuscript is too damaged to tell).

OHJ, p. 75

All while citing experts for every point. And yet this is literally everything Davis himself goes on to say: such evidence is too ambiguous and fragmentary. So I actually did exactly what Davis tried to take me to task for not doing: I didn’t use such documents because, as he himself says, they are too ambiguous and fragmentary. That Davis missed me saying that is more evidence that he is not acting like a scholar in reviewing my book, but only rageskimming it, and thus getting incorrect everything it does and doesn’t say.

In the end, since everything Davis says here is what I myself also said, he can have no real complaint left. And this concludes his video.

This Is Where We End Up

Regardless of the particulars, the broader point, that the Jews had notions of suffering and dying messiahs before Christianity, has wide scholarly support. As I just noted, it’s a claim that has passed peer review some two dozen times now. Davis might want to start taking it seriously, instead of trying to falsely claim dozens of experts are somehow coincidentally incompetent.

Davis also didn’t mention another argument I made in this section, which is peculiar, because it illustrates all the correct ways to use existing expert scholarship when you aren’t yourself an expert in the material:

We might have evidence of a strand of that prior tradition in the early-first-century Targum of Jonathan ben Uzziel on Isaiah 53 (a kind of paraphrastic commentary in Aramaic; Jonathan ben Uzziel was traditionally a student of Hillel, who died c. 10 CE, and a contemporary of Shammai, who died c. 30 CE), which explicitly identifies the suffering servant there as the Christ—but otherwise transforms the narrative to suppress or downplay the element of his dying. But anyone who read this Targum, and then the original Hebrew (or Greek), could put two and two together: ‘this servant is the messiah’ plus ‘this servant dies and is buried and then exalted’ = ‘the messiah dies and is buried and then exalted’, the very doctrine we see in the Talmud, which just happens to be the same doctrine adopted by Christians. This Targum was multiply tampered with over the years, however (see Bruce Chilton, The Glory of Israel: The Theology and Provenience of the Isaiah Targum [Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1982], e.g., p. 94), so nothing conclusive can be decided by it (even though, again, it is unlikely Jews would change the Targum to make Isaiah 53 messianic after Christianity started using Isaiah 53 to support their cause), although Jintae Kim makes a case for the reading being early in ‘Targum Isaiah 53 and the New Testament Concept of Atonement’, Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism 5 (2008), pp. 81-98. 

OHJ, p. 75

Notice how I handle this: I describe the facts correctly; I cite experts for my own conclusions. And at no point do I make any argument “from the Hebrew or Aramaic” for Davis to complain about.

Kipp Davis has a reputation for doing this: making false, misleading, or unreliable claims about my work, criticizing whatever false thing he just invented as evincing my “incompetence,” and then (I guess?) counting on no one checking so as to notice that nothing he said was true. I’ll close with an example outside this video illustrating this is a trend.

In comments elsewhere, Kipp Davis tried to claim I was “incompetent” because I “didn’t know” that in Hebrew Yeshua means “God saves” and not “God’s savior.” Here is what I actually wrote in OHJ:

The name ‘Jesus Christ’ literally means ‘Savior Messiah,” which actually just means ‘Anointed Savior’. The author of the Gospel of Matthew was well aware of this, and even made a point of it [Mt. 1:20-21]. Jesus is an English derivation from the Greek spelling of the Hebrew name Joshua (Yeshua), which means ‘Yahweh saves’. Christ is from the Greek christos, meaning ‘anointed’, which in Hebrew is masiah, ‘messiah’.

OHJ, pp. 239–40

So…I literally said the word means “Yahweh saves,” and that the understanding of this as “God’s savior” was simply readily apparent to all concerned (which Davis could not challenge). So he invented a false claim (that I didn’t know the correct grammatical parsing of the word) and used that false claim to slander my competence as a scholar. When in reality, I correctly parsed it, and so by his own reasoning, I am thereby confirmed by his own argument to be entirely competent. Yay!

Davis does this again, in the same pedantic argument, by insisting I “didn’t know” that Yahweh does not mean “God” but is the name of a god. Obviously I know that (cf. OHJ, pp. 303, 315). It’s silly of Davis to nitpick “whether” Yahweh is the same thing as God. Even Bibles will translate it that way for a reason. Just as Allah just means God. Obviously I am not making some sectarian point about the true name or ancestry of God. I’m an atheist. It doesn’t matter what the name of God is. He’s still God. So a Jew saying “Yahweh saves” is saying “God saves.” This is not a Masked Man Fallacy. It’s a tautology. Davis really had to struggle to invent something to accuse me of here, because this absurdist pedantry has nothing to do with reality. I never claimed Yahweh wasn’t the name of a god. I never claimed Yeshua didn’t parse out as “Yahweh saves.” I outright said both things. So it would appear Davis is the one who is incompetent here.

These examples (and the ones above) illustrate that Kipp Davis has a tendency to be wholly unreliable. You should heed that going forward. You now know you can’t trust anything he says to be accurate, and therefore you have to fact-check him. Not necessarily his incidental fact-claims (he usually gets those fine), but in whatever he claims I supposedly did or did not say or argue. Which means his incompetence is limited to personal bias, not quackery. You simply can never trust anything he says about me or what I have written. Which indicates he has lost all objectivity, and is letting his emotions subvert all his skills. You should take care to notice if he treats anyone else the same way.

-:-

On Part 2 of Davis’s series, where he makes all the same mistakes and worse, see And Then Kipp Davis Fails to Heed My Advice and Digs a Hole for Himself.

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