The story often told about Hypatia of Alexandria was that she was a great scientist, rationalist and scholar who was brutally murdered by a mob of Christians who hated her knowledge and learning, with her death ushering in the Dark Ages. But this story is mostly nonsense and the real history is far more complex and much more interesting. Contrary to the myths, she was not a modern-style scientist, she was far from an atheist or what we would regard…
My guest today is Dr Philipp Nothaft. Philipp is a Fellow of All Souls Oxford and a historian specializing in astronomy, astrology and calendars in late antiquity, the Middle Ages and early modern Europe. He’s also the author of a key paper on the question of why Christmas falls on December 25th, which is our main topic today. It’s often claimed in pop history that Christians stole a pagan feast day and made it into Christmas, and this is a…
In 529 AD Damascius, the last head of the Academy in Athens, closed down the philosophical school and, with several fellow scholars, went into exile in Persia. This is often portrayed as the final act in “the closing of the western mind” and the beginning of “the darkening age”; the symbolic closing of an institution founded by Plato himself almost a millennium earlier. It is regularly portrayed in popular writing and anti-theist polemic as the end of ancient science and…
My latest guest is Dr Andrew Henry, who is an adjunct professor at George Washington University in Washington DC and a specialist in late antique Mediterranean religion. He is also the writer and presenter of the excellent Religion for Breakfast YouTube channel, where he has several videos debunking claims about the supposed “pagan origins” of Christian festivals. In this conversation we discuss the various claims about the supposed “pagan origin” of the date of and customs surrounding Easter. We go…
Both conservative Christians and many atheist activists point to 1Corinthians 14:34-35 and note how Paul forbids women to speak in church. The Christians do this to maintain that women should not preach and cannot be pastors or priests. The atheists usually do so to hold this up as evidence that Paul was a misogynist and Christianity is inherently sexist. But did Paul really write this? And was it Christianity which made the Greco-Roman world less egalitarian or was it actually…
Every year fundamentalist Christians, New Agers, neo-pagans and many atheists loudly agree that Easter was not originally a Christian feast and was a pagan fertility festival stolen by Christianity. Unfortunately, despite what endless memes and pop history articles claim, this idea is complete nonsense. So is the claim that Easter eggs and the Easter Bunny are also originally pagan. It is rather ironic that a set of false historical claims about the origin of Easter and its customs are propagated…
The idea that all the traditional holidays and festivals of the year are “pagan” in origin and were simply “stolen by the Church” is one that has permeated popular culture and is repeated without question in newspaper, magazine and online articles. It is perhaps not surprising that harried journalists and underpaid online content writers are uncritical about these claims, but it is more strange that prominent atheists are as well, given they are meant to be sceptics who check their…
Many ideologues want the world’s most reviled man to belong to “the other side”. There are some Christians who claim Hitler was a pagan who led an “atheistic regime” or even that he was an atheist himself. On the other hand, many atheists claim he was a devout Catholic or at least some kind of Christian who was cosy with the churches. So what is true? Was Adolf Hitler an atheist, a neo-pagan occultist or a devout Christian? Or was…
It is traditional that the media be filled with pseudo historical nonsense about the pagan elements of Christmas at this time of year. But atheists who claim to be “working for a more rational world” really should be more careful than harried journalists when presenting the “real history” of the season. Unfortunately, they almost never are. As I have noted here before, the media loves giving dubious background stories on traditions and festivals. At Christmas, it fills column inches or…
Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World (Little, Brown, 2019) 624 pp. Tom Holland is the best kind of popular history writer. He is a good researcher who knows what can be stated with emphasis and what needs to be judiciously hedged. He is a fine story-teller, who can weave bare facts into a smooth and engaging narrative. He is provocative and startling enough to keep the reader on their toes and turning pages. And he is…