On the Historicity of Jesus: The Daniel Gullotta Review

Two academic reviews of On the Historicity of Jesus now exist: one positive by Raphael Lataster published in the Journal of Religious History (38.4, 2014, pp. 614-16); and one negative by Daniel Gullotta published in the Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus...

Last Minute Christmas Shopping? Check Out My New Amazon Store!

Amazon eliminated its astore feature. But I’m still an Amazon Associate. So here I am, recommending a whole slew of books for commissions on the sale if I can tempt you to buy any! I’ve built my own stores. Smaller. A lot fewer books listed. But the core...

My Debate with Ray Comfort: Can Moral Facts Exist without a God?

Last Saturday, I was recruited to live-debate Ray Comfort on Facebook. That’s right. The banana man himself. Warlock to Kirk Cameron’s imp. Mr. “Everyone Is an Adulterer” (including Mother Theresa and that unborn fetus over there). Topic? “Can...

The Difference Between a Historian and an Apologist

Larry Hurtado’s latest foot-in-mouth affords a good opportunity to explain what the difference is between an apologist and a historian. Not in respect to their goals (apologists need to defend a position even when it’s false or indefensible; historians...

The Bizarre Fugue of Larry Hurtado

Biblical historian Larry Hurtado went on a rant against mythicism recently. In which, once again, like nearly every other expert has done, all he does he give excuses for not reading the peer reviewed literature of his own field and (as one could then have predicted)...

Was Roman Science in Decline? (Excerpt from My New Book)

My new book The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire will be in print in just a few days! You can already pre-order it in print or kindle. But in celebration and promotion, I’m here producing an excerpt from it. You can read a bit more about the book at...

Mastering the New Testament Skeptically: My Christmas Online Course!

Want to study the Reason for the Season this December? Christmas is coming! So you should know how to critically examine the Book that it sort of almost loosely isn’t based on. The best fake news ever. Master how to debate and understand the Bible skeptically...

Road School 201: 100,000 Miles of Weird Experience

I’ve been on the road, all across the U.S. and Canada, for almost four months now. I’ve driven across it many times before that. For years. I’ve logged tens of thousands of miles of driving along our nation’s greatest and smallest highways. And...

How Did Christianity Switch to a Historical Jesus?

If Jesus didn’t exist, if he was originally believed to have lived and died in outer space, how did our Christianity come to exist? How could an earthly Jesus just get invented like that, and the original view of him forgotten? That’s the question Jonathan...

Did the Environment Kill Rome?

An article at Vox argues that environmental disasters destroyed the Roman Empire: “6 Ways Climate Change and Disease Helped Topple the Roman Empire,” by Kyle Harper, a professor of classics, whose article summarizes his book The Fate of Rome: Climate,...

See Me in Canton, Michigan, with Robert Price!

Muslim YouTuber Ehteshaam Gulam has rescheduled his panel talk between him and Robert Price and myself for Saturday January 13 (2018). Tickets and details are now on EventBrite. Politics, religion, and pop culture will be the topic. Including current events, and...

Speaking in Las Vegas!

I’ve been invited to give a presentation on ancient science by The Center for Science and Wonder in Las Vegas (Nevada), this November 1 (Wednesday), from 7-9pm. I will of course have books to sell and sign. And I’ll be hanging out til late to chat and...
Debating Jesus: A Course on Mastering the Subject!

Debating Jesus: A Course on Mastering the Subject!

Starting November 1, I will be teaching online my course on the historicity of Jesus! If you want to really master this subject, and learn the best arguments and evidence for both sides of that debate; if you want to learn how to critique and destroy mythicism, or...

The Cosmic Seed of David

Nicholas Covington just produced an intersting article on the cosmic seed hypothesis that so vexes Jonathan Tweet (see Jonathan Tweet and the Jesus Debate). In Seed of David, Take Two, Covington makes two valuable points: he correctly frames the logic of the argument...

How to Successfully Argue Jesus Existed (or Anything Else in the World)

In conjunction with my Critical Thinking course this month, and in light of a number of casual debates I’ve been in lately, I’ve drawn up this twelve step advice, which actually applies to all arguments for any conclusions in any subject whatever. But I’ll use...