Since we are now a few days into the new year, I have been looking at the statistics for this blog over the last twelve months and thought I would post a short summary, with a few comments.

History for Atheists has been running since October 2015, and so is now into its fourth year of operation. In that time, I am happy to say, it has built up a solid following and has gone some way toward its objective of critiquing those atheists who perpetuate bad history out of ignorance and/or anti-religious bias. As a result, I have received praise and appreciation from many and, of course, denunciation and scorn from others – mainly its targets and their allies.

In 2018 I posted 12 articles, which means I kept last year’s new year resolution to maintain a posting rate of at least one article a month. The longest article was Jesus Mythicism 2: “James, the Brother of the Lord”, at 10,902 words, and the average length of this year’s posts was 5,798 words. They are fairly long, as blog posts go, and given the often obscure subject matter and the depth of detail I try to go into, I am pretty happy with the fact that this blog received 113, 848 vistors in 2018.

The article that got the most traffic in the last twelve months is one first published in May 2017 – Easter, Ishtar, Eostre and Eggs. Since it debunks some of the bad history around Easter and its customs, it seems it is going to get a boost each year and this year its traffic skyrocketed when it was linked to by a couple of online magazines and a link to it was retweeted by some writers and academics with lots of Twitter followers – special thanks to history writer and supporter of this blog, Tom Holland.

Number two this year was my detailed critique of Catherine Nixey’s terrible book – Review: Catherine Nixey “The Darkening Age”. This was also posted in 2017, but got steady traffic all year and a particular spike in June 2018, which was (I think) when Nixey’s silly little book was released in paperback.

Third rank goes to my analysis of Sam Harris and Ben Shapiro’s mangling of ancient and medieval history and the history of science – Sam Harris’ Horrible Histories. This one got most of its traffic in August 2018, the month it was posted, largely because it immediately got linked to Reddit subs by both Harris fans and detractors.

Number four is The Great Myths 5: The Destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria. This is another article that has attracted steady and steadily increasing traffic since I wrote it in July 2017, and this seems to be because the Great Library remains a topic of interest to many. For some reason there were spikes in its views in September and December of 2018, when it seems to have been shared widely on Facebook and Twitter.

In fifth place we have the already mentioned Jesus Mythicism 2: “James, the Brother of the Lord” which, despite its length and overall complexity, is by far the most read of my ongoing Jesus Mythicism series. This seems to be because many recognise that, together, the references to Jesus’ brother James in Galatians 1:19 and Josephus Antiquities XX.200 form a solid nexus of evidence that is extremely hard for Mythicists to dismiss.

Other articles also attract steady and consistent traffic, such as Cats, the Black Death and a Pope, which got a tiny number of views when it was first published back in May 2017 but has since consistently grown in visits and came in the top ten this year. There was a spike in its traffic in October this year, which I suspect has to do with Halloween. A surprising entry in the top ten articles for 2018 is Richard Carrier is Displeased, Again. Given that this is a reply to a response to a reply to a response involving some abstruse arguments around technical points on an obscure topic, I am amazed it has got the traffic it has. Perhaps this is a testament to the continuing decline in the obnoxious and increasingly weird Dr. Carrier’s popularity and credibility.

That Carrier article also attracted one of the highest number of comments for the year, with 136 comments to date. But the one that topped the number of comments for the year was another in the Jesus Mythicism series, Jesus Mythicism 3: “No Contemporary References to Jesus”, which has 221 comments so far. Some of those comments are by drive-by critics, who usually do not stick around, but it is nice to see most of them on all articles are by a growing community of regulars, from all kinds of backgrounds. History for Atheists has 288 signed-up regular followers and a far larger following on Twitter via my 1100 or so followers there.

So thanks to you all for your interest, your contributions and your encouragement. Special thanks, again, to Tom Holland and to Professor Tim Whitmarsh, Professor James F. McGrath and Dame Averil Cameron, all of whom were kind enough to provide me with public endorsements. Your support makes the long hours of reading, annotation, writing and fighting the endless tide of comment spam worthwhile. I should also give a special thank you to the very talented Kyle Curtis, of Non Sequitur Show fame, who used his graphic design skills to allow me to (finally) replace the place-holder header graphic on the blog with something more professional and aesthetic. I did four shows on various topics with the Non Sequitur Show this year and Kyle and Steve were not only highly amusing hosts but also gave many of us hope that at least some activist atheists can practice what they preach when it comes to open-minded and objective consideration that many common historical narratives are actually nonsense. And finally, many thanks to all my detractors as well – you make me laugh, you pathetic twerps. Happy new year everyone.