peacefulpete, I read Richard Carrier’s books when they came out as I was interested in mythicism for a while. (Narkissos on this forum had mythicist leanings and he led me part way down that path.) Carrier’s books are pretty dismal. Have you read them? The one on Bayes theory was convoluted and unconvincing that this is a viable method for doing history. Neverhelss, I got the sequel ‘On the Historicity’ too, when it was published, to much fanfare. On the positive side it covers a lots of material and sources, but it’s hard going and not very rewarding. The best explanation for why Jesus had brothers running around in the first century, for example, is quite simply that Jesus was a real person who had siblings. Carrier works incredibly hard to offer other explanations but they are pretty farfetched. Robert Price and Earl Doherty are better authors on mythicism. Price’s The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man is an entertaining read - he can make any topic entertaining, but he has a fetish for outlandish theories too. I’ve got a book by Dennis R. McDonald and he makes a good case for some of the gospel stories being based on Greek epics, but this doesn’t show there was no Jesus at all. Bill Darlison is a British mythicist who makes some interesting arguments. I know Bill a little through the Unitarians and he certainly has interesting things to say. Ultimately, other scholars I respect, such as Mark Goodacre and James McGrath, have offered effective responses to Carrier that can be found online. Mythicism remains incredibly fringe among scholars and Carrier has not made a dent on that. (It was a liberal British NT scholar who likened it to flat earth to me in conversation.) If anything, Carrier’s turgid prose, vindictive debating style, and putrid personality (reminds me of LE) has set the ‘cause of mythicism’ back, if anything.
The most readable of Carrier’s books is the one with the silly title Jesus from Outer Space. For what it’s worth, in that book Carrier argues for an original Christian Jesus that’s strikingly similar to JW theology, although I wouldn’t quote him on that because scholars don’t take him seriously, and it’s not the result of original research, he is just offering a colourful summary of other scholars on early Christology.
The evidence is amply secure that the original story the Christians taught was that Jesus was God's supreme archangel, eternal high priest of God's celestial temple, his firstborn creation and adopted son, viceroy of the universe, and the original superbeing who carried out all of God's other acts of creation and that he ruled the resulting cosmos on God's behalf. A being whom Philo reveals Jews already believed in.
Richard Carrier, Jesus From Outer Space (2020), page 32.