History for Atheists

• Dr Nathan Johnstone Interview - New Atheist Bad History

  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 great pleasure to get the chance to sit down with him and discuss this subject. We talk less about the examples of anti-theistic bad history and more about why the New Atheist movement tends to bungle history so badly and the sources and motivations of the flawed historiography their arguments depend on. We also discuss whether the New Atheist moment has passed. 

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• Dr David Perry Interview - The "Dark Ages"

  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/

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• Dr Kipp Davis Interview - Jewish Apocalypticism

  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/@DrKippDavisShare this:

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• Hypatia - Myths and History

  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 ReadingAlan 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, 2019Maria Dzielska, Hypatia of Alexandria, (Harvard, 1995)Peter Gainsford, “Cosmos #3 – Hypatia and the Library”, Kiwi Hellenist, 2018Christopher Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity: Topography and Social Conflict (John Hopkins, 1997)Spencer Alexander McDaniel, “Who was Hypatia Really?”, Tales of Times Forgotten, 2018Edward 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

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• Dr Philipp Nothaft Interview - The Date of Christmas

  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 ReadingSteven 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.

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