On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt

Everest might be the highest mountain, but to climb it, you get to start high up in the Himalayas. Kilimanjaro is the longer climb, starting close to sea level. I draw this analogy because Carrier's book doesn't start at the bottom, but rather close to the top. For example, Carrier's target reader will already be aware that Daniel was written closer to the second century BC, long after the purported events it depicts, rather than being written during the rise of the Persian Empire (rendering the 'prophecies' rather less spectacular). A reader unfamiliar with the general trends in biblical scholarship will likely balk at many of the points Dr. Carrier takes for granted. Likewise, a member of the faithful might balk at the casual dismissal of miracle stories and the like as being simply absurd or obvious fabrications. I don't mention this to discourage anyone from tackling this book, but if you're coming from a faith-based method of reading the Bible, you'll find a lot of points require additional study in order to evaluate the claims of this book - or just a really good ability to compartmentalize while you read (accepting some things as given, just 'for the sake of the argument').In general, I found Carrier's thesis worth serious consideration. I'm borderline persuaded, though there's a few things I want to do some additional reading on before I give in completely. One thing Dr. Carrier is quite good at is reading scripture without importing extra 'context' that might not be there. I'll give one example: all the times when Paul says that such and such event in the life of Jesus happened 'according to scripture'. Growing up in the church, and reading Paul in light of the gospels (which weren't yet written), I naturally import the context 'according to scripture' = 'this thing that we have eyewitness accounts of happened and it also was predicted in scripture and therefore fulfilled prophecy'. But Carrier reads this to mean 'we know that such and such a thing happened because scripture said it would'. That is, scripture saying that a thing would happen is sufficient justification for Paul and his readers to believe that such a thing must have indeed happened; no appeal to eyewitnesses is necessary. 'According to scripture' means exactly that and nothing more. This might not make sense until you dig into the book and see how Carrier connects the dots, for example (on the one hand) by seeing that this technique of reading the Old Testament and then inventing stories of the life of Jesus to fulfill those scriptures was a common technique for composing scripture in general (e.g. Jesus riding TWO donkeys into Jerusalem) and (on the other hand) how this method, along with personal revelation, would be the only techniques possible (and not strange or unexpected) if Jesus started as a deity whose 'ministry' was conducted in the invisible spirit/celestial realm.You can't get too far in New Testament studies without running into commentary about the similarities between Philo's use of 'the Logos' and John's prologue, or that Christianity shared some features in common with Greco-Roman mystery cults, but the general impression given by the NT intros that I've read is that you shouldn't push these connections too far, and that scholars have scoured these sources for whatever they're worth, and there isn't really much to pursue there. Boy, howdy! One of the more eye-opening features of Carrier's book (to me) was seeing how strong these connections really are. Likewise, the exposition of 1 Clement and the Assumption of Isaiah, as well as reading between the lines a bit on early Church Fathers like Origin, to show that an entirely celestial Jesus would have made perfect sense out of the 'high Christology' of Hebrews and many of Paul's letters.Could I punch a few holes in this book? Yes, I think I can, but if I'm honest, the holes I noticed are not enough to topple the structure. For example, in Element 38, Carrier talks about how MOSES beheld the 'true Mount Zion and the city of the Living God' etc, etc., but he seems to have missed the change of grammatical subject to 2nd person plural (you all) - the author of Hebrews is claiming that, in contrast to Moses, his readers have experienced this greater revelation. If there is some reason to shift the 'you (pl.)' back to Moses, Carrier doesn't explain himself. But despite what seems like a big gaff to me, it doesn't knock down Element 38 - the concept that the things on earth are but reflections of a higher order in the heavens is supported by this passage even when you remove Moses from the picture.There are places where I feel that Carrier plays a little fast and loose with scripture to make connections seems tighter than they are, which is unfortunate because 1) often his point would have come across fine without pushing so hard and 2) it made me feel like I had to check him on ALL his citations to make sure that he was representing the text properly. A couple examples: in Element 40, his rendering of Zechariah 6:11 from the GREEK, he translates as mentioning 'Jesus the son of Jehovah the Righteous', but it does no such thing. In the Greek, the word 'son' is dropped completely (and even the Gottingen critical apparatus seems unaware of any manuscripts that add it back in - the genitive article being sufficient to establish a relationship between 'Jesus' and 'Iosedek', even if it doesn't explicitly state the relationship like the Hebrew text does), and the name Iosedek is left as that - a name roughly transliterated from the Hebrew, not translated into the Greek words for 'Jehovah the Righteous', so then assuming that the Greek speaking readers of the Septuagint would know enough Hebrew to gloss that in their heads and render it the way Carrier suggests seems like a stretch. Which is not to say that NO Jews would have read it this way. But his quote of the Greek text is doctored (unnecessarily) to make a tighter fit to his theory. (In fairness, the first time he introduces the Hebrew text of this verse early in the book, he does hedge his view properly, it's just that when he returns to it many chapters later, it's expressed without a doubt, and presented as if this is just what the Greek says.)Another example, in Chapter 8 Carrier uses 1 Cor 2.8 to back up the idea that the Prince of This World killed Jesus, when 1 Cor 2.8 is plural: Princes. Again, this doesn't defeat Carrier's point - the plural Princes could still refer to demons/fallen angels/etc. rather than human authorities, and he does a good enough job of defending why this supernatural reading makes more sense (if we're bringing logic into the picture) than a more pedestrian reading (where 'princes' refers to Pilate and the Sanhedrin/Jewish authorities). So why the switch in number from plural to singular? It makes a tighter fit with the passage in Ignatius that he is examining.In Chapter 9, Carrier claims that Paul was said to have died and rose from the dead, citing Acts 14:19, which only says that his persecutors 'thought' he was dead. The text makes no claim that Paul actually died. Again with the tweaking Scripture to form a tighter connection, this time to the ministry of Jesus in Luke.Carrier's point in Chapter 10 where he makes a deal out of Mark's use of the word 'trader' rather than 'Canaanite' in the allusion to Zechariah 14:21 is just plain wrong. That the same word can be translated as 'tradesman' is plain from Proverbs 31:24 as well as the word it derives from 'Canaan' being used in the phrase translated 'land of traders' meaning not Canaan but Babylon in Ezekiel 16:29 and 17:4, see also Hos 12:8 and Zeph 1:11, where 'Canaan' is translated as 'traders' or something similar in many modern translations and modern lexicons. If it was only the one verse, one might wonder if the lexicographers were playing fast and loose to make Mark more accurate by projecting his gloss back on the Hebrew, but some of these verses really make no sense on the 'Canaan/Canaanite' translation and perfect sense on the 'trader' translation. Appeal to the Targums is of (probably) no help (I haven't looked), because if 'Canaanite' could mean a people group or just 'traders' in Hebrew, it could have carried the same connotations in Aramaic. Or the Targum could have simply made the same mistake Carrier makes in assuming the word only had one meaning.It seems to me like it's pushing a little hard to assert that a reasonably common word for 'breathing one's last' is a sharp parallel to a mention in another passage of the Holy Spirit descending. Sure, there is a shared root, but to translate exepneusen as 'exhaled the spirit' makes the root do double duty - the word already means simply 'exhale' (the 'pneu' root referring to 'breath'), and if the author wanted to be explicit about what was exhaled, he could have added 'pneuma' (other Greek texts have characters exhaling their psyche, for example, using the same verb but with an object). Maybe the connection is there, maybe it isn't. Seems like a stretch and maybe an etymological fallacy, but given the creative nature of some of the connections that I don't dispute on the part of the gospel authors, I suppose I can chalk this one up as a maybe.Sometimes Carrier treats later sources as relevant support for his criticism of the Biblical story without justification. For example, at least twice he makes kind of a big deal of how a capital sentence (like Jesus') could not have been carried out in one day, because that would violate Jewish Law, according to the Mishnah. There are many problems with this: 1) The Mishnah was written down at least 130 years after the destruction of the temple, and a correspondingly longer time since Israel was autonomously run according to its own theocratic principles. There's an open question in Mishnah studies whether the rulings therein were EVER practiced in the real world, or if they represent an attempt to codify a sort of ideal Jewish society with the hopes that someday they might follow those laws if they ever gained a temple and a degree of autonomy again. But even if Carrier can successfully argue that we should take the Mishnah's laws on capital trials seriously for the early 1st century, he's got the problem that Jesus wasn't sentenced to death by the Sanhedrin, he was handed over to the Romans/Pilate, who could hardly be expected to follow Jewish religious law on capital trials. So any way you cut it, the Mishnah doesn't seem relevant. Likewise on the Mishnah, making a big deal out of a particular law being the 39th in a list codified a hundred years after the gospels were written stretches credulity (and the idea that John would expect his Greek speaking readers to add 1 to the 38 years of the man's illness to arrive at this connection, one that they'd have to be intimately familiar with the Mishnah to make...). Whatever oral sources you suppose were accurately handed down to constitute the Mishnah, its final arrangement was a creative, literary work. Elsewhere Carrier ably demonstrates that the Gospels themselves are inherently literary, not oral traditions, but he fails to see the literary nature of the Mishnah's final arrangement.Some of Carrier's 'arguments from silence' should have been skipped entirely. For example, making a big deal out of the lack of tax receipts for homes used for services or meetings (chapter 8) is strange. How many cults do we have similar receipts for? Do we have them for the Attis cult, for example? What would such a receipt look like? Might we have those receipts without any mention of the specific religion making use of such homes? Why would the Romans need to know what the home was being used for as long as the taxes were being paid? What is particularly strange about some of these digressions is that in the end, he does NOT use these types of tenuous arguments in his mathematical calculation of probability - he determines they are irrelevant or inconclusive. So why bring them up? The existence of the early church itself is not the question here, and nowhere does Carrier argue that there was no early church at all: irrelevant digressions like this made me feel a little glimmer of what I feel when I read apologetics books that throw lots of bad arguments and data in the mix to overwhelm the reader, even if Carrier is honest enough to admit that these arguments have no bearing on the end result of his calculations.Some assertions seem to rely only on Carrier's own sense of credulity/incredulity, and thus could have been left out entirely. Example: the assertion that Jesus turning out the tables of the moneychangers has to be fiction because there were guards who would have killed him on the spot. Why do we assume that the temple guards were murderous jerks? Enforcing a law code of 'an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth', what evidence do we have that Jesus would have been summarily executed just for causing a raucous? These tidbits seldom contribute to the argument, so why bother unless you have sources to back it up? What's the point of the digression on how the names of Jesus' brothers in the Gospel are all the most common names in Judea as if his brothers were 'Tom, Dick and Harry'? If those are the most common names, how odd is it really to find a family with all those name? We don't run into too many American families with 'Tom, Dick and Shaniqua'. If they're common, they're common, and it's useless to make a big deal out of it, as it can't tell you anything about historicity.But in the end, none of these types of nitpicks knock down Carrier's argument. One wishes that he were more careful on points like this because it would encourage critics to focus on the bigger issues, but his argument really stands or fall on bigger issues. One that I need to think about is whether I'm convinced that ALL the focus of Jesus being explicitly 'in the flesh' in Paul's writings can be adequately explained by the idea that there's no conflict between being 'in the flesh' and being an invisible celestial being. That the 'flesh' talked about might be a more perfect human flesh in the celestial realm - somehow less than the angels, but more than the mundane flesh that is our lot in life. This was an issue Carrier addresses early in his book, but doesn't actually return to at the end (where he's more focused on the problematic references to James being the 'brother of the Lord' in Paul's writings, and mentions of his mother. It's interesting to me that McGrath, in his blog criticism of Carrier focuses so much on the 'brother of the Lord' point, even calling it the best evidence for a historical Jesus (or perhaps he was arguing the inverse, that Carrier's treatment of this issue was the weakest link? Seems to amount to the same thing). If that's really the best evidence there is, we really do need to think this through! But I'm not sure McGrath counts as the most powerful defender of historicity). So the bits about 'in the flesh' I'm going to have to go back and read again, and probably do some additional research on.A lot of fuss has been made about Carrier's use of the Rank-Raglan Hero scale. Most of it is just that: fuss. Don't like that reference class? Fine: pick another one. Then everything you leave out of the class used to establish prior probabilities has to go into the evidence pile. So you can make a broader class like 'characters with resurrection stories', but then you have to calculate the effect of also having a 'miracle birth story' on the evidence side of the equation (even if only to argue that it can have 'no effect' on minimal historicity). Same for (most of) the other line items on the Rank-Raglan scale. I'm not saying I'm thrilled with the Rank-Raglan thing, but it seems like an OK 'back-of-the-napkin' place to start. I spent some time dreaming up alternate categories: they all seemed harder to get solid numbers on, and I'm not sure that they'd make a difference. But Carrier teaches his method for anyone who wants to give it a try with a different reference class.*SPOILER ALERT* in the end of the day, Carrier's technique of giving the opposition favorable odds at each step in his calculation produces an estimate that it is 60% likely that there was no historical Jesus, but rather stories about a celestial being that were later placed in a more mundane historical context. It's clear that Carrier thinks the real probability is much higher, but I think this demonstrates a reasonable amount of humility, given how much we don't and can't know about the distant past. Though I MIGHT be the first person to call Carrier 'humble'. :)Despite my nitpicks, I found this to be an engaging read, and am inclined to think that the conclusions are reasonable. At the very least, what we need now is a response from the mainstream historicists that addresses Carrier's main points. Reading bits of debate after Ehrman's book (in 2012?) was depressing because there was a lot of ego bruising and ego defending but a fair bit of ignoring the most interesting points of conversation; but perhaps the historicists can be forgiven since Carrier had not yet laid out his whole thesis start to finish for evaluation. I hope now all parties involved can shake off the acrimony of the blog wars and reboot the conversation now that all the cards are on the table.2 final notes: 1) be prepared to pick up Carrier's other books, including volumes he merely contributed essays to, in order to get his complete thesis, as sometimes he simply declares a problem 'already solved' (but note that some of this present volume will correct or supersede SOME of his earlier thoughts) and 2) boy do I wish this book were available in a good Bible software platform like Logos with all the hundreds (thousands?) of references to Bible passages, Early Church Fathers, Dead Sea Scrolls, Philo, Josephus, etc. linked so that they'd be a click away. At least half my reading time was spent looking up references that I'm used to having just a click or tap away. First world problem, yeah?Congrats, Dr. Carrier. I'd been waiting rather impatiently for this ever since reading 'Proving History'. Worth the wait.

There are many gold nuggets of information I found by reading this book. I sort of picked these at random, but could have easily picked dozens more if space allowed. It will cover all of these in far more depth and give it the attention that it deserves along with you discovering a great deal more than this small sample I bring up.I think what Earl Doherty did many years ago by planting that seed of doubt in Carrier and getting it to grow, that this book too, will do the same for many others. I was pleasantly surprised how easy it was to read, and this was actually my first book by Carrier. Father Stevens shall surely be along shortly once again to show his displeasure and to let us know God isn't pleased that we can't kind find his Son.I was familiar enough with Carrier's other work on-line at the secular library, and watched some of him on youtube. This book starts out saying it was the second book in the series. I'm not sure "Proving History..." which is the first one is something that really is required or necessary to understanding this one although he repeatedly refers over to it many times. I did just fine without it. He was very professional; his arguments were reasonable and detailed from front to back.I've read quite a few of the most popular books on this controversy, and some not so popular works for some 30 years, but pretty much had taken a break from it all for the last ten years or so. Occasionally I pick back up on it, but my interest is more casual now, it doesn't interest me as much as it once did, and I've forgotten a lot. I do feel like many who were on the fence about this issue, will be getting off of it now or at least no longer considering a historical Jesus the default position. Time for a reset.So why doesn't Carrier take Christian apologists seriously? Actually who does, other than their own? No credible historian worth his weight believes in the supernatural, they adhere to a very strict adherence to naturalism as any professional historian should, and I'm puzzled why some schools ignore this important concept and are sending out these fourth-rate historians and passing them off as scholars. No credible historian would consider such, nor should they be called historians, but theologians instead.This book is professional in every way. It is well researched and extensively documented (bib alone 41 pages), and thoroughly argued. Besides the subject index, it has a scriptures index in the back, authors index, and on the bottom of many other pages as you're reading, additional footnotes of yet another massive amount of material and comments. Also besides the table of contents, there is also another page listing the various tables and figures he also used. No one could ever accuse him of not naming his sources and documenting his work. Had he taken out all of his documentation that I mention above, I think one could expect 150-200 pages to be gone from this book, it is that extensive. Having it laid out like this, sure makes it easier to go back and reference it quickly on what you were looking for, and I plan to do so often.I took his advice and read the chapters 1-3, skipped 4-9, then to 10-12 in that order. Then went back and read 4-9. This helped significantly and made all of the difference, and made it much easier to get through than my first attempt, when I tried to read it from front to back, but had to start over again a week later because life kept getting in the way.I'm glad he referenced "Jesus Outside the NT" (248 pages) from Van Voorst (VV) often in the beginning section and through various parts of his book because I have it in my library. VV offers sources and arguments for a historical Jesus while also showing what he thinks is wrong with the mythicist position. He estimates over the two centuries there have been over 100 mythicist books or essays on Jesus. He covers a few of them in his book, mostly Well's, while not addressing Earl Doherty which many feel like makes one of the better cases for a mythicist Jesus including Carrier.Carrier addressed the seven points VV makes by giving arguments for what mythicists use, and the counter arguments he used against it. He thought these are the weakest arguments to be using for a mythicist position. I seen how much more I had missed through Carrier's critical eye covering many things, pointing out what VV's gets right, while explaining other parts that were obviously missed, and what was wrong with some of his arguments.VV claims like so many others that nobody doubted Jesus' historical position back then, which other historicists raise as well, which I think is a valid point. Carrier points to VV's own book, where he does put in a small footnote at the bottom of the page, that there is a possible attempt of this in Justin's "Dialogue with Trypho, written in the middle of the second century. But there are more examples Carrier shares, and covers in his book with more detail in sections 6 and 12 of chapter eight. It does seem like if anyone was going to be raising the most stink about this, it would have been the Jews.In chapter 2 section 2: "The Basic Problem." On page 21, E.P. Sanders claims "the sources for Jesus are better...than those that deal with Alexander [the Great]." Carrier retorts back never has a more suicidal remark for his case could have been imagined. He explains in quite a few pages why we had actual eyewitness account of Alexander, and none read like the romance or fanatical worshipping types that you find in religious dogma, but are simply historical writers giving their accounts of the events. He further shows where archaeology has verified many of his battles, in the time and places archeologists expect to find them. This is just a very small sampling of the pages he devotes to it, but is successful in every way of refuting Sanders here, and definitely backs up his retort of it being a suicidal remark.Bruce Chilton makes the claim that `Jesus is acknowledged as a figure of history" now more than ever which he says is because of the unearthing of new information he claims is from literary documentation and archaeological evidence. Carrier correctly states there is not a single new item of evidence that pertains to a historical Jesus, it only consists of background evidence, such as the DSS, with almost none of it mentioning Jesus, and actually works found in the DSS such as the `Gospel of Judas" are more late fictions about him.Carrier brings up a fourth century Christian scholar, Epiphanius, that compiled a dossier of the heresies that he knew of, called `Medicine Chest' (Panarion). Epiphanius points out that these Christians say Jesus lived and died in the time of Alexander Jannaeus. Carrier also says the Babylonian Talmud confirms this. He states that VV's data is inaccurate and there are once again more references that exist in the Talmud than he collects from, and that many of the passages he cites have been expunged from them by Christian scribes. Looking at it more accurately, he says "Jesus of Nazareth' is repeatedly and explicitly identified as `Jesus ben Pantera" and "Jesus ben Stada'.A historicist should also explain the 21 parallels of Mark with his Jesus compared to Jesus ben Ananias (pages 429-430) that can be found in Josephus' "Jewish War." He raises too many interesting aspects with this to cover it here, and confirms two things, how much the first Gospel is making everything up, and also why it shows Mark wrote after the Jewish War. Most historians have used the Jewish War as a marker that Mark would not have been any earlier than that. Historicists are going to at least need to address the parallels without it being just a casual dismissal. To do so, or not bring it up at all, don't think others will not take note of it.I thoroughly enjoyed the explanation of Nazareth/Nazarene/Nazorian and understand this aspect better. Others occasionally cover this, but are much too brief with it; not so with this work, and gives it enough depth to realize its pertinence.I made note of what he uses for examples of other scriptures that were referring over to cosmic events in the OT that really weren't earthly events. He also makes the same case for Jesus with the," "crucifixion" and "resurrection" that Paul continually refers to, and a few times the "seed of David." This needs more study by me.In the spirit of honest disclosure, where did I stand before and now. First of all, take my opinion for what it's worth as a layman, not a professional historian. In my youth, I had always assumed some kind of historical Jesus as probable during this time, perhaps someone that may have been a magician or faith healer of sorts, or at least someone that was a teacher, possibly an Essene. My position for the next 30 years or so has been pretty much neutral or leaning a bit more in favor of some kind of a historical Jesus (forget the supernatural entirely) than not, but also still realizing the evidence isn't strong enough either way to know with a great deal of certainty. To actually pinpoint a Jesus in that time period and region that the Gospels are claiming seems to be a weaker case of it. He puts Jesus historicity at 1/3, and mythical at 2/3. I'm not sure how a historicist could go much higher than 2/3 in its favor as well, yet I know many are much more convinced than that, but with what they got to work with, I don't see how that is possible.I still have much of the late Joseph McCabe's work from the previous century including his "Did Jesus ever Live?" whose arguments still have a large amount of influence with me that I may try to review again to see his main arguments for a historical Jesus. It's only about 45 pages, and never was meant to be a thorough study of it all. Without addressing McCabe's work, Carrier covers his concerns, not sure if he seals the deal with me, but he has certainly got my attention. I would need to go back and re-read at least the Epistles again to see if it does make more sense in light of what Carrier has shared. Not sure if my curiosity is as strong this time around to where I want to do all of this again. If I thought it would finally have me firmly siding one way or the other, I'd be glad to do so. But I doubt it would, better minds by far have tried, and are still struggling with it. I will still look forward to what mainstream scholarship and hopefully some respectable peer reviewed papers have to say about it all. I do want to commend Carrier on a fine work, rarely do books of this high of caliber come out. I think it would make a fine supplement to some college course in history. It would be interesting to see college students culling over the best arguments for and against a historical Jesus and seeing where they end up. I'm sure apologists will be putting this book on Defcon 2, and will be sending Carrier lots of love. :-)

The historicity of Jesus is a touchy subject. Talk about it on social media and you're sure to attract both historicists and mythicists with strong views. New Testament scholars who dissent from the consensus suddenly find they're unemployable in university religious studies departments, ridiculed online and occasionally by NT scholars who hold the line.I stumbled into this topic during a period of binge-watching YouTube videos featuring NT scholar Bart Ehrman, a former fundamentalist Christian whose studies eventually turned him into an agnostic atheist. In one of these, Ehrman referred to a 'fringe' view among some that Jesus never existed, and quickly dismissed it.Like many Christians, my first reaction was amazed disbelief that such a wackadoodle theory could be taken seriously. I watched some videos online and some debates.I occasionally fact-checked the refutations and found that in fact, opponents of Richard Carrier often misrepresented or got their facts wrong. The Trent Horn debate in particular amazed me because Horn insisted that something was written in a text, but when I checked, it wasn't. (Horn claimed that the Life of Adam showed Adam being buried on Earth, Carrier said the text has him buried in the third heaven. Both were insistent, because a lot hangs on it, believe it or not. I checked. Carrier was right.)Wow - what was going on? How could something I had believed all my life to be a historic fact by a myth? Why couldn't any of these experts demolish Carrier's argument, as I'd expected them to do?So - I read it for myself. Slowly and carefully, often looking up the footnote references. Every serious argument from scriptures (e.g. Acts, Gospels, Epistles) and from the historical record (Josephus, Tacitus etc) is examined, dissected and evaluated according to Bayes theorem, using the following method:- how likely is it that this text would look like this if Jesus was a historical figure?against- how likely is it that this text would look like this if Jesus began as a myth?The chapter on the evidence from the gospels is particularly fascinating - a summary of recent scholarship that shows the brilliance of the four evangelists as myth-creators and propagandists.In the end I was convinced - on the historicity of Jesus, there is indeed reason to doubt.(Review by Maria, David's wife.)

I bought this after attending a conference were the author gave a presentation. It's a very well researched book and the author has reportedvall know literature about whether Jesus existed or not.The chapters are all interlinking, and more like a reference book where evidence is referenced around in different chapters so it's not an easy to read narrative. However it's interesting and has made me think about the topic more so. However the argument made also refers to other books from the author which I cannot cross reference because I haven't got them.I find the topic very much repetitive throughout and as the argument is made in the first chapters I struggle to comprehend why the book continues. It feels likes I'm reading a thesis or scientific article rather than a book for public consumption.Has it changed my mind about the historicity of Jesus? Not really, but to be honest it's doesn't make difference to me whether he existed or not. It's a thought provoking book.

Having been fascinated by biblical studies for many years, as well as having taught 'A' level religious studies courses for twenty years this is a fascinating book. It has been easy to dismiss the mythicist case prior to this book but Carrier brings his academic power to bear on the issue and his critical faculties are on excellent form throughout. Very interesting on the Pauline epistles in particular. One slight caveat is the amount of time he spends on the 'mathematical' likelihood of either history or myth being correct on different points. Could have done with a little editing there but I understand why he has done it. Easily the best book I've read on this particular issue.

I am a non-believer who was brought up in the Church of England, and have been trying to make sense of Christianity for decades. This book was very helpful to that endeavour. My initial concerns with Bayes's theorem, that the output will depend on one's subjective choice of input figures, were satisfactorily dealt with by Carrier choosing upper and lower bounds, and also inviting one to supply one's own estimates. Of much greater interest than the mathematical result, however, was the deep insight into why and how Christianity originated and developed in the early centuries. The biggest problem with this book is now trying to find something as engrossing with which to follow it.

What got me was Carrier's challenge to the world to produce a different proof model for Jesus' existence, or a different result to Carrier's own model. No result for either. Interesting.If giraffes could speak, God would be a giraffe.The bibliography is overwhelming (much checked), and testifies to the years of research undertaken in reaching a logical conclusion..This book is only of use to those with an unshackled world-view.