22 May 2024
The Review of Biblical Literature recently published a brief “review” of Jesus from Outer Space by William Chavez (RBL 03/2024). It is quite useless as a review, because it merely complains about aesthetics, ignores the academic study the book summarizes,...
20 May 2024
This continues my discussion from Part 1, reviewing Thinking-Ape’s half-hour video Protectors, Providers, Nazis and Prostitutes. You’ll need to read that to understand what’s going on here. Because there I surveyed important background facts about...
20 May 2024
There are thousands of crappy videos in aid of dubious projects. So I generally have to be paid to care about any of them. And lo, my latest hire: to examine what’s going on with Stardusk’s half-hour video Protectors, Providers, Nazis and Prostitutes on...
10 May 2024
I recently read a new article by David Allen, “A Model Reconstruction of What Josephus Would Have Realistically Written about Jesus,” in the Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism 18 (2022), which tries to argue that Josephus really did write...
3 May 2024
My popular market summary of my academic study of Jesus, Jesus from Outer Space, is now available in Greek and Polish translations. Follow the links for details and to buy one. These are not available in the Americas by normal channels, but special ordering at a brick...
9 April 2024
This April 27 (2024), a Saturday, I’ll be appearing in Bangor, Maine (video now available, which requires a correction, noted below). This was via Zoom to discuss the historicity of Jesus (including my new book on it which I just completed and sent to the...
5 April 2024
I’ve been getting the same question a lot lately, which suggests an old Christian apologetic trend has risen from the dead and is making its rounds, zombie-like, across the internet: “I’m being told it was normal in the ancient world to publish...
2 April 2024
This is my second and closing article on Simone’s series On Reading the Talmud. For backstory see my first entry, Simone’s Series on How to Read the Talmud: Regarding Jewish Diversity. There I established Simone’s modus operandi as continually...
1 April 2024
My attention has been brought to a long series on my treatment of Jewish sources in On the Historicity of Jesus by a certain Simone (actual name unknown). The series is extraordinarily long-winded, almost entirely impertinent, and makes strange errors in vocabulary or...
29 February 2024
I still hear the myth repeated that “scientists” proved the ancient city of Sodom was in fact destroyed by a meteor, and this therefore became the basis of the Sodom & Gomorrah legend in the Bible. But that never happened. The science has been proved...
26 February 2024
There have been two really weird and unexpected turns in mainstream peer-reviewed scholarship lately: multiple independent studies are redating the entire Bible—Old Testament and New—far later than consensus imagines. What’s Up with the Old...
31 January 2024
In my debate with Fernando Bermejo-Rubio, he defended the theory that Jesus can only plausibly have been historical if he was an armed militant who was later whitewashed as a pacifist. I argued that that might be plausible in concept, but not when we look at the...
23 January 2024
I am often asked what the best Bible translation is. My usual reply is that there aren’t any. All translations are biased, they merely differ as to how or where. The best you can do is to read it in the original language (and I teach a course with a lecture on...
31 December 2023
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...
15 December 2023
In my recent article on Orphans (What About Orphans, Then?) I mentioned the following: Contrary to lore, the ancients did not just chuck unwanted infants into the wilderness to starve. While “exposure” as this was called was legal until Christians got sterner about it...
15 December 2023
There will be an online special event next week: the night of the 23rd of December (a “pre” Christmas Eve!), I will debate Jabari Osaze on whether Christianity was stolen from Egyptian religion. This is an exclusive webinar event. Tickets are $30. This is...