I just completed a research trip to UC Berkeley and its neighboring Graduate Theological Union and garnered up a treasure trove of books, studies, and journal articles, checked and re-checked quotes and footnotes and citations, and took abundant notes. And all this was in aid of some future articles I am planning for peer-reviewed journal publication and my next edition (or sequel) to my previous peer-reviewed study On the Historicity of Jesus (see An Ongoing List of Updates to the Arguments and Evidence in On the Historicity of Jesus).

There will also be some blogs about all this, this being the first: a summary of a few “controversial” claims that are actually respectable now yet that many keep falsely claiming are crank or incompetent or ridiculous or not taken seriously by “real” experts with exactly the right PhDs and appointments and publication histories. Contrary to those gainsaying assertions, these “controversial” positions are actually now mainstream and accepted as credible or even true by a large number of fully qualified experts. Even insofar as any debate remains about them, it consists of ignoring these shifts in scholarly opinion, ignoring the latest arguments and evidence, and deploying fallacies, sometimes even just fallacious “arguments from authority” by citing mere gainsayers (often quite obsolete), rather than anyone who has actually properly disproved these positions against the cases now widely made for them in the legitimate academic literature.

In short, claims that these positions are not accepted by experts are now false. The tide has turned in the other direction. And continuing to resist this fact by just listing scholars who don’t like these claims is no longer a credible argument against this tide’s new turn. I have compiled this article for popular reference so you can use it as a starting bibliography for your own verification or to simply point people here who don’t believe you when you point this out.

The subjects treated here are:

• The Idea That Jesus Might Not Have Existed
• The Idea That Dying-and-Rising Gods Were Already Fashionable
• The Idea That Christianity Began with a High Christology
• The Idea That Some Jews Were Already Expecting a Dying Messiah
• And a Few Other Things on the Horizon

So here we go…

The Idea That Jesus Might Not Have Existed

That doubting the historicity of Jesus is now widely acceptable among fully qualified experts I already document in List of Historians Who Take Mythicism Seriously, there establishing that over forty recent and current scholars concur it’s a respectable position. So the claims that “this is ridiculous,” that “this is incompetent,” that “this is crank,” that “no real scholar takes this seriously,” are all decisively false and anyone who continues to repeat them is, at this point, simply lying. They need to start actually confronting the evidence, not ignore or lie about it.

The Idea That Dying-and-Rising Gods Were Already Fashionable

Christian apologists and some secular pundits have called into question the existence of a pre-Christian trend toward inventing “dying and rising” gods, many even savior gods at that, often accusing the claim of being, again, “ridiculous,” “incompetent,” or “crank,” something “no real scholar takes seriously” anymore. Generally, everyone keeps re-citing only one study arguing this, Jonathan Z. Smith’s Drudgery Divine (University of Chicago, 1994), which in fact didn’t even mention, much less “rebut,” almost all the pertinent evidence—proving, yet again, that even supposedly responsible scholars aren’t even reading the studies they propagandistically keep referencing as vindicating their desires.

The actual evidence is overwhelming, and only someone committed to denying reality can maintain that the trope and a fashion for it didn’t exist (see Dying-and-Rising Gods: It’s Pagan, Guys. Get Over It.). But because disingenuous idealogues don’t believe in evidence, only prestige, let’s drub them with an uncomfortable fact: since I published OHJ with a survey of the best evidence for this category being real, the overwhelming trend in peer-reviewed scholarship has been to agree with me.

Of course, that trend preceded me: doubt of the category was already refuted for specifically pre-Hellenistic Near Eastern deities by Tryggve Mettinger in The Riddle of Resurrection: “Dying and Rising Gods” in the Ancient Near East (Eisenbrauns, 2001), whom I duly cited for the fact; likewise Pirjo Lapinkivi’s The Neo-Assyrian Myth of Ištar’s Descent and Resurrection (Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, 2010), Mark Smith’s The Ugaritic Baal Cycle (Brill, 1994), and Bojana Mojsov’s Osiris: Death and Afterlife of a God (Blackwell, 2005; cf. pp. 38–53). I could have added Richard Clifford, “Phoenician Religion,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 279 (1990), pp. 55-64, who establishes “dying and rising gods were important” in Phoenician settlements, presenting evidence for Eshmun at Sidon (equated with the Greek Asclepius), Adonis at Byblos, and Melqart at Tyre (equated with the Greek Heracles); and Dag Øistein Endsjø, Greek Resurrection Beliefs and the Success of Christianity (Palgrave, 2009), who establishes that it was actually pagan ideas of a resurrection of the flesh, ubiquitous across many myths, that substantially molded Christian ideas and determined its success. And, of course, after also myself (On the Historicity of Jesus, pp. 46–47, 56–58, 168–73), the concept was reaffirmed under peer-review again by Raphael Lataster in Questioning the Historicity of Jesus (Brill, 2019; pp. 230–33).

But now a sea change has carried this trend to fruition.

• Noga Ayali-Darshan, professor of Hebrew and Semitic languages at Bar-Ilan University, in “The Death of Mot and His Resurrection (KYU^3 1.5 II, V) in the Light of Egyptian Sources,” Ugarit Forschungen: Internationales Jahrbuch für die Altertumskunde Syrien-Palästinas 48 (2019), pp. 1–20, proves that in their popular myths, Baal, Mot, and Osiris were unmistakably dying and rising gods, and their myths show affinities and influences across each other, demonstrating a fashionable trend. One can now show the same with Lapinkivi’s study proving the death and resurrection of Inanna (Ishtar) in her popular mythology, and likewise other gods, with Mettinger.
• Paul Rovang, an award-winning professor of Medieval English Literature at Pennsylvania Western University-Edinboro, just this year published a targeted and detailed refutation of J.Z. Smith in The Archetype of the Dying and Rising God in World Mythology (Lexington, 2023).
• John Granger Cook, professor of Religion at La Grange College with a PhD in the same from Emory University, in Empty Tomb, Resurrection, Apotheosis (Mohr Siebeck, 2018), acutely establishes the trope against apologetic denials, arguing, like Endsjø, that in fact the ubiquity of it actually aided Christian evangelism owing to its exploitation of an already-popular mytheme.
• Richard C. Miller, professor of Religious Studies at Chapman University, with a PhD in same from Claremont Graduate School, in Resurrection and Reception in Early Christianity (Routledge, 2014) establishes the trope of vanishing, ascending, and resurrecting gods and heroes was an enormously popular one that pervasively influenced Christian accounts.
• Paola Corrente, professor of Humanities at the University of the Pacific in Peru, and of Religious Studies at the University of Madrid, with a PhD in Classics from the University of Salerno, published two peer-reviewed articles refuting Smith and other critics: “Rethinking Frazer’s Dying Gods: New Perspectives on the Death and Resurrection Pattern in Ancient Mediterranean Myths,” Annali di Scienze Religiose 15 (2022), pp. 345-363, and “The Gods who Die and Come Back to Life: The Orphic Dionysus and His parallels in the Near-East,” Tracing Orpheus: Studies of Orphic Fragments, ed. Miguel Herrero de Jáuregui et al. (De Gruyter, 2012), pp. 69–76 (there with a particular focus on the examples of Inanna, Baal, and Dionysus).

That’s eleven studies by ten qualified scholars coming to the same conclusion. So the notion that this trope didn’t exist when Christianity formed is pretty much now dead. The overwhelming majority of peer-reviewed studies now conclusively refutes the unsupported over-generalizations of J.Z. Smith and establish what I said the evidence shows to be the case: that “dying and rising” gods were in fact already a popular trend before proto-Christian Jews invented their own Jewish version of one and built a religion around it; and that trend literally surrounded Judea on every border, infiltrating every culture Jews interacted with, a phenomenon impossible not to notice—or envy. This fact can no longer be ignored.

The Idea That Christianity Began with a High Christology

This is a problem for historicity because it means the idea that Jesus was an incarnate celestial being who existed since the dawn of time was not a later legend attached to a historical person. It is instead what Christians were claiming from day one. Which means no historical person was needed for this idea to take shape. Though of course these ideas could have been attached to a historical person (even right away), any imagined revelatory encounter with such a being, discovered hidden in scripture and portending the imminent end of the world, would do. Moreover, the concealing of this information in the Gospels thereby proves they were not meant to be literal guides to Christian history and doctrine, but hide the truth behind stories and allegory, letting the real doctrine only leak out slowly over time. Exactly as mythicism predicts, and only certain models of historicity do.

The hard evidence for this is already conclusive (OHJ, pp. 92–96), so it was never doubted on any sound basis. But there are people who still balk, claiming it’s a minority position in the field. I don’t think it is anymore. All the latest studies affirm it, and even Bart Ehrman himself has finally agreed it’s correct (see Bart Ehrman on How Jesus Became God). The current state of the field is now represented by: Ruben Bühner, Messianic High Christology: New Testament Variants of Second Temple Judaism (Baylor University Press, 2021); Angela Costley, Creation and Christ: An Exploration of the Topic of Creation in the Epistle to the Hebrews (Mohr Siebeck, 2020); Peter Schäfer, Two Gods in Heaven: Jewish Concepts of God in Antiquity (Princeton University Press, 2020); Chris Kugler, Paul and the Image of God (Fortress 2020); Andrei Orlov, The Glory of the Invisible God: Two Powers in Heaven Traditions and Early Christology (T&T Clark, 2019); Alan Segal, Two Powers in Heaven: Early Rabbinic Reports about Christianity and Gnosticism (Baylor University Press, 2012); Susan Garrett, No Ordinary Angel: Celestial Spirits and Christian Claims about Jesus (Yale University Press, 2008); Margaret Barker, The Great Angel: A Study of Israel’s Second God (Westminster John Knox Press, 1992); and Larry Hurtado, One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism (Fortress, 1988).

That’s now nine peer-reviewed studies, specifically devoted to the question, reaching this same conclusion, most of them published in just the last ten years. The number of studies published in that time coming to the contrary conclusion is zero. The state of the field now is clear.

The Idea That Some Jews Were Already Expecting a Dying Messiah

In Element 5 of Chapter 4 of my study On the Historicity of Jesus I summarized existing scholarship concluding that there was a lot of evidence for the possibility, if not indeed the probability, that some Jewish sects already were expecting a dying messiah, and that this was already a component of their eschatological timetable. I even point out elsewhere in that book that this apocalyptic expectation, claimed to have been found hidden in scripture, might have inspired actual messianic pretenders to try and make that happen, which could also explain a historical Jesus (pp. 68–72, 245–46; for a humorous yet still serious outline of this theory, see my Wichita Talk, You’re All Gonna Die!! How the Jews Kept Failing to Predict Doomsday and Caused Christianity Instead). But this also wipes out a common defense of historicity: the argument that no Jews would ever have thought of such a thing—without actually suffering the unexpected death of their (thereby necessarily historical) messiah.

That argument is refuted of course by that fact that, actually, that had already happened: Daniel 9:26 assigns the death of the “messiah” Onias III as a key sign of the apocalypse. So coming up with such a notion by exactly that kind of historical motivation already predates Christianity by almost two centuries. But since the end didn’t come as the book of Daniel originally intended, many sects (as we already see happening at Qumran) started feverishly trying to reinterpret that “dying messiah” prophecy as somehow in their future. This is all we need to explain how someone could then invent a suitable new candidate to mark the end of the world. A real guy was no longer needed for that. An imaginary one would do. That is, after all, the easiest way to fulfill a prophecy.

But it’s only the worse that, in fact, there is no evidence for this alleged universal “opposition” among Jews to such a prophetic timetable anyway, and actually quite a lot of converging circumstantial evidence for the opposite: that some Jews were ginning up messianic readings of Isaiah’s Suffering Servant prophecy (Is. 52–53) into just such an expectation, and scouring scriptures to learn more about it. Later, Talmudic Jews simply adopted the idea as a matter of course—we find no opposition at all in the Talmud to the idea of a suffering or dying messiah. And the clues that survive, from Jewish Medieval and Talmudic exegesis all the way back to ancient scriptures, apocrypha, and the Dead Sea Scrolls, all triangulate toward this being much earlier than later. Certainly, there is no evidence it was only invented late; whereas there is some evidence it was invented early. And at the very least, even if you aren’t sure of that, the evidence is sufficient to establish this could have happened, and thus is a plausible pathway to the invention of Christianity. Either way, the attempt to argue this is impossible fails.

Against this it is said no one with “real” expertise believes this, and that I have interpreted all the evidence incompetently, and the consensus is overwhelmingly against me. In actual fact, what I argued is argued by well over a dozen experts now, many of unimpeachable competence and qualifications, all under peer review. And many more concur as to its plausibility, just as I affirmed. There is in fact no argument I made that hasn’t passed peer review multiple times, in studies completed by some of the most prominent experts in Hebrew, Talmud, Second Temple Judaism, and the Dead Sea Scrolls.

But since the litany of internet trolls reject evidence, spit on peer review, and lean instead on the apologetic tactic of cherry-picking the obsolete opinions of scholars who only conclude the way they want (but who never actually rebut, rarely even at all much less effectively, scholars arguing the other side), and insist, rather, on “arguments from prestige” whereby only scholars of suitable social status count, and only some never-admitted “number” of them have to say this before being believed, let’s survey the actual status of this question in the field today—mustering all the prestige you could want. Because in actual reality, my conclusion in Element 5, and indeed even my use of evidence to that conclusion, is not fringe but mainstream. And to make very clear that anyone who tells you otherwise is lying, I have no choice but to bombard you with examples until you relent. So here goes…

David Mitchell has a PhD in Hebrew Bible from New College, Edinburgh. His book Messiah ben Joseph (Campbell 2016) has received wide praise among highly qualified peers, including: Robert Gordon, a retired professor of Hebrew at Cambridge; Alan Avery-Peck, professor of Judaic studies at Holy Cross and editor of the Review of Rabbinic Judaism; Mart-Jan Paul, professor of Old Testament at ETF Leuven; Michael Heiser, a PhD in Hebrew and Semitic Studies who has held multiple appointments and professorships in the field; even Evangelical scholars L. Michael Morales, a professor of Biblical Studies at a seminary, with a PhD in Old Testament from Trinity College, UK, and Michael L. Brown, who has held professorships at numerous seminaries and holds a PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Literature from NYU; and, above all, famed Judaic scholar Lester Grabbe, who says of Mitchell’s study that “Mitchell has now devoted a monograph to the subject” of the “Messiah ben Joseph,” that the corresponding “concept of the dying and salvific Messiah is an important belief in the rabbinic period,” and that Mitchell’s “collection of material is very thorough.”

Mitchell argues, as I do in OHJ, that the modern belief that this messianic concept derived later (such as from the disappointing experience of Bar Kochba) is based on no evidence at all (just conjecture), whereas, actually, the preponderance of evidence indicates the idea long predates that event. He deploys a triangulation of converging evidence to that conclusion, just as I did. And all those other professors of Jewish studies concur that Mitchell adequately proves this plausible or even probable from the Talmudic references I myself cited (such as b.Sukkah 52 and b.Sanhedrin 98), and from the Dead Sea Scrolls and their (and others’) use and interpretations of Isaiah 53; he even agrees with my reading of 11QMelchizedek (“This may not be the only Qumran text to feature a dying messianic figure”; cf. Messiah, pp. 100–01). Some of these conclusions were previously published under peer review as well in David Mitchell, “Rabbi Dosa and the Rabbis Differ: Messiah ben Joseph in the Babylonian Talmud,” The Review of Rabbinic Judaism (2005), pp. 77–90 (vide 89–90), particularly his arguments for an early dating of the material that ended up later in the Talmud.

Mitchell’s blog is full of summaries of his case, with a detailed understanding of the Hebrew. In no way is his treatment of this material incompetent. Yet it reaches the same conclusions I did, with the same evidence and more. I was only repeating the conclusions of other scholars reaching the same conclusions (I never made any argument from the Hebrew of any text myself, for example). But a survey of the literature shows that I (in OHJ, pp. 73–81) and Mitchell (supra) are not outliers. As you’ll see shortly, the view that pre-Christian Jews could already have been expecting (or indeed were expecting) a dying messiah to presage the end of the world is now widely shared across the expert literature. Nearly twenty experts now concede it—and all doing so under peer review or with the agreement of peer-reviewed experts, including many notable specialists in early Judaism, Hebrew, the Talmud, or the Dead Sea Scrolls.

For example, just this month I cited leading scroll experts who’ve reached the same conclusion. Timothy Lim, Professor of Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism at the University of Edinburgh, a major scholar in Dead Sea Scrolls research—indeed author of one of the standard manuals on Pesharim (Sheffield 2002)—concurs with me in reading 11Q13 as referring to a dying messiah who would presage the end of the world. And Geza Vermes (pron. “Vèrmesh”), another renowned scrolls specialist, even commissioned Lim to add an appendix to his published comments from “The Oxford Forum for Qumran Research Seminar on the Rule of War from Cave 4 (4Q285)” in the Journal of Jewish Studies (vol. 43, 1992, pp. 90–92), entitled “11QMelch, Luke 4 and the Dying Messiah.” Which entails Vermes himself endorses Lim’s contribution to his own article. Vermes here agrees as well with my point (and Mitchell’s), discussed earlier this month, about the dying Messiah ben Joseph in the Talmud; which is also the conclusion of David Mitchell as just discussed. [See comment for a side-note here]

In this appendix to Vermes, Lim says “the herald of Isa. 52:7 is identified with ‘the anointed of the spirit’ in “reference to Dan. 9:25” in 11Q13. Lim then links this to Daniel 9:26 exactly as I did—because the author of 11Q13 says this is the one “about whom Daniel spoke,” and thus is not merely extracting one line, but referencing the entirety of what Daniel says about this person, and relating this to his own time or later. And hence, Lim concludes, “what 11QMelch does is to link the dying prince/messiah of Dan. 9 to the herald of Isa. 52:7.” He concedes this is debatable (as I do), and lists reasons for its uncertainty, but he affirms, nevertheless, that “what is unassailable is that in Dan. 9:25ff. there is a figure who is described as ‘an anointed one’ and ‘a priest’, whose appearance is connected with the rebuilding of Jerusalem and who after sixty-two weeks of years is cut off or killed (cf. Dan. 11:22),” thus heralding the final years of the apocalypse. Mitchell cites this very discussion by Lim in concurrence with this same conclusion about 11Q13. And no one can accuse Lim and Vermesh and Mitchell of all being incompetent, of “not knowing the Hebrew,” or not understanding the Dead Sea Scrolls.

In Second Temple Judaism more generally, Martin Hengel, a professor of New Testament Studies at the Universities of Erlanger and Tübingen, which latter had previously awarded him the PhD in Judaic studies, wrote with the assistance of Daniel P. Bailey, a PhD in New Testament studies from the University of Cambridge, “The Effective History of Isaiah 53 in the Pre-Christian Period,” in The Suffering Servant: Isaiah 53 in Jewish and Christian Sources, eds. Bernd Janowski & Peter Stuhlmacher (Eerdmans, 2004). Hengel and Bailey argue there that “the demonstrated uses and echoes” of Isaiah 52–53 in early Judaism “are enough to suggest that traditions of suffering and atoning eschatological messianic figures were current in Palestinian Judaism, and that Jesus and the earliest Church could have known and appealed to them,” indeed “this would explain” how that “would be comprehensible to their Jewish contemporaries” (p. 75; cf. p. 146), precisely as I argued in OHJ.

These teachings could also have included “a Messiah ben Joseph or Messiah from Ephraim who ultimately dies” (pp. 77, 139), just as I argued. He and I even put it the same way: that “might” post date one or the other Jewish War, but “it could also be significantly older” (Mitchell, in his book and “Rabbi Dosa and the Rabbis Differ,” makes a strong case that in fact it was). But more assuredly, Hengel finds interconnections between Isaiah 53 and Wisdom 2 and 5, as I did (pp. 101, 130). He notes both are pre-Christian texts depicting a heroic “chosen one” dying but being exalted and effecting (in some way) God’s ultimate messianic plans. He also agrees with me that Daniel 9 already sets up a model for a dying messiah (p. 137), just as I argued. And he locates a wide range of other evidence for early Jewish thinking along these lines (pp. 75-146). His conclusion is even worded the same way as mine (in case you were wondering where my disjunctive reasoning came from), with emphasis now added so you don’t miss the point he is actually making (as was I):

The expectation of an eschatological suffering savior figure connected with Isaiah 53 cannot therefore be proven to exist with absolute certainty and in a clearly outlined form in pre-Christian Judaism. Nevertheless, a lot of indices that must be taken seriously in texts of very different provenance suggest that these types of expectations could also have existed at the margins, next to many others. This would then explain how a suffering or dying Messiah surfaces in various forms with the Tannaim of the second century C.E., and why Isaiah 53 is clearly interpreted messianically in the Targum and rabbinic texts.

Another example is Daniel Boyarin, professor of Talmudic Culture at UC Berkeley with a PhD in Talmudic studies from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, who wrote in The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ (New Press, 2012) that the “commonplace view” that dying-messiah interpretations of Isaiah 53 were a Christian innovation unprecedented in Judaism “has to be rejected completely,” because “the notion of the humiliated and suffering messiah was not at all alien within Judaism before Jesus,” and even “remained current among Jews” well after, proving “Jews, it seems, had no difficulty whatever with understanding a Messiah who would vicariously suffer to redeem the world” (pp. 132–33). Moreover, “there is no evidence at all that any late ancient Jews read Isaiah 52–53 as referring to anyone but the messiah” yet there are “several attestations” of their reading it messianically. He cites the same evidence I do, and likewise Mitchell does (pp. 152–53). There is a good summary of Boyarin’s arguments at Vridar (The Suffering Messiah Is a Very Jewish Idea).

A more timely example is the opinion of George Brooke, a renowned Dead Sea scrolls specialist, member of the Israel Antiquities Authority’s international team of editors of the Dead Sea Scrolls, founding editor of the journal Dead Sea Discoveries, and once President of the British Association for Jewish Studies, with a Ph.D. in Religion from Claremont Graduate School and a doctorate in Divinity from Oxford, as well as being a professor of Biblical Criticism and Exegesis at the University of Manchester, where he not only taught Biblical Studies and Early Judaism, but was Kipp Davis’s dissertation advisor (yes, that Kipp Davis). Brooke in turn studied under William Brownlee, who (as we’ll see shortly) also agrees with me regarding Element 5. And, alas, so does Kipp Davis’s own professor and mentor, George Brooke. Process that.

In The Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament (Fortress, 2005), Brooke argues that we can’t be certain that the reference to Daniel 9:25 in 11Q13 meant to include 9:26, but “it is possible” it does, and so 11Q13 “should be viewed as providing much of the exegetical background…allowing for the early Christian development of the motif of a dying messiah” (pp. 160–61), exactly as I argue. He cites and concurs with Timothy Lim on this (whose opinion we just discussed). But Brooke goes further. In his chapter on “The Use of Isaiah in 4Q541,” referring to the Apocryphon on Levi in which Brooke is a leading expert, he articulates a case for my conclusion that even I did not make, in various places approvingly citing in concurrence Puech and Starcky (see below).

There Brooke argues “It may be possible to construe [even] 4Q541 24 as speaking of the death of [an] eschatological figure as Isaiah 53 could itself be construed, possibly even a death by crucifixion” (pp. 150–51), and when we link this with 11Q13 (he goes on to point out) the imagined atoning role of that death is also deducible, exactly as I noted. So, Brooke concludes, “it now seems that there is a Jewish text whose author used the Servant passages of Isaiah to support the understanding that there was to be an eschatological priest who would suffer, possibly even that the suffering involved death, death that would lead to joyous benefits for others” (pp. 152–54), proving an early messianic reading of Isaiah 52–53 even more affirmatively, he says, than Martin Hengel had argued. And thus George Brooke thinks the first Christians coopted (not invented) “already existing traditions about the suffering of the eschatological Servent priest(-Messiah) to explain” the fate of Jesus (pp. 155–57). Brooke thus endorses the similar thought of Bruce Chilton, who “posit[ed] (now apparently with some vindication) that there was a pre-Christian messianic Servant” (p. 152 n. 24; see below).

The list goes on:

• Gabriele Boccaccini, founding director of the Enoch Seminar and once professor of Second Temple Judaism and Christian Origins at the University of Michigan, with a PhD in Judaic Studies from the University of Turin, wrote in Paul’s Three Paths to Salvation (Eerdmans, 2020) that “the idea that the messiah could suffer and die was not foreign to the Jewish tradition” (p. 101), citing Boyarin.
• John Goldingay, once a professor of Old Testament at Fuller Theological Seminary, with a PhD in Old Testament Studies from the University of Nottingham and a Doctor of Divinity from the Church of England, in the latest commentary on Daniel (World Biblical Commentary, 2019), writes that whatever the original (failed) prophetic intent of the author(s) of Daniel 9 had been, in subsequent transmission and reinterpretation, given “the punctuation of v. 25a in the ancient versions…it is probably the same ‘anointed’ as in v. 26, one who appears after seven plus sixty-two sevens” and is killed, and that grammatical arguments to the contrary don’t carry weight (pp. 261–62). He thus considers early dying-messiah interpretations of the text plausible even if uncertain.
• Raphael Lataster, a PhD in Religious Studies from the University of Sydney, in Questioning the Historicity of Jesus (Brill, 2019), a peer-reviewed study published by one of the most prestigious of academic presses, wrote: “That the messiah would suffer is not a concept merely invented by desper­ate Christians upset over Jesus’ death; it was something Jews, pre-Jesus, already believed in” and scholars are “simply wrong to think that (non-Christian) Jews could not create a suffering messiah” (pp. 94–95), citing the atoning-death soteriology of the Maccabean martyrs as a model (as do Hengel and others). None of his peer-reviewers challenged this claim, requiring it be neither struck nor qualified.
• Joseph Angel, professor of Bible and Jewish History at Yeshiva University, an expert in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Jewish Apocrypha, with a PhD in Hebrew and Judaic Studies from NYU, in “Enoch, Jesus, and the Priestly Tradition,” Enoch and the Synoptic Gospels: Reminiscences, Allusions, Intertextuality, eds., L.T. Stuckenbruck and G. Boccaccini (SBL, 2016), pp. 285-316, argues, like Brooke, that 4Q541 suggests a pre-Christian dying-messiah concept was constructed from Isaiah 52–53, because “the trajectory of this figure’s experience—his universal significance, the association of his mission with the removal of darkness, ridicule and abuse, perhaps violent suffering, even death, and positive results for others—appears to be modeled on that of Isaiah’s servant” and “this is corroborated by extensive linguistic and thematic links with the Servant Songs” and his declared “atoning function” (e.g. 4Q541 2: “And he will atone for all the children of his generation.”); and so “several scholars have thus seen evidence in 4Q541 for the notion of a suffering messiah in pre-Christian Judaism” (p. 299). He cites Brooke, Puech, and Starcky.
• Anathea Portier-Young, a professor of Old Testament at Duke Divinity School, with a PhD in Religion from Duke University (majoring in Hebrew), argues in Apocalypse against Empire: Theologies of Resistance in Early Judaism (2014), pp. 272–76, that Daniel 9 was deliberately written to articulate their interpretation of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 52–53, and thus its authors already understood both passages to reflect messianic expectations—albeit collectively in the body of the ‘enlighteners’ (the elect): the one who suffers and dies being a model for the end-time fate of these righteous few as a whole, possibly even with an apocalyptic atoning function similar to the Maccabean martyrs tradition, which of course would be rewarded with resurrection. Thus a pre-Christian package of apocalyptic atoning-death heroism based on these texts was already in place to adapt to any specific messiah they wanted.
• Dean Ulrich, with two PhDs, in theology from Westminster Theological Seminary and in Biblical Studies from North-West University, in “How Early Judaism Read Daniel 9:24–27,” Old Testament Essays 27.3 (January 2014), pp. 1062–83, concludes that in 11Q13, “the anointed one of Dan 9:26 seems to be in view,” the one the verse says will be “cut off,” and although this part of Daniel originally referred to people in the past, the author of 11Q13 “evidently expects a recapitulation of messianic suffering in the near future” (p. 1071), hence expecting another dying messiah to come.
• Sook-Young Kim, an expert on ancient Hebrew and messianism with a PhD in New Testament from Andrews University Theological Seminary and Professor of Theology at Avondale College, in The Warrior Messiah in Scripture and Intertestamental Writings (Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010), a republication of her dissertation, she concludes 11QMelch refers to “the Messiah who would be cut off in Dan 9:25–26” (p. 263; cf. p. 226) citing Lim (as attesting to the possibility there of “a reference to the dying Messiah,” p. 146 n. 244). She finds (as other scholars have) that Daniel 9 is based on (and represents an interpretation of) Isaiah 53 (e.g. pp. 81–82; she finds this connection in several other texts as well, including 1 Enoch: p. 263), and that Isaiah 53 was thus by some taken as a messianic text delineating a model whereby, “contrary to the customary way” of imagining a Messiah “conducting war with military weapons” and the like, this one “takes a different way of achieving supremacy, namely through suffering, humiliation, and death” (p. 80).
• Rick Van de Water, a widely published expert in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Second Temple Judaism, in “Michael or Yhwh? Toward Identifying Melchizedek in 11Q13,” Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 16.1 (2006), pp. 75–86, concludes that 11Q13 does mean the messiah in verses 25 and 26 are intended to be the same; and “that he is said to be the Anointed One ‘cut off (Dan. 9.26), moreover, implies his death” and “since the ‘cutting off’ of Daniel’s Messiah is associated with ‘atonement for sin’ … it is not inconceivable that the death of Melchizedek was taken to be the act of expiation delivering ‘those of his lot’ from” an ill end and therefore “the elaborate collage of biblical images in 11 QMelch argues that its full text presented Melchizedek, not only as a heavenly priestly Messiah, but also as a human suffering Messiah” (p. 83), just as I suggested (though I don’t assume this dying messiah had to be Melchizedek himself).
• John Bergsma, professor of Theology at the Franciscan University of Steubenville, with a PhD in Theology from the University of Notre Dame, a noted specialist in the Old Testament and the Dead Sea Scrolls, in The Jubilee from Leviticus to Qumran (Brill, 2006) gives the same argument I and (below) Roger Beckwith do, that 11Q13 in its end-times prophecy can only be referring to the same messiah who dies in Daniel 9:26, regardless of whether it quoted verse 25 or not (pp. 282–83, 288–89). He also makes an argument that this is the messiah Melchizedek himself (pp. 289–90; which I didn’t presume, since my working definition of “messiah” doesn’t require that it be). He cites Lim on this, approvingly (on 11Q13 linking “the dying prince/messiah of Dan. 9 to the herald of Isa. 52:7,” p. 283, n. 80).
• Marshall Johnson, with a PhD in Biblical Studies from Union Seminary in New York and a former Director of Fortress Press and Lecturer at the University of Bergen, in The Purpose of the Biblical Genealogies: With Special Reference to the Setting of the Genealogies of Jesus (Wipf and Stock, 2002), pp. 129–38, argues that the two-messiah tradition that evolved into later Medieval traditions of a dying Messiah ben Joseph followed by a resurrecting Messiah ben David (such as are clearly spelled out in Sefer Zerubbabel and are hinted at in the Talmud—per Mitchell, above) could even be evident in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
• Israel Knohl, professor of Biblical Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where he also received his PhD, in his study The Messiah Before Jesus: The Suffering Servant of the Dead Sea Scrolls (University of California Press, 2000) observes that “one could also find confirmation of the killing of the messiah in Daniel [9:26]” (p. 120 n. 61), and in the Talmud (naming the same passages I cited, including “the Messiah, son of Joseph, who was [to be] killed in the war of redemption and was [then] destined to be resurrected,” p. 74). He also notes that Jerome reports in his Commentary on Daniel that some Jews indeed regarded Daniel 9:26 as messianic (as did Josephus: OHJ, p. 84 n. 48). Knohl adduces evidence from the scrolls that “the messianic interpretation of Isaiah 53 was not discovered in the Christian Church” but “was already developed” at Qumran (p. 26), where “a catastrophic model of messianism based on verses of the Bible” was developed by members who “believed that the suffering, death, and resurrection of the Messiah were a necessary basis for the process of redemption” (p. 48), all through a messianic reading of Isaiah 53 (passim). Knohl thinks they may have applied this to a revered member of their own community.
• Michael Wise, Professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Languages at the University of Northwestern St. Paul, “an internationally recognized expert on the Dead Sea Scrolls,” with two PhDs (in Jewish Studies from the University of Chicago; and in Classics from the University of Minnesota), makes a case for a historical pre-Christian dying messiah, similar to Knohl, in The First Messiah: Investigating the Savior Before Jesus (HarperOne, 1999), showing strong links between the Thanksgiving Hymns at Qumran and Isaiah’s Servant Songs and a messianic understanding of both (links that several other scholars I’m listing also make). He believes 11Q13 is referencing Daniel 9:26 (p. 227), perhaps by abbreviation, because the “Anointed One” it refers to can only be someone in the last days, not someone hundreds of years before (pp. 228–29), just as I (and others here) argue, and so he concludes (like Beckwith, below) that “they found predicted in Daniel 9:24–27 the death of an Anointed One, a messiah” (p. 232).
• Florentino Garcia Martinez, a professor of Religion and Literature of Early Judaism and Director of the Qumran Institute at the University of Groningen, previous professor of Literature of Early Judaism at the University of Leuven, Editorial Secretary of the Revue de Qumran, and Editor-in-chief of the Journal for the Study of Judaism, “a leading expert on messianic ideas in the Dead Sea scrolls,” argues in “Messianic Hopes in the Qumran Writings,” The People of the Dead Sea Scrolls, ed. Florentino Garcia Martinez and Julio Barrera (Brill, 1995), pp. 159–90, that the Qumran text 4Q541 “shows us that the portrayal of [a] ‘Messiah-priest’ with the features of the ‘Suffering Servant’ of Deutero-Isaiah is not an innovation of” the Christians “but the result of previous developments,” and “it cannot be excluded that the Aramaic text even contained the idea of the violent death of this ‘Messiah-priest'” (pp. 170–72).
• Émile Puech, a renowned scrolls scholar with a PhD in Biblical Studies from the Catholic University of Paris at the School of Ancient Oriental Languages, in “Fragments d’un apocryphe de Levi et le personnage christologique. 4QTestLevi^a–d(?) et 4QAJ,” The Madrid Qumran Congress (Brill, 1992), pp. 449–501, argued the same thesis as Martinez (above), and is cited approvingly by Brooke.
• Roy Rosenberg, a renowned Rabbi and graduate of Hebrew Union College with a considerable peer-reviewed publication record, in “The Slain Messiah in the Old Testament,” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 99 (1987), pp. 259–61, endorses much of my same evidence to the same conclusion: “a slain Messiah … is spelled out very clearly in Dan 9,26” which “says that the ‘Messiah will be cut off and will be no more'”; post-Danielic Jews saw this “messiah” in Daniel 9 verses 25 and 26 to be the same; likewise “a ritualistic mourning for a slain Messiah is referred to in Zach 12,10–11,” and, he notes, even the Talmud references this in respect to an apocalyptic dying messiah (“There are some rabbinic texts that speak of a ‘Messiah ben Joseph’ who will perish in the War of God and Magog,” citing b.Sukkah 52, just as I do, and a Targum on Zechariah 12 that references the same thing). He argues that a concurrence of vocabulary across these and other messianic passages would have made it “quite simple for [Jewish] exegetes to identify” that figure as the messiah and conclude “it was the destiny of the Davidic Messiah to flourish for a time, and then be cut down,” a view later transferred to the Josephite messiah. He references the “two messiahs” tradition spanning from the Dead Sea Scrolls to Medieval rabbinical texts as evidence supporting this, as I do, concluding that such a “sectarian exegesis of scripture brought forth the doctrine of a slain Messiah” before Christianity coopted it.
• Sydney Page, retired Professor of New Testament at Taylor Seminary, surveys the evidence for a pre-Christian notion of a suffering or even dying messiah in “The Suffering Servant between the Testaments,” New Testament Studies 31.4 (1985): 481-497, and concludes that while it cannot be conclusively proved, “the denial of the possibility of such a conception having been entertained before the time of Christ is unwarranted” (p. 493).
• Bruce Chilton, professor of Religion at Bard College and formerly professor of New Testament at Yale, with a PhD in New Testament from Cambridge University, and a renowned expert in Aramaic, in The Glory of Israel: The Theology and Provenience of the Isaiah Targum (UNKNO, 1982) argues against simply assuming a dying-messiah interpretation of Isaiah 53 “cannot” be a pre-Christian development in Judaism, clarifying that he isn’t saying, for example, that the Targumic re-phrasing of the prophecy in Isaiah 53 “unequivocally means the messiah did die, but merely that it is susceptible of the interpretation that he did so” (p. 94; see my previous discussion of this Targum). In other words, such a pre-Christian development is plausible and thus its denial cannot be used to date developments in the interpretation of Isaiah. Which was exactly my argument. And as we saw earlier, Kipp Davis’s advisor George Brooke thinks the case is even stronger now than Chilton did, having moved the ball from “possibly” to “probably.”
• Roger Beckwith, an Oxford librarian with an impressive peer review record and a Doctorate in Divinity from Oxford University, writes in “Daniel 9 and the Date of the Messiah’s Coming in Essene, Hellenistic, Pharisaic, Zealot, and Early Christian Computation,” Revue de Qumrân 10.4 (December 1981), pp. 521-542, regarding the interpreters of Daniel 9 at Qumran and elsewhere, “Since they are looking to the future, they concentrate their attention on the concluding part of the 70-week period, and expect ‘the anointed one, the prince’ of verse 25 not after the 7 weeks but after the 7 weeks and 62 weeks (i.e. 69 weeks)” and “as a consequence, they usually identify ‘the anointed one, the prince’ with ‘the anointed one’ who is cut off after the 62 weeks in verse 26,” therefore formulating a dying-messiah eschatology well before Christianity came along, just as I also argue.
• Jean Starcky, a renowned scrolls specialist with advanced degrees from the Pontifical Biblical Institute of Rome and the École Biblique in Jerusalem, in “Les quatres étapes du messianisme à Qumrân,” Revue Biblique 70 (1963), p. 492, argued the same thesis as Martinez (above), and is cited approvingly by Brooke.
• William Brownlee, a renowned scrolls scholar and once professor of Religion at Claremont Graduate School and Director of their Dead Sea Scrolls Project, with a PhD in Religion from Duke University, in “The Servant of the Lord in the Qumran Scrolls,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 132 (December 1953), pp. 8–15, argues that Daniel 9:24–27 was in fact a reinterpretation of Isaiah 52:13–53:12, linking its dying messiah with the Suffering Servant and the murdered hero of Zechariah 12:10, particularly in light of variant readings in Isaiah found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, thus (he argues) setting the entire stage for later Christian readings of these texts.
• Harold Luis Ginsberg, once a professor of Biblical Literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York, with a PhD in same from the University of London, in “The Oldest Interpretation of the Suffering Servant,” Vetus Testamentum 63 (October 1953), pp. 25–28, argues an early form of the thesis developed by Portier-Young (above), thus establishing the plausibility of the Christian model already being a going idea circulating in Jewish thought, whereby anyone who models “the Servant” will be killed but resurrected and exalted, possibly having atoned for the many by their willing deaths—a model then easily applied to any hero, like the messiah.

All of which led to…

• Jason Staples, a professor of Religious Studies at NC State with a PhD from UNC-Chapel Hill, in a dissertation approved by Bart Ehrman and subsequently published as The Idea of Israel in Second Temple Judaism: A New Theory of People, Exile, and Israelite Identity (Cambridge University Press, 2021), writing that “the oft-repeated dictum that there is no evidence for the concept of a suffering and dying ‘anointed one’ or of a messianic interpretation of the Suffering Servant in pre-Christian Judaism is therefore mistaken” (p. 163 n. 79).

That’s now Mitchell, Lim, Hengel, Boyarin, Brooke, Carrier, Boccaccini, Goldingay, Lataster, Angel, Portier-Young, Bergsma, Johnson, Knohl, Wise, Martinez, Puech, Rosenberg, Chilton, Beckwith, Starcky, Brownlee, Ginsberg, Kim, Ulrich, and Staples all affirming my Element 5—that some pre-Christian Jews had already come up with a dying-messiah expectation—and concurring that this conclusion is at least plausible (or even probable) includes now Page, Gordon, Avery-Peck, Paul, Heiser, Morales, Brown, Bailey, Grabbe, and Vermesh. Besides myself, that’s thirty five scholars now siding with my Element 5 being correct, nearly all of them substantial experts in Hebrew Studies generally or the Dead Sea Scrolls specifically. Indeed, this conclusion has now passed peer review in our field over twenty times.

So, contrary to gainsaying assertions, this supposedly “controversial” conclusion of mine is actually now mainstream and accepted as credible or even true by a large number of fully qualified experts. Indeed, many of these experts in Hebrew studies are more assertive than me: they conclude that it is the case that some pre-Christian Jews expected a dying messiah (a conclusion I also lean toward, but do not require). And as all the righteous would be resurrected in these messianic systems, this had to indeed be as well a resurrected messiah—which would then be why the earliest Christians were preaching the resurrection of Jesus as the beginning of the general resurrection of all. And yet in Element 5, though I reference rising messiahs, I only argued for the dying messiah component. And I only settled on arguing for its possibility, not just its actuality. But the number of scholars agreeing it’s not just possible but actual is no longer trivial. Which in turn only reinforces my conclusion of its plausibility—as do the dozens of scholars concurring that it is, indeed, plausible.

This is no longer a fringe conclusion. It is now a mainstream view in the field. And this is because of all the same evidence and arguments I summarized—which, again, I did not invent, but merely briefed from the expert literature—and more evidence even that that. We don’t have to agree with every single argument these scholars make to accept that they all establish that entertaining this conclusion is something scholars of sterling expertise are comfortable with, making my agreeing with them not something to balk at. Numerous peer-reviewed studies have since been published affirming or confirming my same results. None since have refuted it. And that’s where we are now. It’s simply widely agreed among leading experts that a dying-messiah expectation either probably predated Christianity or could plausibly have. Exactly what I argued.

And a Few Other Things on the Horizon

A few other trends are worth noting, even if not in full swing.

In OHJ I only mentioned the need to rule it out, but the trend now seems clear that the Gospels did indeed creatively build their stories out of Paul, not the other way around; and accordingly not only should we not assume Paul is referring to facts recounted in the Gospels, we should doubt it. I surveyed the growing scholarship establishing this in Mark’s Use of Paul’s Epistles. As I document there, eight studies now confirm this, most of them published after I wrote OHJ. And now I’ve found this conclusion affirmed again in the recent study of John-Christian Eurell, “Paul and the Jesus Tradition: Reconsidering the Relationship Between Paul and the Synoptics,” Journal of Early Christian History 12 (2022).

Other developments are more nascent, but still worth noting. My designation of the cosmological space divine activity takes place in as “outer space,” which I demonstrate in my opening sections of Jesus from Outer Space is more accurate to how ancient people thought, has now been affirmed by Judaism expert Catherine Hezser in “Outer Space in Ancient Jewish and Christian Literature” (see Jesus Is an Extraterrestrial). My argument that the “Archons of this Aeon,” whom Paul says killed Jesus, might too easily mean cosmic powers to count on as evidence for historicity (OHJ, pp. 184–93, 564–65) has support from Beverly Roberts Gaventa, who argues in “Interpreting the Death of Jesus Apocalyptically: Reconsidering Romans 8:32,” in Jesus and Paul Reconnected: Fresh Pathways into an Old Debate, ed. Todd Still (Eerdmans, 2007), pp. 125–45, that Paul indeed means cosmic powers killed Jesus (a view shared by M. David Litwa, and others), and that God is the one who “handed him over” to them, not (for example) Judas.

Likewise, my argument that the “Eucharist” Paul relates in 1 Corinthians 11 looks like a vision he is reporting, not a human tradition, has support from Francis Watson, who argues in “‘I Received from the Lord …’ : Paul, Jesus, and the Last Supper” (in the same volume as Gaventa, pp. 103–24) that there is no more plausible way to read what Paul says than that, indeed, he is reporting a vision he personally received, and that he probably invented the tradition that the Gospels then elaborate into a story—which connects to my previous point about a growing acceptance that the Gospels (including the first of them, Mark) build their stories out of material in Paul, and not from any received oral lore. Notably, Watson gives many of the same arguments for this conclusion as I did. When multiple scholars come to the same conclusions independently of each other, that is evidence they might be right (take note: this has happened now in all the other cases I’ve surveyed here).

Finally, something else just recently occurred worth a notice: Elizabeth A. Myers, in Intertextual Borrowing between 1 Peter and Hebrews: Probability of Literary Dependence and the Most Likely Direction of Borrowing (Pistos Ktistes, 2020), develops a sophisticated and credible statistical argument that the book of Hebrews used 1 Peter as a source. This is not a trivial observation. I already noted in OHJ my suspicion that 1 Peter might be authentic. Given that I am also certain Hebrews can only have been written before the late 60s A.D. (for the same reasons as 1 Clement: see How We Can Know 1 Clement Was Actually Written in the 60s AD), this would establish that 1 Peter was written even earlier, probably at the same time as the authentic Pauline epistles (50s A.D.); it could even be the earliest Christian document surviving. This would also argue for it being authentic (since I have also long noted the claim that Peter was illiterate and not a fully educated Rabbi on a par with Paul has never been credible: OHJ, pp. 263–64, 440, 528–31). Which creates a real problem for historicity: if Peter himself wrote 1 Peter (or anyone in Paul’s generation did), then everyone knew Peter himself never met Jesus, but only knew of his death from scripture and revelation (e.g. 1 Peter 1:10–11, 1 Peter 1:20; probably also 1 Peter 5:1, martus more generally meaning testifier, cf. Hebrews 3:5), and that he, like Paul, evidently didn’t know anything about human authorities having killed Jesus (e.g. 1 Peter 2:13–14), and only knew of Jesus ministering to spirits (1 Peter 3:17-22), not people on Earth (that’s never mentioned; apart, again, from scripture and revelation). This would all but prove Jesus never existed. If even Peter himself could only call up evidence for Jesus (his deeds, sayings, sufferings) from scripture and revelation, then that had to be the only evidence there was.

So those are things to keep an eye on. But more substantial are the clear and overwhelming turns toward a field-wide acceptance of a pre-Christian dying-messiah tradition, an early high Christology, and the existence and popularity of a dying-and-rising god mytheme, as well as the acceptability of doubting the historicity of Jesus altogether. Even if still debated or balked at, these positions have nevertheless now moved into the mainstream.