Richard Carrier

Career

Carrier received a PhD in Ancient History from Columbia University in 2008. 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. He was formerly the editor of and a substantial contributor to The Secular Web. His contributions there includes an autobiographical essay From Taoist to Infidel in which he 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. This was reprinted in his major work defending atheism and naturalism, Sense and Goodness without God.

In his contribution to The Empty Tomb, Carrier argues that the earliest Christians probably believed Jesus had received a new spiritual body in the resurrection, and that stories of his old body disappearing from its tomb were developed later. He also argues it is less likely, but also possible, that the original body of Jesus was misplaced or stolen. This work was criticized by philosophy professor Stephen T. Davis in Philosophia Christi and Christian theologian Norman Geisler.

In Not the Impossible Faith, he wrote on the social and intellectual context of the rise and early development of Christianity. Though originally skeptical of theories about the ahistoricity of Jesus, since late 2005, he has considered it "very probable Jesus never actually existed as a historical person." He also said "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."

Carrier was initially not interested in the question of the historicity of Jesus. Like many others his first thought was that it was a fringe conspiracy topic not worthy of academic inquiry; however a number of different people requested that he investigate the subject and raised money for him to do so. Since then he has become a leading expert on the Jesus ahistoricity theory. Other scholars who hold the "Jesus agnosticism" viewpoint or "Jesus atheism" viewpoint, include; Arthur Droge, Kurt Noll, Thomas L. Brodie, Earl Doherty, Robert M. Price, Thomas L. Thompson, Raphael Lataster, Hector Avalos and still others like Philip R. Davies, who have opined that the viewpoint of Carrier et al. is respectable enough to deserve consideration.

Investigating Antony Flew's changing thinking on god

When reports spread in 2004 that Antony Flew changed his mind on his rejection of the existence of gods, Carrier engaged in correspondence with Flew to find out what happened and published an extensive analysis of the situation on The Secular Web, finding among other things that Flew changed his position to there being some sort of "minimal God," as in Deism. According to the author of the book in Flew's name, Roy Abraham Varghese, Flew had released a statement through his publisher (without addressing Carrier's correspondence), stating, "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." Carrier concluded that Flew's changed ideas were not accurately represented in the book written for Flew, There is a God.

Investigating quotes attributed to Adolf Hitler regarding Christianity

Richard Carrier, in collaboration with Reinhold Mittschang, challenged several anti-Christian statements attributed to Adolf Hitler in his collection of monologues known as the Table Talk. Carrier's paper argues that the French and English translations are "entirely untrustworthy" and suggests the possibility that Francois Genoud had doctored portions of the text to enhance Hitler's views. Carrier put forward a new translation of twelve quotations based on Henry Picker and Werner Jochmann's German editions, as well as a fragment from the Bormann-Vermerke preserved at the Library of Congress, which challenge some of the quotations popularly used to demonstrate Hitler's hostility to Christianity. Carrier concludes that Hitler's views in the Table Talk, "resemble Kant's with regard to the primacy of science over theology in deciding the facts of the universe, while remaining personally committed to a more abstract theism." Carrier also maintains that throughout the Table Talk Hitler takes a cynical view of Catholicism, "voicing many of the same criticisms one might hear from a candid (and bigoted) Protestant."

In the new forward to the Table Talk, Gerhard Weinberg commented 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 entirely dispensed with is not accepted by Richard Steigmann-Gall, who despite referencing the controversies raised by Carrier, "ultimately presume[d] its authenticity."

Public debates

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.

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." And then per his post debate commentary, Carrier noted 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."

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). Per the Question and Answer session, Horn lists some of his recommended books for defending the historicity of Jesus. Horn notes works by ; Shirley Jackson Case, Robert Van Voorst, Paul Rhodes Eddy and Greg Boyd and Bart D. Ehrman. Per Ehrman's book, Horn states, "a good popular introduction might be Bart Ehrman's book Did Jesus Exist?. Unfortunately it is not a scholarly treatment like Dr. Carrier's [book]" and "there really is not a scholarly treatment of the issue from the historical view" (time 1:38:30).

The April 13, 2016 debate Did Jesus Exist? with Craig A. Evans was held at the Kennesaw State University and posted online by KSUTV. Per Evans' opening remarks (time 6:30-28:30), Carrier states, "That is the best case I think you can make for the historicity of Jesus" (time 28:30).

In news and media

Carrier appeared on national television in 2004, debating William Lane Craig on Lee Strobel's talk show Faith Under Fire on the PAX network (now ION Television), in a segment on the resurrection of Jesus.

Richard 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 appeared on three episodes of The Polyschizmatic Reprobates Hour podcast with host Dan Sawyer.

He also appears in the documentary The Nature of Existence in which film-maker Roger Nygard interviews people of many different religious and secular philosophies about the meaning of life.

Carrier is listed in Who's Who in Hell. Carrier was featured in the documentary film The God Who Wasn't There, where he was interviewed about his doubts on the historicity of Jesus. He is also featured in the 2017 documentary film Batman & Jesus by Jozef K. Richards, as well as his series, "Holy Shit", where Carrier appears in a skit as the biblical character, Absalom, alongside comedian Reuben Glaser.

Personal life

Carrier announced in 2015 that he and his wife had ended their 20-year marriage. He also revealed that he is polyamorous, and that the last two years of his marriage had an open relationship agreement, after informing his wife of his extramarital affairs.

Jesus ahistoricity theory

Carrier has authored two Jesus historicity books: Proving History and On the Historicity of Jesus. The first of these books advances a methodology, based on Bayes' theorem, as the standard by which all methodology for any historical study must adhere in order to be logically sound. The second applies this methodology to the question of the historicity of Jesus, and reaches a conclusion for the ahistoricity of Jesus. Per Carrier's Bayesian methodology, Raphael Lataster writes, "Given the problematic sources that historical Jesus scholars have access to, and the failings of many of their methods, it seems appropriate to call for a thorough, and Bayesian, analysis of the evidence in order to determine if Jesus’ historicity or ahistoricity is more probable." Thus the historicist and ahistoricist argument for Jesus hinges on how well each theory predicts each item of evidence, which items of evidence count, and how they count towards the most probable Bayesian conclusion.

Carrier's first major book, Proving History: Bayes's Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus, published in 2012 by Prometheus Books, describes the application of Bayes' theorem to historical inquiry in general and the historicity of Jesus in particular.

Hitler Homer Bible Christ: The Historical Papers of Richard Carrier 1995-2013, published January 2014, is an anthology of Carrier's published papers on history—of which some are peer reviewed journal articles on the historicity of Jesus and are also cited as source references in Carrier's On the Historicity of Jesus.

In June 2014, Carrier's On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt was published by Sheffield Phoenix Press. Carrier notes that it is "the first comprehensive pro-Jesus-myth book ever published by a respected academic press and under formal peer review." Carrier argues that there is insufficient Bayesian probability, that is evidence, to believe in the historicity of Jesus. Furthermore, he argues that a celestial Jesus figure was probably originally known only through private revelations and hidden messages in scripture which were then crafted into a historical figure, to communicate the claims of the gospels allegorically. These allegories then began to be believed as fact during the struggle for control of the Christian churches of the first century.

Jesus Did Not Exist: A Debate Among Atheists, was published November 12, 2015, with foreword and afterword by Richard Carrier. The book by Raphael Lataster compares the claims of Bart D. Ehrman, Maurice Casey, and Richard Carrier and was positively reviewed by atheist author David Fitzgerald, who wrote that the book "doesn’t just inform and invigorate the debate – arguably, it settles it." Fitzgerald additionally notes Lataster's excoriation of Bart Ehrman, "taking Ehrman to task over his misuse of that same evidence, double standards, outright errors, and most of all, what he terms 'Ehrman’s Law', his propensity to uncritically appeal to hypothetical sources (a tendency shared by all too many historicists)." Lataster previously wrote the only book review—that was peer reviewed—on Carrier's On the Historicity of Jesus which is used as the base for the section on Carrier and then expanded upon for the lay reader. Per any evidence outside of the New Testament, for Jesus’s existence, Carrier writes;

There is no independent evidence of Jesus’s existence outside the New Testament. All external evidence for his existence, even if it were fully authentic (though much of it isn’t), cannot be shown to be independent of the Gospels, or Christian informants relying on the Gospels. None of it can be shown to independently corroborate the Gospels as to the historicity of Jesus. Not one single item of evidence. Regardless of why no independent evidence survives (it does not matter the reason), no such evidence survives.

Thus no reliable conclusion on the historicity of Jesus is possible from the so-called "independent" and "objective" sources dated after the Gospels (see Sources for the historicity of Jesus). They could be reliant on the Gospels and therefore would not be independent, nor objective.

Marcan priority assumes that the Gospel of Mark was the first gospel to be written. However, biblical scholars do not have access to any primary sources for the Gospels (see Historical reliability of the Gospels), which makes any conclusions about them susceptible to doubt as is also the case with any oral transmission of the gospel prior to the first-written gospel. Per the Gospels' status as reliable historical sources, Raphael Lataster writes, "The Gospels, and indeed all the sources concerning Jesus, are not primary sources; they are not contemporary to the events they describe, nor is it reasonable to assume that they were written by eye-witnesses. The extant sources concerning Jesus are, at best, secondary sources." and Carrier additionally claims that:

"The Gospels come decades later and are the first we hear of an earthly story for Jesus."

"The Gospels are wildly fictitious in their content and structure."

"Every story has discernible allegorical or propagandistic intent."

"The first (Mark) looks like an extended meta-parable (outsiders are told a story, while insiders are told what it really means)."

Carrier contends that apart from the hero archetype pattern, nothing else in the Gospels is reliable evidence for or against the historicity of Jesus.

Celestial Jesus

Carrier asserts that originally "Jesus was the name of a celestial being, subordinate to God, with whom some people hallucinated conversations" and "The Gospel began as a mythic allegory about the celestial Jesus, set on earth, as most myths then were" (see Jesus in comparative mythology). Stories were created that placed Jesus on Earth, in context with historical figures and places. Eventually people began to believe that these allegorical stories were real.

A celestial being, subordinate to God:

Carrier notes, "Jesus was originally a god just like any other god (properly speaking, a demigod in pagan terms; an archangel in Jewish terms; in either sense, a deity), who was later historicized."

Hallucinated conversations:

Carrier gives as example Joseph Smith—the founder of Mormonism—who declared that he had conversations with the Angel Moroni.

Earl Doherty originated the premise that Jesus originated as a myth per Middle Platonism (with some influence from Jewish mysticism) and that the belief in a historical Jesus emerged only among Christian communities in the 2nd century. Doherty asserts that Paul the Apostle and other writers of the earliest existing proto-Christian Gnostic documents did not believe in Jesus as a person who was incarnated on Earth in an historical setting, rather, they believed in Jesus as a heavenly being who suffered his sacrificial death in the lower spheres of heaven, where he was crucified by demons and then was subsequently resurrected by God (see Dying-and-rising god). This mythological Jesus was not based on a historical Jesus, but rather on an exegesis of the Old Testament in the context of Jewish-Hellenistic religious syncretism heavily influenced by Middle Platonism, and what the authors believed to be mystical visions of a risen Jesus.

Carrier reviewed Doherty's work in 2002, concluding that Doherty's thesis was plausible, however, Carrier had not yet concluded it was probably more true than the minimal historicity thesis (he also noted that some of Doherty's points were untenable and that only his core thesis was at least coherent with the evidence). Carrier remained a historicity agnostic until he began formal research on Jesus ahistoricity theory in 2008, which eventually convinced him that the evidence actually favored the core Doherty thesis.

In regards to plausible theories for the origination of Jesus in relation to the founding of Christianity, the most probable is contested between three competing theories; Mythological Ahistoricity, Supernatural Historicity, and Natural Historicity. In regards to Mythological Ahistoricity, Carrier reviews Ehrman's How Jesus Became God and notes, "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."

Birth of a deity:

The creation story of celestial Jesus is not known, but as Carrier notes, "This 'Jesus' would most likely have been the same archangel identified by Philo of Alexandria as already extant in Jewish theology". Philo knew this figure by all of the attributes Paul already knew Jesus by: the firstborn son of God (Epistle to the Romans 8:29), the celestial 'image of God' (Second Epistle to the Corinthians 4:4), and God’s agent of creation (First Epistle to the Corinthians 8:6). He was also God’s celestial high priest (Heb. 2:17, 4:14, etc.) and God’s 'Logos.' And Philo says this being was identified as the figure named 'Jesus' in the Book of Zechariah.

An incarnated (cloned) human body:

When Paul writes that Jesus “came to be” from the sperm of David, in the context of Jesus' incarnation, this meant that an adult human body was cloned/grown from the sperm (seed) of David, for Jesus to use (Paul's previous usage of the contextually unique term Greek:genomenos—came to be—meant a human body manufactured by God). Thus Jesus possessed a surrogate human body, therefore the religious requirement for a human/god blood sacrifice was fulfilled during his subsequent crucifixion by demons. Per the incarnation of Jesus, Carrier writes, "[Paul] saying (in Phil. 2. 7) that Christ was not actually a man, but came 'in the likeness of men' (homoiomati anthropon) and was found 'in a form like a man' (schemati euretheis hos anthropos) and (in Rom. 8.3) that he was only sent 'in the likeness of sinful flesh' (en homoiomati sarkos hamartias). This is a doctrine of a preexistent being assuming a human body, but not being fully transformed into a man, just looking like one, having a flesh-and-blood body to abuse and kill."

The abodes of mythological deities:

Merkabah mysticism is a school of early Jewish mysticism, c. 100 BCE – 1000 CE, centered on visions such as those found in the Book of Ezekiel or in the hekhalot literature, concerning stories of ascents to the heavenly palaces and the Throne of God. Per the difference between the heavens and the firmament in regards to the location for the incarnation of Jesus, Carrier writes, "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)."

Jewish and Hellenistic syncretism

Carrier notes four major trends in religion, occurring prior to the formation of Christianity:

1. "Syncretism: combining a foreign cult deity with Hellenistic elements."
2. "Monotheism: transforming polytheism into monotheism (via henotheism)."
3. "Individualism: agricultural salvation cults retooled as personal salvation cults."
4. "Cosmopolitanism: all races, cultures, classes admitted as equals, with fictive kinship (members are all “brothers”); you now “join” a religion rather than being born into it."

Carrier writes that per syncretism, "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."

Carrier contends that Christianity originated from a Jewish sect, writing;

Christianity, as a Jewish sect, began when someone (most likely Cephas, perhaps backed by his closest devotees) claimed this [celestial deity] “Jesus” had at last revealed that he had tricked the Devil by becoming incarnate and being crucified by the Devil (in the region of the heavens ruled by Devil), thereby atoning for all of Israel’s sins. [...] It would be several decades later when subsequent members of this cult, after the world had not yet ended as claimed, started allegorizing the gospel of this angelic being. By placing him in earth history as a divine man, as a commentary on the gospel and its relation to society and the Christian mission.

Reception

Carrier's methodology in his work on the historicity of Christ was reviewed by Aviezer Tucker, a prior advocate of using Bayesian techniques in history. Tucker expressed some sympathy for Carrier's view of the Gospels, stating: "The problem with the Synoptic Gospels as evidence for a historical Jesus from a Bayesian perspective is that the evidence that coheres does not seem to be independent, whereas the evidence that is independent does not seem to cohere." However, Tucker argued that historians have been able to use theories about the transmission and preservation of information to identify reliable parts of the Gospels. He said that "Carrier is too dismissive of such methods because he is focused on hypotheses about the historical Jesus rather than on the best explanations of the evidence."

Selected articles

"Flash! Fox News Reports that Aliens May Have Built the Pyramids of Egypt!". Skeptical Inquirer 23.5 (September–October 1999).

"The Guarded Tomb of Jesus and Daniel in the Lion's Den: An Argument for the Plausibility of Theft". Journal of Higher Criticism 8.2 (Fall 2001).

"Pseudohistory in Jerry Vardaman's Magic Coins: The Nonsense of Micrographic Letters". Skeptical Inquirer 26.2 (March–April 2002) and 26.4 (July–August 2002).

"The Function of the Historian in Society". The History Teacher 35.4 (August 2002).

"Hitler's Table Talk: Troubling Finds". German Studies Review 26.3 (October 2003).

"The Argument from Biogenesis: Probabilities Against a Natural Origin of Life". Biology & Philosophy 19.5 (November 2004).

"Whence Christianity? A Meta-Theory for the Origins of Christianity". Journal of Higher Criticism 11.1 (Spring 2005).

"Fatal Flaws in Michael Almeida's Alleged 'Defeat' of Rowe's New Evidential Argument from Evil". Philo 10.1 (Spring-Summer 2007).

"On Defining Naturalism as a Worldview". Free Inquiry 30.3 (April/May 2010).

"Thallus and the Darkness at Christ’s Death". Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism 8 (2011-2012).

"Origen, Eusebius, and the Accidental Interpolation in Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 20.200". Journal of Early Christian Studies 20.4 (Winter 2012).

"The Prospect of a Christian Interpolation in Tacitus, Annals 15.44". Vigiliae Christianae 68 (2014).

Books and chapters

On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt (Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2014) ISBN 978-1-909697-49-2 ISBN 978-1-909697-35-5

Hitler Homer Bible Christ: The Historical Papers of Richard Carrier 1995-2013 (Richmond, CA: Philosophy Press, 2014) ISBN 978-1-49356-712-6

Proving History: Bayes's Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2012) ISBN 978-1-61614-559-0

Chapter: "How Not to Defend Historicity", in Bart Ehrman and the Quest of the Historical Jesus of Nazareth, (Cranford, NJ: American Atheist Press 2013) ISBN 978-1578840199

Why I Am Not a Christian: Four Conclusive Reasons to Reject the Faith (Philosophy Press, 2011) ISBN 978-1-45658-885-4

Chapters: "Christianity's success was not incredible", "Neither life nor the universe appear intelligently designed", "Moral facts naturally exist (and science could find them)" in The End of Christianity edited by John W. Loftus (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books 2011) ISBN 978-1-61614-413-5.

Chapters: "Why the resurrection is unbelievable", "Christianity was not responsible for modern science" in The Christian Delusion edited by John W. Loftus (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books 2010) ISBN 978-1-61614-168-4.

Chapters: "Bayes's Theorem for Beginners: Formal Logic and Its Relevance to Historical Method", in Sources of the Jesus Tradition: Separating History from Myth ed. R. Joseph Hoffmann (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books 2010).

Not the Impossible Faith, Why Christianity Didn't Need a Miracle to Succeed Lulu.com (2009) ISBN 978-0-557-04464-1

"Abortion Cannot be Regarded as Immoral". In The Abortion Controversy (edited by Lucinda Almond) Greenhaven Press (2007) ISBN 0-7377-3274-1.

Chapters: "The Spiritual Body of Christ and the Legend of the Empty Tomb", "The Plausibility of Theft", "The Burial of Jesus in Light of Jewish Law". In The Empty Tomb: Jesus Beyond The Grave (edited by Robert M. Price and Jeffery Jay Lowder) Prometheus Books (2005) ISBN 1-59102-286-X

Sense and Goodness without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism. AuthorHouse (2005) ISBN 1-4208-0293-3.

Entries on "Epicurus", "Lucretius", "Philodemus", "Second Sophistic", and "Soranus of Ephesus" in Encyclopedia of the Ancient World (edited by Thomas J. Sienkewicz). Salem Press (2002). ISBN 0-89356-038-3.