In celebration of our blog 10 year anniversary on April 18, I’ve decided to post the past ten years posts that were posted on April 18 of each year!   Here is the first, from April 18, 2012.  You will notice (if you pay attention to how I write these posts), that I was even more thin-skinned, defensive, and argumentative than I am now!  Ha.  I thought about editing these then thought, ah, why?  In this first from ten years ago, I was responding to an accusation that I don’t do my own work. (!)

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I was surprised, shocked, dismayed, incredulous, and well, OK, pretty ticked off and aggravated when some of the mythicists that I deal with in my book, Did Jesus Exist, went on the attack and made it personal.   Let me make a confession: before getting ready to do this Blog, and getting into Facebook as a preparation for it, I had no idea how grimy the Internet can be.   It is one messy place.  I know, I know – welcome to the 21st century!

One of the charges against me that is being made is not just atrociously wrong but insulting to my integrity, something I take very seriously.  It’s one thing to have a disagreement about how to interpret historical data; it’s another thing to charge a scholar with dishonesty.  The first instance I know of the charge was suggested by Achyra S on her blog, and most forcefully by Robert Price on his podcast.  The charge is that I did not actually do any of the research for Did Jesus Exist myself, but that I had my Research Assistants (RA’s) read the mythicist literature for me and I relied on what they summarized (poorly, is the implication) for the comments I make about it.

This is wrong, wrong, wrong.

Let me explain how I use my RAs generally, then say something about their role in Did Jesus Exist.
I’ll start at the beginning.  Most senior professors at research universities are given, in addition to their salary, a research budget.  My colleagues at UNC and around the country

I get a bit feisty here.  Most of my posts, though, aren’t about me but about the NT and early Christianity.  Join the blog and get tons of content, with access to archives going back five years! Click here for membership options