A massive detailed scholarly work. You cannot read this and fail to learn scores or hundreds of things about the history-sociology-theology of antiquity. The author’s use of Bayes Theorem did not initially seem problematic to me, and I supposed that the attempt to summarize all of his arguments was worthwhile (when all is said and done, he favors that the odds that an historical Jesus existed is less than 1 in 12,000), but the arbitrariness of the prior probabilities, and the peculiarity of some of his arguments, e.g. comparing the probability that an historical person meets the Rank-Raglan hero type criteria with the probability that a non-historical person does, sometimes made the effort seem like window dressing. The author’s use of Bayes Theorem has been widely attacked, but there are obviously a lot of opponents with strong feelings to any non-religious analytical discussion of Jesus, to say the least, and after reading their objections on the Internet, I’m confident that at least some of them don’t know what they are talking about. (The clearest discussion that I’ve found so far is here: https://irrco.wordpress.com/2012/09/08/a-mathematical-review-of-proving-history-...). Nevertheless, I agree with the author anyway, and I thought that his book was fascinating.
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Additional comment: If you are looking for the probability of event B and it is conditioned on many events A, then all of the events A have to be pairwise disjoint events, i.e. they make up a single probability space altogether. That this is true in Carrier’s book is not clear to me.
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Additional additional comment: You might like this video of the author discussing this book:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTllC7TbM8M. ( )

I am a huge fan of Richard Carrier and of this book, but I have a different, albeit amateur, take on the trickiest evidence mythicists have to negotiate, viz. "James, the Lord's brother" (Gal. 1:19), "born/made of woman, born/made under the law" (Gal. 4:4), and "from the seed of David" (Rom. 1:3). Instead of relying on difficult interpretations of these phrases, I would suggest interpolation. I know it is easy to call interpolation on any phrase one doesn't like, and Carrier himself does not like to do it without excellent evidence because it lowers the probability of his theory (relying as it does on unproven tampering with the text). However, I am confident enough in the correctness of mythicism on other grounds that these phrases stand out from Paul's letters as obvious candidates for forgery.

For the following specific textual grounds for arguing interpolation I rely on Peter Kirby's work here: http://peterkirby.com/marcions-shorter-readings-of-paul.html

"James, the Lord's brother" is contained in a passage in Galatians about Paul's supposed first visit to Jerusalem which is suspect in its entirety: it was not in Marcion's text, nor I suspect in Irenaeus'. Of course Catholics accused Marcion of deleting them, but it is no less likely that they added them in. If this line were absent, the figure of James, the human brother of a human Jesus of Nazareth, could still have been invented through a process of imaginative textual reconciliation: in Acts (as Carrier discusses) there is a problem where one James is killed and then another James carries on as the leader of the Church: combine this unidentified James with the brother James named in Mark's Gospel and Paul's remark at 1 Cor 9:5 about "the Lord's brothers", and (voila!) one has engineered a James, human brother of Jesus, who is a Church leader, then written into Gal. 1. Giving Jesus a human brother would also be an anti-Marcionite statement, to interpolate, since Marcion argued Jesus had no human birth (he descended in adult form). This interpolation solution would allow brother to hold its meaning of human siblinghood, while still not bolstering the case for the historical Jesus. This would also explain why, if this is a brother in the human sense, the sentence does not distinguish this kind of brother from the spiritual kind that Paul wrote about much more often: it wasn't Paul writing.

The phrase "born/made of woman, born/made under the law" was not in Marcion's text of Galatians. Marcion did not believe either of these things about Jesus, but they make sense as something Catholics might have interpolated to use against Marcionites.

Nor was "from the seed of David" in Marcion's text of Romans. Marcion believed Jesus had no human birth so dismissing this phrase would spare us having to follow Carrier's argument about sperm implantation.

I know Carrier will not make this argument, and there will be some who are loath to accept or to rely on interpolation arguments. Personally, from my reading I have very little confidence in the faithful transmission of the texts: Catholics were clearly willing to forge documents to bolster their theological positions - hence why several letters attributed to Paul are now regarded as forgeries. I have no problem believing they would have inserted anti-Marcionite interpolations. We cannot prove them interpolations, but readers who baulk at Carrier's most difficult arguments might like to consider this alternative way around his most problematic evidence.

Edit: it should also be noted that these 3 verses are not in DeBuhn's reconstructions of Marcion's texts: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1633263891

Edit: the blog Vridar mentions that neither Justin Martyr nor Tertullian seems to be aware of a James, brother of Jesus, who is a leader of the Christians.

Thanks for reading. ( )

A well researched book that is extremely marred by poor writing and pretentious pomposity. The author overwrites, and fails to consider his reader in the use of punctuation, sentence fragments in nearly every paragraph, and just plain boastfulness. His research is good, or at least appears to be so to one who is less versed in history than in science, and he does explain his methods, though sometimes with so much pretentious boasting that you want him to stop. His footnotes are not infrequently 3/4 of a page long, which does have the benefit of making this long book shorter, since you can avoid the footnotes. Most of what is in there does not add enough to make them worth reading; he is no Edward Gibbon. Overall, a mixed bag, sometimes with too much manure and not enough pony. When he does settle down to straight discussion, he gives a decent accounting, and if an editor took a mind to, they could make this a much more readable book, and one that did not annoy readers nearly so much...at least, not those that found his thesis reasonable. For those who are unwilling to be open to the idea that Jesus never existed, this book would be annoying even without the pretentiousness and pomposity. ( )

I am a huge fan of Richard Carrier and of this book, but I have a different, albeit amateur, take on the trickiest evidence mythicists have to negotiate, viz. "James, the Lord's brother" (Gal. 1:19), "born/made of woman, born/made under the law" (Gal. 4:4), and "from the seed of David" (Rom. 1:3). Instead of relying on difficult interpretations of these phrases, I would suggest interpolation. I know it is easy to call interpolation on any phrase one doesn't like, and Carrier himself does not like to do it without excellent evidence because it lowers the probability of his theory (relying as it does on unproven tampering with the text). However, I am confident enough in the correctness of mythicism on other grounds that these phrases stand out from Paul's letters as obvious candidates for forgery.

For the following specific textual grounds for arguing interpolation I rely on Peter Kirby's work here: http://peterkirby.com/marcions-shorter-readings-of-paul.html

"James, the Lord's brother" is contained in a passage in Galatians about Paul's supposed first visit to Jerusalem which is suspect in its entirety: it was not in Marcion's text, nor I suspect in Irenaeus'. Of course Catholics accused Marcion of deleting them, but it is no less likely that they added them in. If this line were absent, the figure of James, the human brother of a human Jesus of Nazareth, could still have been invented through a process of imaginative textual reconciliation: in Acts (as Carrier discusses) there is a problem where one James is killed and then another James carries on as the leader of the Church: combine this unidentified James with the brother James named in Mark's Gospel and Paul's remark at 1 Cor 9:5 about "the Lord's brothers", and (voila!) one has engineered a James, human brother of Jesus, who is a Church leader, then written into Gal. 1. Giving Jesus a human brother would also be an anti-Marcionite statement, to interpolate, since Marcion argued Jesus had no human birth (he descended in adult form). This interpolation solution would allow brother to hold its meaning of human siblinghood, while still not bolstering the case for the historical Jesus. This would also explain why, if this is a brother in the human sense, the sentence does not distinguish this kind of brother from the spiritual kind that Paul wrote about much more often: it wasn't Paul writing.

The phrase "born/made of woman, born/made under the law" was not in Marcion's text of Galatians. Marcion did not believe either of these things about Jesus, but they make sense as something Catholics might have interpolated to use against Marcionites.

Nor was "from the seed of David" in Marcion's text of Romans. Marcion believed Jesus had no human birth so dismissing this phrase would spare us having to follow Carrier's argument about sperm implantation.

I know Carrier will not make this argument, and there will be some who are loath to accept or to rely on interpolation arguments. Personally, from my reading I have very little confidence in the faithful transmission of the texts: Catholics were clearly willing to forge documents to bolster their theological positions - hence why several letters attributed to Paul are now regarded as forgeries. I have no problem believing they would have inserted anti-Marcionite interpolations. We cannot prove them interpolations, but readers who baulk at Carrier's most difficult arguments might like to consider this alternative way around his most problematic evidence.

Thanks for reading. ( )

A brilliant piece of scholarship. Tightly argued, comprehensive evidence, and very persuasive. The author concludes that Jesus Christ was highly unlikely to be a historical figure. The evidence, according to Carrier, is more consistent with the conclusion that Jesus was originally a mythic being who, over time, became historicised. Whether you agree with this conclusion or not, this book is a must read for anyone interested in who Jesus was. It was a long haul to read but absolutely worthwhile. ( )