Cover of Richard Carrier's book On the Historicity of Jesus. Medieval icon image of Jesus holding a codex, on a plain brown background, title above in white text, author below in white text.

Upon request I am creating an open thread here for any continued scholarly Q&A on my book On the Historicity of Jesus (published under peer review by Sheffield-Phoenix) and its thesis—that at best there is only (but still possibly as much as) a 1 in 3 chance Jesus actually existed, rather than began as a revelatory being only known from visions and scripture. Any serious question about that posed here I will publish and answer.

Overall, I expect this to operate similarly to an AMA (“Ask Me Anything”) on a Reddit like AcademicBiblical. Only it will have no expiry. I’ll keep it open indefinitely.

Please do not post comments here unless you have both read On the Historicity of Jesus and have it on hand to refer to (I will be citing page numbers in it, for example). It is not productive to ask questions already answered or dealt with in the book. Please attempt to ask questions about how I already treat the question that interests you in the book; or to ask questions you confirmed aren’t addressed there.

My other book pertaining, Proving History: Bayes’s Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus (published under peer review by Prometheus and now available through Rowman & Littlefield), you might also want to consult or have on hand. Because if questions of methodology come up, for example, I will likely be citing it.

Also please be aware of my continuing catalog of responses to scholarly critiques and of my existing corrections list for OHJ. There are also some few minor things I would more substantively correct in a future edition if ever I produce one, and if those don’t come up in Q&A here already, I may add them myself as they occur to me.

Note: This thread often gets bombed with troll-posting that doesn’t meet the comment requirements. And sometimes it gets overwhelmed with legitimate queries but too many to get through in a timely fashion, which then get buried amidst the trollery. All this results in unusually long delays in my getting through the queue. Because of all this, please expect thirty to sixty days as a typical timeline before posted comments will be vetted for appropriateness and be published and answered.

Reminder: Only questions about the content of my books addressing the historicity of Jesus are allowed here. Questions about anything other than that will be deleted. So will comments that don’t ask a question at all.

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