Reviews

Jesus from Outer Space: What the Earliest Christians Really Believed about Christ by Richard Carrier

kahawa's review against another edition

4.0

A pretty good intro to the strongest of the mythicist theories. Most, but not all, of this was covered in OHJ in depth, but there were some new angles in here that I hadn't heard before.

Carrier can be a difficult read for some people. Occasionally he goes too far with saying that someone would never do a particular thing - I think we often underestimate people and the weird things they do, and history is pretty weird. But his logic, if followed carefully and technically, is almost always tight.

psteve's review against another edition

4.0

This unfortunately titled book is not like the superb Philip Jose Farmer novel from some years ago, Jesus On Mars; instead it's an examination of what early Christians, those in the New Testament and around, thought what or who Jesus was. He argues that much of the language around Jesus shows that early Christians actually thought he descended from space, and has plenty of proof of it. It doesn't really do a great job of talking about what early Christians, or others, may have thought of him. I was hoping for more of a wide-ranging survey, but is instead of a very good (to me) discussion of the historicity of Jesus -- did he really exist? Carrier makes the case that all history about Jesus derives from the book of Mark, and even Paul's early epistles don't discuss a historical Jesus, but a myth. I was, am, pretty persuaded, but I think a lot of that is my own bias. I'm also reading Ehrmann's book about whether Jesus was real or not, and at least in the first half, find it less well argued than Carrier. It seems to me that the evidence for a historical Jesus is just very thin.