Richard Cevantis Carrier (born December 1, 1969) is an American historian, author, and Christ myth theorist. A longtime contributor to skeptical outlets including The Secular Web and Freethought Blogs, Carrier writes about philosophy and religion in classical antiquity, examining the development of early Christianity from a skeptical perspective and addressing modern debates about religion and morality. He frequently debates the historical basis of the Bible and Christianity and promotes the view that Jesus did not exist in his publications. Carrier's mythicist views have been rejected by academic scholarship,Gathercole, Simon. "The Historical and Human Existence of Jesus in Paul's Letters." Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 16.2–3 (2018): 183–212. and are considered fringe.
Background In his autobiographical essay "From Taoist to Infidel", Carrier recounts a benign Methodist upbringing, an early adult conversion to Taoism, and conflicts with Christian fundamentalists while he served in the United States Coast Guard. He writes that those experiences and his study of religion, Christianity, and Western philosophy led him to embrace naturalism. Carrier married Jennifer Robin Carrier in 1995, and the couple divorced in 2015. When he announced the separation he described himself as polyamorous and said the final two years of their marriage were an open relationship.
In 2008, Carrier received a doctorate in ancient history from Columbia University, where he studied the history of science in antiquity. His thesis was titled "Attitudes Towards the Natural Philosopher in the Early Roman Empire (100 B.C. to 313 A.D.)."
From 1996 to 2008 Carrier edited and contributed extensively to The Secular Web, writing about atheism and metaphysical naturalism. Those essays later formed the basis for his book Sense and Goodness without God. Carrier has frequently spoken at skeptic, secular humanist, freethought, and atheist conventions, including the annual Freethought Festival in Madison, Wisconsin, Skepticon in Springfield, Missouri, and gatherings hosted by American Atheists.
Carrier initially regarded the nonexistence of Jesus as a fringe theory that did not warrant academic investigation, but readers asked him to examine the topic and crowdfunded his research. He later became a vocal advocate of the view that Jesus was not a historical person. Carrier notes the scholarly consensus when he writes "the non-existence of Jesus is simply not plausible, as arguments from silence in the matter aren't valid, nor could they ever be sufficient to challenge what is, after all, the near-universal consensus of well-qualified experts."
Public debates and other media
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. In 2013, Carrier 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.
In 2006, Carrier was the keynote speaker at the Humanist Community of Central Ohio's annual Winter Solstice Banquet, where he spoke on defending naturalism as a philosophy. He appears in Roger Nygard's 2009 documentary The Nature of Existence, in which people of different religious and secular philosophies are interviewed about the meaning of life.
In 2007, English philosopher Antony Flew, who 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 deism. Carrier wrote to Flew and discussed Flew's supposed conversion on The Secular Web. Carrier concluded that There Is a God was primarily by Varghese and misrepresented Flew's views. Without addressing Carrier directly, Flew released a rebuttal 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."
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 on YouTube. Before the debate, Carrier said, "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." After the debate, 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.
The October 25, 2014, debate Did Jesus Exist? with Trent Horn was held in San Diego, California, and posted on YouTube. A debate with Craig A. Evans titled Did Jesus Exist? was held at Kennesaw State University on April 13, 2016, and posted online by KSUTV.
Carrier appears in the 2020 film Marketing the Messiah, where he discusses several topics, including biblical canon creation, the Pauline sect, the dating of Paul's letters and the Gospels, Gospel authorship and redactions over time, and his interpretation of the Gospels as allegory. On allegory, he specifically addresses the story of Jesus Barabbas as a symbolic retelling of atonement in Leviticus.
Publications Carrier's publications include 11 books and eight contributions to other publications. His best-known works concern the development of early Christianity and mythicism, as well as Roman scientific education and practices.
Sense and Goodness without God Sense and Goodness without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism (2005) sets out a systematic naturalist worldview, developing positions in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and ethics, and argues for naturalized moral realism and a physicalist account of consciousness in preference to theism.
Not the Impossible Faith Not the Impossible Faith: Why Christianity Didn't Need a Miracle to Succeed (2009) contends that the early Christian movement's growth can be explained by ordinary sociocultural mechanisms rather than miraculous events, assessing claims about missionary strategy, social networks, class and gender dynamics, and patronage in the Roman world.
Why I Am Not a Christian Carrier's 2011 book Why I Am Not a Christian: Four Conclusive Reasons to Reject the Faith outlines a case against Christian theism by examining miracle claims, scriptural authority, moral theory, and the comparative explanatory power of naturalism.
Proving History, On Historicity, and Outer Space
Carrier has linked Proving History, On the Historicity of Jesus, and Jesus from Outer Space as an informal trilogy. Proving History introduces his Bayesian framework for historical method, On the Historicity of Jesus applies that framework to competing mythicist and historicist models, and Jesus from Outer Space restates the argument for general readers.
Proving History: Bayes's Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus (2012) promotes formal probabilistic reasoning in historical research, critiques the "criteria of authenticity" used in Jesus studies, and defends Bayesian probability analysis as a way to compare hypotheses.
Carrier argues that Bayes' theorem should guide historical methodology. He maintains that a Bayesian analysis renders the ahistoricity of Jesus the most probable conclusion and that Jesus originated as a mythic figure rather than as a historical person who was later mythologized. Carrier estimates the probability of Jesus' existence at between 1/3 and 1/12000, depending on the values supplied to his model. Critics have rejected his methodology, calling it "tenuous" and "problematic and unpersuasive". Simon Gathercole argues that Carrier's conclusions "are contradicted by the historical data."
On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt (2014) applies the framework from Proving History to the question of Jesus's existence, develops minimal historicist and mythicist models, surveys the surviving evidence, and argues that a mythicist reconstruction is at least as probable as historicity.
Carrier has said: "I am also the first historian in a hundred years to publish a complete peer-reviewed, academic press argument for the origin and development of Christianity that does not include a historical Jesus." Sheffield Phoenix Press, a biblical studies publisher, released the volume. Carrier argues that a Bayesian analysis leaves insufficient evidence for a historical Jesus and that the earliest Christians revered a celestial or "angelic extraterrestrial" named Jesus who was subordinate to God. He maintains that this being emerged from a "cosmic sperm bank" and was tortured and crucified by Satan and his demons, buried above the clouds, and resurrected in outer space. Carrier writes that the celestial Jesus was known through private revelations and scriptural interpretation before being cast as a narrative figure in the Gospels. He contends that the allegorical dimension of Jesus was lost during early disputes over control of Christian communities. Because the gospels were written decades after Jesus' death, Carrier considers them "wildly fictitious" and treats the Gospel of Mark as an extended meta-parable. He argues that later references to Jesus depended on the Gospels rather than independent testimony.Raphael Lataster. Questioning the Plausibility of Jesus Ahistoricity Theories — A Brief Pseudo-Bayesian Metacritique of the Sources. The Intermountain West Journal of Religious Studies, 2015, 75. Apart from the hero archetype pattern, Carrier contends that nothing in the Gospels is reliable evidence for or against historicity.
Jesus from Outer Space: What the Earliest Christians Really Believed about Christ (2020) offers a popular-level restatement of Carrier's mythicist hypothesis presented in On the Historicity of Jesus, arguing that the earliest Christ cult centered on a celestial rather than historical person and that later narratives re-situated that figure in a biographical frame.
Hitler Homer Bible Christ Hitler Homer Bible Christ: The Historical Papers of Richard Carrier 1995–2013 (2014) collects articles and conference papers on early Christianity, historical method, Greco-Roman science, and textual criticism, including the study of Hitler's Table Talk translations.
Science Education and The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire
The Science Education in the Early Roman Empire monograph (2016) revises Carrier's dissertation and surveys the curricular, institutional, and social settings through which scientific knowledge was taught in the Roman world, with attention to rhetorical schooling, technical handbooks, and educational stratification. In his review, Michiel Meeusen wrote the work had defects such as "whiggism employed in dealing with ancient science and scientists".