of the time period and that the book has "serious anachronisms". He also observes that Carrier fails to demonstrate the supposed stagnation of science from the Roman period to the modern period, but mainly assumes such is the case and relies on focusing on the advances made by pagans as enough to show that science really would have continued to grow indefinitely. Historicity of Jesus Earlier in his career, Carrier was not interested in the historicity of Jesus. His first thought was that it 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. Since then, Carrier has become a vocal advocate of the theory that Jesus was not a historical person. In Not the Impossible Faith: Why Christianity Didn't Need a Miracle to Succeed (2009), Carrier writes on the social and intellectual context of the rise and early development of Christianity. 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." 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." In Proving History: Bayes's Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus (2012), Carrier describes the application of Bayes' theorem to historical inquiry in general, and the historicity of Jesus in particular. According to Carrier, Bayes’ theorem is the standard to which all methodology for any historical study must adhere in order to be logically sound. In his Bayesian analysis, the ahistoricity of Jesus is "true": that is, the "most probable" Bayesian conclusion. By the same methodology, Carrier posits that Jesus originated in the realm of mythology, rather than as a historical person who was subsequently mythologized. Carrier argues that the probability of Jesus' existence is somewhere in the range of 1/3 to 1/12000, depending on the estimates used for the computation. A number of critics have rejected Carrier's ideas and methodology, calling it "tenuous", or "problematic and unpersuasive". Simon Gathercole writes that Carrier's arguments "are contradicted by the historical data." In On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt (2014), Carrier continues to develop his Bayesian analysis of the historicity