For a number of years, Carrier was editor of and a substantial contributor to The Secular Web, where he wrote on the topics of atheism and metaphysical naturalism; these later formed the basis for his book Sense and Goodness without God.

[21] His debates on the historicity of Jesus have included professor of religious studies Zeba A. Crook,[22][23][24][25] Christian scholars Dave Lehman and Doug Hamp.

with William Lane Craig was held at the Northwest Missouri State University and posted online in two parts by ReasonableFaithOrg (YouTube channel).

"[30] In his post debate commentary, Carrier argued that Craig "focused almost entirely on protecting the Gospels as historical sources, and it was there that his shotgun of arguments got well ahead of my ability to catch up.

In 2006, Carrier was the keynote speaker for the Humanist Community of Central Ohio's annual Winter Solstice Banquet, where he spoke on defending naturalism as a philosophy.

[34] Carrier appears in Roger Nygard's 2009 documentary The Nature of Existence, in which persons of different religious and secular philosophies are interviewed about the meaning of life.

[35] In 2007, famed English philosopher Antony Flew, who had long advocated atheism in the absence of empirical evidence of divinity, published his final book with co-author Roy Varghese, There Is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind.

Carrier concludes that Hitler's views in Table Talk "resemble Kant's with regard to the primacy of science over theology in deciding the facts of the universe, while remaining personally committed to a more abstract theism.

Here he attempts to describe the Roman education system that pertained to the sciences and how Jews and Christians held different views, which set the stage for dark ages.

[8][9][10] Earlier in his career, Carrier believed that the nonexistence of Jesus was a fringe theory, not worthy of academic inquiry; but a number of individuals requested that he investigate the subject, and raised money for him to do so.

Despite his initial skepticism of Christ myth theory, since late 2005 Carrier has considered it "very probable Jesus never actually existed as a historical person.

"[58] In a blog entry from 2009, he writes "though I foresee a rising challenge among qualified experts against the assumption of historicity [of Jesus], as I explained, that remains only a hypothesis that has yet to survive proper peer review.

[64][65] Carrier self describes himself and this work as "I am also the first historian in a hundred years to publish a complete peer-reviewed, academic press argument for the origin and development of Christianity that does not include a historical Jesus.

Furthermore, Carrier posits originally Jesus was the name of a celestial or "angelic extraterrestrial"[67] being who was subordinate to God who came from a "cosmic sperm bank",[68] was tortured and crucified by Satan and his demons, buried in a tomb above the clouds, and resurrected - all in outer space.

[69] As a celestial extraterrestrial, Jesus was probably known originally only through private revelations and hidden messages in scripture, which were then elaborated into an allegorical person, communicating the claims of the gospels.

[74] He wrote, "It does soundly establish the key point that Jesus was regarded as a pre-existent incarnate divine being from the earliest recorded history of Christianity, even in fact before the writings of Paul, and that this was not even remarkable within Judaism.

"[75] Carrier states that originally Jesus was the name of a celestial or "angelic extraterrestrial"[76] being who was subordinate to God who came from a "cosmic sperm bank",[77] was tortured and crucified by Satan and his demons, buried in a tomb above the clouds, and resurrected - all in outer space.

In Carrier's interpretation of Paul, Jesus possessed a surrogate human body, and thus the religious requirement of a blood sacrifice was fulfilled by his crucifixion by demons.

[87][9] Writing in 2004, Michael Grant stated, "In recent years, 'no serious scholar has ventured to postulate the non-historicity of Jesus' or at any rate very few, and they have not succeeded in disposing of the much stronger, indeed very abundant, evidence to the contrary.

"[88] More recently, Patrick Gray posited, "That Jesus did in fact walk the face of the earth in the first century is no longer seriously doubted even by those who believe that very little about his life or death can be known with any certainty.

According to James F. McGrath, Carrier misuses Rank and Raglan's criteria and stretches their scales to make Jesus appear to score high on mythotype.

[99] Gullotta also says that there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever, either documentary or archaeological, that there was a period when Jews or Christians believed that Jesus only existed in heaven as a celestial being where he was born from a "cosmic sperm bank" and was subsequently crucified by satan and his demons in outer space, which is Carrier's "foundational" thesis, rather than living as a human being on earth.

Unlike Gullotta, Petterson describes On the Historicity of Jesus as somewhat amateurish: "Maths aside, nothing in the book shocked me, but seemed quite rudimentary first year New Testament stuff."

"[102] He also criticizes Carrier's attempts to derive Jesus from James Frazer's theory of the Near-Eastern dying-and-rising fertility god as relying on a "largely defunct" category in religious scholarship.

[104] Regarding Carrier's appeals to other ancient religious figures such as Romulus and the prophet Daniel who appear not to have existed, Litwa argues that Jesus is attested only twenty years after his death by Paul: "A name and a human character to go with it could not have been invented in this short period without invoking suspicion.

He states, following Daniel Gullotta, "there is not a single instance of a recorded celestial angel or Logos figure named Jesus/Joshua in ancient Jewish literature.

"[108] Professor Emeritus Larry Hurtado of the University of Edinburgh writes that, contrary to Carrier's claims, Philo of Alexandria never refers to an archangel named "Jesus".

[110] In addition, Carrier's counter-consensus thesis that the early reference to Christ in the Roman historian Tacitus was a Christian interpolation, and that Tacitus intended to refer to "Chrestians" as a separate religious group unaffiliated with Christianity, has been recently rejected by Willem Blom, who finds that Carrier's thesis relies on unconvincing silences and mistaken understandings of the 1st and 2nd centuries, and notes that the consensus view is that the passage is not an interpolation.

[111] Furthermore, classicist Margaret Williams observes that Carrier’s thesis is outdated, not supported on textual grounds, nor is there any evidence of this non-Christian group existing and is thus dismissed by classical scholars.

However, when Blais et al. used 33 personages from after the 10th century BC (more recent time period) along with the date they were depicted as living, they observed that most were actually historical.