Richard Carrier

Richard Carrier
Born Richard Cevantis Carrier
(1969-12-01) December 1, 1969
Nationality American
Education B.A. (History), M.A. (Ancient history), M.Phil. (Ancient history), Ph.D. (Ancient history)[1]
Alma mater University of California, Berkeley, Columbia University[1]
Website http://www.richardcarrier.info/

Richard Cevantis Carrier (born December 1, 1969) is a historian, atheist activist, author, public speaker, and blogger. He has a doctorate in ancient history from Columbia University where his thesis was on the history of science in ancient antiquity. He is a leading proponent of the Christ myth theory.[2]

Richard Carrier originally gained prominence as an advocate of atheism and metaphysical naturalism, authoring many articles on The Secular Web, and later defending his basic position in his book Sense and Goodness Without God.

Carrier was initially not interested in the question of the historicity of Jesus.[3] 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 Jesus ahistoricity theory.[4][5]

His blog appears on Freethought Blogs, and he has frequently been a featured speaker at various skeptic, secular humanist, freethought, and atheist conventions, such as the annual Freethought Festival in Madison, WI, the annual Skepticon convention in Springfield, MO, and conventions sponsored by American Atheists.

Carrier has frequently debated Christian apologists such as William Lane Craig and David Marshall both in person and online. The Craig debate was broadcast on Lee Strobel's television show Faith Under Fire.[6]

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.)."[7] He has published several articles and chapters in books on the subject of history and philosophy (see below). 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 U.S. Coast Guard, and his deeper study of religion, Christianity, and Western philosophy, which eventually led to his embrace of naturalism.[8] This was reprinted in his major work defending atheism and naturalism, Sense and Goodness without God.

Carrier contributed chapters to three books of counter-apologetics edited by John W. Loftus on whether the historical evidence confirms Jesus rose from the dead, and whether the origins and rise of Christianity really were supernatural, in Christianity Is Not Great, The Christian Delusion, and The End of Christianity. 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.[9] 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[10] and Christian apologist Norman Geisler.[11]

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."[12] 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."[13]

Carrier's recent books on the Historicity of Jesus have established him as a leading expert on Jesus ahistoricity theory (a.k.a Christ myth theory). Carrier asserts that the ahistoricity of Jesus and his origin as a mythical deity are true.[5]

Public debates

He 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 UCLA on April 19, 2004.[14] Carrier debated atheist Jennifer Roth online on the morality of abortion.[15] 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.[16]

The debate with William Lane Craig was broadcast on Lee Strobel's now defunct television show Faith Under Fire.[6]

Investigating Antony Flew's leaving atheism

When reports spread of Antony Flew's rejection of atheism in 2004, 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 belief into there being some sort of "minimal God," as in Deism. Carrier also came away with the opinion that Flew's changed ideas were not accurately represented in the book Flew co-authored, There is a God.[17][18][19] However, Flew released a statement through his publisher (without directly addressing Carrier's statements):

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.[20]

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"[21] and suggests the possibility that Francois Genoud had doctored portions of the text to enhance Hitler's views.[22] Carrier put forward a new translation of twelve quotations based on Picker and 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."[23] 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."[24]

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."[25] Derek Hastings cites Carrier's paper for "an attempt to undermine the reliability of the anti-Christian statements."[26] 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,[27] "ultimately presume[d] its authenticity."[28]

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.[29]

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.[30]

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.[31]

Carrier is listed in Who's Who in Hell.[32]

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.[33]

Personal life

Dr. Carrier announced in 2015 that he and his wife had ended their 20-year marriage. He also revealed that he is polyamorous.[34]

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.

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 of Nazareth in particular.[35]

In June 2014, Carrier's On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt was published by Sheffield Phoenix Press.[36][37] He notes that it is "the first comprehensive pro-Jesus-myth book ever published by a respected academic press and under formal peer review."[38] 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 started 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 Ehrman, Maurice Casey and Richard Carrier[39][40] 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)."[41] Lataster previously wrote the only peer reviewed book review on Carrier's On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt[42] 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.[43]

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 later created that placed Jesus on earth interacting with historical figures and eventually people began to believe that these stories were about real historical events and people.[44]

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 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 by the hands of the demon spirits, and was subsequently resurrected by God (see Dying-and-rising god). This Christ myth was not based on a tradition reaching back to a historical Jesus, but on the Old Testament exegesis 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,[45] 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.

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."[5]
Carrier gives as example, Joseph Smith the founder of Mormonism, who declared that he had conversations with the Angel Moroni.
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), thus rendering all of their conclusions susceptible to doubt,[46][47] as is also the case with any oral transmission of the gospel prior to the first-written gospel.[48][49]

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."[50][51]

Mythological Ahistoricity Supernatural Historicity Natural Historicity
  • Birth of a deity.
  • An incarnated (cloned) human body was crucified, thus the religious requirement for a human/god blood sacrifice was fulfilled.
  • These events occur in the abodes of mythological deities (see Seven Heavens).
  • Birth of a deity, from a human mother, thus a human demigod.
  • A demigod human body was crucified, thus the religious requirement for a human/god blood sacrifice was fulfilled.
  • These events occur on Earth.
  • Birth of a human.
  • A human body was crucified.
  • These events occur on Earth.
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.[52] Philo knew this figure by all of the attributes Paul already knew Jesus by: the firstborn son of God (Rom. 8:29), the celestial 'image of God' (2 Cor. 4:4), and God’s agent of creation (1 Cor. 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 Zechariah."[53]
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 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.
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.

Jewish and Hellenistic syncretism

Carrier notes four big trends of religion, in the previous centuries leading up to Christianity, which then subsequently conforms to all four trends.

  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."[54]

Publications

Selected articles

Books and chapters

See also

References

  1. 1 2 "Curriculum Vitae" (PDF). October 7, 2014. Retrieved March 19, 2015.
  2. ↑ Casey, Maurice (2014). Jesus: Evidence and Argument or Mythicist Myths?. Bloomsbury T&T Clark. pp. 14–16. ISBN 9780567447623.
  3. ↑ "Did Jesus Exist? Dr. Robert M Price, Dr. Richard Carrier, David Fitzgerald Interview Part 1".
  4. ↑ Lataster, Raphael (2015). "Questioning the Plausibility of Jesus Ahistoricity Theories — A Brief Pseudo-Bayesian Metacritique of the Sources". The Intermountain West Journal of Religious Studies 6:1: 63.
  5. 1 2 3 Carrier, Richard (2014). On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt. Sheffield Phoenix Press Limited. p. 52. ISBN 978-1-909697-49-2. [T]he basic thesis of every competent mythologist, then and now, has always been that 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.
  6. 1 2 Audio Archive of Debate
  7. ↑ "Clio Holdings Information". Columbia University Libraries. Retrieved March 29, 2015.
  8. ↑ "From Taoist to Infidel". The Secular Web. 2001. Retrieved March 19, 2015.
  9. ↑ Carrier, Richard (2005). "The Spiritual Body of Christ and the Legend of the Empty Tomb". In Price, Robert M.; Lowder, Jeffery Jay. The Empty Tomb: Jesus Beyond the Grave. Prometheus Books. ISBN 9781591022862.
  10. ↑ Davis, Stephen T. (2006). "The Counterattack of the Resurrection Skeptics: A Review Article". Philosophia Christi 8 (1): 39–63.
  11. ↑ Geisler, Norman (Spring 2006). "A Critical Review of The Empty Tomb: Jesus beyond the Grave". Christian Apologetics Journal 5 (1): 45–106.
  12. ↑ Carrier, Richard. "Spiritual Body FAQ". Retrieved March 19, 2015.
  13. ↑ Carrier, Richard (March 25, 2009). "Richard Carrier Blogs: Craig Debate Wrap". Retrieved March 19, 2015.
  14. ↑ "Licona vs. Carrier: On the Resurrection of Jesus Christ". April 19, 2004. Retrieved March 19, 2015.
  15. ↑ "On the Issue of Abortion". Retrieved March 19, 2015.
  16. ↑ "Marshall vs. Carrier: Richard's opening argument". Christ the Tao. March 25, 2013. Retrieved March 19, 2015.
  17. ↑ Carrier, Richard (October 10, 2004). "Antony Flew Considers God...Sort Of". The Secular Web. Retrieved March 19, 2015.
  18. ↑ "Leading Atheist Philosopher Concludes God's Real". FOX News. Associated Press. December 9, 2004. Retrieved March 19, 2015.
  19. ↑ Oppenheimer, Mark (November 4, 2007). "The Turning of an Atheist". New York Times Magazine. Retrieved March 19, 2015.
  20. ↑ Varghese, Roy Abraham (January 13, 2008). "'There Is a God'". New York Times. Retrieved March 19, 2015.
  21. ↑ "'Hitler's Table Talk': Troubling Finds." German Studies Review 26 (3): 561-576.
  22. ↑ Carrier (2003), p. 565.
  23. ↑ Carrier (2003), p. 574.
  24. ↑ Carrier (2003), p. 573.
  25. ↑ Weinberg, Gerhard (2003). Foreword In Hugh Trevor-Roper, ed. 2003. Hitler's Table Talk 1941–1944. New York: Engima Books, p. xi
  26. ↑ Hastings, Derek (2010). Catholicism and the Roots of Nazism: Religious Identity and National Socialism. New York: Oxford University Press. p. 251.
  27. ↑ Steigmann-Gall, Richard (2003). The Holy Reich: Nazi conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 255–256.
  28. ↑ Steigmann-Gall, Richard (2007). Christianity and the Nazi Movement. Journal of Contemporary History 42 (2): 208.
  29. ↑ "The End of Faith" (Faith Under Fire episode 1, season 1, aired October 2, 2004). Reported by WorldNetDaily.com ("Faith Under Fire hits TV screens: PAX series looks at religion, spirituality, morality"), EvangelicalNews.org (Randall Murphree, "Is God Republican Or Democrat? New PAX Series with Lee Strobel Debates Issues"), and IIDB.org (Richard Carrier debates William Lane Craig on "Faith Under Fire").
  30. ↑ "Speaker will defend godless worldview". The Columbus Dispatch. 2006-12-22. p. 03C – via LexisNexis.
  31. ↑ Imdb cast listing
  32. ↑ Smith, Warren Allen (2000). Who's Who in Hell. Barricade Books. p. 186. ISBN 1-56980-158-4.
  33. ↑ Biederman, Patricia Ward (August 20, 2005). "Documentary Questions the Existence of Jesus". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved March 19, 2015.
  34. ↑ Carrier, Richard (February 18, 2015). "Coming Out Poly + A Change of Life Venue". Richard Carrier Blogs. Retrieved March 19, 2015.
  35. ↑ Carrier, Richard (2012). Proving History: Bayes's Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus. New York: Prometheus Books. ISBN 9781616145606.
  36. ↑ http://www.sheffieldphoenix.com/showbook.asp?bkid=264
  37. ↑ Carrier, Richard (2014). On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt. Sheffield Phoenix Press. ISBN 9781909697355.
  38. ↑ Carrier, Richard (July 17, 2013). "Update on Historicity of Jesus". Retrieved March 19, 2015.
  39. ↑ Lataster, Raphael (Nov 12, 2015). "Chapter 1 & 2, Ehrman and Casey respectively". Jesus Did Not Exist: A Debate Among Atheists. ISBN 1514814420. Length: 458 pages
  40. ↑ Carrier, Richard (December 2, 2015). "Lataster on the Historicity of Jesus Being a Debate Among Atheists". Richard Carrier Blogs. Freethought Blogs. Retrieved 20 March 2016. Bart Ehrman and Maurice Casey, were neither published by academic presses, nor underwent any formal peer review. But Lataster works with what the academy has given him. And so he surveys the merits of those two books anyway. And compares them with mine, On the Historicity of Jesus, which was published by an academic press and did pass formal academic peer review.
  41. ↑ Raphael Lataster. "Jesus Did Not Exist reviewed by David Fitzgerald - Raphael Lataster".
  42. ↑ Lataster, Raphael (December 2014). "Richard Carrier: On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2014; pp. xiv + 696.". Journal of Religious History 38 (4): 614–616. doi:10.1111/1467-9809.12219.
  43. ↑ Lataster, Raphael (November 12, 2015). "Afterword by Richard Carrier". Jesus Did Not Exist: A Debate Among Atheists. p. 418. ISBN 1514814420.
  44. ↑ So...if Jesus Didn’t Exist, Where Did He Come from Then?
  45. ↑ Did Jesus Exist? Earl Doherty and the Argument to Ahistoricity
  46. ↑ Howell, Martha C.; Prevenier, Walter (2001). From Reliable Sources: An Introduction to Historical Methods. Cornell University Press. p. 19. ISBN 0-8014-8560-6. Historians must thus always consider the conditions under which a source was produced—the intentions that motivated it—but they must not assume that such knowledge tells them all they need to know about its “reliability.” They must also consider the historical context in which it was produced—the events that preceded it, and those that followed.
  47. ↑ Lataster, Raphael (2015). "Questioning the Plausibility of Jesus Ahistoricity Theories — A Brief Pseudo-Bayesian Metacritique of the Sources". The Intermountain West Journal of Religious Studies 6:1: 65–66. Primary sources are vital to historians, not only as they provide direct evidence, but also serve as the benchmark by which secondary sources are measured.[Leopold von Ranke, Sarah Austin, and Robert Arthur Johnson, History of the Reformation in Germany (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1905), pxi.; Louis Reichenthal Gottschalk, Understanding History: A Primer of Historical Method (New York: Knopf, 1950), p. 165.] Unfortunately, biblical scholars do not have access to primary sources, arguably rendering all of their conclusions about the historical Jesus as susceptible to doubt.
  48. ↑ Ehrman, Bart D. (1 March 2016). Jesus Before the Gospels: How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior. HarperCollins. ISBN 978-0-06-228523-2.
  49. ↑ Bethune, Brian (March 23, 2016). "Did Jesus really exist?". macleans.ca. Maclean's. Retrieved 16 April 2016. Memory research has cast doubt on the few things we knew about Jesus, raising an even bigger question.
  50. ↑ Ehrman, Bart D. (25 March 2014). How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee. HarperCollins. ISBN 978-0-06-225219-7.
  51. ↑ Bart Ehrman on How Jesus Became God
  52. ↑ Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus, pp. 200-05.
  53. ↑ Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt: Should We Still Be Looking for a Historical Jesus?
  54. ↑ Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus, p. 100.

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