Was the Entire New Testament Forged in the Second Century?
There have been two really weird and unexpected turns in mainstream peer-reviewed scholarship lately: multiple independent studies are redating the entire Bible—Old Testament and New—far later than consensus imagines. What’s Up with the Old...Like, Can You Rebel Against Rome with Only Two Swords?
In my debate with Fernando Bermejo-Rubio, he defended the theory that Jesus can only plausibly have been historical if he was an armed militant who was later whitewashed as a pacifist. I argued that that might be plausible in concept, but not when we look at the...Margaret Williams on Early Classical Authors on Jesus
Preparing my new volume on the historicity of Jesus for next year, I’ve found that one of the works published since my first volume that warrants attention in my new one is Early Classical Authors on Jesus (T&T Clark, 2022) by Margaret H. Williams (hereafter...Things Fall Apart Only When You Check: The Main Reason the Historicity of Jesus Continues to Be Believed
After ten years of observing the field after publishing my academic study on the subject, I find there are generally only two reasons to remain confident in the historicity of Jesus: a desperate faith-based need to; and a disinterest in actually checking. The former...Goldberg’s Attempt to Rehabilitate the Testimonium Flavianum
Did Josephus write his paragraph about Jesus by slavishly copying Luke? No. In my Ongoing List of Updates to the Arguments and Evidence in On the Historicity of Jesus I maintain a section on Josephus, and as of now it simply summarizes and references my article...And So Kipp Davis Conclusively Demonstrates His Incompetence as a Scholar
Kipp Davis has composed three videos about my work that now amount to dishonest slander. Because once you make mistakes and find that out—but keep repeating those false statements anyway, rather than correcting them—you’ve transitioned from merely...Some Controversial Ideas That Now Have Wide Scholarly Support
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...Kipp Davis’s Selective Confirmation and Ignoring of Everything I Actually Said in Chapter 4 of On the Historicity of Jesus
Kipp Davis recently published a kind of analysis of the fourth chapter of my academic study On the Historicity of Jesus: “How (Not) to Read the Talmud: Reviewing Richard Carrier’s On the Historicity of Jesus, Part 1.” It’s a weird one, because...An Ongoing List of Updates to the Arguments and Evidence in On the Historicity of Jesus
My academic study On the Historicity of Jesus was published in 2014, by respected biblical studies press Sheffield-Phoenix. It was the first complete study of the historicity of Jesus to pass peer review in over a hundred years. Since then only one other has been...Did ‘Docetism’ Really Even Exist?
This article briefs a more thorough and academic treatment later completed in The Obsolete Paradigm of a Historical Jesus. If you want to consult or cite the complete expert study of this question, citing numerous scholars concurring and many more prooftexts, you...How Would We Know Jesus Existed?
You can watch an edited video of my live talk, with slides, for the Secular Humanist Society of New York earlier this month: How Would We Know Jesus Existed? But here I will provide a brief written methodological summary, for ease of reference and use. My talk drew...Jesus Is an Extraterrestrial
There are two new books assessing the intersection of religion and astrophysics. Both are fantastic reads. First is Aliens and Religion: Where Two Worlds Collide, by Jonathan MS Pearce and Aaron Adair (Onus 2023), which explores the philosophical problems that...My Rank-Raglan Scoring for Osiris
The first question anyone has to answer when answering the question “How likely is it that Jesus was a mythical and not a historical person?” is “How often, at that time, were people like Jesus mythical and not historical?” And that requires...Captain DadPool on Who Is Inventing Workarounds: Historicists or Mythicists?
Youtuber Captain DadPool recently published a short video (Responding to Godless Engineer’s Recent Attacks) that so aptly captures the backwards methodology of defenders of the historicity of Jesus it will be productive to analyze. Especially as it supplements...Did Jesus Even Exist? Bart Ehrman’s Latest Take
Bart Ehrman has almost entirely avoided discussing “the historicity question” for years (I continually catalogue everything, and my responses, in Ehrman on Historicity Recap; some people have mistaken an article on his blog on this as recent, but in fact...Get Dr. Carrier’s Latest!
About the Author
Richard Carrier is the author of many books and numerous articles online and in print. His avid readers span the world from Hong Kong to Poland. With a Ph.D. in ancient history from Columbia University, he specializes in the modern philosophy of naturalism and humanism, and the origins of Christianity and the intellectual history of Greece and Rome, with particular expertise in ancient philosophy, science and technology. He is also a noted defender of scientific and moral realism, Bayesian reasoning, and historical methods.
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