Bart Ehrman has finally composed an extensive response to my critical review of his book. But before that came out, he composed two briefer responses, one to my review of his Huffington Post article and another to my subsequent review of his book. He also briefly punted to another blogger, R.J. Hoffman. In this post …
Category Archive: ancient history
Apr 08 2012
Jesus Myth on CNN.com
The Jesus myth vs. history debate just got covered on CNN.com for Easter Sunday. The article, by John Blake, is “The Jesus Debate: Man vs. Myth.” Blake interviewed me and several others on both sides of the issue, and put together a sort of okay article reflecting common views on both sides, although it’s a …
Mar 25 2012
McGrath on the Amazing Infallible Ehrman
James McGrath responded to my reply to Ehrman’s intemperate and badly worded assault on the theory that Jesus was mythical (McGrath: Responding to Richard Carrier’s Response to Bart Ehrman), and as such represents exactly what is wrong with defenders of historicity: carelessness, post hoc rationalization, and factual error. I shall examine these flaws in detail, …
Feb 29 2012
Amazing Proofs of Jesus!
There seems to be an odd rise the last year or so in forgeries or other bogus claims of “archaeological” finds attesting to first century Christianity. In actual fact, we have no (that’s zero) archaeological evidence pertaining to Jesus or Christians from the first century (and very, very little even from the second). But last …
Jan 26 2012
B.C.A.D.C.E.B.C.E.
You may know there are two conventions for representing historical years: the traditional A.D. and B.C., and the chic new C.E. and B.C.E. (if you don’t know about that, Wikipedia will get you up to speed). People often ask me why I use one or the other, or what (as a historian) I think we …
Jan 06 2012
Herod the Procurator
Herod the Great (you know, that guy in the Bible who killed all those babies, but didn’t really) was a procurator. (WTF is a procurator? Don’t worry, I’ll get to that.) In fact, Herod wasn’t just any procurator. He was the chief procurator of the entire Roman province of Syria. Holy crap! That’s amazing! Er…or …
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