The Nativity: A Critical Examination

Herod would never have slaughtered the innocents

It's that time of year when those nativity accounts get brought up. And summarily debunked. My book, The Nativity: A Critical Examination, hopefully does a good job of dealing with the many attempts to harmonise the contradictory accounts in Matthew and Luke.

Debate

A Christmas Debate for You

A few years ago, around the time of the release of my book The Nativity: A Critical Examination, Reasonable Doubts hosted a radio podcast debate, pre-recorded, between myself and Randal Rauser. Here is the fruit of our labour, detailing the arguments for and against the historicity of the Nativity accounts.

Featured ATP

It's that Nativity time again!

As I have said before, Holidays are coming, holidays are coming... It's that time of year, you know, the interminable run-up to Christmas when big corporations vie for your hard-earned cash in an attempt to exploit the seasonal goodwill brought on by the imaginary birth of a godmanspirit.

Featured ATP

Holidays are coming, holidays are coming... It's that time of year, you know, the interminable run-up to Christmas when big corporations vie for your hard-earned cash in an attempt to exploit the seasonal goodwill brought on by the imaginary birth of a godmanspirit.

Biblical Exegesis

Why return to an ancestral town for a census?

This excerpt is taken from my book, The Nativity: A Critical Examination, and details why Joseph returning to his ancestral town for a census, as according to Luke is a ridiculous idea.

atheism

Me and Koresh vs the Gospel Writers and Jesus

Christian: Why is it more probable that your god exists than man made him up? We have an exceptionally high prior probability that your god is false given that we both believe that every other god claimed to be true (before and after) is false. Thus, on prior probability, the JC God is HIGHLY

Book Reviews

Cracking review of The Nativity: A Critical Examination

I’ve never written a book review before. Occasionally I’ve considered reviewing books and essays I found to be not only interesting, but enjoyable and enlightening. So I’ve decided that once in a while, when I’ve read something I consider really well done, I would write about it here that I might

Jesus

The historicity of the Nativity

Just to topically remind people of my last authored book, on the Nativity, called The Nativity: A Critical Examination. I recently cleared the book up of a few typographical errors and whatnot so that it is looking better than ever. The book is a concise yet comprehensive look at the

Biblical Exegesis

Merry Christmas Everybody - it never happened though, and here's why (and also why we shouldn't believe anything else about Jesus)...

Christmas is upon us, the season of joy and merriment, the season, it seems, of massacres reminding us of other massacres. I have a book out called The Nativity: A Critical Examination, which is available from the sidebar over there. As a result of the book's release this year, I have been doing a n

Debate

It's Christmas - my Nativity Debate

Here's a reminder about my debate with Randal Rauser which took place last year over the historicity of the nativity accounts. Listen in and enjoy! The post from last year. My nativity book is available from the sidebar over there!

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Slaughter of the innocents

Surely both, that the star appeared and the wise men knew to follow it to find the baby Jesus, was a miracle. Can there be any doubt? So why did it lead them to Jerusalem, the wrong town -- and much worse -- to Herod, who only became aware of His rival after the wise men inquired about the new born

humour

Hilarious book categorisation

My book on the nativity accounts of Jesus, The Nativity: A Critical Examination, seems to have found itself amongst company of dubious reputations. I love that there are four books listed on this Hungarian site, and the three accompanying books are so incongruously linked to mine, or more accurately vice

Bart Ehrman

Ehrman on the Nativity

This is the sort of stuff I talk about in my book The Nativity: A Critical Examination, available from the sidebar over there on your right! From Bart Ehrman's blog: - Christianity In Antiquity (behind a members only wall):

Biblical Exegesis

My Nativity Talk Now a Podcast

I can't remember if I let anyone know, but my talk on the Nativity given to the Portsmouth Skeptics in the Pub group in 2012 is a podcast which can be downloaded or streamed from this link. It follows many of the arguments exhibited in my 2012 book

Gospel of Luke

"Jonathan Pearce Points Out the Many Questions Raised By The Stories of Jesus' Infancy in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke"

Ed Babinski has recently kindly written about my book, The Nativity: A Critical Examination. Here is his post. Thanks, Ed! Jonathan Pearce has composed a book titled, The Nativity: A Critical Examination in which he asks questions like these (to which I have added a few comments myself below-

Biblical Exegesis

How do you solve a problem like Herod?

Over on a previous post and thread, one (Christian) commenter declared that the likes of JP Holding and Jason Engwer had basically dealt with all of the harmonisation issues within the context of the historical problems in the Gospels of Luke and Matthew and their infancy accounts. I will now, as Ra

Debate

The Nativity - a talk, and a debate with apologist Randal Rauser

On Thursday night I gave another talk on the Nativity to the Portsmouth Skeptics in the Pub. The talk was a great success. I was able to establish the case in some good detail as I set out in my last book The Nativity: A Critical Examination. There was a good turnout for the relaunching of PSITP and

Randal Rauser

My first talk on the Nativity, yesterday, went well

So I gave my first public talk on my book The Nativity: A Critical Examination yesterday. It was a bit of a warm up for my next to, being to a group of students at a small conference (very small!) of humanist / atheists representatives from local universities (they were doing

Biblical Exegesis

Mary at the census? Er, no.

Here is my latest video offering to the world of You Tube. Let me know what you think. http://youtu.be/wQdu9dvg16Y

Biblical Exegesis

The hoops the Christian has to jump through to believe the Nativity

I thought I'd re-post this thread from when I was regularly contributing to John's original Debunking Christianity blog. See what you think: I was recently talking, an a thread or two, about the historical implausibility of pretty much all of the claims in both Luke and Matthew with regards to