I just completed a research trip to UC Berkeley and its neighboring Graduate Theological Union and garnered up a treasure trove of books, studies, and journal articles, checked and re-checked quotes and footnotes and citations, and took abundant notes. And all this...
I was privileged to be able to sit in on some of a private virtual Q&A with Christian philosopher Daniel Bonevac regarding his peer-reviewed paper “The Argument from Miracles,” Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion 3 (2011), pp. 16-40. Many...
Some years ago I briefed the Westar Institute’s conclusion that Gnosticism didn’t exist. It is a modern construct. The term in antiquity never designated any sect or set of beliefs; and what the term designated in modern times never existed in...
There is a much overlooked late-20th century polemical satire of Christian apologetics by the Russian writer Kirill Eskov called the Gospel of Afranius. Award-winning and popular in the slavic world, from Russia, Poland, the Baltics, and Ukraine (even once having...
The Global Center for Religious Research (GCRR) is hosting the 2023 International eConference on Atheism next month, March 4–5. I will be among the presenters. Registration is affordable, between ten and thirty dollars depending on your status. GCRR members get a...
Justin Brierley starts his discussion of the historical facts of Jesus by quoting H.G. Wells (p. 94), someone who had no degrees in history, and only remarked upon the historical effect on Well’s era of the literary character of Jesus, and merely presuming the...
This book is the definitive starting point for anyone intent on questioning or defending the resurrection of Jesus. Introductory and aimed at a broad audience, but thoroughly researched, all the key works are here cited and arguments addressed, and with sound...
This is my final written response to Jonathan Sheffield’s argument that the Romans could have disproved the resurrection unless it really happened and therefore it must really have happened. See Sheffield’s opening statement for a description of the debate and...
This is Jonathan Sheffield’s response to my opening response to his argument that the Romans could have disproved the resurrection unless it really happened and therefore it must really have happened. See Sheffield’s opening statement for a description of...
This is my opening response to Jonathan Sheffield’s argument that the Romans could have disproved the resurrection unless it really happened and therefore it must really have happened. Thus begins a new short debate. See Sheffield’s opening statement for a...
Anglican autodidact Jonathan Sheffield is back and we will this time be debating whether the Romans should have disproved the resurrection of Jesus—and thus, their not having done so proves Jesus really did rise from the dead. Last time we had an extended...
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...
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....
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...
Christian apologists will often throw a tantrum and kick up hay over the notion of “mass hallucination.” That’s impossible! Never documented! Absurd on its face! And they’ll especially bring up “the more than five hundred brethren”...
Easter this year lands most fittingly on April Fool’s Day. Because indeed, the resurrection of Jesus is akin to the greatest prank in history. Not because anyone actually faked it (though the evidence we have left, remains fully consistent with their having done...
Richard Carrier is the author of many books and numerous articles online and in print. His avid readers span the world from Hong Kong to Poland. With a Ph.D. in ancient history from Columbia University, he specializes in the modern philosophy of naturalism and humanism, and the origins of Christianity and the intellectual history of Greece and Rome, with particular expertise in ancient philosophy, science and technology. He is also a noted defender of scientific and moral realism, Bayesian reasoning, and historical methods.