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!