of Jesus. Carrier described his work as "the first comprehensive pro-Jesus-myth book ever published by a respected academic press and under formal peer review." The essence of his argument is that there is insufficient evidence, in the context of Bayesian probability, to believe in the historicity of Jesus. Furthermore, Carrier posits that as a celestial figure, 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. The allegorical aspect of Jesus was then lost during the struggle for control of the Christian churches during the first century. Noting that the gospels were written decades after Jesus' death, Carrier claims that the gospels are "wildly fictitious", and proposes that the Gospel of Mark is really an extended meta-parable. He further claims that post-biblical writings mentioning Jesus should not be regarded as independent sources for his existence, since they may have relied on the gospels for their information. Apart from the hero archetype pattern, Carrier contends that nothing else in the Gospels is reliable evidence for or against the historicity of Jesus. Celestial Jesus In 2002, Carrier reviewed the work of Earl Doherty, who posited that Jesus was originally a mythological being who subsequently came to be regarded as a historical person. Carrier concluded that Doherty's theory was plausible, although at the time he had not yet concluded that this hypothesis was more probable than the historical Jesus. He also criticized some of Doherty's points, which he considered untenable, although he regarded the basic concept as coherent and consistent with the evidence. Over time, Carrier's views shifted to the point that he accepted Doherty's premise as the most likely explanation of Jesus. 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." Elaborating on this hypothesis, Carrier asserts that originally "Jesus was the name of a celestial being, subordinate to God, with whom some people hallucinated conversations", and that "The Gospel began as a mythic allegory about the celestial Jesus, set on earth, as most myths then were." Stories developed placing Jesus on Earth, and placing him in context with historical figures and places. Subsequently, his worshipers came to believe that