Holy balls. Yep. A dude actually said this. Just recently, a Godfearing San Diegan by the name of Francesco Scinico (credentials unknown but probably non-existent) Tweeted: “There’s no contemporary historical evidence for Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus...
A patron has hired me to write a response to an article by an undergraduate “studying the classics at Indiana University Bloomington” called “Was Jesus a Historical Figure?” on her expansive website Tales of Times Forgotten. Her name is Spencer...
I will be giving a lecture in Manhattan, NY, on Sunday, June 23rd (2019), from 12-1pm on the ancient mystery religions and their influence on the earliest known (and thus probably original) formulation of Christianity. This will be at the Center for Remembering and...
Novelist Tom Holland just wrote an article for The Spectator titled “Thank God for Western Values,” declaring the “debt of the West to Christianity is more deeply rooted than many might presume.” Everything he says is false. The Back Story...
A certain Colin Green, sports enthusiast and author of How To Run A Football Club, maintains an amateur Christian apologetics blog called The Truth of Things. Where he wrote a tediously long attempt at rebutting my peer reviewed scholarship in the Journal of Early...
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...
Simon Gathercole gained infamy writing a really atrocious, face-palmingly bad article on the historicity of Jesus for The Guardian some years back. Which I took to task in 2017 (in The Guardian on Jesus). He has now published a proper, peer reviewed article on the...
There’s more news about Hitler! In 2016 I published an update on the saga of Hitler’s Table Talk and its fraudulent or questionable quotations making him out to be an atheist that he wasn’t. That 2016 article contains the background explaining my...
This is the last article in my account of what I learned and heard at the SBL conference in Denver last month. My previous accounts (of the Saturday and Friday I spent there) you can catch up on with those links. Sunday: The Morning Section Sunday morning I attended...
The SBL national conference was massive. Held jointly with the AAR (the American Association of Religion) it occupied the entirety of the enormous Denver Convention Center and seven hotels, each with multiple floors filled with massive ballrooms the size of small...
I attended the SBL conference in Denver this month and spent several days engrossed in observing panel presentations and voting on new motions for the Westar Institute. I’m a member of the SBL and a Westar fellow. But I’ve rarely been able to afford to...
One of the most insurmountable errors in the Bible, being both a historical inaccuracy and a contradiction, is the conflicting dates given to the birth of Jesus in Matthew and Luke. This goof is so terrifying to Christians they have destroyed hundreds of trees and...
In honor of Halloween, here is a fun and informative sample of some weird things said and believed about the risen dead in the ancient world. Rising from the Dead? Always Creepy Tons of heroes, superheroes, gods, and lucky lads rose from the dead in ancient pagan...
Joseph Atwill is a crank. His acolytes at Postflaviana are cranks. They are all conspiracy theory nutcases who prefer wildly, implausibly complex interpretations of history that insist Shakespeare was a black Jewish woman, the writers of Jane the Virgin may have...
Reformed Baptist Josh Sommer has attempted to rebut my peer reviewed paper on the Testimonium Taciteum in Suetonius and Tacitus: Christians or Chrestians? The paper he is talking about is “The Prospect of a Christian Interpolation in Tacitus, Annals...
I’ve been asked about it a lot. So here’s a handy guide to all the tricks pulled by the Jehovah’s Witnesses on their website (JW.org) aimed at fooling people into being sure some Jesus behind the Gospels really existed. I didn’t dive into the...
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.