On the Historicity of Jesus

Paperback, 712 pages

English language

Published June 23, 2014 by Sheffield Phoenix Press.

ISBN:: 978-1-909697-49-2
OCLC Number:: 861768627

The assumption that Jesus existed as a historical person has occasionally been questioned in the course of the last hundred years or so, but any doubts that have been raised have usually been put to rest in favor of imagining a blend of the historical, the mythical and the theological in the surviving records of Jesus. Carrier re-examines the whole question and finds compelling reasons to suspect the more daring assumption is correct. He lays out extensive research on the evidence for Jesus and the origins of Christianity and poses the key questions that must now be answered if the historicity of Jesus is to survive as a dominant paradigm. Carrier contrasts the most credible reconstruction of a historical Jesus with the most credible theory of Christian origins if a historical Jesus did not exist. Such a theory would posit that the Jesus figure was originally conceived of as a …

The assumption that Jesus existed as a historical person has occasionally been questioned in the course of the last hundred years or so, but any doubts that have been raised have usually been put to rest in favor of imagining a blend of the historical, the mythical and the theological in the surviving records of Jesus. Carrier re-examines the whole question and finds compelling reasons to suspect the more daring assumption is correct. He lays out extensive research on the evidence for Jesus and the origins of Christianity and poses the key questions that must now be answered if the historicity of Jesus is to survive as a dominant paradigm. Carrier contrasts the most credible reconstruction of a historical Jesus with the most credible theory of Christian origins if a historical Jesus did not exist. Such a theory would posit that the Jesus figure was originally conceived of as a celestial being known only through private revelations and hidden messages in scripture; then stories placing this being in earth history were crafted to communicate the claims of the gospel allegorically; such stories eventually came to be believed or promoted in the struggle for control of the Christian churches that survived the tribulations of the first century. Carrier finds the latter theory more credible than has been previously imagined. He explains why it offers a better explanation for all the disparate evidence surviving from the first two centuries of the Christian era. He argues that we need a more careful and robust theory of cultural syncretism between Jewish theology and politics of the second-temple period and the most popular features of pagan religion and philosophy of the time. For anyone intent on defending a historical Jesus, this is the book to challenge. -- (Source)

1 edition

markm reviewed On the Historicity of Jesus by Richard Carrier

Review of 'On the Historicity of Jesus' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

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 …

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: irrco.wordpress.com/2012/09/08/a-mathematical-review-of-proving-history-by-richard-carrier/). 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.