Why You Should Not Believe the Apostle John Wrote the Last Gospel

This month I have been showcasing how apologetics is fundamentally bankrupt methodologically. It depends on fallacious reasoning, held up as sound and professional, yet which adheres to the methods of no actual legitimate academic field—except those very fields...

How We Know Daniel Is a Forgery

Even the historicity of Daniel the man is dubious. Unlike other prophets, he has no patronymic, profession, or place of origin, and he first appears in historical records when “Ezekiel the priest, the son of Buzi, by the Kebar River in the land of the...

Pearce’s New Take-Down of Resurrection Apologetics Is a Must-Have

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...

Hitler’s Table Talk: The Definitive Account

I have written many times before on the strange history of my scholarly involvement in the so-called “Table Talk” of Adolf Hitler. The most prominent example is the inclusion of my peer reviewed article in German Studies Review, with a new epilogue and...

Imperial Roman Economics as an Example of an Overthrown Consensus

My dissertation advisor at Columbia University was William V. Harris, who employed his own Ph.D. in straightforward political history to cultivate a wide range of specializations in ancient Roman history, ranging from dream culture to history of emotions, to ancient...

No, Christianity Was Not Invented in the 4th Century

And yes. We know that for a fact. Like QAnon, which is a new secular religion spreading, quite bizarrely, across the globe, I have noticed another strange conspiracy theory gaining popularity and spreading worldwide: the belief that Christianity was invented in the...

A Few More Attempts to Rescue Jesus

A while ago I composed Historicity Big and Small: How Historians Try to Rescue Jesus, summarizing and categorizing the main arguments pushed in a kind of phylogeny. Here I will expand on that by adding a few more arguments, within the same scheme I constructed there....

Some Problems with Modern Kemetic Mythology

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...

The Original Scriptural Concept of ‘The Lord’ Jesus

I recently realized a minor underlying fact in the background knowledge I laid out in my peer-reviewed book On the Historicity of Jesus has gone unnoticed. It seems trivial to me, but too many things do. I realize this stuff I take for granted is really shocking or...

Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Christianity: The First Three Hundred Years

This is part two of my series on Diarmaid MacCulloch’s book and BBC series A History of Christianity, or as the book is sometimes titled, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, referring to the fact that Christianity evolved out of trends that began a...

Diarmaid MacCulloch’s BBC Series on the History of Christianity

I’ve been asked a lot about Diarmaid MacCulloch’s book and BBC series A History of Christianity, or as the book is sometimes titled, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, referring to the fact that Christianity evolved out of trends that began a...

Crucifixion Quake! An Unusual Movie about an Unusual Passion

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...

Ancient Theories of Gravity: What Was Lost?

Everyone rags on Aristotle for totally phoning in his theory of gravity. But in perspective, (a) Aristotle was a biologist, not a physicist, so his not being the best at physics should not be held to any more account than when a modern biologist goofs some esoteric...