The Review of Biblical Literature recently published a brief “review” of Jesus from Outer Space by William Chavez (RBL 03/2024). It is quite useless as a review, because it merely complains about aesthetics, ignores the academic study the book summarizes, and (as usual) makes false claims about it. You won’t learn from this review what JFOS is for, or even why Chavez is reviewing that and not On the Historicity of Jesus, the actual academic study. This was indeed the very reason I avoided writing a popmarket book on the subject for so long, despite countless public requests for one: I knew academics would dishonestly straw-man the case by then ignoring the real study and “complaining” about all the things not in the popmarket version.

Aesthetics Over Substance

This is exactly what Chavez dishonestly does when he complains that “Carrier provides no footnotes and prioritizes his efforts on popular presentation.” He fails to mention that the footnotes he wants are in the real study he should be reviewing, which did not “prioritize effort on popular presentation.” He instead pretends to his readers that I skipped all that and that this is therefore censurable. This is particularly dishonest because I specifically addressed this concern in JFOS itself. Yet Chavez entirely ignores this sentence on page 9 (despite actually citing that page for an unrelated point):

The complete, sober, academic case … with all the requisite evidence, cited scholarship, footnotes, and apparatus, you will find in the near seven-hundred pages of On the Historicity of Jesus. Here in your hands is a much briefer, more colloquial, but still informative summary of that more serious academic monograph, a concordance to which you’ll find at the end of this book.

In other words, JFOS is not an academic monograph. It is a popular market summary of one, and is deliberately written in a popular (not an academic) style. It did not “omit” footnotes at all: it included a concordance to the academic study and thereby all its footnotes. Once someone realizes this (which they won’t if they just read his review), they will be perplexed at what Chavez is complaining about. Is he really just slagging off all popular market books in existence, by insisting that every one have footnotes and a dry style? Or is he dishonestly misrepresenting a popmarket summary as an academic monograph? Because he claims to “find it productive to engage ‘fringe’ (i.e., nonconsensus) scholarly interpretations of data,” but by this very review explicitly avoids doing that—confronting instead only a colloquial brief and not the actual academic study. That’s avoidance, not engagement.

This oddity illustrates how Chavez’s entire review is really just a bunch of aesthetic rather than academic complaints (he just “wants” pop market books to have footnotes and not concordances to the academic studies that have the footnotes). Often these aesthetic complaints aren’t even factual or logical. For example, he complains that “Carrier proposes himself, in the third-person, as the most prominent skeptic.” The entire book is written in the first person. There is not a single sentence in the main text of the book anywhere that refers to me in the third person. Notice the sentence I quoted above (which he has to be referring to): the subject of that sentence is “The…case” against historicity, not “Richard Carrier.” In that same paragraph, every reference to myself is in the first person (“I’ve also written…in my other peer-reviewed book,” Proving History; “I also reproduced all my peer-reviewed research” in Hitler Homer Bible Christ; “I continue to write on this subject and respond to critics” on my website; here “I have pared down what needs to be said”; “I survey some”; “I survey the overall case”; “I show why”). So Chavez isn’t even telling the truth about the aesthetics of the book.

I also never “propose myself as the most prominent skeptic.” Nowhere on the page he cites. That happens to be true. No one has published as much on the topic as I have, and my work remains seminal to the debate. But that’s never relevant to anything I argue in JFOS so it’s never a point I bring up there. Yet by this snide remark Chavez even implies that my reference to “many scholars” doubting historicity or agreeing doubt is sensible (on page 7) is never backed by any examples. You will not learn from him that I list ten examples (on page 26), including Raphael Lataster’s entire peer reviewed study corroborating mine, another fact Chavez will never mention—instead falsely portraying me as a lone wolf. Of course there are many more. But this illustrates the dishonest mode of the entire review, replacing reliable factual descriptions with biased spin, FOX News style, sowing false beliefs about what I wrote. Chavez complains that he had “hoped Carrier’s latest book would demonstrate” at least the academic “utility” of a student paper, but that only makes honest sense as a complaint if there wasn’t a book meeting that condition—but there is: On the Historicity of Jesus. He is thus literally behaving as if the actual academic study being summarized does not exist.

As another example of this dishonest mode of discourse, Chavez sneers at my frequent mention of what has and hasn’t been “peer reviewed,” essentially implying that that has no value and there is no reason to mention it. This is a standard disingenuous tactic of historicists now, a fallacy of moving the goal posts: for years they complained that Jesus mythicism was just a product of crank amateurs and had never (indeed, could never) pass peer-review; so we published studies of the subject under peer review (and that includes myself and Lataster); but then they pulled a complete 180 and now complain that peer review doesn’t matter and we should stop mentioning it—even though they are the ones who compelled us to mention it, by complaining that we didn’t have it.

Peer review does matter, of course. That’s why they complained before that mythicism wasn’t peer reviewed. They used that as an excuse to dismiss it; but the only validity of that excuse was that peer review serves the purpose of ensuring a study meets the standards of the field and is thus worth the bother of considering, and not dismissing out of hand. All we are doing now is pointing out that that complaint has been met: they have no excuse to ignore our studies now; and they can no longer straw-man mythicism by falsely equating the publications of cranks and amateurs with what are now real academic studies. Chavez ignores those anyway. Hence he reviews only a popmarket summary, and neither of the actual academic studies now published on this point. He is continuing the disingenuous tactic. Yet I explicitly warned against this in JFOS: “the historical community needs to set aside the previous claims of cranks and amateurs pushing this thesis, and look at the more careful, well-vetted, peer-reviewed arguments now published” (pp. 26–27), and “all the requisite evidence, cited scholarship, [and] footnotes” are in those studies (p. 9). Chavez refused to take the memo. Ask yourself why.

Chavez at least admits it “is fair to challenge the assumption of Jesus’s historical existence.” The truth is, after all, “heavily obscured through hagiography,” and Chavez “cannot dispute” that “any conclusion that supports” the historicity Jesus, “for instance, as an ‘Apocalyptic Prophet, or Cynic Sage’,” is only “achieved by ‘circular reasoning’, namely, an overdependence on Mark’s Gospel.” Which sounds pretty close to simply agreeing with me. A historical Jesus is only plausible, not established. Hence he admits:

Carrier correctly notes that “most scholars already conclude [Jesus] was not called Christ … until after his death” (14); that the authors of the canonical gospels, never identified in text, are traditional personages used “for convenience” (19); that Mark’s Gospel, though earliest, is edited to feature “five different endings” (77); and that “John is the most unreliable, distrusted, and fabricated Gospel in the canon” (21). Such historical skepticism is heightened by the story’s use of literary characters, with clear thematic and/or political associations such as Judas Iscariot, Barabbas, Nicodemus, Lazarus, and those later named as Dysmas, Claudia Procula, and Longinus.

He likewise concurs Moses and the Patriarchs are mythical persons, so precedents exist. But then Chavez says “I am reluctant to recommend this text in its entirety for anyone teaching Jesus courses for undergraduates.” This is a strange segue away. Who suggested he should use a popmarket book for that and not the actual academic book? The only appropriate college textbook for this is either my On the Historicity of Jesus or Lataster’s Questioning the Historicity of Jesus. This is like complaining that Bart Ehrman’s Forged is too colloquial and lacks footnotes and therefore should not be used as a textbook—and forgetting to mention that its academic version, Forgery and Counterforgery, should be.

Chavez then goes on to complain that JFOS employs “stylized prose” and a “hypermasculine tone” (a rather gender-essentialist, and thus sexist, remark, implying women cannot be assertive, combative, or biting) and that its “voice” and manner of presentation is “best fit for a subculture” interested in the subject rather than scholars. Since these things are literally the purpose of JFOS, those aren’t really complaints about it, but about the absence of a more suitable text for scholars—except, there is no such absence: the more suitable text for scholars exists. In fact, two now, given Lataster’s publication in 2019, occasioning my finally relenting and producing a popmarket summary.

The most laughable complaint Chavez has is that JFOS contains “refutations of previous critics” (perish the thought), and in the same breath he denigrates our observations of irrational and dishonest dismissal (like Chavez’s own review even exemplifies) as simply airing “academic grievances,” like a bully punching you in the face until you defend yourself and then complaining how violent you are. And the beauty of all ironies: after complaining that we mention our studies were peer reviewed, he compares JFOS to “a book by John G. Jackson that I read as a teenager, Christianity before Christ,” the work of a crank amateur, the very thing our work is nothing like and specifically avoided repeating the errors of, so that it would pass peer review and thus obtain academic credibility. He even implies that I, like Jackson, compared Jesus to Mithras (Mithras is never mentioned in JFOS). Chavez thus implies an equivalence of academic merit, without giving any examples of any such equivalence. Which is yet another disingenuous rhetorical tactic: implying our academic studies are “just like” the crank amateur stuff they are nothing like, in an evident and dishonest effort to dissuade scholars from consulting it.

Nevertheless, Chavez claims he “likely will assign portions of Carrier’s book and blog in my gospels course,” but does not explain why he doesn’t, instead, assign portions of any of the actual academic studies (my Proving History or On the Historicity of Jesus or Lataster’s Questioning the Historicity of Jesus). Strangest of all: earlier he said he can’t recommend doing this. But now he says he will do it anyway. And without any clear reason. He can’t mean that he will use JFOS instead of OHJ or QHJ because it is briefer and an easier read; he just spent the whole review complaining about that as an unallowable defect. So why is he going to have students read it, and not the real studies? One can only speculate as to his intentions, though they are not likely to be honorable; I smell an argument by straw man, another device used to discourage students from reading the real thing, by misrepresenting the qualities of the colloquial summary as typical of even the original study it summarizes.

Factual Errors

Chavez does also make false statements about the facts and the field of Jesus studies. First, he complains that I rely “most problematically” on “a high Christology … in contradistinction to recent academic waves in search of a human Jesus.” In actual fact, recent academic waves have been in support of high Christology, the exact opposite of what Chavez claims here (though this I think any informed reader might immediately detect on their own, as anyone up on the literature will know his claim is false). He appears to be methodologically confusing Christian belief with historical reality. That the first Christians believed immediately in a high christology is not “in contradistinction” to Jesus having been an ordinary historical man. Those two quests are not related. The latter is a quest to determine who Jesus really was, rather than what his first worshipers believed him to be. That they believed him to be a space alien is beyond dispute. Whether there was an ordinary guy that they believed this of is a separate question. And I am explicit about this in the first chapter: “we all agree the Christians originally believed Jesus was from outer space” (p. 9), so the only dispute is whether they thought this of a real man or only an imagined one (p. 10; cf. pp. 14–16).

Or as I put it (on p. 31):

[Bart] Ehrman thinks the first Christians taught these things of a historical man, that they believed he had descended from outer space all the way to Earth to preach his ministry in Galilee and Jerusalem, and then reascended into outer space to communicate by revelation from there. But what if Jesus was originally thought to have resided only in outer space? To never have visited Earth at all? That crucial step of “being on Earth” is absent from the letters of Paul. So had Paul ever heard of the preacher from Galilee? Or was that a later fiction?

In other words, there is no longer any academic dispute about high Christology. We all agree now that Christians believed Jesus came from outer space in some sense (and returned thence). The dispute is over whether they believed this of someone they only imagined to exist, or actually met. And that cannot be answered by appeals to high Christology. It’s equally compatible with both scenarios.

Chavez then claims that it is “equally problematic” that “Carrier seems to overstate the development of Satan’s Luciferian mythology,” because “Lucifer’s fall is not fully actualized until Tertullian, Origen, and later theologians. Satan is not understood to be ‘hurled to the earth, and his angels with him’ until Rev 12:9.” The meaning of Revelation 12:7–13 is still debated. Given its allegorical mode, scholars are divided whether it refers to a past or future fall; and the dragon’s fall all the way to earth suggests an even farther fall than previous traditions that had Satan fall only as far as the air, as reflected in the Ascension of Isaiah. Because the legend of the fall of Satan and his angels long predates Revelation. It was already understood by Christians to be a past-tense event (Luke 10:18), and the reason Satan now plagues the air and is the cause of death and sin. This is explicitly related in the pre-Christian Jewish text of the Life of Adam and Eve, to which Paul even alludes (2 Corinthians 12:2–4; cf. Life 12.1 and 13.2–14.3, in the original Greek text), and the pre-Christian Jewish text of 1 Enoch, which Christians originally built their religion on. Likewise, 2 Enoch, also a first century Jewish text whether pre-Christian or not, explicitly equated the central villain with Satan (there are also pre-Christian allusions to these myths in the Book of Giants and Jubilees). The fall of Satan (by any of his names) was therefore unmistakably a pre-Christian and entirely Jewish development, not some later Christian innovation.

Chavez would not have made this mistake if he had read the actual academic study he was supposed to. For I cover this in Historicity (p. 184; which is duly noted in the concordance of JFOS), where I thoroughly contextualize the Jewish background to this (something Chavez claims I didn’t do), and I cite those sources, and scholarship confirming it as well, such as Michael Stone, “The Fall of Satan and Adam’s Penance: Three Notes on the ‘Books of Adam and Eve’,” Journal of Theological Studies 44 (1993). There are actually quite a lot of studies on pre-Christian demonology now, verifying my point: Thomas Farrar, “The Intimate and Ultimate Adversary: Satanology in Early Second-Century Christian Literature,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 24 (2018); Travis Proctor, Demonic Bodies and the Dark Ecologies of Early Christian Culture (Oxford University Press, 2022); Hector Patmore and Josef Lössl (eds.), Demons in Early Judaism and Christianity: Characters and Characteristics (Brill, 2022); Robert Moses, Practices of Power: Revisiting the Principalities and Powers in the Pauline Letters (Fortress, 2014); Annette Yoshiko Reed (Author)Reed, Fallen Angels and the History of Judaism and Christianity: The Reception of Enochic Literature (Cambridge University, 2005).

Conclusion

William Chavez never specifies a single factual error in Jesus from Outer Space. The only two times that he even attempts to, he ends up being the one making factual errors. Chavez also never specifies a single fallacy of argument in Jesus from Outer Space. He alludes to some disingenuously, but always by misrepresenting the reality (of what is in that book or the study it merely briefs or various contextual facts, like what a popmarket book is for, or why we emphasize peer review and how our studies differ from previous amateur work).

Chavez’s only substantive complaints are purely aesthetic—and still entirely off target, because he incorrectly applies the standards of an academic monograph to a colloquial popmarket book. By the actual standards of colloquial popmarket books, none of his complaints are even pertinent, and never relate to any substantial point. Whereas the academic study it summarizes (and that Chavez is completely avoiding any engagement with) does not commit any of those follies, and so they do not port over to it. This renders Chavez’s review entirely useless to any reader who wants to know what is really in Jesus from Outer Space, what it is actually doing as a book, or anything at all about any actual academic monographs on the historicity of Jesus, such as would actually be used as a textbook in a college course by any serious professor.

That historicists keep doing this is definitive proof now that there is no sound case for the historicity of Jesus. Because you don’t have to lie about things you can actually refute. You don’t have to employ rhetorical tricks designed to curry emotional hostility to a thesis, like ignoring an academic study and complaining that a popmarket summary of it isn’t academic, or ignoring why the distinction between what is and what is not peer-reviewed centrally matters to this subject, and the history of previous historicist rhetoric responsible for that. You don’t need tricks and lies to defend the truth; only falsehood.