deities of pagan saviour cults, such as Isis and Osiris, were not transformed in their devotees' ideas from heavenly deities to actual people living on earth. Similar criticisms were voiced by Simon Gathercole of Cambridge, who concludes that Carrier's arguments, and more broadly, the mythicist positions on different aspects of Paul's letters, are contradicted by the historical data, and that Paul's description of Jesus' life on Earth, his personality and family, tend to establish that Paul regarded Jesus as a natural person, rather than an allegorical figure. According to Christopher Hansen, Carrier's understanding of Romans 1:3 as meaning that Jesus was born in heaven by God from a "cosmic sperm bank" is not supported by the Jewish or Christian sources and not supported even by the scholars that Carrier cites to make his argument. In addition, Carrier's counter-consensus thesis that the early reference to Christ in the Roman historian Tacitus was a Christian interpolation 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. Bibliography Gesù resistente Gesù inesistente. Due visioni a confronto (with Fernando Bermejo-Rubio, Franco Tommasi & Robert M. Price, in Italian) (Manni, 2022) Jesus from Outer Space: What the Earliest Christians Really Believed about Christ (Pitchstone Publishing, 2020) On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt (Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2014) Hitler Homer Bible Christ: The Historical Papers of Richard Carrier 1995–2013 (Richmond, CA: Philosophy Press, 2014) Proving History: Bayes's Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2012) Chapter: "How Not to Defend Historicity", in Bart Ehrman and the Quest of the Historical Jesus of Nazareth, (Cranford, NJ: American Atheist Press 2013) Why I Am Not a Christian: Four Conclusive Reasons to Reject the Faith (Philosophy Press, 2011) Chapters: "Christianity's success was not incredible", "Neither life nor the universe appear intelligently designed", "Moral facts naturally exist (and science could find them)" in The End of Christianity edited by John W. Loftus (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books 2011) . Not the Impossible Faith, Why Christianity Didn't Need a Miracle to Succeed Lulu.com (2009) Sense and Goodness without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism. AuthorHouse (2005) . See also Criticism of the Bible Criticism of Christian origins List of atheist activists and educators Footnotes References Sources External links Richard Carrier's writings at Internet Infidels Westar Fellow 1969