41 Reasons We’re, Like, Totes Sure Jesus Existed!

9 May 2015

People often ask me about Christian apologist James Bishop’s “41 Reasons Why Scholars Know Jesus Really Existed.” Because it’s the highest number of reasons anyone has attempted to claim (apart from the 10/42 apologetic, which Matthew Ferguson...

Biblical Archaeology Review = Crappy Christian Propaganda Mag

7 March 2015

In further preparation for my upcoming defense of On the Historicity of Jesus at the SBL regional meeting, someone clued me in to an awful piece on the historicity issue published by BAR: Lawrence Mykytiuk (I assume that means this guy), “Did Jesus Exist?...

A Bayesian Brief on Comments at TAM

26 August 2014

I was asked about remarks made by Chris Guest (President of the Australian Skeptics, Victorian Branch) at this year’s TAM. He gave a quick twenty minute talk on Bayesian reasoning and its abuses, with which I entirely concur. (This talk begins with Guest’s...

Strange Notions: Questioning the Historicity of Jesus

26 September 2013

The Catholic website Strange Notions asked me to write two brief articles on why questioning the historicity of Jesus is more plausible than commonly assumed. I was asked to respond to two earlier challenges to that thesis on their site, written from the perspective...

Is This Not the Carpenter?

11 July 2012

A new book questioning the historicity of Jesus has just come out, with academic contributors of some esteem: Is This Not the Carpenter? The Question of the Historicity of the Figure of Jesus (a publication of the Copenhagen International Seminar: Equinox, 2012),...

Ehrman’s Dubious Replies (Round Two)

29 April 2012

As promised Friday, here I shall reply to Ehrman’s longest reply to me to date (in Fuller Reply to Richard Carrier, mostly responding to my critique of his book). I won’t rehash the points I already addressed in my previous response (see Round One). Here...

Ehrman on Jesus: A Failure of Facts and Logic

19 April 2012

Having completed and fully annotated Ehrman’s new book Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth (Harper 2012), I can officially say it is filled with factual errors, logical fallacies, and badly worded arguments. Moreover, it completely...

Herod the Procurator

6 January 2012

Herod the Great (you know, that guy in the Bible who killed all those babies, but didn’t really) was a procurator. (WTF is a procurator? Don’t worry, I’ll get to that.) In fact, Herod wasn’t just any procurator. He was the chief procurator of...