History for Atheists

Tim O'Neill
  • 4.0 (17)
  • EDUCATION

Atheist activism has a serious history problem. In the History for Atheists podcast, history writer Tim O'Neill tries to correct the misconceptions many of his fellow atheists have about history and debunks some common myths and fringe ideas about religious history generally.

  1. 12/08/2025

    Prof Bart Ehrman on Jesus Mythicism

    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 the Bible. Those and other books have made him the bête noire of Christian fundamentalists. But his book Did Jesus Exist: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth also made him deeply unpopular – predictably – with Jesus Mythicists, since he holds that fringe theory in very low regard. So today, thanks to generous donations from people I’ll thank by name at the end of this interview, I have the great pleasure of discussing Jesus Mythicism with Dr Ehrman. We cover a lot of ground in just one hour and I’m sure some of what he says is going to set the cat among certain pigeons. So please enjoy my conversation with Professor Bart Ehrman.

    1h 1m
  2. Dr Dan McClellan on the Hebrew Bible

    09/28/2025

    Dr Dan McClellan on the Hebrew Bible

    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 his doctorate in Hebrew Bible Studies under Francesca Stavrakopoulou at Exeter University. Dan spends a lot of his time correcting erroneous and simplistic ideas about the Hebrew Bible, called the Old Testament by Christians, held by Christian fundamentalists and Biblical literalists. But I’ve found many of my fellow atheists have similarly poor understanding of these texts and their cultural contexts. So I invited Dan to discuss what current critical scholarship can tell us about this subject and asked him about some common claims about the Hebrew biblical texts made by atheists. So I hope you enjoy my conversation with Dan McClellan.

    1h 2m

  3. 07/16/2025

    Dr Thomas C. Schmidt on Josephus' Testimonium

    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, but he also argues that the passage we have is substantially what Josephus wrote. This is a distinctive position among scholars, who usually argue that it has at least be significantly changed and added to, with a minority arguing for it being a wholesale interpolation. So I hope you enjoy my conversation with Tom Schmidt about his provocative new book. You can download Tom’s book here: https://josephusandjesus.com/purchase-page/

    1h 39m
  4. Dr Ada Palmer on Myths of "the Renaissance"

    06/01/2025

    Dr Ada Palmer on Myths of "the Renaissance"

    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 almost entirely nonsense. She then takes the reader on a remarkable tour of the people, places and periods we can associate with “the Renaissance” and shows – as usual – the real history is so much more complex, varied and interesting than the pop history cliches. It’s a highly engaging, chatty and personable read  – she manages to make some very complex history rather fun. So it was no surprise to find Ada Palmer is as much fun in person as she is on the page. We had a long discussion about the common misconceptions about the concept of “the Renaissance”, the myth of “the Dark Ages” and the misunderstanding of how secular and non-religious these people and periods were or were not. So I hope you enjoy my conversation with Dr Ada Palmer as much as I did.

    1h 42m
  5. Dr Nathan Johnstone Interview - New Atheist Bad History

    01/30/2025

    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.

    1h 14m
  6. Dr David Perry Interview - The "Dark Ages"

    11/17/2024

    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/

    55 min
  7. Dr Kipp Davis Interview - Jewish Apocalypticism

    07/08/2024

    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/@DrKippDavis Share this:

    1h 32m
  8. Hypatia - Myths and History

    04/06/2024

    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 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

    53 min
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About

Atheist activism has a serious history problem. In the History for Atheists podcast, history writer Tim O'Neill tries to correct the misconceptions many of his fellow atheists have about history and debunks some common myths and fringe ideas about religious history generally.

Information

  • Creator
    Tim O'Neill
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2025
  • Episodes
    29
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2025 History for Atheists
  • Show Website
    History for Atheists