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Context for "Fringe"

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I became interested in this topic with no preconceptions, and decided to investigate which of Carrier's critics were not themselves Christians. Premise being that, obviously, practicing Christians have a total theological bias against the "Christ Myth Theory" (the idea that Jesus of Nazareth was not a real historical figure).

I found exactly three historians (not also advertised as practicing Christians, went to Seminary, were ordained priests, etc), other than Carrier, writing about the Christ Myth at all.

These are:

What this reveals is that the vast majority of academic writers on the subject of the historicity of Jesus are believing Christians, as one might expect given who would be most interested in the topic. However, this is the main source for accusation that Carrier is fringe.

Of the non-overtly-practicing Christian historians, one disagrees with Carrier methods (but calls his conclusion "fair"), another seems to concur, and one is in the middle.

In light of that, I'm calling shenanigans on "Carrier's views have been rejected by academic scholarship, and are considered fringe" unless amended to read "by practicing Christians"

Lasati (talk) 09:42, 14 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]

You obviously haven’t looked into this very thoroughly if you’ve only found three scholars who call Christ myth theory fringe. We have citations in the article itself.—-Ermenrich (talk) 11:38, 14 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I suggest you go to Christ myth theory and either inform yourself or argue it out on the talk page. You won’t convince anyone by focusing on a single scholar when this is an academic consensus on the whole idea.—-Ermenrich (talk) 11:42, 14 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Please see the policy WP:FRINGE. Also Hoffmann, Davies, and Goodcare are not mythicists. The fact that mythicism is widely rejected by even non-Christian scholars means the theory has no traction in scholarship. Easy examples are Bart Ehrman and Maurice Casey who did survey of scholarship on its status. Even they recognize it is fringe. Carrier himself admits his views are fringe when he debated another fringe concept of militant Jesus view. Ramos1990 (talk) 17:14, 14 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I said three scholars who didn't have a Christian background. Yes I looked through all of Carrier's critics which is a very long list, and checked out their Wikipedia pages one by one.
For example:
Maurice Casey intended to be an Anglican Priest.
Bart D. Ehrman was active in the Episcopal Church as an altar server, and studied at Moody Bible Institute
James D. G. Dunn is a member of the Church of Scotland and a Methodist.
Géza Vermes served as a Roman Catholic Priest
John P. Meier went to Seminary
So yes, I think it's obvious that if someone is priest, went to Seminary, is former altar server who studied at Moody Bible Institute, etc; they are necessarily heavily biased on the topic of whether or not Jesus is a historical figure. And in my view the article needs to not obfuscate this reality.
Lasati (talk) 21:37, 14 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for acknowledging there is a long list of critics. Any background of any scholar is not really what decides historicity and no scholar bases it on that. The conclusion among non-Christian scholars is the same. He did exist and the opposite is widely rejected. Ramos1990 (talk) 23:30, 14 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Ramos, looking over WP:FRINGE, are you suggesting that Carrier's assertion that Christ didn't exist rises to the level of pseudoscience and the face on Mars? I would have a hard time with that. Isambard Kingdom (talk) 18:53, 19 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
First sentence of WP:FRINGE: In Wikipedia parlance, the term fringe theory is used in a broad sense to describe an idea that departs significantly from the prevailing views or mainstream views in its particular field. In this sense, the theory is indeed WP:FRINGE - and we have citations that explicitly call it that.--Ermenrich (talk) 19:17, 19 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Also: Bart Ehrman is an atheist. Suggesting that because someone used to be Christian they cannot write about the historicity of Jesus is ridiculous. (As, for that matter, is suggesting that Christians couldn't write objectively about the existence of a man called Jesus - see Liberal Christianity for instance.--Ermenrich (talk) 19:20, 19 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Not sure who you're talking to. Did I say something "ridiculous"? Just checking. Isambard Kingdom (talk) 19:30, 19 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
See Lasati's last reply.--Ermenrich (talk) 19:34, 19 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Isambard, yes scholars such as Bart Ehrman have expressed that mythicism views are indeed like holocaust denialism. Even Robert Price, an important mythicist admits such comparisons are common among experts. Carrier himself admits his views are fringe when he debated another fringe view of a militant Jesus. For scholars to admit this shows the level of acceptance they have for mythicist - virtually none. Carrier’s view is that Jesus was an extraterrestrial who was crucified in outer space. Ramos1990 (talk) 21:08, 19 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Well, I suppose I'd have to read his book, but my understanding (up for correction) is that Carrier argues that early Christians held mystical views tantamount to believing that Jesus was an extraterrestrial of sorts. That's not the same as Carrier himself holding such beliefs. I don't have strong opinions about Jesus existing, or not, just so I'm on the record. Isambard Kingdom (talk) 22:25, 19 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Oh, Ramos… „Mythicism views are INDEED like holocaust denialism”? Everything you say is insinuation. Are you a man of "thoroughgoing eschatology" who hasn’t heard about (or listen to) that "thoroughgoing skepticism" is irrefutable? The first wave of the "Quest" ended for a long time because everyone believed Schweitzer that nothing could be safely inferred from the Gospels about the "real" Jesus, including any evidence for or against the historical existence of him. One of the authors Schweitzer held in highest regard was Bruno Bauer, the first thorough mythicist. With the third wave of the Quest, most non-apologetic "mainstream scholarship" sees even more clearly that the Gospels are largely fabrication, and nobody knows how minimally chronicle. They only differ in the percentages. Ehrman might be around 60% / 40%. The later Jesus Seminarists are around 85% / 15% (but only because they attribute Q and crucifiction to Jesus). No mythicist is 100% / 0%. Carrier says up to 66% / 33%, but at least 99.999% / 0.001%. Mythicism is actually the more radical wing of the scepticism of non-apologetic mainstream scholarship. And the hysterical "fringe"-ing and insinuation surrounding mythicism is characteristically reminiscent of the Inquisition.
About "mainstream scholarship" in New Testament studies, see Richard C. Miller, author of Resurrection and Reception in Early Christianity (Routledge, 2015) saying in an interview (2025, https://youtu.be/hhPbj0VUjLU):
(quote)
Let me give an analogy. You're going to have a heart surgery. Now how much witch doctorism do you want involved in that procedure? None. Right. Now, when I put that forward: you want the kind of rigor [in NT studies] that you would get like, say, at Stanford Medical Center or UCLA: real people doing real scientific work that are not interested in some kind of hocus-pocus idea about health or, you know, the spirits being involved or any of these kinds of things. That's what I'm after. I'm a Carl Sagan kind of person: I want to know, I don't want to believe. I want to know, that's what I'm after.
That's not the discourse that I see, that I saw all the way [in NT studies], even up to the top, even at Yale Divinity School. And I don't mean to criticize those places, I know that they are well-intended people, and I learned a tremendous amount from any number of them all along my journey. But at this point, that discourse is not helpful to me. It's in the way. In fact, it's even offensive. And so anybody trying to answer historical questions when they having the answers before they may even know the questions – that's not a scientific approach. That's some we have to call something else. I don't even know what. That's madness, in my view. And that's really what's going on. And people are entering this discussion already determining what the conclusion needs to be, before they even begin, and then going back and trying to marshal the evidence to get there. To me that that is the Dark Ages. I have no tolerance for that. I love the people but I have no respect for that approach. […]
So when you talk about "mainstream scholarship" you're talking about SBL's big tent. Okay, that means let's invite everyone and have them equally able to give presentations on this and that topic, and it ends up becoming a negotiation, a cultural negotiation, in our time between faith and these historical methods that we're trying to apply to the Bible. The midpoint between that, if you were to create a bell curve of where all the scholars might just distribute on the spectrum between literalism or historical rigor, and more of a faith approach, the midpoint between those two is not the answer. And so I find that oftentimes you go online or you see in articles things like "mainstream scholars say this and that." That doesn't prove a thing. "Mainstream scholars" is midpoint between witch doctorism and actual medical science.
These are people that are in orbit around faith communities living in a world that is still under the spell. Western world is still under the spell of these sacred texts, with students, giving them student reviews based upon their faith. Why are they even taking the class? Because they think it's an easy A, because they were raised in the Christian tradition and so when they show up to the class they judge the teacher based upon how comfortable they were what they got, and so professors are worried about their own student reviews. They're worried about faith-based academic boards. Or how do you publish something like what I've published, to a society that is still very much under the spell of these texts? […]
I had a lot of Classics from various places UCLA, Yale, The Claremont Colleges and and other places, and so I was in those contexts, and I got to hear what the back room discussions were at a lot of these places, and no, they don't want to touch this [NT studies] with a 10-foot pole. They're not interested even the people that I got on my dissertation committee. It was a little bit of a struggle to get them to be part of it, and I thank them because their careers are now tied to my work in some way that they might not have signed on for that they don't want to be part of, being pulled into some apologetic debate with people throwing mud and poop at them, and they're got dignified careers all in their own right and they didn't sign up for that. It definitely spoils and ruins and, I think, utterly destroys the discourse […]
[Faith-based institutions' scholars] are trained to have that dividing line, and so some of their Christianity course that they take basically says: no, nothing to see here [in Greek and Roman studies], move on, this is all Jewish. And so they're trained also to draw that line in the sand and a lot of that line starts to get disrupted as they begin actually doing their real work over time and that's where I find these these interesting and very honest discussions […] Now, that doesn't mean we're all right, but at least we're on the golf course, we're hitting the ball. Now, what's bizarre to me is oftentimes when you go to actual, normal, what we would call "mainstream", New Testament studies, they think they're just on the putting green perfecting their discussion. This group that you're talking about, those that are doing true transdisciplinary work, that's untethered to theology, from a classicist hybridic kind of perspective, we don't even think they're on the golf course. […] You've got a group of people that are doing rigorous work in that space trying to truly contextualize these writings within the world that they grew up, within the world that they found their initial meaning. I don't find that going on at a lot of the Divinity schools and seminaries in this country.
(end quote)
Istenaldja (talk) 10:28, 10 June 2026 (UTC)[reply]
See WP:NOTFORUM. Miller has collaborated with mythicists so it not surprising… Ramos1990 (talk) 13:50, 10 June 2026 (UTC)[reply]
“Maurice Casey intended to be an Anglican priest”
”Bart Ehrman was an alter server”
Is that your basis of what constitutes a Christian? That’s a very weak argument. You do realize that’s like saying Carrier himself is a Christian because he used to be a Methodist.
There is zero evidence to your claim that Casey and Ehrman are Christian scholars. The two themselves claim to be non-Christians. AustinEmme (talk) 08:55, 18 June 2026 (UTC)[reply]

"Astronauts" "Extraterrestrials"

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Ramos1990 I'm not sure this is being accurately portrayed. Carrier is saying all this stuff about Jesus being an "extraterrestrial" to make religion sound silly and improbable:

So this isn’t just some fancy of my own contrivance. It’s official now: Jesus came from outer space. Jesus is an extraterrestrial. As is God, who resides on a distant planet or space station. And ascending heroes of Jewish legend are astronauts. And Jesus, our alien overlord, visited Earth (or at least the lower realm of the firmament) in a disposable environment suit. And these things are all true of early Jewish and Christian belief regardless whether Jesus existed or didn’t. But realizing all this does make the possibility that he didn’t more credible. Because it is a key component of our background knowledge that indeed changes our estimates of what’s likely or plausible in ancient imagination.

This paragraph drips sarcasm. The "disposable environment suit" is the incarnation. Saying God resides on a "space station" and calling him an "alien overlord" just makes Christianity sound as realistic as Raelism. But the way it's presented in the article now makes it sound like he earnestly believes it in an Ancient Aliens sense - in other words, we're making him sound silly, when he's being facetious. Moreover, when he talks about "space ships" and "astronauts," he's actually summarizing an argument by some guy named Hezser:

Hezser explains how “Ancient Jewish and Christian views of outer space” differed from our modern views today, but this does not change the fact of what part of the universe they were imagining the contents and qualities of. When anyone came from heaven, they descended physically from above, flying great distances down to Earth. When anyone visited heaven, they flew into and above the sky into the great beyond, physically moving upward and seeing, and reporting, what’s in outer space—in human myth, the earliest astronauts. The Epicurean wit Lucian would poke fun of this whole idea by imagining a ship sailing into space to land on the moon—the first “space ship” in human imagination (unless we include Ezekiel’s chariot, although that appears to have been, actually, just another flying creature).

I think we need to be more careful about attributing what he actually thinks, arguments he's making that are meant to make religion sound silly, and when he's just using some other person's ideas.--Ermenrich (talk) 14:15, 8 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This addition seems sensible! You don't have to have read all of Carrier's writings to realise that – obviously – he initially read not only Ezekiel's chapter 23, but also about Josef F. Blumrich's spaceships. His book of 1974 is based on the publications of extraterrestrial researcher Erich von Däniken. Incidentally, Blumrich's book was further pursued by Austrian scientist Hans Herbert Beier: Kronzeuge Ezechiel (‘Key Witness Ezekiel’), Munich 1985.
In my experience, Carrier (therefore) plays hardly any role in German and English speaking Europe! Tympanus (talk) 20:08, 8 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Carrier doesn’t play a role in scholarship anywhere- my point was I don’t think we’re representing this particular argument in the spirit it’s been
made.—-Ermenrich (talk) 22:37, 8 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Ermenrich, initially I though something similar to you, but this is how Carrier expresses himself in multiple publications. Its not just his blog (which is is most blunt and uncensored of all). For example in his book "Jesus From Outer Space" (which is a summary of OHJ)- "If Jesus was never really a historical person, then what the original Christians were teaching was that this ancient archangel descended from the superior heavens, not to Earth, but into the sky, below the top ring of outer space, then known as a vast and terrifying region between the earth and moon, the realm of all flesh, where death and decay, and Satan and his demons, were known to hold sway. And there is where Jesus was originally believed to have died, crucified not by the Romans on Earth, or by the Jews, but by Satan or his agents, far above the clouds. And there is where Jesus's mortal bodysuit was buried, perhaps in some garden among the demonic sky castles."
In OHJ he talks about "cosmic sperm banks", and says "In Chapter 3 we addressed the bare facts of Jesus having suffered and died and been buried and resurrected, which are all expected beliefs on minimal mythicism - as on that theory, these events all occurred in outer space (in the original Christian belief). Jesus would have been buried in a grave or tomb somewhere above the clouds, just as Adam was (Element 38). He would likewise have been abused and crucified there, by Satan and his sky demons (Element 37), just as the earliest discernible redaction of the Ascension of Isaiah imagined."
I got one of these quotes from Bart Ehrman's slides from his Paths courses from his site [1] (slides 26-29) which quotes "Jesus From Outer Space". So that is how Ehrman understands Carrier's actual theory. I am ok if you reword it, but I tried to stick to how he characterizes it because he really does think that the earliest Christians saw Jesus, God, etc as how we see extraterrestrials. Ramos1990 (talk) 01:01, 9 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I did a partial revert to previous wording and just added the new ref to the other refs. Hope that works. Ramos1990 (talk) 02:16, 9 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Photo

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Can we get a more up-to-date photo of Carrier? Mukogodo (talk) 15:18, 27 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Sexual harassment allegations

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This section, and perhaps the whole topic, strikes me as really inappropriate. As far as as I can tell, the allegations are non-substantive: there were no formal or legal allegations (except for Carrier's complaints of defamation), and thus no convictions or formal findings of guilt. Yet, the article gives the subject its own three-paragraph section. The sources do not strike me as reliable, a lot of blogs, an "official" Facebook page, and newsletters for the group making the accusations (the Washington Post is used for a tacked-on two-sentence summary of what the blogs say).

This is a biography of a living person, and devoting three paragraphs to promoting unsubstantiated allegations seems in bad faith. I found this policy:

"Biographies of living persons ("BLPs") must be written conservatively and with regard for the subject's privacy. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a tabloid: it is not Wikipedia's job to be sensationalist, or to be the primary vehicle for the spread of titillating claims about people's lives; the possibility of harm to living subjects must always be considered when exercising editorial judgment. This policy applies to any living person mentioned in a BLP, whether or not that person is the subject of the article, and to material about living persons in other articles and on other pages, including talk pages. The burden of evidence rests with the editor who adds or restores the material.

"This policy extends that principle, adding that contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced should be removed immediately and without discussion. This applies whether the material is negative, positive, neutral, or just questionable, and whether the material is in a biography or in some other article. Such material should not be added to an article when the only available sources are tabloid journalism. When material is both verifiable and noteworthy, it will have appeared in more reliable sources.

In accordance with the bolded text, I will delete the section. Mevsherd (talk) 01:42, 28 June 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Some more policies I found:
Remove immediately any contentious material about a living person that:
is unsourced or poorly sourced;
is an original interpretation or analysis of a source, or a synthesis of sources (see also Wikipedia:No original research);
relies on self-published sources, unless written by the subject of the BLP (see § Using the subject as a self-published source, above); or
relies on sources that fail in some other way to meet verifiability standards.
Note that, although the three-revert rule does not apply to such removals, what counts as exempt under BLP can be controversial. Editors who find themselves in edit wars over potentially defamatory material about living persons should consider raising the matter at the biographies of living persons noticeboard instead of relying on the exemption.
Administrators are allowed to enforce the removal of clear BLP violations with page protection or by blocking the violator(s), even if they have been editing the article themselves or are in some other way involved. In less clear cases they should request the attention of an uninvolved administrator at the administrators' noticeboard/Incidents page. See § Role of administrators, below. Mevsherd (talk) 01:49, 28 June 2026 (UTC)[reply]

This applies to the section. albeit not the page:

"Pages that are unsourced and negative in tone, especially when they appear to have been created primarily to disparage the subject, should be deleted at once if there is no policy-compliant version to revert to; see § Summary deletion, creation prevention, and courtesy blanking, below. Non-administrators should tag them with {{db-attack}} or {{db-negublp}}. Creation of such pages, especially when repeated or in bad faith, is grounds for immediate blocking.

I've reformatted your tags as it seems you meant to explain them, rather than tag the talk page for deletion. I hope that's okay. I've also looked at the sources for the aforementioned section and do have some doubts. Many of the sources are blogs, with a prominent one being this: [2], which appears less than neutral to me. The strongest source is Washington Post, which consists of two sentences, as mentioned. There may be a case for revision deletion of this content, but I am not experienced enough in this area to decide on my own. Further examination of the relevant sources for this (including any not previously or currently cited, and we should examine revisions to ensure no stronger citations have been removed) may be appropriate. ASUKITE 02:11, 28 June 2026 (UTC)[reply]
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