45 Facts About Richard Carrier

Richard Cevantis Carrier was born on December 1,1969 and is an American ancient historian.

Richard Carrier is a long-time contributor to skeptical websites, including The Secular Web and Freethought Blogs.

Richard Carrier has publicly debated a number of scholars on the historical basis of the Bible and Christianity.

Richard Carrier is a prominent advocate of the theory that Jesus did not exist, which he has argued in a number of his works.

However, Richard Carrier's arguments have been controversial and have not been accepted within academic scholarship, and remains fringe.

In 2008, Richard Carrier received a doctorate in ancient history from Columbia University, where he studied the history of science in antiquity.

Richard Carrier has frequently been a featured speaker at various skeptic, secular humanist, freethought and atheist conventions, such as the annual Freethought Festival in Madison, Wisconsin, the annual Skepticon convention in Springfield, Missouri, and conventions sponsored by American Atheists.

Richard Carrier strongly advocated for a movement in atheism called "Atheism Plus," through which he argued that the atheist community ought to share certain particular political agendas, not just lack a belief in God.

Philosopher Massimo Pigliucci criticized Richard Carrier for being very intolerant of people who disagreed with him or his atheistic views and for radicalizing the "Atheism plus" agenda.

Richard Carrier has both apologized for and denied the alleged misconduct.

Richard 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.

Richard Carrier debated Michael R Licona on the Resurrection of Jesus at the University of California, Los Angeles on April 19,2004.

Richard Carrier debated atheist Jennifer Roth online on the morality of abortion.

Richard Carrier has defended naturalism in formal debates with Tom Wanchick and Hassanain Rajabali.

Richard Carrier has debated David Marshall on the general credibility of the New Testament.

In 2006, 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.

Richard Carrier appears in Roger Nygard's 2009 documentary The Nature of Existence, in which persons of different religious and secular philosophies are interviewed about the meaning of life.

Richard Carrier wrote to Flew, and discussed the philosopher's supposed conversion on The Secular Web.

In Richard Carrier's analysis he came up with an incorrect theory that There Is a God was authored primarily by Varghese, and misrepresented Flew's opinion regarding religion.

In collaboration with Reinhold Mittschang, Richard Carrier challenged several quotations attributed to Adolf Hitler, which were found in a collection of monologues known as Hitler's Table Talk in which he scorns Christianity.

Richard Carrier's paper argues that the French and English translations are "entirely untrustworthy", and suggests that translator Francois Genoud doctored portions of the text to enhance Hitler's views.

Richard Carrier put forward a new translation of twelve quotations, based on the German editions of Henry Picker and Werner Jochmann, as well as a fragment of the Bormann-Vermerke preserved at the Library of Congress, challenging some of the quotations frequently used to demonstrate Hitler's contempt for Christianity.

In "The Spiritual Body of Christ and the Legend of the Empty Tomb", Richard Carrier argues that the earliest Christians probably believed that Jesus received a new spiritual body in the resurrection, and that stories of his original body disappearing from his tomb were later embellishments.

Richard Carrier argues that science in the Roman world was very advanced and progressive and would have reached a scientific revolution in a few more centuries had Christians not stepped in.

In Cristian Tolsa's review of the book, he notes that Richard Carrier's view of science as essentially unaltered since Aristotle is a reductionist view that is inaccurate of the time period and that the book has "serious anachronisms".

Richard Carrier observes that Carrier fails to demonstrate the supposed stagnation of science from the Roman period to the modern period, but mainly assumes such is the case and relies on focusing on the advances made by pagans as enough to show that science really would have continued to grow indefinitely.

Richard Carrier is a prominent advocate of the theory that Jesus did not exist, which he has argued in a number of his works.

Since then, Richard Carrier has become a vocal advocate of the theory that Jesus was not a historical person.

In Not the Impossible Faith: Why Christianity Didn't Need a Miracle to Succeed, Richard Carrier writes on the social and intellectual context of the rise and early development of Christianity.

In Proving History: Bayes's Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus, Richard Carrier describes the application of Bayes' theorem to historical inquiry in general, and the historicity of Jesus in particular.

In On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt, Richard Carrier continues to develop his Bayesian analysis of the historicity of Jesus.

Furthermore, Richard Carrier posits originally Jesus was the name of a celestial or "angelic extraterrestrial" being who was subordinate to God who came from a "cosmic sperm bank", was tortured and crucified by Satan and his demons, buried in a tomb above the clouds, and resurrected - all in outer space.

Apart from the hero archetype pattern, Richard Carrier contends that nothing else in the Gospels is reliable evidence for or against the historicity of Jesus.

In 2002, Richard Carrier reviewed the work of Earl Doherty, who posited that Jesus was originally a mythological being who subsequently came to be regarded as a historical person.

Richard Carrier concluded that Doherty's theory was plausible, although at the time he had not yet concluded that this hypothesis was more probable than the historical Jesus.

Richard Carrier criticized some of Doherty's points, which he considered untenable, although he regarded the basic concept as coherent and consistent with the evidence.

Over time, Richard Carrier's views shifted to the point that he accepted Doherty's premise as the most likely explanation of Jesus.

Richard Carrier asserts that the idea of a pre-Christian celestial being named "Jesus" is known from the writings of Philo of Alexandria on the Book of Zechariah.

New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman writes that Richard Carrier is one of only two scholars with relevant graduate credentials who argues against the historicity of Jesus.

Richard Carrier is observed to constantly misinterpret and stretch sources and he uses extensively fringe ideas like those of Dennis MacDonald on Homeric epics paralleling some of the Gospels, while downplaying the fact that MacDonald is still a historicist, not a mythicist.

Gullotta observes that Richard Carrier relies on outdated and historically useless methods like Otto Rank and Lord Raglan's hero myth archetype events lists, which have been criticized and "have been almost universally rejected by scholars of folklore and mythology", in which Richard Carrier alters the quantity and wording of these lists arbitrarily to his favor.

Christopher Hansen observed that Richard Carrier believes Jews already believed in a preexisting a supernatural son of God named Jesus based Philo's interpretation Zech.

Furthermore, classicist Margaret Williams observes that Richard Carrier's thesis is outdated, not supported on textual grounds, nor is there any evidence of this non-Christian group existing and is thus dismissed by classical scholars.

Richard Carrier noted that in a recent assessment by latinists on the Tacitus passage, they unanimously deemed the passage authentic and noted that no serious Tacitean scholar believes it to be an interpolation.

Marko Marina, an ancient historian, states that Richard Carrier's work is guided by his ideological agenda, not by serious historical work, and criticizes his views of Paul's letters, his assumptions of how Jesus tradition developed, lack of positive evidences from primary sources and notes that his mythicist views have not won any supporters from critical scholars in the past 10 years.