24 September 2017
Yesterday I pointed out the defects of Kristi Winters’ YouTube case for the historicity of Jesus in 2015. Her case then, mostly, was at least respectably mainstream and just uninformed about a lot of things. But then in 2016 and 2017 her videos on this subject...
23 September 2017
I’ve had on my to-do list for some time to write about all the weirdly inept videos on the historicity of Jesus posted by YouTuber Kristi Winters lately. So I’ll do that now. In two parts. In the first, she starts sensible and merely wrong. In the second,...
30 August 2017
I began my critique of Keller’s The Reason for God with an exposé of everything up through Chapter 1, then Chapters [2] [3-5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10-12]. Here I will conclude with Chapters 13 and 14. Today, Keller returns to his usual pattern of simply lying; lying...
21 June 2017
I began my critique of Keller’s The Reason for God with an exposé of everything up through Chapter 1, then Chapter 2, then Chapters 3 through 5, and Chapter 6. Here I will cover Chapter 7. Next will be Chapter 8. I’ll continue to other chapters in future...
5 June 2017
I’ll be speaking across numerous cities this year after July. Four at least are ticketed events, so you should make plans now (see below for what that entails). Don’t worry, though. They’re totally affordable. But do not expect video of these events...
27 May 2017
This September, Mythicist Milwaukee will be putting on Mythinformation Con IV, always a fun and excellent conference. You’ll definitely want to go this year. Some of the Mythicist Milwaukee team traveled to Italy recently, and among much else, took some...
24 May 2017
Let me dispel a common myth: no, Christianity did not bring the idea of charity to the Western world. The concept of charity and concern for the poor was already fully developed before the Christians borrowed the notion from their pagan and Jewish peers. It’s...
27 April 2017
A few years ago a hyper-religious Catholic chemist with no history credentials wrote a face-palming article at Strange Notions that repeats an all-too-common myth Christians love to sell today: that science was “stillborn” in antiquity, and only a...
26 April 2017
Q is a hypothetical Gospel. The letter Q stands for Quelle, German for “Source.” It has long been a popular hypothesis, and it serves a lot of agendas well. But there is no evidence whatever for it. Q never existed. And there is no rational reason to believe it did....
19 April 2017
[Update: This is my critique of Simon Gathercole’s Guardian article, which is amateurish and terrible. For his more professional article in JSHJ see my analysis in 2019.] -:- Everyone keeps asking about The Guardian article “What Is the Historical Evidence...
15 April 2017
So I went and saw it. Here’s a review. Read on, and enjoy your Easter week pondering the aesthetic merits of a film embedded with religious propaganda. I’ll remark on both, but my focus will be on the propaganda, and what this film tells us about how...
20 March 2017
In my book On the Historicity of Jesus, I covered pretty much every possible verse in the Epistles that any expert has ever tried to claim proves Jesus really lived. You can check yourself: it has a complete scripture index (pp. 661-71). And Chapter 11 rakes the whole...
15 February 2017
On whether Josephus actually ever mentioned Jesus, usually you hear people claim “the consensus is” or “such-and-such renowned Josephus expert said” that he did, so shut-up already, nothing more to see here, “move on!” Well, there...
14 February 2017
One of the things I talked about at the Society of Biblical Literature conference in Notre Dame last weekend was the demise of a popular argument for the authenticity of the Testiminium Flavianum (that fawning paragraph about Jesus in the Jewish Antiquities of...
5 February 2017
A fawningly-Christian non-historian (though reportedly she’s an atheist) wrote one of the weirdest book reviews I’ve ever seen. Not just of my book On the Historicity of Jesus. But of any book, in any academic journal, anywhere. It’s six or so pages...
25 January 2017
The last two years have been the Golden Age of crankery and fake news. And not just in the ways everyone is already talking about. Hardly a month goes by that I’m not bombarded with queries from puzzled fans about this or that astonishing story about ancient...