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... Read More Read More The post Interview – Bart Ehrman on Jesus Mythicism appeared first on History for Atheists.

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 –... Read More Read More The post Review – Alice Roberts “Domination: The Fall of the Roman Empire and the Rise of Christianity” appeared first on History for Atheists.

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... Read More Read More The post Interview – Dr Dan McClennan on the Hebrew Bible appeared first on History for Atheists.

The “Conflict Thesis” forms a kind of underlying historial metamyth that informs and undergirds a substantial amount of historical assumptions 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 in... Read More Read More The post The Great Myths 16: The Conflict Between Science and Religion appeared first on History for Atheists.

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,... Read More Read More The post Interview – Dr Thomas C. Schmidt on Josephus’ Testimonium appeared first on History for Atheists.

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... Read More Read More The post “Rationality Rules” Bungles Tom Holland appeared first on History for Atheists.

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... Read More Read More The post Interview – Dr Ada Palmer on Myths of the Renaissance appeared first on History for Atheists.

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... Read More Read More The post Did the Pope Apologise to Galileo? appeared first on History for Atheists.

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... Read More Read More The post Interview – Dr Nathan Johnstone on New Atheist Bad History appeared first on History for Atheists.

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... Read More Read More The post Pagan Christmas, Again. appeared first on History for Atheists.

My guest today is Dr David M. Perry . David is a medieval historian and author of several books, including The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe and the forthcoming Oathbreakers, both co-authored with Matthew Gabriele. He has taught medieval history at Dominican University and is currently the Associate Director of Undergraduate Studies at the University of Minnesota. The Bright Ages sought to refute common misconceptions about the Middle Ages and counter the misconception that this period was... Read More Read More The post Interview – Dr David M. Perry on the “Dark Ages” appeared first on History for Atheists.

The concept of “the Dark Ages” is central to several key elements in much anti-religious polemic. One of the primary myths most beloved by many anti-theists is the one whereby Christianity violently suppressed ancient Greco-Roman learning, destroyed an ancient intellectual culture based on pure reason and retarded a nascent scientific and technological revolution, thus plunging Europe into a one thousand year “dark age” which was only relieved by the glorious dawn of “the Renaissance”. But when this “Dark Age” supposedly... Read More Read More The post The Great Myths 15: What about “the Dark Ages?” appeared first on History for Atheists.

My guest today is Dr Kipp Davis. . Kipp is a biblical scholar and an expert in early Jewish literature and history, with a focus on the Dead Sea Scrolls. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Manchester (2009), has held several professional academic appointments in Europe and North America, and has published widely on the topics related to the Bible, its creation, development and transmission in the Second Temple period. His work on manuscript forgeries in private collections... Read More Read More The post Interview – Dr Kipp Davis on Jewish Apocalypticism appeared first on History for Atheists.

Catherine Nixey, Heresy – Jesus Christ and Other Sons of God (Picador, 2024) 365 pp. British journalist Catherine Nixey’s first foray into popular history, The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, (Macmillan, 2017) received enthusiastic praise by many non-specialist reviewers and an even more rapturous reception by certain polemicists, who relished its fundamentally anti-Christian thesis. It was far less well-regarded by historians who are expert in the periods and topics it covers, who condemned it as biased,... Read More Read More The post Review – Catherine Nixey “Heresy – Jesus Christ and Other Sons of God” appeared first on History for Atheists.

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... Read More Read More The post Hypatia – Myths and History appeared first on History for Atheists.

Along with “the Witch Craze” and “the Crusades”, the violence and oppression of “the Inquisition” is part of a triumvirate of historical atrocities that is usually invoked by anti-theists as proof of the wickedness of Christianity in particular and religion in general. “Everyone knows” these things were evil, even though what most people know about each of these things is largely wrong. This is perhaps most the case with “the Inquisition”; given that there was never a single institution by... Read More Read More The post The Great Myths 14: “The Inquisition” – Myths and History appeared first on History for Atheists.

Here is my annual year in review survey for History for Atheists in 2023. But I am happy to announce the return of the much loved Crappy Golden Orrery Award for the most egregious, boneheaded and/or stupid bad history by an atheist in 2023. A lack of suitable candidates meant it was not awarded last year, but 2023 saw some prime examples of terrible takes on history by anti-theists, with some stiff competition for this unprestigious prize. Tune in to... Read More Read More The post The Crappy Golden Orrery Award 2023 appeared first on History for Atheists.

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... Read More Read More The post Interview – Dr. Philipp Nothaft on the Date of Christmas appeared first on History for Atheists.

Alec Ryrie, Unbelievers – An Emotional History of Doubt (William Collins, 2019) 262 pp. We unbelievers are often mentioned in passing in histories of religion, but there are only a few works of history that focus on those of us who reject religion or who never held religious beliefs at all. This one is by a scholar who is a Christian, but one who strives to give a balanced and nuanced view of how various modern Western strains of unbelief... Read More Read More The post Review – Alec Ryrie “Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt” appeared first on History for Atheists.

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... Read More Read More The post The Closing of the Athenian Academy appeared first on History for Atheists.