History for Atheists - New Atheists Getting History Wrong!

Interview – Bart Ehrman on Jesus Mythicism

November 30, 2025 Tim O'Neill Comments 27 comments

My very special guest today is Professor Bart Ehrman. Bart will need no introduction for most people, but in case you aren’t aware: he is the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author of over 30 books on early Christianity and New Testament studies, including the best sellers Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why and Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in…

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Review – Alice Roberts “Domination: The Fall of the Roman Empire and the Rise of Christianity”

October 30, 2025 Tim O'Neill Comments 59 comments

Alice Roberts, Domination: The Fall of the Roman Empire and the Rise of Christianity, (Simon and Schuster, 2025), 413 pp. There is no shortage of excellent books on both the end of the Roman Empire and on the formation of Christendom. Most are by expert historians, many are recent and several are highly accessible works aimed at the general reader. So it may be wondered why another such book has been released and why a non-historian – a biologist –…

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Interview – Dr Dan McClellan on the Hebrew Bible

September 28, 2025 Tim O'Neill Comments 4 comments

My guest today is Dr Dan McClellan. Dan is the presenter of the Data over Dogma podcast and a public educator who has won the Society of Biblical Literature’s 2023 Richards Award for Public Scholarship for his YouTube and TikTok videos on the academic study of the Bible. He is also the author of The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues (2025). Dan holds a Masters in Jewish Studies from Oxford and did…

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The Great Myths 16: The Conflict Between Science and Religion

August 6, 2025 Tim O'Neill Comments 66 comments

The “Conflict Thesis” forms a kind of underlying historical metamyth that informs and undergirds a substantial number of assumptions about history by anti-theist polemicists. This is the assumed and unquestioned idea that Science and Religion have been perpetually at war down the ages. Also known as the Draper-White Thesis or Warfare Model, it is a conception of the history of science that presents religion as the perpetual and consistent enemy of science, technology and progress. It is a pervasive idea…

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Interview – Dr Thomas C. Schmidt on Josephus’ Testimonium

June 30, 2025 Tim O'Neill Comments 12 comments

My guest today is Dr Thomas C. Schmidt of Fairfield University. Tom has just published an interesting new book through Oxford University Press: Josephus and Jesus – New Evidence for the One Called Christ. In it he makes a detailed case for the authenticity of the Testimonium Flavianum; the much disputed passage about Jesus in Book 18 of Flavius Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews. Not only does he argue that Josephus wrote about Jesus as this point in his book,…

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“Rationality Rules” Bungles Tom Holland

May 11, 2025 Tim O'Neill Comments 73 comments

In 2019 public historian Tom Holland published his book Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind, a thematic history examining the ways Christianity has fundamentally influenced western thinking. The book became a best-seller and critical favourite, though it did not sit well with some, particularly those with an animus against Christianity and religion in general. It has been, however, warmly embraced by Christian apologists and this has recently attracted the ire of the YouTube creator Stephen Woodford, known online as…

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Interview – Dr Ada Palmer on Myths of the Renaissance

April 27, 2025 Tim O'Neill Comments 9 comments

My guest today is Dr Ada Palmer, Associate Professor of Early Modern European History at the University of Chicago and author Inventing the Renaissance: Myths of a Golden Age. I must say I haven’t enjoyed reading a book as much as this one in quite some time. Dr Palmer takes the traditional idea of the Renaissance – that it was a glorious rebirth of reason, artistic mastery and secular thinking after a centuries long dark age – and shows this is…

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Did the Pope Apologise to Galileo?

March 23, 2025 Tim O'Neill Comments 19 comments

One regularly repeated element in the mythic version of the Galileo story is the claim that the Catholic Church did not even admit Galileo had been right about heliocentrism until 1992, which is when Pope John Paul II finally issued an apology for his persecution. This factoid forms a satisfying coda to the popular version of the Galileo Affair, when the righteous martyr for reason is finally vindicated and the Church is shown to be an antiquated behemoth, belatedly dragged…

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Interview – Dr Nathan Johnstone on New Atheist Bad History

January 30, 2025 Tim O'Neill Comments 12 comments

My guest today is Dr Nathan Johnstone. Nathan is the author of the excellent 2018 book, The New Atheism, Myth and History: The Black Legends of Contemporary Anti-Religion. Like me, Nathan is an unbeliever. And, like me, he has been concerned at the way many of our more anti-theistic fellow atheists have misused history in their arguments. His book covers many of the same examples of this as the articles on my site History for Atheist, so it was a…

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Pagan Christmas, Again.

December 15, 2024 Tim O'Neill Comments 92 comments

Every year, without fail, we find endless articles, memes and claims on social media about the supposed “pagan origins” of Christmas. As with Halloween and Easter, anti-theist activists find themselves in furious agreement with neo-pagans and even some evangelical Christians that the date and virtually all the main customs and traditions of Christmas are actually pagan. Pop history articles and books are full of these breathlessly confident claims. Except, in fact, very little about Christmas is ancient, less still is…

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