I just published the English edition of my debate with Fernando Bermejo-Rubio and Franco Tommasi, Jesus: Militant or Nonexistent? Two Views Compared (Philosophy Press, 2025), including a chapter by Robert Price, and originally published in Italian as Gesù resistente Gesù inesistente: Due visioni a confronto (Manni, 2022). There we composed a written debate, meeting assigned word-counts, on the question of Jesus’s historicity, with them agreeing it is more likely he didn’t exist than that he was the Jesus of any other reconstruction than theirs–which was of Jesus as an armed resistor to Rome (such as someone who really did order his men to procure swords, and whose storming of the temple was a military op of some kind).
The debate recorded in this book is unusual as we both take positions widely scoffed at, whose proponents rarely talk to each other. So you can see neither of us is chained to any institutional inertias or confessional assumptions, but are both attacking the mainstream consensus as too poorly argued to credit. Issues of facts and methodology come up a lot, and informedly. Every chapter is a useful read on the subject of the historical study of Jesus and early Christianity. And though I do not vouch for everything Price claims in his chapter, he does cite sources you can explore. So it maintains utility. And though I obviously strongly argue against Bermejo-Rubio and Tommasi in this volume, I actually do agree their theory is plausible—in fact, one variant of it has long been my number two theory of the historical Jesus, number one being of course that he didn’t exist at all (I’ll say more about all that in a blog tomorrow where I cover some elements of this book that I originally lacked word count to).
The formal description of the book (composed mostly by Tommasi with some of my edits and additions) is:
Was Jesus a revelatory being, whom the Gospels transposed into a mythic history … or a promoter of armed resistance against Rome, whom the Gospels whitewashed into a pacifist? With the weakening of the hegemony of confessional alignments in biblical studies, other points of view on the “historical Jesus” that have long had their supporters in the past have gradually gained more space and visibility. This includes mythicism, a radically agnostic position on the historical existence of Jesus, and another that finds Jesus to have been somehow involved in the armed resistance of the Jews against the Romans, another view that cannot be reconciled with any theological understanding of Jesus today.
This book presents a well-composed debate between these two visions regarding the historicity of Jesus: Robert Price (Ph.D., New Testament; Ph.D. Systematic Theology) and Richard Carrier (Ph.D., Ancient History) defend the hypothesis of mythicism; and Fernando Bermejo-Rubio (Ph.D., History of Religion, and Professor of Ancient History at UNED) and Franco Tommasi (Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Salento and a published author on Jesus) compare that with the “militant Jesus” hypothesis, arguing the latter is more plausible than any other theory of a historical Jesus.
The English edition is updated. We all added newly available references and minor tweaks not in the Italian. As this is a multi-author work I will not be producing an audio version. But it is available in print and kindle. Get yours today!
Meanwhile, for those wondering, I have several more books in the pipe this year. The closest to be published is my sequel to On the Historicity of Jesus. Somewhat farther out is my sequel to Sense and Goodness without God. And somewhere in between is a brief new volume on…well, that will be a surprise. I am also planning an anthology of my published philosophy papers, which will make a pair with Hitler Homer Bible Christ (which is an anthology of my published history papers). So stay tuned!
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There is now an interesting review of Jesus: Militant or Nonexistent by Nicholas Covington (of Hume’s Apprentice) that illustrates why even when wrong it remains the only serious debate of the subject in print and well worth reading and engaging with.
Very excited about these upcoming works! Look forward to reading this volume too.
Congratulations on your new book !!! Hope your writings survive any Major Nuclear War (and MAGA), remembering the Great Library’s fate. There is a seed bank in Scandinavia. Maybe a time-proof library would also be a good idea. Or even a survival community of all races that no one would want to bomb.
Purchased. Peep that babyface pic on your Amazon page. 🙂
Oh wow! That’s a good point. I never look at that so I didn’t notice I’ve aged quite a bit since!
Sorry if it disappoints, but I will update it. 🙂
Where will the sequel to OHJ be published? Have you officially gotten a publisher for it?
Yes. Stay tuned for that.
I had assumed it would be Sheffield, the same as OHJ. Did that change? Got your new book yesterday. Will read this weekend.
It has. I have submitted a different book to Sheffield (more on that to come). The sequel will be published elsewhere (to be announced in the next few months).
I’m puzzled by “sequel” I do recall you considering doing a 2nd Edition of OHJ (same topic but with corrections and updates to address more recent evidence/counter-evidence+arguments) a while back, but I think I missed where that discussion ended up.
(to me, “sequel” suggests more of a continuation, i.e., expanding the topic in some direction, say if you were to do more on 2nd century church history, Marcion et al, or the lost years (65-110), or more about the various ancilliary figures (Paul, Peter, …), except I didn’t think you were that interested in going those particular directions, so I’m at something of a loss…)
Correct. The revised edition of OHJ launched in 2023. So it’s already out. I then announced my plan to either do a whole new version or a sequel of some kind. I settled on the latter.
And by “sequel” I mean to the study, not to the chronology. As in, I will discuss what has happened in the academic literature in the last ten years; respond to critics, discuss new studies supporting the conclusions in OHJ, and tackle new topics I only briefed in OHJ (e.g. the new book has a whole chapter on Docetism as evidence for Mythicism, expanding a couple of sentences in OHJ into a detailed discussion of the most recent scholarship that is trending my way now).
Bom dia. Richard Carrier, você enviou o novo livro sobre a historicidade de Jesus para uma revisão esse ano ? Estou entusiasmado para comprar o novo volume.
Yes. It should be out this year. Details to come.
I’m excited for you and I am looking forward to devouring your new releases! Well done Richard.
Todd G
I’ve been keen to hear more from you.
Tbh I prefer your works on things that don’t specifically revolve around the historicity of Jesus as I think your philosophical positions are much more enlightening.
Either way, I will be purchasing this book in support of your ongoing work.
I, too, prefer my philosophical work. But I get hired to do the Jesus stuff far more. And I have to make a living. Which in turn has made me one of the world’s leading experts on that, which carries a moral obligation to continue informing and advising on it; but it would be nice if I got more paid work in philosophy.
Nevertheless, two of my forthcoming books will be in philosophy (I am building an anthology of my published philosophy to match my anthology of published history, and a sequel updating Sense and Goodness without God).
So stay tuned!
Ok, just got the kindle version. Will read this up before moving on to the post about the debate. Looking forward to the other books in the pipeline!
Have you read “The Chosen People” by John M. Allegro? It traces the militant aspect from the return to Jerusalem from Babylon, through the Macabbees/Hasmoneans, up to the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus. At the end it considers a blend of Essene, Zealot, Sicarii, the latter two so high on amanita muscaria and unshakeable faith in the Jews’ Last Days God-assisted supremacy to fear the Romans, who all the sane Jews knew were too strong for them. He looks in to how the mixture of defeated Essenes and militant guys after 64 may have devolved into Christianity, with the crucifixion story modeled on the execution, 100 years before it, of the Qumran Teacher of Righteousness, possibly by Alexander Jannaeus. You might have to go to “The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth” to get all the details, since “The Chosen People” is centrally about the Jews, not Jesus. Its theme is how the bad doctrinal launch given them by the rich Jews who stayed behind in Babylon led inevitably to the Holocaust.
I haven’t. But Allegro was generally a crank. And this sounds like the standard “pretend a pile of speculations are facts” methodology that my Fisk explains is a bad method rife throughout biblical studies as a field. And even if this is solid work, it’s only relevant if the militant hypothesis has already been proved likely by the direct evidence available. So it would just add to the bibliography that Bermejo-Rubio and Tommasi provide in this volume.
Have you read any of his books?
I tried. But they are too awful and outdated to endure. I’ve spent more time reading ensuing debates (various critics and his responses) throughout the literature.
He can’t help being outdated. He died. What do you find awful? I am interested in the sources of the beliefs which you say Peter’s group passed to Paul (JFOS), hence my curiosity about Qumran and Allegro’s translations of the Scrolls.
Allegro does not employ reliable modes of argument, and thus comes up with strange conclusions not logically supported by the evidence he presents. He is thus, pervasively, just unreliable. The most infamous example is his use of late medieval art to “prove” the use of mushrooms in Pauline congregations.
Whereas that his work is obsolete is not an indictment of him, but his work. It does no good to talk about “did he have a good argument half a century ago even though it’s obsolete now?” Since “it’s obsolete now” already rules out any relevance of his work now.
That does not mean everything he said is wrong. It just means anything he said is only usable if you can independently confirm it in more recent work. But if you can do that, you don’t need his work.