Apocalyptic
There is a common line of argument among the more naïve believers in Jesus Mythicism that goes “the stories of Jesus are full of miracles and other non-historical elements. So if any of them are not historical, why not all of them?” This all-or-nothing thinking is based on the idea that if any part of these accounts can be concluded to be not historical, this means the rest of them are as well: “it’s all made up”. But even in…
That religion is uniquely prone to violence is a truism anti-theistic atheists assume almost without question. The cliché that more people have died in wars over religion than any other cause is a unassailable dictum among atheist activists, and religious violence is a driving motivation for their zealotry. But, on closer inspection, this idea becomes increasingly incoherent and actually leads several New Atheists into some ethically paradoxical positions. The idea that religion is essentially and particularly violent is a founding…
Derek Lambert, the enthusiastic and open-minded host of the MythVision podcast and video channel, was kind enough to have me on as a guest. Derek is someone who has been both a Christian and then a Jesus Mythicist, but is now exploring ideas about the historical Jesus and the origins of Christianity with a broad range of guests. It was a pleasure to speak with him and explore the problems with Jesus Mythicism in a fairly long and wide ranging…
It is always nice to be invited to speak to other atheists and to highlight the work I do here on History for Atheists. This week I had the pleasure of talking to Davidian from Answers in Reason in a live discussion which was mainly about the historical Jesus but also on how history is analysed, the nature of ancient source material and the problem of atheist bad history and anti-theist tribalism. We did not get to cover many other…
When discussing the historicity of Jesus and debating the claims of Jesus Mythicists I often come across people who take the view that there may be at least some historical basis for Jesus, but there was no single historical person. They claim he was an amalgam of many different figures from the time, not one man. These people rarely back this idea up with evidence-based argument, but when they do, it does not stand up to critical scrutiny. The “Amalgam…
For over a century, scholarship on the origins of Christianity has been dealing with a fundamental issue – the Jesus in the earliest Christian texts is presented as preaching an eschatological message about an imminent apocalypse. Despite ongoing rearguard actions, the idea that the historical Jesus was a Jewish apocalyptic prophet remains the most likely interpretation of the evidence. A Galilean Peasant’s World If in the early first century AD a preacher appeared in a Galilean village proclaiming repentance in…