history Archives • Richard Carrier Blogs

The Mystery of the Seven Loaves as Mythographic Composition in Mark

Richard Carrier — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 22:03:02 +0000

What’s up with the numbers across Mark’s two feeding narratives? Weird numbers of loaves and fishes and baskets don’t make sense as history. No one would preserve incidental details like that, much less even have counted in the first place; nor could what is described ever have happened anyway. There is therefore some reason Mark […]

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Three Genuinely Good Lay Treatments of Bible History

Richard Carrier — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 19:48:42 +0000

Today I want to introduce you to three books about the Bible not written by PhDs yet are outstanding enough to be well worth reading. As always, I get a commission on anything you buy on Amazon after clicking any link on my website—in fact, on everything in your cart when you check out within […]

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The Infamous Missing Third Fragment of Mark Was a Prank!

Richard Carrier — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 15:31:00 +0000

So, the story began with a debate between Dan Wallace and Bart Ehrman in 2012. Yes. It’s been fourteen years. But anyway. I first covered this in 2012 under Amazing Proofs of Jesus! and updated it in 2017 in an article about how not to be duped by myths like this, From Lead Codices to […]

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Let’s Be Honest about Why You Are a Christian or a Muslim: Your Forebears Murdered Their Way into Your Mind

Richard Carrier — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 20:51:12 +0000

This is another updated extract from Sense and Goodness without God that I’ve removed from its future edition (coming soon) because it’s an unnecessary use of wordcount there. So I am preserving a revised version of it here for posterity and utility. It is an account of how the world became Judeo-Christian-Islamic. Which wasn’t because […]

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New Journal Publication on Jewish Expectations of a Dying Messiah

Richard Carrier — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 15:54:19 +0000

I just published a major new article in a peer-reviewed journal, the Canadian-American Theological Review: “Did Any Pre-Christian Jews Expect a Dying-and-Rising Messiah?” It will be the lead article in vol. 14, their delayed 2025 issue (print copies are going out to that journal’s subscribers in a few weeks, and digital versions will be available […]

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Top Three Handbooks of Ancient Science & Technology

Richard Carrier — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 17:54:29 +0000

Today I review for you the top three handbooks in ancient science and technology. There are others, but they either suck or are amazing but out of print. These three are must-haves for any enthusiast. Two I used a lot in my own books on ancient science, and the third is new, but I very […]

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Why Christians Are So Bad at This: Paulogia vs. Inspiring Philosophy on the Bayesian Argument for the Resurrection

Richard Carrier — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 20:10:46 +0000

Recently, Than Christopoulos produced a silly and absurdly wordy insistence that Bayes’ Theorem proves Jesus rose from the dead in Paulogia…It’s Time To Stop. I was recently interviewed about this on Modern Atheism (you can watch that here) and as promised I am here writing up the main issues. Christopoulos frames this as a response […]

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Prophecy and History: Some Pointers

Richard Carrier — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 18:10:19 +0000

I am near to completing my forthcoming rewrite of Sense and Goodness without God (which I will be retiring soon, so if you want to collect the original edition before it goes out of print, better get it now!). And one of the things I am doing is removing things that have gone out of […]

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How Many Ancient Books Did the Christians Throw Away?

Richard Carrier — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 20:39:35 +0000

How much have we lost? That’s a question I get asked a lot. I have often ballparked it at over 99%. But I decided to dig in to some real numbers to see what percentage can actually be backed by evidence. And I found we can actually calculate, by multiple converging lines of evidence, that […]

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Hardback Edition of Hitler Homer Bible Christ

Richard Carrier — Mon, 11 May 2026 19:08:10 +0000

In preparation for a new anthology I have coming out later this year, which will be available in all formats, I just created a hardback edition of its companion volume. So if you want a complete set of my anthologies in hardback, you can start collecting now! The old book coming into hardback is Hitler […]

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