Reddit reviews How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels

Three books I recommend highly:

Thom Stark's The Human Faces of God. If you only read one book about the Bible before giving up on it, please make sure it's this one.

Scot McKnight's The King Jesus Gospel does a great job of laying out the ways in which the story the Bible is trying to tell has been distorted and misunderstood by a focus on personal salvation.

N.T. Wright's How God Became King makes a similar case, but fleshes it out from a more scholarly perspective and addresses the political implications of the gospel.

Lost me at "to get into Heaven."

This makes a common mistake of assuming the only reason for the Incarnation was for Jesus to die on the cross, and everything else in between was just filler. That's what this book does a good job of addressing.

For a first step into biblical study, I'm not sure I would only read Carrier's book. As I haven't read it fully, I can't really comment on it like /u/koine_lingua.

But if you want to get a broad spectrum, you can check out:

John Meier Marginal Jew - (maybe vol. 2 or 3)

NT Wright's How God Became King

John Dominic Crossan's Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography

Marcus Borg Jesus: An uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary

Craig Blomberg Jesus and the Gospels: An Introduction and Survey

You can take a stab at Albert Schweitzer's The Quest for the Historical Jesus

or Raymond E. Brown's Death of the Messiah or Birth of the Messiah if you want. I found Schweitzer's book difficult to get through. And one Easter holiday my plans were to read Death of the Messiah. After page like 17, I quit and played WoW.

That will give you a healthy dose of different perspectives - and will not only give you a survey of the scholarship but also will argue for a model, as opposed to Luke Timothy Johnson's The Real Jesus which just criticizes one aspect of HJ studies.

Thanks for excerpt... I'm also reading N.T. Wright (for the first time but not the last).

A very recent book called How God Became King. He is such a deep and thought-through thinker. Very inspiring and eye-opening book.