God’s Not Dead 2: Historicity Boogaloo

The best thing about this film is that it lies to the audience. Because we live in the age of the Internet. So anyone who ever thinks to fact-check it will find out they’ve been lied to. And that may do more damage to their faith than any atheist they may ever...

Two Lessons Bart Ehrman Needs to Learn about Probability Theory

A reader pointed something out to me that was a fantastic facepalm moment. It’s another demonstration of how Bart Ehrman doesn’t know how epistemic probability works, and not only hasn’t read On the Historicity of Jesus, he doesn’t even know...

Ehrman and James the Brother of the Lord

On the matter of the historicity of Jesus, Bart Ehrman has replied to what I recently summarized about the problems with Paul’s reference to brothers of the Lord in the Epistles. In Carrier and James the Brother of the Jesus (already distorting his facts in the...

The Ehrman-Price Debate

The Mythinformation Con Historicity of Jesus debate last Friday was disappointing to many. To be fair to Robert Price, he is in failing health. And he’s a sweet guy. But I have to be honest. Even granting that, he didn’t respond to hardly anything Ehrman...

Speaking at Edinboro, Pennsylvania!

The Anthropology Club at Edinboro University has invited me to speak on Bayes’ Theorem Is the Logic of Historical Argument: A Demonstration Comparing the Historicity of Jesus and John Frum. That’s right, I’m going to compare Bayesian arguments for two...

Virgin Birth: It’s Pagan, Guys. Get Over It.

The deep anxiety of Christians is often revealed in their desperation to convince themselves they aren’t just new fangled pagans who stole everything from other religions. The virgin birth is a classic example, and the fact-challenged ill-logic of trying to deny...

On the Historicity of Jesus: The Tim Hendrix Critique

Tim Hendrix, a mathematician, recently published an inaccurate critique of my book On the Historicity of Jesus. This is my analysis of where he went wrong. Hendrix wrote a critique of my book Proving History: Bayes’s Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus a...

Lena Einhorn on the Claudian Christ Theory

Editor, physician and documentarian Lena Einhorn has written a book, A Shift in Time, arguing a new theory of the historical Jesus: that he actually was a violent rebel from the era of Claudius, who was later whitewashed into a pacifist from the era of Tiberius. My...

Dating the Corinthian Creed

I’m so frequently asked this that I need to publish a general answer everyone can refer to. It usually amounts to something like this: I keep hearing Christian apologists insisting the Corinthian Creed (1 Cor. 15:3-8) can be reliably dated to the 30s A.D., just...

Analysis of the Carrier-Evans Debate

In April of 2016 I debated Professor Craig Evans, a renowned Evangelical professor of Christianity from Houston Baptist University, on whether Jesus actually existed as a historical person. The debate was held at Kennesaw State University in Georgia, sponsored by...

Dykstra on Ehrman & Brodie

Rene Salm has clued me in to another important new peer reviewed journal article, by Tom Dykstra (M.Div.; Ph.D. in Russian History), who is best known for his critically acclaimed book on how the Gospel of Mark is built out of the Epistles of Paul (Mark, Canonizer of...

Bart Ehrman Just Can’t Do Truth or Logic

Bart Ehrman was again asked what evidence there is that Jesus existed this February 18, 2016, at Fresno City College. See the video here (he begins his answer at timestamp 23:18). First he says this: I don’t think there is any doubt that Jesus existed. There are a...

We Weep for John Tors

I mentioned a couple days ago the John Tors travesty, an outraged attempt to “rebut” the Macleans article questioning the historicity of Jesus. His ignorance is only exceeded by his arrogance. And it’s all just so sad to behold....

Historicity Apologists: Their Own Worst Enemy

Brian Bethune has published a good article on the historicity question for Macleans, a leading Canadian magazine. Titled Did Jesus Really Exist?, his article presents a pretty fair assessment of the debate (after summarizing recent developments in the field calling...

Announcing The Richard Carrier Exists Tour!

I may be visiting your town soon! And I may need your help. I’ll explain in a moment. But here’s the basic idea… Because Christians don’t understand how evidence works, they’ve literally argued that there is no more evidence for my...