historical method Archives • Richard Carrier Blogs

(Last) Remarks on Richard Carrier’s ‘Thorough Fisk’

Richard Carrier — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 16:02:04 +0000

I offered to publish replies from Fernando Bermejo-Rubio and Franco Tommasi to my article A Thorough Fisk of the Arguments of Fernando Bermejo-Rubio and Franco Tommasi (and these will be linked there). They each provided their own reply. First up and in detail is Bermejo-Rubio. Franco Tommasi then adds his own brief remarks. If I […]

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A Thorough Fisk of the Arguments of Fernando Bermejo-Rubio and Franco Tommasi

Richard Carrier — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 17:27:00 +0000

I just published the English edition of my debate with Fernando Bermejo-Rubio and Franco Tommasi, Jesus: Militant or Nonexistent? Two Views Compared (Philosophy Press, 2025), including a chapter by Robert Price, and originally published in Italian as Gesù resistente Gesù inesistente: Due visioni a confronto (Manni, 2022). See last week’s announcement for a description and […]

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My New Book! Jesus: Militant or Nonexistent? Two Views Compared

Richard Carrier — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 22:55:57 +0000

I just published the English edition of my debate with Fernando Bermejo-Rubio and Franco Tommasi, Jesus: Militant or Nonexistent? Two Views Compared (Philosophy Press, 2025), including a chapter by Robert Price, and originally published in Italian as Gesù resistente Gesù inesistente: Due visioni a confronto (Manni, 2022). There we composed a written debate, meeting assigned […]

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A Primer on Actually Doing Your Own Research

Richard Carrier — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 16:13:08 +0000

Here I shall assemble some advice I now realize I always take for granted, but that I find even well-meaning people sometimes don’t know, yet will definitely benefit from. The idiom “Doing Your Own Research” has become a joke largely because the phrase usually comes from people who are shockingly bad at that, but who […]

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Michael Alter’s Exemplary Review of Undesigned Coincidences

Richard Carrier — Mon, 23 Dec 2024 21:13:03 +0000

The Argument from Undesigned Coincidences is a naive Christian apologetic invented in the 19th century but revived recently by apologist Lydia McGrew, which ignores all historical knowledge of the redaction history of the Gospels to argue that, instead of the authors using each other as sources, they wrote completely independently of each other, such that […]

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Matt Kovacs Demonstrates What’s Wrong with Atheists Clinging to the Historicity of Jesus

Richard Carrier — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 14:32:09 +0000

I’ve commented a lot lately in my articles on the historicity of Jesus that critics themselves are now demonstrating why historicity is a bankrupt paradigm: they never have a sound or valid argument for it. Instead, they kneejerk oppose it emotionally, doing no work to even understand the peer reviewed studies questioning it (they rarely […]

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Did the Rapture Already Happen!? No. Nor Will It Ever.

Richard Carrier — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 13:24:02 +0000

“Truly I tell you, this generation shall certainly not pass away until all these things have happened,” we’re told the Lord said, “For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise […]

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Did the Rapture Already Happen!? My Debate with the Full Preterist Don Preston Is Tonight

Richard Carrier — Sat, 26 Oct 2024 15:53:52 +0000

You can catch up on the strange world of Christian preterism (a view lately gaining a lot of attention, and causing a lot of panic among Evangelicals), especially “full preterism,” at Wikipedia. But in the ultra-quick: Don Preston holds that Jesus not only did predict he would return and complete the end times in 70 […]

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James Tabor and the Mainstream Paul

Richard Carrier — Fri, 20 Sep 2024 19:08:17 +0000

James Tabor recently wrote two guest posts on Bart Ehrman’s blog in preparation for an academic conference on the historical Paul. One is better than the other, but both are illustrative of everything right and wrong about biblical studies as a field—primarily because what he presents is indeed reflective of the mainstream consensus, and thus […]

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James Valliant’s Bogus Theory of a Roman Invention of Christianity

Richard Carrier — Mon, 12 Aug 2024 15:25:02 +0000

It took me a long time to suffer through Creating Christ: How Roman Emperors Invented Christianity by James Valliant and Warren Fahy. But my verdict is now in. Its thesis is bogus. Its method of argument is tediously amateurish. And its only significant evidence appears to be fabricated. Backstory Valliant and Fahy are advancing yet […]

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