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 a “dark age” of unrelieved brutality, ignorance, oppression and backwardness. So today David and I will be talking about the concept of the Medieval Period as “a dark age”, the origins of this idea and why it’s a poor way of understanding a complex 1000 year period of history.

https://www.davidmperry.com/the-bright-ages/

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 and best practices for provenance research and conservation has been widely publicised in academic venues as well as in mainstream media. He presently works as a public facing scholar, and runs a YouTube channel where he regularly features videos and lectures promoting quality scholarship of the Bible.

Today I’ll be talking to Kipp about Jewish apocalyptic thought, apocalyptic writings and the relevance of these to an understanding of the historical Jesus.

Kipp’s video channel can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/@DrKippDavis

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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 as a rationalist and her murder was due to the complex city politics of her day, not some hatred of science and scholarship.

Further Reading

Alan Cameron, “Hypatia: Life, Death, and Works” in Wandering Poets and Other Essays on Late Greek Literature and Philosophy, pp. 37-80, (Oxford, 2016)

Thony Christie, “Hypatia – What do we Really Know?”, Renaissance Mathematicus, 2019

Maria Dzielska, Hypatia of Alexandria, (Harvard, 1995)

Peter Gainsford, “Cosmos #3 – Hypatia and the Library”, Kiwi Hellenist, 2018

Christopher Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity: Topography and Social Conflict (John Hopkins, 1997)

Spencer Alexander McDaniel, “Who was Hypatia Really?”, Tales of Times Forgotten, 2018

Edward J. Watts, Hypatia: The Life and Legend of an Ancient Philosopher, (Oxford, 2017)

Bryan J. Whitfield, “The Beauty of Reasoning: A Reexamination of Hypatia of Alexandria”, The Mathematics Educator, Vol.6:1 (1995), pp. 14-21

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 version of a thesis scholars developed in the late nineteenth century. But Philipp and several other recent scholars have bolstered an alternative theory that seems to fit the evidence better, as he’ll discuss with me today.

Further Reading

Steven Hijmans, “Sol Invictus, the Winter Solstice, and the Origins of Christmas”, Mouseion, Series III, Vol. 3, 2003, pp. 377-98 and his monograph Sol: Image and Meaning of the Sun in Roman Art and Religion Vol. 1 (Brill, 2022).
Thomas C. Schmidt, “Calculating December 25 as the Birth of Jesus in Hippolytus’ ‘Canon’ and ‘Chronicon’” Vigiliae Christianae Vol. 69, No. 5 (2015), pp. 542-563.
Philipp Nothaft, “Early Christian Chronology and the Origins of the Christmas Date: In Defense of the ‘Calculation … Theory'” Questions Liturgiques, 94 (2013), pp. 247-65.

My guest today is Professor Ken Dark. Ken is Visiting Professor at King's College and formerly Professor of Archaeology and History at the University of Reading. His archaeological work has focused on Late Antiquity and the Byzantine Era, but, as he and I will discuss, this led him to study sites in Nazareth which will be the focus of our discussion today. His analysis of these sites is the focus of his new book  Archaeology of Jesus’ Nazareth (Oxford University Press, 2023) which draws on several papers he has published based on his examination of sites and finds in Nazareth. In today’s conversation we talk about the evidence regarding the town of Nazareth in Jesus’ time and, of course, eventually get to Rene Salm's crackpot theory that there was no such town in Jesus' time. This is a theory so stupid that even most Jesus Mythicists reject it, but it still has currency among far too many non-believers. Ken Dark will help us to understand why it’s complete nonsense.

Further Reading 

Dark, K., Archaeology of Jesus' Nazareth (Oxford University Press, 2023)

Dark, K., Roman-period and Byzantine Nazareth and its Hinterland (Routledge: London, 2020) 

Dark, K., The Sisters of Nazareth Convent - A Roman-Period, Byzantine and Crusader Site in Central Nazareth (Routledge: London, 2021) 

History for Atheists: Jesus Mythicism 5 - The Nazareth "Myth".

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 … the other way around? In this interview, I speak with Dr Joseph A. P. Wilson of Fairfield University and explore these questions.

(Note to listeners: my apologies for the clicking in the background at various points in this conversation. It seems it was feedback from my headset’s mic.)

Further Reading:

Joseph A. P. Wilson, “Recasting Paul as a Chauvinist within the Western Text-Type Manuscript Tradition: Implications for the Authorship Debate on 1 Corinthians 14.34-35”, Religions, 2022, 13(5), p. 432

Ally Kateusz, “Women Leaders at the Table in Early Churches”, Pricilla Papers, Spring 2020, Vol. 34, No. 2. https://www.cbeinternational.org/resource/women-leaders-table-early-churches/

Dr Ally Kateusz on Early Christian Women: https://allykateusz.org/

Some atheists and even some prominent scientists claim that the Black Death was caused or at least made worse by a wholesale massacre of cats ordered by the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages. But is this true? And where did this strange story come from?

My guest today is Sebastian Major, writer and presenter of the excellent "Our Fake History" podcast. Sebastian recently presented a three part episode on the Galileo Affair, debunking the many historical myths surrounding Galileo. He did a fine job, but he also took on board some criticisms I had of what he said. And so he was also happy to come on "History for Atheists" to discuss Galileo, how hard it is to get complex history right and some thoughts about the persistence of bad history in the popular sphere.

I highly recommend Sebastian's work on "Our Fake History" and would encourage everyone to subscribe and listen to Sebastian's work: https://ourfakehistory.com/

On Galileo, there is my three part interview with Thony Christie which goes into what really happened and why in some depth. And there is also my article on the theological background and some myths about the 1633 trial:
https://historyforatheists.com/2022/0...

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. Unfortunately, many anti-theistic polemicists cannot resist a chance to get in a jab at any aspect of Christianity being “really pagan”, so every October we see supposed rationalists parroting pseudo history about the “pagan origins of Halloween”, with no sign of any fact-checking, let alone engagement with scholarship. In fact, the claim that Halloween is “pagan” is largely a nineteenth century myth.

My guests today are David Hutchings and James C. Ungureanu, co-authors of Of Popes and Unicorns: Science, Christianity and How the Conflict Thesis Fooled the World. David is a physicist, science teacher and writer and James is a historian of science and religion. In this interview we discuss their book and the origin and impact of the Conflict Thesis - the pervasive but erroneous idea that religion and science have always been in conflict down the ages.

To buy the book: Of Popes and Unicorns: Science, Christianity and How the Conflict Thesis Fooled the World .

And for debunkings of many of the myths the Conflict Thesis is founded on, see History for Atheists: The Great Myths.