Richard Carrier

For a number of years, Carrier was editor of and a substantial contributor to The Secular Web, where he wrote on the topics of atheism and metaphysical naturalism; these later formed the basis for his book Sense and Goodness without God. He also authored a regular column on the web site Freethought Blogs; this was suspended in 2016 amid allegations of sexual misconduct. Carrier has frequently been a featured speaker at various skeptic, secular humanist, freethought and atheist conventions, such as the annual Freethought Festival in Madison, Wisconsin, the annual Skepticon convention in Springfield, Missouri, and conventions sponsored by American Atheists.

The October 25, 2014 debate Did Jesus Exist? with Trent Horn was held in San Diego, California, and posted online by the "MABOOM Show" (YouTube channel). A debate with Craig A. Evans, entitled Did Jesus Exist? was held at Kennesaw State University on April 13, 2016, and posted online by KSUTV.

In On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt (2014), Carrier continues to develop his Bayesian analysis of the historicity of Jesus. Carrier described his work as "the first comprehensive pro-Jesus-myth book ever published by a respected academic press and under formal peer review." The essence of his argument is that there is insufficient evidence, in the context of Bayesian probability, to believe in the historicity of Jesus. Furthermore, Carrier posits that as a celestial figure, Jesus was probably known originally only through private revelations and hidden messages in scripture, which were then elaborated into an allegorical person, communicating the claims of the gospels. The allegorical aspect of Jesus was then lost during the struggle for control of the Christian churches during the first century. Noting that the gospels were written decades after Jesus' death, Carrier claims that the gospels are "wildly fictitious", and proposes that the Gospel of Mark is really an extended meta-parable. He further claims that post-biblical writings mentioning Jesus should not be regarded as independent sources for his existence, since they may have relied on the gospels for their information. Apart from the hero archetype pattern, Carrier contends that nothing else in the Gospels is reliable evidence for or against the historicity of Jesus.

Carrier writes that "Mithraism was a syncretism of Persian and Hellenistic elements; the Mysteries of Isis and Osiris were a syncretism of Egyptian and Hellenistic elements. Christianity is simply a continuation of the same trend: a syncretism of Jewish and Hellenistic elements. Each of these cults is unique and different from all the others in nearly every detail—but it's the general features they all share in common that reflect the overall fad that produced them in the first place, the very features that made them popular and successful within Greco-Roman culture." Furthermore, Carrier says;

New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman writes that Carrier is one of only two scholars with relevant graduate credentials who argues against the historicity of Jesus. Discussing Carrier's theory that some Jews believed in a "humiliated messiah" prior to the existence of Christianity, Ehrman criticizes Carrier for "idiosyncratic" readings of the Old Testament that ignore modern critical scholarship on the Bible. Ehrman concludes by saying "[w]e do not have a shred of evidence to suggest that any Jew prior to the birth of Christianity anticipated that there would be a future messiah who would be killed for sins—or killed at all—let alone one who would be unceremoniously destroyed by the enemies of the Jews, tortured and crucified in full public view. This was the opposite of what Jews thought the messiah would be."

In Carrier's view, Paul's reference in Romans 1:3 to Jesus being the "seed" of David describes his incarnation from a "cosmic sperm bank", rather than the usual interpretation of Jesus as a descendant of David. In Carrier's interpretation of Paul, Jesus possessed a surrogate human body, and thus the religious requirement of a blood sacrifice was fulfilled by his crucifixion by demons. Gathercole, however, notes that Paul's reference in Romans 1:3 is a common expression in the Septuagint, which simply refers to a "descendant", and that the theme of the descendants of David is common throughout the Old Testament. Carrier argues that like the school of early Jewish mysticism (100 BC– AD 1000), known as Merkabah mysticism, together with its views on the heavens and firmaments of creation, "Mythicism places the incarnation of Jesus below the heavens... being the whole vast region between the earth and the moon [the firmament], was well-established in both Jewish and pagan cosmology (see Element 37, Chapter 4, OHJ, pp. 184–93)."

In Proving History: Bayes's Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus (2012), Carrier describes the application of Bayes' theorem to historical inquiry in general, and the historicity of Jesus in particular. According to Carrier, the Bayes theorem is the standard by which all methodology for any historical study must adhere in order to be logically sound. In his Bayesian analysis, the ahistoricity of Jesus is "true": that is, the "most probable" Bayesian conclusion. By the same methodology, Carrier posits that Jesus originated in the realm of mythology, rather than as a historical person who was subsequently mythologized. Carrier argues that the probability of Jesus' existence is somewhere in the range of 1/3 to 1/12000, depending on the estimates used for the computation. A number of critics have rejected Carrier's ideas and methodology, calling it "tenuous", or "problematic and unpersuasive". Simon Gathercole writes that Carrier's arguments "are contradicted by the historical data."

The March 18, 2009 debate Did Jesus Rise From The Dead? with William Lane Craig was held at the Northwest Missouri State University and posted online in two parts by ReasonableFaithOrg (YouTube channel). Prior to the debate, Carrier commented that "I originally insisted we first debate [on the topic] Are the Gospels Historically Reliable? for the simple reason that you can't honestly debate the former until you've debated (and in fact settled) the latter." In his post debate commentary, Carrier argued that Craig "focused almost entirely on protecting the Gospels as historical sources, and it was there that his shotgun of arguments got well ahead of my ability to catch up." Another debate with Craig was broadcast on Lee Strobel's television show Faith Under Fire.

In Not the Impossible Faith: Why Christianity Didn't Need a Miracle to Succeed (2009), Carrier writes on the social and intellectual context of the rise and early development of Christianity. Despite his initial skepticism of Christ myth theory, since late 2005 Carrier has considered it "very probable Jesus never actually existed as a historical person." In a blog entry from 2009, he writes "though I foresee a rising challenge among qualified experts against the assumption of historicity [of Jesus], as I explained, that remains only a hypothesis that has yet to survive proper peer review."

In 2008, Carrier received a doctorate in ancient history from Columbia University, where he studied the history of science in antiquity. His thesis was entitled "Attitudes Towards the Natural Philosopher in the Early Roman Empire (100 B.C. to 313 A.D.)." He has published several articles and chapters in books on the subject of history and philosophy.

In 2007, famed English philosopher Antony Flew, who had long advocated atheism in the absence of empirical evidence of divinity, published his final book with co-author Roy Varghese, There is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind. Flew espoused the position that there was an intelligent creator, thereby embracing the concept of deism. Carrier wrote to Flew, and discussed the philosopher's supposed conversion on The Secular Web. In Carrier's analysis he came up with an incorrect theory that There is a God was authored primarily by Varghese, and misrepresented Flew's opinion regarding religion. Without addressing Carrier directly, Flew released a rebutting statement through his publisher: "My name is on the book and it represents exactly my opinions. I would not have a book issued in my name that I do not 100 percent agree with. I needed someone to do the actual writing because I'm 84 and that was Roy Varghese's role. This is my book and it represents my thinking."

In 2006, Carrier was the keynote speaker for the Humanist Community of Central Ohio's annual Winter Solstice Banquet, where he spoke on defending naturalism as a philosophy. Carrier appears in Roger Nygard's 2009 documentary The Nature of Existence, in which persons of different religious and secular philosophies are interviewed about the meaning of life.

Carrier has engaged in several formal debates, both online and in person, on a range of subjects, including naturalism, natural explanations of early Christian resurrection accounts, the morality of abortion, and the general credibility of the Bible. He debated Michael R. Licona on the Resurrection of Jesus at the University of California, Los Angeles on April 19, 2004. Carrier debated atheist Jennifer Roth online on the morality of abortion. He has defended naturalism in formal debates with Tom Wanchick and Hassanain Rajabali. He has debated David Marshall on the general credibility of the New Testament. His debates on the historicity of Jesus have included professor of religious studies Zeba A. Crook, Christian scholars Dave Lehman and Doug Hamp.

However, most contemporary scholarship has been critical of Carrier's methodology and conclusions. Both classicists and biblical scholars agree that there is a historical basis for a person called Jesus of Nazareth. Writing in 2004, Michael Grant stated, "In recent years, 'no serious scholar has ventured to postulate the non-historicity of Jesus' or at any rate very few, and they have not succeeded in disposing of the much stronger, indeed very abundant, evidence to the contrary." More recently, Patrick Gray posited, "That Jesus did in fact walk the face of the earth in the first century is no longer seriously doubted even by those who believe that very little about his life or death can be known with any certainty." For this reason, the views of Carrier and other proponents of the belief that a historical Jesus did not exist are frequently dismissed as "fringe theories" within classical scholarship.

In 2002, Carrier reviewed the work of Earl Doherty, who posited that Jesus was originally a mythological being who subsequently came to be regarded as a historical person. Carrier concluded that Doherty's theory was plausible, although at the time he had not yet concluded that this hypothesis was more probable than the historical Jesus. He also criticized some of Doherty's points, which he considered untenable, although he regarded the basic concept as coherent and consistent with the evidence. Over time, Carrier's views shifted to the point that he accepted Doherty's premise as the most likely explanation of Jesus. He wrote, "It does soundly establish the key point that Jesus was regarded as a pre-existent incarnate divine being from the earliest recorded history of Christianity, even in fact before the writings of Paul, and that this was not even remarkable within Judaism."

In his autobiographical essay, "From Taoist to Infidel", Carrier discusses his upbringing in a benign Methodist church, his conversion to Taoism in early adulthood, his confrontation with Christian fundamentalists while in the United States Coast Guard, and his deeper study of religion, Christianity, and Western philosophy, which eventually led to his embrace of naturalism. From 1995 to 2015, he was married to Jennifer Robin Carrier. Announcing their divorce, Carrier revealed that he is polyamorous, and that after informing his wife of his extramarital affairs, the last two years of their marriage had been an open relationship.

Richard Cevantis Carrier (born December 1, 1969) is an American author and activist, whose work focuses on empiricism, atheism, and the historicity of Jesus. A long-time contributor to self-published philosophical web sites, including The Secular Web and Freethought Blogs, Carrier has published a number of books and articles on philosophy and religion in classical antiquity, discussing the development of early Christianity from a skeptical viewpoint, and concerning religion and morality in the modern world. He has publicly debated a number of religious scholars on the historical basis of the Bible and Christianity. He is a prominent advocate of the theory that Jesus did not exist, which he has argued in a number of his works. Carrier's methodology and conclusions in this field have proven controversial and unconvincing to specialists in the field, and he and his theories are often identified as "fringe".

In a new forward to Table Talk, Gerhard Weinberg comments that "Carrier has shown the English text of the table-talk that originally appeared in 1953 and is reprinted here derives from Genoud's French edition and not from one of the German texts." Derek Hastings cites Carrier's paper for "an attempt to undermine the reliability of the anti-Christian statements." Carrier's thesis that the English translation should be dispensed with entirely is rejected by Richard Steigmann-Gall, who while acknowledging the controversies raised by Carrier, "ultimately presume[d] its authenticity." Johnstone writes that Carrier only purports to show that four of the forty-two anti-Christian comments in Table Talks have been misrepresented, without discussing the rest; for this reason Johnstone contends that Carrier has been far from successful in removing the historical view of Hitler's anti-Christian character.