Chapter Twelve - Carrier - The Mythmaker

CHAPTER TWELVE

Carrier - The Mythmaker

RICHARD CARRIER DOESN’T just study the Bible.
He studies the gaps around it.

With a PhD in ancient history from Columbia and a background in classical studies, Carrier approaches the Bible not from theology, but from the wider world of Greco-Roman religion, literature, and myth.

His central claim is simple and explosive.

He doesn’t think Jesus existed.

At least, not the way most people assume.
Carrier is a leading voice in what’s known as mythicism. The idea that Jesus of Nazareth may not have been a historical figure at all, but rather a fictional or legendary character whose story developed over time through theological writing, oral tradition, and cultural synthesis.

He argues that early Christian writings, especially the letters of Paul, contain surprisingly few concrete details about Jesus’s life. Paul doesn’t mention Jesus’s birthplace, family, specific teachings, or miracles. Instead, Jesus is mostly described as a spiritual figure revealed through scripture and visions.

Carrier sees this as a red flag.

If Paul was writing within a few decades of Jesus’s death and believed him to be a real person who had walked the earth, why would so many essential details be missing?

In Carrier’s view, the figure of Jesus may have started as a celestial being. A heavenly messiah known through revelation and only later developed into a biographical character through the writing of the Gospels.

He supports this idea with comparisons to other dying-and-rising gods, messianic expectations in Second Temple Judaism, and literary parallels to earlier mythic structures.
His book On the Historicity of Jesus lays out the case in detail, complete with probabilistic models and historical analysis.

Mainstream scholars overwhelmingly disagree with him.
Most historians, including secular ones, accept that Jesus likely existed as a historical figure, even if the supernatural claims about him are set aside.

But Carrier doesn’t claim certainty. He argues that mythicism is a valid hypothesis, one that deserves academic consideration rather than automatic dismissal. And he criticizes what he sees as overconfidence among biblical scholars who operate from assumptions rather than historical rigor.

He’s polarizing, no question.
But his influence has grown, especially among internet-era skeptics and independent researchers looking for alternate explanations of Christian origins.

Carrier doesn’t claim to have disproven Jesus.
He claims that the evidence we have is weaker than most people realize and that the burden of proof lies not with the doubters, but with the defenders.

To some, that sounds like intellectual honesty.
To others, it sounds like denial in disguise.

Either way, Carrier reminds us that the debate over Jesus’s identity isn’t just about what he did.
It’s about whether he ever lived at all.