mythology 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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The Earth Will Be Destroyed Very Soon

Richard Carrier — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 20:43:07 +0000

The gargantuan amounts of money that are vanishing into the mysterious black hole of private equity (which is now collapsing because all that money has indeed vanished…somewhere) and AI (which is also vanishing…somewhere, because the data centers it was supposed to have been spent on don’t actually exist) cannot be explained. The disappearance of trillions […]

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All the Fantastical Things in the Gospel according to Mark

Richard Carrier — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 22:33:20 +0000

I’ve often noted that even the very first Gospel we know of (the one eventually source-credited to someone named Mark), despite often being described as the least fantastical or the most mundane narrative of Jesus, is in fact wildly fantastical, and does not even come close to resembling the actual histories and biographies of the […]

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Did Christians Steal Their Religion from Egypt?

Richard Carrier — Fri, 15 Dec 2023 14:22:27 +0000

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 the same person I critiqued before in Some Problems with Modern […]

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My Rank-Raglan Scoring for Osiris

Richard Carrier — Fri, 19 May 2023 01:11:00 +0000

The first question anyone has to answer when answering the question “How likely is it that Jesus was a mythical and not a historical person?” is “How often, at that time, were people like Jesus mythical and not historical?” And that requires answering the question, “What does it mean to be like Jesus?” What category […]

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Some Problems with Modern Kemetic Mythology

Richard Carrier — Fri, 26 Feb 2021 17:26:09 +0000

There is a sub-category of Neopaganism today called Kemetism, or Egyptian Neopaganism. It is often heavily wrapped up in Black Supremacist or Afrocentrism movements. By analogy to Wicca, the most well-known variety of Neopaganism, which is based on a European pagan legacy (especially Celtic, Greek, Nordo-Germanic, and Roman), Kemetic religion is derived from Egyptian religion […]

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Crucifixion Quake! An Unusual Movie about an Unusual Passion

Richard Carrier — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 19:27:03 +0000

Years ago I sat for a day of interviews for a film by Marco Bazzi about a geologist obsessed with the alleged earthquake at the time of Christ’s death. The resulting movie is now available (you can find it in most of the usual places, including Amazon Prime or with commercials on Tubi or as […]

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No, Mr. Christian, A.N. Sherwin-White Didn’t Say That. And Even What He Did Say Was Wrong.

Richard Carrier — Wed, 29 Jan 2020 02:11:36 +0000

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. 189-93) that (in Sherwin-White’s words) “even two generations,” or […]

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Five Bogus Reasons to Trust the Bible

Richard Carrier — Sat, 04 Aug 2018 05:21:31 +0000

Sean McDowell (yes, son of the Josh McDowell of Evidence That Demands a Verdict fame, now in a co-written new edition) has been Tweeting some eye-rolling propaganda to miseducate the public and keep conning Christians to stay in the fold. Just like all other fake news, it distorts and deceives an unwary public, who won’t […]

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The Cosmic Seed of David

Richard Carrier — Wed, 18 Oct 2017 22:26:52 +0000

Nicholas Covington just produced an intersting article on the cosmic seed hypothesis that so vexes Jonathan Tweet (see Jonathan Tweet and the Jesus Debate). In Seed of David, Take Two, Covington makes two valuable points: he correctly frames the logic of the argument (and thus what Tweet needs to argue), and he presents a valid […]

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