Jim Hall of the Atheist Edge show will be taking my class this month (starting today, but you can register and jump in anytime this first week) with an aim to test and review it, and maybe challenge it and assess how it could be improved. He’d love more students...
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...
Want to see some high-quality, in-person interviews of me about my work? Good audio, good video, good editing, good questions? Then please help fund Derek Lambert’s new project! Lambert needs a budget to fly out to the mountains of California where I live and...
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...
Dawkins is spewing irrational, uninformed bigotry-fuel on Twitter again. I don’t think deliberately; he’s just a clueless fool. But the effect is the same. He even unknowingly chose the tired old bigot’s tactic of Just Asking Questions, in precisely...
I’ve written on biogenesis before (and before that). It’s even one of the subjects in philosophy in which I’ve had peer reviewed research published. And I have a whole section on it in Sense and Goodness without God, my survey of naturalism as a...
I just updated my social media guide. And it’s been a while, so you might want to check that out. It explains in more detail the differences among what I publish on my various social media and how to take advantage of that. Because only watching my blog or...
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...
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...
It’s not common that major, respected academic journals exhibit a catastrophic failure in their peer review process. But it happens. Everything from creationist dribble to just about anything in any field has “slipped past” peer review protocols in...
Dennis MacDonald and I have discussed the question of Jesus’s historicity many times over the years. These are among the most important kinds of discussions to have, as MacDonald isn’t a Christian apologist and actually agrees the Gospels are almost...
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....
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...
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...
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...
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...
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.