23 February 2020
I have written on this question in many different places. Here I collect excerpts from, or summarize, several of the most important. You’ll find further material and expanded arguments, with evidence and footnotes and cited scholarship, in my contributions to The...
28 January 2020
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....
22 December 2019
In April of this year the Biblical History Skeptics talked shop for three hours with Tim O’Neill (this Tim O’Neill) and I was invited to talk shop about that with Godless Engineer last month. The latter video has now gone live and you can watch it here....
18 December 2019
Part 3 of my series on the new Macmillan reference Theism & Atheism: Opposing Arguments in Philosophy: my discussion of the Argument from Science, which holds that the collective consequence of the advance of the sciences is the substantial reduction in the...
27 November 2019
Tim O’Neill is at it again, on Twitter this time, making false claims about my work, and about the Epistles of Paul. The item of contention again is my proposal that when Paul said Jesus was “made from the sperm of David” (which is literally what...
25 November 2019
It’s often claimed Medieval Christians invented the university. But this is as false as the similar claim that they invented the hospital. In both cases the underlying claim is used to sell a “Christianity saved the world” narrative in the halls of...
31 October 2019
An interesting video discussion of On the Historicity of Jesus took place earlier this year, in which “Kamil Gregor and Joel Pearson discuss the Historicity of Jesus.” It’s well worth a reply. Because Gregor understands the math. So what he gets...
12 October 2019
Cristian Tolsa, an Osnabrück postdoc fellow, wrote a brief review of my book The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire that inspires me to clarify some things that I wonder at their getting wrong, getting wrong what’s actually in the book and what it actually...
30 September 2019
I debated the historicity of Jesus with the renowned Christian scholar Craig Evans back in 2016, and later analyzed that debate. But I didn’t notice Evans’ own post-debate analysis in the Christian Research Journal, nor its republication online years later...
28 September 2019
There is a trend to try and deny the Dark Ages ever existed; even to portray them as really lovely, light and wonderful ages of goodness and achievement. I’m exaggerating. But only a little. I’ve debunked this a lot. I have a whole category assigned to the...
10 August 2019
Holy balls. Yep. A dude actually said this. Just recently, a Godfearing San Diegan by the name of Francesco Scinico (credentials unknown but probably non-existent) Tweeted: “There’s no contemporary historical evidence for Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus...
1 July 2019
A patron has hired me to write a response to an article by an undergraduate “studying the classics at Indiana University Bloomington” called “Was Jesus a Historical Figure?” on her expansive website Tales of Times Forgotten. Her name is Spencer...
25 April 2019
I will be giving a lecture in Manhattan, NY, on Sunday, June 23rd (2019), from 12-1pm on the ancient mystery religions and their influence on the earliest known (and thus probably original) formulation of Christianity. This will be at the Center for Remembering and...
18 April 2019
Novelist Tom Holland just wrote an article for The Spectator titled “Thank God for Western Values,” declaring the “debt of the West to Christianity is more deeply rooted than many might presume.” Everything he says is false. He has since...
29 March 2019
A certain Colin Green, sports enthusiast and author of How To Run A Football Club, maintains an amateur Christian apologetics blog called The Truth of Things. Where he wrote a tediously long attempt at rebutting my peer reviewed scholarship in the Journal of Early...
27 March 2019
I contributed a chapter to a great new book that was just released, a book I dare say is required reading for anyone who wants to be up-to-date on the “Did Jesus rise from the dead?” debate. It pits atheist professor Carl Stecher against Christian...