Jesus from Outer Space

What the Earliest Christians Really Believed about Christ

Richard Carrier

• Publisher: Pitchstone Publishing
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN:
  9781634312080
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

The earliest Christians believed Jesus was an ancient celestial being who put on a bodysuit of flesh, died at the hands of dark forces, and then rose from the dead and ascended back into the heavens. But the writing we have today from that first generation of Christians never says where they thought he landed, where he lived, or where he died. The idea that Jesus toured Galilee and visited Jerusalem arose only a lifetime later, in unsourced legends written in a foreign land and language. Many sources repeat those legends, but none corroborate them. Why? What exactly was the original belief about Jesus, and how did this belief change over time? In Jesus from Outer Space, noted philosopher and historian Richard Carrier summarizes for a popular audience the scholarly research on these and related questions, revealing in turn how modern attempts to conceal, misrepresent, or avoid the actual evidence calls into question the entire field of Jesus studies--and present-day beliefs about how Christianity began.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Which Jesus Are We Talking about Exactly?
• 2. There Is a Good Chance Jesus Never Existed
• 3. A Plausible Jesus Is Not Necessarily a Probable Jesus
• 4. All the Historians on a Single Postcard
• 5. But Isn’t Jesus as Attested as Any Other Famous Dude?
• 6. More Like All the Other Dying-and-Rising Savior Gods of Yore
• 7. How Did Christianity Switch to a Historical Jesus?
• 8. The Cosmic Seed of David?
• 9. The Peculiar Cult of the Brothers of the Lord
• Bibliography
• Concordance to On the Historicity of Jesus
• About the Author