this ^ is a mischacterisation of the recent increase in popularity of the mythic jesus idea. It has nothing to do with quote mining, it is simply because the internet enables people to encounter the mythic view and think about it for themselves.
It enables people who haven't read much in the way of primary sources to talk about texts they can't actually read except in translation and about a time, cultures, oral/written tradition, religious traditions, and so forth they do not know enough about such that they can judge the veracity of the claims made (e.g., the usual conflation of the Persian Mithra to the Hellenistic Mithras dating from after most of the N.T. was already composed, mischaracterization of gnostics and paganism, mischaracterization of ancient historiography, etc.). It also means that a guy like Carrier can talk about using Bayes' Theroem in a way that doesn't actually concern Bayes' theorem at all, but Bayesian probability, or a method designed to update one's beliefs given particular starting conditions (e.g., if I am convinced that a particular canditate will win some election), and particular new information (e.g., initial polling results), where hopefully a Bayesian approach will allow me to update my beliefs in an optimal way (which is why Bayesian networks and Bayesian probability are so common in machine learning). But as most people are as unfamiliar with mathematics as Carrier seems to be (or more so), numbers look very convincing. The social sciences have been increasingly basing research on bad math for decades, and I guess Carrier believes the time is ripe for historians to create garbage analyses which look good because they have
numbers and equations and stuff.
Before the internet existed there was no access to the mythic view, nobody ever heard about it.
They had. Lots. In fact, a lot of current mythicist literature relies (or at least references) amateurs from a century ago like Drews. The reason we refer to a "quest for the historical Jesus" at all is because of the translation of a century old book
Von Reimarus zu Wrede which had, in English, the title
The Quest of the Historical Jesus. As Schweitzer pointed out then, the quest basically began with someone trying to undermine Christianity (Reimaruss), proceeded with a number of defenses which moved the discussion of Jesus Christ form a purely religious one to a historical arena as well, ended (as far as the first defenses were concerned) with the devastating critique by Strauß which showed that the attempts to rationalize the miracles in the gospels were doomed. Schweitzer included a critique of the "mythic Jesus" view
even then (i.e., in the very early 20th century), and demonstrated that most of the history of the quest has been dominated by challenges to the Christian faith.
It is never mentioned in schools or universities, strictly forbidden to even entertain it as a possibility; but the internet levels the playing field by enabling a much greater degree of free discussion.
Perhaps it is "never mentioned" in mainstream academia because, after over a century of various mythicist proposals to explain the data we do have thoroughly failed, the last bastion for the mythicist is ignorance. After all, the historical Jesus is almost guarenteed to contradict Christian faith, has done so quite frequently in ways which would offend many (perhaps most) practicing Christians, and has in general included everything from discussions of Jesus' sexuality to the ways in which the gospel authors, Paul and the N.T. distorted Jesus' message. Why would mythicism be taboo?
