Unfortunately for Carrier he would have to apply the same myth hypothesis to Alexander and Julius Caesar.
He does address Alexander in his book and a search of line for Richard carrier evidence Caesar led me to some of his thoughts on that subject.
On Alexander pages 20-23 OHJ
Unlike Jesus, we have over half a dozen relatively objective historians discussing the history of Alexander the Great (most notably Diodorus, Dionysius, Rufus, Trogus, Plutarch and more)...
Lest one complain that these historians wrote 'too late', this is actually of minor significance because, unlike Jesus, they still had contemporary and eyewitness sources to work from. In fact, our best historian of Alexan der is Arrian, who though he wrote five hundred years later, nevertheless employed an explicit method of using only three eyewitness sources (two of them actual generals of Alexander who wrote accounts of their adven tures with him). He names and identifies these sources, explains how he used them to generate a more reliable account, and discusses their relative merits. That alone is quite a great deal more than we have for esus, for whom we have not a single named eyewitness source in any of the accounts of him, much less a discussion of how those sources were used or what their relative merits were. Not even for the anonymous witness claimed to have been used by the authors of the Gospel of John, which claim isn't even cred ible to begin with (that source is almost certainly fabricated, as I'll show in Chapter 10, §7), but in any case we're not told who he was, why we should trust him or what all exactly derives from him. And that's not aiL We have mentions of Alexander the Great and details about him in several contemporary or eyewitness sources still extant, including the speeches of !socrates and Demosthenes and Aeschines and Hyperides and Dinarchus, the poetry of Theocritus, the scientific works of Theophrastus and the plays of Menander. We have not a single contempo rary mention of Jesus-apart from, at best, the letters of Paul, who never even knew him, and says next to nothing about him (as a historical man), or the dubious letters of certain alleged disciples (and I say alleged because apart from known forgeries, none ever say they were his disciples), and (again apart from those forgeries) none ever distinctly place Jesus in history (see Chapters 7 and 11). The eyewitness and contemporary attestation for Alexander is thus vastly better than we have for Jesus, not the other way around. And that's even if we count only extant texts-if we count extant quotations of lost texts in other extant texts, we have literally hundreds of quotations of contemporaries and eyewitnesses that survive in later works attesting to Alexander and his history. We have not even one such for Jesus (e.g. even Paul never once quotes anyone he identifies as an eyewitness or contemporary source for any of his information on Jesus).
And even that is not all. For Alexander we have contemporary inscrip tions and coins, sculpture (originals or copies of originals done from life), as well as other archaeological verifications of historical claims about him. For example, we can verify the claim that Alexander attached Tyre to the mainland with rubble from Ushu-because that rubble is still there and dates to his time; the city of Alexandria named for him dates from his time...
There is more but I don't have Carrier's permission to cite long sections of his book so I had better stop.
The NT manuscript evidence eclipses every other historical account in antiquity.
This is absolutely true but the number of manuscripts does not in any way tell us about the veracity or the quote of the original from which they were derived.
