You’d have to pay me to waste my time on any of the millions of amateur Christian arguments on the internet. But of course, that being the case, occasionally someone actually does. A benefactor of mine wanted an expert take on the specious argumentation of a woman...
So the big Carrier-Jabari debate went down last week. That all began with my article Some Problems with Modern Kemetic Mythology, which caught numerous catastrophic errors in the crank efforts of Jabari Osaze (who goes by Brother Jabari) to argue a confused...
There is a much overlooked late-20th century polemical satire of Christian apologetics by the Russian writer Kirill Eskov called the Gospel of Afranius. Award-winning and popular in the slavic world, from Russia, Poland, the Baltics, and Ukraine (even once having been...
Every few years I check what the top ten books are in Christian apologetics (by Amazon ranking). And what I have recently noticed is that Christian apologetics is in a state of intellectual stagnation or even decline. Seven of the top ten are old, long-refuted,...
I’ve discussed the fact before that the first Christians believed Jesus was secretly an angel who came down from heaven in the guise of a man (a conclusion with which even Bart Ehrman now concurs). Even if Jesus was a historical person they believed this (a key...
This is part two of my series on Diarmaid MacCulloch’s book and BBC series A History of Christianity, or as the book is sometimes titled, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, referring to the fact that Christianity evolved out of trends that began a...
I’ve been asked a lot about Diarmaid MacCulloch’s book and BBC series A History of Christianity, or as the book is sometimes titled, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, referring to the fact that Christianity evolved out of trends that began a...
In my debate with Craig Evans, one of the strange arguments he attempted was the Argument from Verisimilitude, whereby he says we should believe any story that’s dressed up in a realistic background. In my original Analysis of the Carrier-Evans Debate, I...
Usually I don’t have to argue this because it’s obvious. But there are a few who have attempted to contend that early Christians—say, before the fourth century—never took the Gospels as factually true reports of events but only as allegorical...
On the Ask NT Wright Anything show, Justin Brierley recently read a write-in question that challenged Anglican apologist N.T. Wright on a claim he’s made that I’ve thoroughly debunked: his claim that women would never be invented by the author of Mark as...
You might have heard this one before, but it bears a revisit. Once long ago William Lane Craig started using the argument that a mainstream historian in the early 1960s named A.N. Sherwin-White had demonstrated (in Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament, pp....
Come be my student in August! My online course starts tomorrow: “Counter-Apologetics: Learning the Best Ways to Refute Arguments for God.” You can register and join us any time in the next ten days. As I just completed on my blog several debates with and critical...
One of the most insurmountable errors in the Bible, being both a historical inaccuracy and a contradiction, is the conflicting dates given to the birth of Jesus in Matthew and Luke. This goof is so terrifying to Christians they have destroyed hundreds of trees and...
Christians like to deny the Dark Ages existed, and instead reimagine them as a glorious age of knowledge and progress. That’s just not true. I document the material and textual evidence against that in my chapter on the subject in Christianity Is Not Great, for anyone...
A few years ago Strange Notions published a strange editorial by statistics professor William Briggs, called Bayes Theorem Proves Jesus Existed (And That He Didn’t). I say strange, because it’s weirdly dishonest, incompetent, and irrational coming from someone...
Larry Hurtado’s latest foot-in-mouth affords a good opportunity to explain what the difference is between an apologist and a historian. Not in respect to their goals (apologists need to defend a position even when it’s false or indefensible; historians...
Richard Carrier is the author of many books and numerous articles online and in print. His avid readers span the world from Hong Kong to Poland. With a Ph.D. in ancient history from Columbia University, he specializes in the modern philosophy of naturalism and humanism, and the origins of Christianity and the intellectual history of Greece and Rome, with particular expertise in ancient philosophy, science and technology. He is also a noted defender of scientific and moral realism, Bayesian reasoning, and historical methods.