Paul Clark

by Paul Clark. Posted October 29 2022

Jesus from Outer Space is a shorter and updated version of his 2014 book On the Historicity of Jesus, which I have not read. It is well-written and frequently entertaining. His argument is coherent and has depth. Were it the only book I had ever read on the subject, I have no doubt that I would have found it convincing. But it isn’t. And I didn’t.

Mythicism certainly has its detractors. For example the Yale University Open Course in New Testament Studies states that no reputable scholar today makes such an argument.[i] Carrier counters with a list of prominent mythicists and reputable scholars who either sympathise with parts of his thesis or suggest that academics should deal with his arguments instead of simply dismissing him as a crank.

Carrier’s thesis is that Christianity emerged as a result of syncretism, the mixing of religions. It is a Jewish take on the worship of dying-and-rising gods, which was commonplace among the mystery cults of the Greco-Roman world. He sees Peter, not Jesus, as the founder of Christianity, which was based on his “inner visions” of a celestial being called Jesus.

It was only later that a small group within the Church “historicised” Jesus, claiming that he had walked the earth as a flesh-and-blood person. With their Gospel texts, these “historicists” created a new orthodoxy and suppressed the idea of Jesus as a purely celestial being.

Carrier makes great play of the fact that we have no contemporary or eyewitness accounts of Jesus: “No contemporary of Jesus ever mentioned him. That means none. No historian. No writer of any kind. No inscriptions. No documents. No letters.”

He says that effectively we have just two sources to work with: Paul’s epistles and what we know about dying-and-rising gods. All other sources are useless in terms of establishing Jesus’s historicity. Mark’s Gospel contains nothing of value in terms of biography, and Matthew, Luke and John are simply re-writes of Mark.[ii] The non-Christian sources often cited as evidence of Jesus (for example the “Testimonium Flavianum”) prove absolutely nothing about the historicity of Jesus.

I have a number of minor gripes with Carrier’s book and seven big problems with his thesis. I will start by dealing with one of the minor gripes, after which I will concentrate on the serious problems.

Minor gripe to get off my chest – I don’t like his use of the terms like “outer space” and “space alien”. I think they are anachronistic and it would be better to speak of “the heavens” and “celestial beings”. But this is only a matter of style and personal preference.

In terms of content, these are my seven problems with Carrier’s thesis:

1. The lack of contemporary sources proves nothing.
2. Dying-and-rising gods are crucial to Carrier’s argument, but the idea that they were a common motif in the Greco-Roman world is contested.
3. Most scholars[iii] believe that Carrier misinterprets Paul’s epistles.
4. Carrier’s book does not so much as mention the word christology (differing Christian views how Jesus could be both human and divine), but no discussion of early Church doctrine is complete without the christological disputes that dominated it in the centuries between the crucifixion and the Council of Nicea.
5. The majority of scholars do not believe that Mark is useless as a source about the historical Jesus.
6. The consensus among scholars is that Matthew and Luke are not simply a rehash of Mark (though both do copy from him) and that John’s Gospel represents a quite different tradition.
7. Carrier’s claim that the Testimonium Flavianum is a complete forgery is a minority view in academia.

Points 2, 3, and 5 above are crucial to Carrier’s argument. If he is wrong about just one of them, his hypothesis is falsified. I will argue that aspects of point 4 are also crucial.

I will now examine each of the seven issues in turn.

1. The Lack of Contemporary References to Jesus

This means nothing, and Carrier should know better than to make such a big deal of it.

If, as the synoptic Gospels suggest, Jesus was a peasant preacher who conducted most of his mission in the back end of beyond before a disastrous trip to Jerusalem, where the authorities nipped his movement in the bud (or so they thought) by crucifying him, then it is no wonder that we have no contemporary record of him, just as we have no contemporary record of 99.9% of the people who lived in the region at the time.

Carrier has a lengthy chapter in which he compares the documentary evidence for Jesus with the evidence for historical figures such as Socrates, Alexander, Julius Caesar and Pontius Pilate. If you read the chapter carefully, you will note we also have no contemporary records of Spartacus.[iv] But to use this to claim that Spartacus didn’t exist would be preposterous.

2. Dying-and-Rising Gods

Carrier devotes two chapters to dying-and-rising gods, which are crucial to his thesis. The idea of them became influential among scholars after Sir James George Frazer’s 1898 book The Golden Bough.[v] Carrier claims that dying-and-rising gods were central to many mystery cults, which were a prominent feature of religion in the Greco-Roman world. Examples he discusses include the cults of Osiris, Zalmoxis, Inanna of Sumer, Adonis, Dionysis and Baal.

He draws heavily on Swedish scholar Tryggve Mettinger (who rejects Jesus mythicism) and his 2001 book The Riddle of the Resurrection: “Dying and Rising Gods” in the Ancient Near East. However, in his book Did Jesus Exist? Bart Ehrman has suggested that Mettinger’s evidence is ambiguous.[vi] Ehrman goes on to cite two eminent scholars, Jonathan Z Smith and Mark S. Smith (I don’t think they are related!), who argue against the existence of dying-and-rising gods. Jonathan Z. Smith states that the dying-and-rising god is “largely a misnomer based on imaginative reconstructions and exceedingly late or highly ambiguous texts.” He says that almost without exception the gods that returned had never died and those gods that died did not in fact return. Mark S. Smith suggests that the idea of dying-and-rising gods arose because Frazer and others allowed the Christian myth of the Resurrection to colour their analysis of paganism.[vii]

Ehrman says the continuing dispute about dying-and-rising gods in academia exists because the evidence for them is “at best sparse, scattered and ambiguous and not abundant, ubiquitous and clear.” According to him, Mettinger’s views on dying-and-rising gods are now a minority view.[viii]

Carrier does address criticisms of his and Mettinger’s views. As a lay reader, I am not in any position to say who is right. I checked out all the gods Carrier cites on Wikipedia, where it would seem that some of them certainly were dying-and-rising gods. But I know that Wikipedia is most definitely not regarded as a reliable source in academia!

I can only note that among scholars who study the question of dying-and-rising gods (without reference to Jesus mythicism), the majority view seems to be that they were rare or even non-existent. If this majority view is correct, Carrier’s thesis falls. This wouldn’t disprove Jesus mythicism, but it would mean that Carrier’s version of it is incorrect.

3. The Pauline Epistles

The seven authentic epistles of Paul are the oldest Christian documents we have, written in the 50s CE. Carrier repeatedly says that it is “weird” that Paul never speaks about Jesus as a living human being. He admits that his is a minority view and that mainstream scholars claim that Paul said these things of Jesus:

• He was a Jew, born of a woman (Galatians 4:4-5)
• He was descended from David (Romans 1:3)
• He had a brother called James, who Paul met (Galatians 1:19)
• He was killed by the Jews (1 Thessalonians 2:14-15)

However, Carrier claims that whereas English translations of the Bible make it seem as if Paul said these things, careful examination of the original Greek shows that he did not in fact say any of them. To take the example of Jesus’s “brother” James, Carrier argues that here, “brother” is simply a term used to denote a fellow Christian.

As someone with no knowledge of Ancient Greek, I cannot judge who is right. I can merely note that Carrier’s is a minority view among those in a position to judge. And if the majority are right, and Jesus had a brother called James, who Paul met, then this is evidence that Jesus did exist.

If I may add another of my minor gripes, reading Paul’s letters in English translation, Carrier appears to misuse the word “only”. For example, in Romans 16:25-26, Paul only writes about knowing Jesus through revelation and scripture. He doesn’t mention eyewitness accounts. On page 128, Carrier claims that Paul writes that Jesus can “only” be known through revelation and scripture. But that is not the same thing. To only say “X” is not the same as saying “only X”. There are two more places on page 128 where Carrier does the same thing. Perhaps I need to read the passages in the original Greek, but reading them in English, it seems to me that Carrier is at best guilty of getting carried away.

Whether or not Carrier is right to say that Paul says nothing about Jesus’s life and mission as a human being, it is certainly the case that Paul says very little about it. But I would suggest that this isn’t evidence for mythicism. Paul had a vested interest in not stressing Jesus’s life. After all, unlike Peter and James (with whom he had serious disagreements), Paul never met the living Jesus. His authority derived from his vision of the risen Christ on the road to Damascus, so it was only natural for him to stress the risen Christ rather than the earthly Jesus.[ix]

4. Christology

Christology is the study of Jesus, his nature and his works. Here, I am interested in what early Christians thought about Jesus’s nature: the extent to which he was human and the ways in which he was divine. For a discussion of the diversity of views in the early Church, I would recommend Bart Ehrman’s book How Jesus Became God.

Scholars distinguish between low christology (Jesus was a mortal man who became divine) and high christology (Jesus was a pre-existing divine figure who became human). Among the low, there was disagreement about when he became divine. Was it at birth (Matthew and Luke)? Or at his baptism (Mark)? Or was is at the Resurrection (a creed quoted by Paul in Romans 1:3-4)?

There were also differing versions of high christology. Both Carrier and Ehrman agree that Paul believed that Jesus was the pre-existing Angel of the Lord, though they disagree about whether Paul thought Jesus stayed in the heavens or came down to earth as a human. At the highest extreme were the so-called Docetists, who believed that the earthly Jesus only appeared to be human but in fact wasn’t.

This debate wasn’t settled until the Council of Nicea in the year 325 CE, when the kind of high christology expressed in John’s Gospel won out: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The fully human Jesus was an incarnation of God.

In the latter part of his book, Carrier makes oblique reference to christological debates. But for him, there were only really two sides: the original leaders of the Church who believed that Jesus never came down from the heavens and a later “historicist” faction who came to believe in an earthly Jesus.

Carrier says that the earliest Christians believed Jesus was an “angelic extraterrestrial”. Bart Ehrman and the Yale Open Course disagree. They both cite the creed buried in Paul’s letter to the Romans (1:3-4), possibly the earliest Christian text we have, in which Jesus was exalted to divine status at his Resurrection.[x] If this is really what the earliest Christians believed, Carrier’s thesis is falsified.

5. Does Mark’s Gospel Contain Useful Biographical Information?

Carrier writes at length about Mark. I found this section of the book very entertaining as he tears into Mark, not simply because of the dodgy miracle stories that take up so much of it but because he shows that the whole Gospel is structured as myth rather than anything approaching history or biography. He concludes that “We can locate no history about Jesus” in Mark or any other Gospel.

The majority of scholars beg to differ, even those who agree that all the Gospels are constructed as myth rather than history. One technique they use to seek out nuggets of truth is the criterion of embarrassment: if a Gospel contains something that would have been very embarrassing for the early Church, it is highly unlikely that the authors would have made it up. Therefore, it is likely to be in there because it really happened.

On page 54, Carrier dismisses the criterion of embarrassment. He doesn’t fully set out his reasons for doing so but refers the reader to his book Proving History, which, to be fair, I haven’t read.

Atheist blogger Tim O’Neill[xi] cites three things in the Gospels that were highly embarrassing for the early Church and wouldn’t be there if they weren’t historically true.

1. Jesus came from Nazareth (Mark 1:9). This is embarrassing because the Church had latched on to a prediction in Micah 5:2 that the Messiah would emerge from Bethlehem. It doesn’t seem to have worried Mark too much, but when Matthew and Luke wrote their Gospels, they included lengthy and mutually contradictory tales that placed Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem. But why would the authors of the Gospels mention such an obscure Galilean village as Nazareth at all if it wasn’t widely known to be Jesus’s home village?
2. John baptised Jesus. It is inherent in the ritual of baptism that the status of the person doing the baptising is higher than that of the person being baptised. Both Mark and Matthew struggle with this reversal of status, and John can’t actually bring himself to describe the baptism at all. Why would anyone invent such an embarrassing event if it hadn’t in fact taken place?[xii]
3. The most embarrassing event in the Gospels is the crucifixion. The Jewish apocalyptic tradition had the Messiah coming in clouds of glory to sweep away Israel’s enemies and institute God’s rule on earth. He wasn’t supposed to die,[xiii] and much of Mark can be interpreted as an effort to explain away the death of Jesus.[xiv]

But it wasn’t just a matter of his death. Even more embarrassing was the manner of his execution. The Romans regarded crucifixion as a shameful and humiliating punishment, one reserved for the very lowest classes in society. The victim wouldn’t have their modesty preserved by a loincloth but would be crucified naked, and their corpse would hang on the cross for days to be pecked at by carrion-eating birds. Among Jews, there was an added layer of shame due to their belief that anyone hung on a tree was cursed by God (Deuteronomy 21:23).

Christians would never invent such a vile and shameful death for Jesus. They had to include it because it was something that was known to have happened and couldn’t be expunged from the record.

The dominant paradigm among scholars is that the criterion of embarrassment is a useful tool that allows them to extract these three historical truths from Mark’s Gospel. If this paradigm is correct, then mythicism is falsified.

6. Are All the Other Gospels Basically Just a Re-Write of Mark?

This claim appears on page 16. In the case of Matthew and Luke, mainstream scholars would partly agree. However, most believe that Matthew and Luke also had access to a now lost source, which they have called Q, a collection of Jesus’s sayings which appear in Matthew and Luke but not in Mark.

Carrier is sceptical about the Q hypothesis. In his view, Luke copied from Matthew both the Mark and “Q” passages that make up three-quarters of his Gospel. This is a perfectly respectable point of view supported by a minority of scholars in the field.

What is extraordinary is Carrier’s claim that, “John is just a freestyle rewrite of the previous three Gospels.” Every book I have ever read about early Christianity (and I have read quite a lot) has said that John comes from a very different tradition than the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew Mark and Luke).

It is possible that the author of John had access to one or more of the Synoptic Gospels because there are passages where the wording is suspiciously similar.[xv] However, it is also certain that most of John is based on completely different sources. Most of the content of the Synoptic Gospels doesn’t appear in John, and most of the content of John doesn’t appear in the Synoptic Gospels.

Why does any of this matter? Because one of the criteria historians use to check for authenticity is multiple attestation. If something appears in more than one source, it is more likely to be true. Mainstream scholars believe we have at least five religious texts that we can use as sources of information about the historical Jesus: Paul’s epistles, Mark, Q, John and the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas. Carrier whittles this down to just two: Paul’s epistles and Mark (which is pure myth).

If mainstream scholars are correct and we have five rather than two religious sources about the historical Jesus, that doesn’t falsify Carrier’s hypothesis. But it does weaken it.

7. Is the Testimonium Flavianum a Complete Forgery?

Titus Flavius Josephus was a participant in the disastrous Jewish revolt against Roman rule in 66 CE. He eventually defected to the Romans and became our best source of information about Palestine under Roman rule, writing a history of the Jewish War and a wider history (or “Antiquities”) of the Jews. In the Antiquities, written around 93-94 CE, there are two passages, commonly called the Testimonium Flavianum, which refer to Jesus.

Are these passages genuine or are they interpolations, forgeries inserted into the text by later Christian copyists?

The first passage includes pious references to Jesus and states that he was crucified by Pontius Pilate but his “tribe” lives on. Scholars are almost unanimous that the pious parts of this passage are interpolations. Until very recently, the debate has been over whether all of it is an interpolation or whether the rest is genuine. Carrier and a substantial minority of scholars argue that it is all interpolation. A majority believe that parts of the passage are genuine and can be used as evidence that Jesus existed.

However, a recent study by TC Schmidt suggests persuasively that the whole passage is authentic, but it has been served badly by translators. Depending on how they are translated, the supposedly pious parts of the text are in fact neutral or possibly even hostile, referring to Jesus as a sorcerer who led his followers astray.[xvi] If Schmidt is correct, Jesus mythicism is falsified.

The second passage is less controversial. It refers to the execution of James, the brother of “Jesus who was called Messiah” (the same James referred to by Paul). Most scholars believe that this passage is authentic. Carrier and a smaller minority argue that it is not.[xvii] Carrier’s position here s a respectable minority position.

However (minor quibble time), in his discussion of Josephus, Carrier includes what I regard as a very disingenuous passage that could trap the unwary reader: “The historian Josephus…tells the stories of several men claiming to be a Jesus Christ.”

To back this up, he points out (correctly) that Jesus is a version of the name Joshua, the original liberator of Israel, and that Christ comes from the Greek for Messiah. From this, he leaps to the claim that anyone who claims to be the Messiah come to liberate the Jews is marketing themselves as a Jesus Christ.

However, in his brief discussion of these supposed “Jesus Christs”, Josephus doesn’t refer to Joshua at all, and neither does he use the term Messiah. He says two of them claimed to be prophets. He clearly regards a third as little more than a rabble rouser and gives hardly any details of the fourth.

Conclusions

In my discussion of Carrier’s thesis, he appears again and again as very much an outsider, not merely in his mythicism but in his approach to the seven different issues that I have covered.

1. The great majority of scholars regard the lack of contemporary references to Jesus as irrelevant.
2. Most scholars don’t believe that dying-and-rising gods were a common feature of Greco-Roman religion.
3. The majority believe that Paul referred to Jesus as a human being.
4. Carrier ignores the bitter christological disputes that dominated the theology of the early Church, and he ignores evidence that the very earliest Christians followed a low christology.
5. Most scholars believe the criterion of embarrassment can be used to extract some basic biographical details of Jesus from the Gospels.
6. Carrier acknowledges just one Gospel (Mark) that can be considered a source. The majority of scholars believe we can work from at least four separate Gospel sources: Mark, Q, John and Thomas.
7. Most scholars believe that parts of the Testimonium Flavianum are authentic.

Points 2, 3 and 5 are central to Carrier’s argument. If he is wrong about just one of them, his whole thesis is falsified. It is also falsified if the interpretation of Romans 1:3-4 outlined in point 4 is correct. If TC Schmidt is correct about the Testimonium Flavianum, Jesus mythicism as a whole is falsified. If Carrier is wrong about points 1, 4 and 6, his thesis is weakened but not disproved.

I am not arguing from authority. The majority are not always right and a lone voice in the wilderness can be correct. But Carrier’s mythicist thesis depends on him being right and the majority of experts wrong not about one, but about at least three and possibly all seven of these questions.

We are told that we live in an era when people are tired of experts and prefer to believe what they want to believe. I suspect this is why Carrier’s ideas are so popular.

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[i] Dale B Martin, New Testament History and Literature, Yale University Press, 2012, page 180. Please note that all page references are for the kindle edition.

[ii] I follow convention in using Matthew, Mark, Luke and John as shorthand. Non-conservative scholars are unanimous in the view that we don’t know who wrote any of the Gospels.

[iii] By “scholars” I refer to those who take a secular, historical-critical approach to the Bible, not conservative Christian scholars guided by a presupposition that the Bible is true.

[iv] Carrier discusses Spartacus on pages 82-85.

[v] Bart D. Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist? HarperCollins, 2012, page 222.

[vi] Ehrman op cit pages 226-7.

[vii] Ehrman op cit pages 228-9.

[viii] Ehrman op cit page 230.

[ix] This is my theory. I thought of it first. Which is a Pythonesque way of saying I don’t have a source for this argument.

[x] Ehrman, How Jesus Became God, Harper Collins, 2014, page 209; Martin op cit page 263.

[xi] https://historyforatheists.com/2017/05/did-jesus-exist-the-jesus-myth-theory-again/ accessed 27/10/2022.

[xii] Martin op cit page 186.

[xiii] Ehrman 2012 pages 164-6, Martin op cit page 85.

[xiv] Martin op cit page 85-88.

[xv] Goodacre, Mark, Parallel Traditions or Parallel Gospels: John’s Gospel as a Re-Imagining of Mark, https://www.markgoodacre.org/ParallelGospels.pdf (accessed 11/04/2025).

[xvi] Schmidt, TC, Josephus and Jesus: New Evidence for the One Called Christ, Oxford University Press, 2015, page 138. For a summary of Schmidt’s argument, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9L2bE1-pyiU (accessed 05/07/2025).

[xvii] I have based my discussion of the Testimonium (apart from TC Schmidt’s thesis) on Ehrman Did Jesus Exist? pages 58-66.

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