Richard Carrier's "On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt" is great. He wrote about Q (he isn't a fan) in his blog, which seems to be struggling at the moment.
I am not sure what makes Carrier a non-serious historian. He is trained in ancient history and applies conventional historical methodology to his studies (perhaps the only non-conventional addition is that he tries to add Bayesian statistics to it). He studies and cites the available primary sources. He researches and cites the available scholarly literature. He lays out his arguments both in his book (published under peer review, which he will be the first to inform his audience :-) and now in its second edition) and in various talks. He has participated in a number of debates, in which supposedly serious historians had a chance to demonstrate, with evidence, the error of his ways; yet, to my knowledge, none ever did. Bart Ehrman refuses to engage with him directly; so they resort to sniping at each other in their blogs or youtube appearances.
> But he's hardly the only radical eschatological/messianic jew to emerge from the period, and believing he was fabricated involves making even larger assumptions that there also isn't contemporaneous evidence for.
As Carrier would point out, Jesus wouldn't be the first figure thought to be historical, who, upon further scrutiny, would turn out to be fictional. Moses is one example of such a figure who was believed to have existed; yet, it seems that the consensus among modern historians is that he was an invention. Another example much closer to us is Ned Ludd, the supposed originator of the Luddite movement, whom many treated as historical (see e.g. Encyclopædia Britannica from 1911), yet who now, historians agree, was fictional.
Also, Carrier doesn't claim to have disproven the historicity of Jesus. What he is saying is that he thinks there is a pretty strong case to be made against it, and that he would give about a 60% chance to him being a myth.
Too late for me to edit my sibling comment; but it just occurred to me that you are using the same methodology as Carrier to come to conclusions about historical facts. You call it Occam's razor. Carrier calls it Bayesian probability. But the idea is the same: what is the most likely (most probable) interpretation of the presented evidence. It is funny that, appealing to the same methodology, you arrive at different conclusions.
He's called a crank because the consensus historian opinion is that he'a a crank.
No, it's not. One is a argument about the semantics of the rhetorics and the other is quantitative dealing with lists of claims about the world.
> The reason that a complex explanation is less probable than a simple one is because a complex explanation contains multiple parts (which is what makes it complex), and the probabilities of each of these parts multiply to produce the probability of the whole, which of course quickly makes this overall probability very small.
There is no straightforward connection between probability and the complexity of a set of claims. Sometimes probable events are very complex to explain; sometimes highly unlikely events are simple.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomonoff%27s_theory_of_induc...
Anyway, the question of historicity is not really important, but sometimes atheists who take on atheism as a new religion rather than dropping a religion will get zealous about arguing about Jesus's historicity. No current working academic historians in ancient history I'm aware of take the position seriously since the Jesus Myth argument is a conspiracy theory that has to explain away a lot of evidence rather than an account that uses the available evidence.
This idea of an interpolated marginal note is Carrier's own contribution, first published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Early Christian Studies in 2012. While elegant, is not the only explanation. In his blog [1], Carrier references several recent publications (peer-reviewed, as he likes to emphasize), including one published in Journal of Early Christian History in 2017 by a South African historian Nicholas Peter Legh Allen, who argues that the James passage is a forgery, of which his prime suspect is Origen [2]. So, you can see that Carrier isn't the only one among modern academic historians of antiquity who casts doubt on Josephus passages.
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[0] Josephus and the Testimonia Flaviana in On the Historicity of Jesus, 2014, p. 332-342
[1] https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/12071
[2] Abstract at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/2222582X.2017.1.... Full text can be found in: Christian Forgery in Jewish Antiquities: Josephus Interrupted, 2020, of which a pirated pdf exists online
The only really significant question is the account of James. He dismisses it because he has to, so claiming it's a forgery is another attempt to dismiss evidence. He's not a real philologist, it's great that he managed to get a peer reviewed journal to accept his work, but it's still a crank conspiracy theory attempting to wave away evidence. If denying evidence to prop up a conspiracy theory is your thing, then Carrier is great, but in truth all his work is weak and a waste of any serious person's time and you'd be better off dropping the conspiracies and fringe scholars and learning about the evidence objectively. The truth is more interesting than Carrier's conspiracies once you learn it.
One passage. One. In a text, where the other passage is accepted to be forgery, and which comes to us as a copy by Christian scribes. And if it is specifically Carrier that you dismiss, take a look at Nicholas Allen's recent book that I referenced in my previous comment. Allen uses arguments that are independent from Carrier's and comes to a conclusion that is even more radical than his — while Carrier accepts the James passage on the whole and only suggests that the "who was called Christ" line started as a marginal note by a Christian peruser of the text, Allen argues that the whole James passage is a forgery. And he seems to be a modern mainstream scholar trained in philology and ancient and classical history.