Prepare for the Ehrman-Price debate! Join my affordable online course in September on how to think like a historian and test, challenge, or validate their claims. Or share this with anyone you know who might be keen to. Or both!
This can even help prepare you for the month after that, when Mythicist Milwaukee will be hosting a momentous debate between Robert M. Price and Bart D. Ehrman on whether Jesus existed. Hone your ability to evaluate that debate, and any others about history, with a course on how we determine what existed or happened in the past at all. You can ask me anything on the subject of historical methods, and I can tap my Ph.D. in ancient history and specialization in historical methods to give you the best answers I know. And this will be a momentous time to ask all the questions you may have about how we should investigate and evaluate questions about history.
General Description: Learn how to question and investigate claims about history. Learn not only the logic of historical reasoning and argument, but also a lot of the practical tips and tricks real historians employ to test and check claims. And hone your skills of skeptical and critical thinking about history.
Primary topics: Best practices among historians; historical methods as modes of reasoning (both criteria-based and Bayesian); examples of flawed reasoning and bad arguments in peer reviewed history journals and monographs (and how to spot them as a layperson); and what to do to critically examine a claim using both immediate criteria and procedures for more labor-intensive inquiry.
What it’s like: The course is one month online. You study and participate at your own pace, as much or as little as you like, and you get to ask me any questions you want about the course topics all month long, as well as read and participate in online discussions with me and other students. I will direct and comment on readings throughout each week and offer weekly course assignments, for those who want to tackle them, which consist of doing a simple online investigation, or answering questions about what you’ve learned and what you think about it.
Required Course Text: The only course text you have to buy is Proving History (available in print and electronic editions). All other readings and media will be provided to students free of charge (all you have to provide is your access to the internet).
Note: This course is useful by itself, but also a good preparatory course for my class on the historicity of Jesus, which I will actually be teaching in October, the same month as the debate. It’s also a good companion course to my class on New Testament Studies for Everyone, which I will also offer again later this year.
Tuition: $69
Must register by September 10 . But register as soon you can! It could fill to capacity. And it might sometimes be a year before I offer it again.
Register here.
