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Tim O'Neill Profile picture
Tim O'Neill
@TimONeill007
History writer, medievalist, blogger, atheist, sceptic and expatriate Tasmanian. https://t.co/bsQB7o1C3Q
4 subscribers
Sep 7 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
Wow. Just when I thought I could no longer be surprised by Richard Carrier’s narcissistic self-delusion, he manages to astound yet again. His much ballyhooed follow up to the stinker that was *On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt* (2014) is about to … Image … be released. This new book was also meant to be a peer-reviewed continuation of Carrier’s arguments that no historical Jesus existed. Given that his first book was an academic failure which, to Carrier’s astonishment, convinced no one, I did wonder what new material he ...
Sep 3 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
One third of the way there! Many thanks to those who’ve donated so far. Please help me get Bart Ehrman on History for Atheists to discuss Jesus Mythicism.
If you’ve read my articles, watched my videos, listened to my podcast, linked to my work or tagged me here (all for free) … Image … please help me in this one and only request for donations. I am aiming to get Bart on my channel in November to have a discussion about Mythicism, why it still has some appeal, his responses to it and the historical Jesus generally. And for those of my followers who think …
Sep 2 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
I have to quote-tweet because that weird “Hellenistic” grifter has blocked me for some strange reason. 🤔 I wonder why. 🤣
Anyway, you’re right - the whole the Renaissance” thing is an incoherent nineteenth century construct and part of an artificial modern narrative of … … “Golden Ages” that rise or are revived and “Dark Ages” that have to be shunned and held back. They are part of an Enlightenment mythology that have little to do with actual history and are based on dubious value judgements, weird distortions and total fictions. More below: …
Aug 26 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
What a contrast. Still someone has pointed out that most of the *King and Conqueror* production team were Icelanders, so perhaps the crappy design and terrible costumes and armour were Hardrada’s revenge for Stamford Bridge. Image
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Image And here is the *K&C* Earl Morcar of Northumbria. Yes, just your typical black Anglo-Saxon earl, in his ragged cloak, a pointless leather jerkin (closed at the front, for maximum lack of protection) and his inexplicably diverse wife. It really seems like they’re taking the piss.
Aug 18 • 20 tweets • 5 min read
Yep, this show is going to be *bad*. The luvvies at the BBC have twigged that we "historical purists" might not be impressed with what we've seen of *King and Conqueror*. so they've rolled out the "charming and affable" Nikolaj Coster-Waldau with ...

thetimes.com/culture/tv-rad… ... some carefully scripted talking points. First this article takes a clumsy swipe at we "purists": Image
Jul 30 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
Trying to generalise about the relative intelligence of people in wildly different disciplines is pretty absurd. But that aside, it’s amusing how this STEM bro thinks studying literature or history can be reduced to “people who can read books”. That’s like reducing engineering.. Image … to “people who can draw machines”. I’m reminded of the medicine student I went to university with who was baffled when I said I was considering postgraduate research in history. She said she couldn’t understand how anyone could do original research in history because …
Jun 26 • 16 tweets • 4 min read
Here's the latest example of Hysterical Hypatia (Pseudo)History. And it's a doozy. The account @HistContent , which may or may not be a bot, starts things off with an AI generated image of ... presumably Hypatia. Hard to say, but why a Late Roman aristocratic woman of Hellenic... ... ancestry would be dressed as a Hollywood Pharaonic Egyptian dancing girl, complete with a kind of Las Vegas gold lamé bikini is not clear. Why an ascetic Neoplatonic philosopher would be dresssed this way makes the mystery deeper here. But whatever.
The text is about as ...
Jun 20 • 36 tweets • 8 min read
Here we go again. The capacity of some people to clutch desperately at the pop history cartoon version of the Galileo Affair and scream at anyone who tries to modify or correct their uninformed dogmatic views is astounding.
In the latest episode, a certain ... ... "litigator, attorney" called Dilan Esper (@dilanesper - he's now blocked me 🙄) made some statements about Galileo based on commonly held misconceptions. When he was mildly corrected by a number of people who actually know what they're talking about (@MichalYouDoing, ...
Jan 6 • 18 tweets • 4 min read
No sensible person would get their history from the BBC drama *Rogue Heroes*, which tells a slightly fanciful, "boys own adventure" version of the beginnings of the SAS in WWII. The show itself warns in its credits that it isn't really history. But its depiction of a Nazi flag... Image ... in a Catholic Church in Sicily and the commentary on this by Lt. Paddy Mayne is likely to reinforce some myths about the Church and the Nazis and probably tells us more about writer Steven Knight's attitudes rather than anything historical.
The book by ...
Dec 23, 2024 • 23 tweets • 5 min read
Tis the season for weak apologetics to try and get around the historical issues with the Infancy Narratives in gMatt and gLuke: i.e. what the great Jewish scholar Geza Vermes called "exegetical acrobatics". This guy Huff doesn't actually make a strong case for any particular ... ... way to get around the ten year discrepancy between the two gospel accounts of Jesus' birth, he just throws out about three and hopes one of them is convincing - a kind of scattergun technique.
The essential problem here is that the gLuke account says Jesus was born during ...
Nov 25, 2024 • 28 tweets • 6 min read
The idea that the "real" cause of the 1633 trial of Galileo was that "he was a huge dick to the Pope" is not the most egregious myth about the Galileo Affair, but it's still essentially wrong. The frustrating thing is that it's almost right and is often argued as a counter ... Image ... to other, more common and more erroneous myths. But it's wrong.

The claim is that the Church didn't really care about the scientific debate (true, up to a point) and were happy to leave Galileo to speculate along with other astronomers (also true, up to a point), but ...
Nov 19, 2024 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
It's rare for me to have to correct overly *positive* claims about the Middle Ages - usually I have to deal with the old "Dark Ages" myths. This meme gets some things right, overstates others and goes a bit bonkers on a few more. Taking each claim in turn:
1. True. At least, ... ... far more common than the pop history/Hollywood cliche that people didn't bathe at all. Bath houses did a brisk business, bathing in rivers was common in warm weather and baths were enjoyed at home by the more wealthy. And washing is not the same thing as bathing. People ...
Nov 16, 2024 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Okay, so I've decided not to go the nuclear option and leave this crap hole completely. I'll stay here and keep fighting the fight against bad history. But it seems the #Xodus is real and the "Place Where Skies Are Blue" has become a geniunely great place for discussion of ... ... history, scholarship and books - minus the ads, Nazis. weirdos, conspiracists and AI sludge. I'm still not sure how I'll use this new platform and probably, as it grows, it will need vigorous debunking of bad history there as well. But, for now, I really like it as a ...
Oct 12, 2024 • 21 tweets • 5 min read
Once again Space Karen's "X"/Twitter has served up some utter weirdness. Yesterday the algorithm gave me this strange claim with a screenshot of some kind of journal article. 🧵 Image Okay, any tweet with the words "... the Roman Empire collapsed because ... " should immediately set off a historian's alarm bells. When it's followed by something that looks statistics-based or generally sciencey, the bells should ring louder. A quick look at the account ...
Jul 10, 2024 • 21 tweets • 5 min read
Weird right wing grifter: “Feudalism was great!”
Various random non-historians: “No, it was a terrible system!”
Actual medieval historians: “Ummm, the ‘feudalism’ of your high school textbooks was based on simplistic nineteenth century constructs and never actually existed.”
Image To elaborate on why "feudalism" never existed:-
Everyone has seen those pyramid diagrams that explain how "medieval society worked", with the king at the top, barons and lords on lower levels and the poor peasants at the bottom. Kids' textbooks explain that the king owned ... Image
Jun 17, 2024 • 35 tweets • 8 min read
Wow. I've read some misinformation and plenty of racist crap on this site since Space Karen took over, but the thread below is next level garbage. This "Yevarժiaղ" person (@haravayin_hogh) describes themselves as "Ismaili Crypto-Zoroastrian". Umm, okay.
In a classic case of "beware the man with just one book", this person has taken a dubious polemical work by one non-specialist and a brief holiday in Tasmania and then written a thread detailing how vile and primitive Aboriginal Tasmanians were pre-colonisation. And hoo boy, ...
Apr 17, 2024 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Here is everything I hate about current Twitter in one vile tweet: bad history, antisemitism, Christian nationalism, racist conspiracy theory and massive stupidity, all in one toxic cluster of festering crap. 🤬 Image For the record, there are NO contemporary references to Jesus (not that we’d expect any for a Galilean peasant preacher), so the claim we have contemporary descriptions of him is immediately nonsensical. All the claimed “descriptions” are later fantasies.
The so-called …
Apr 14, 2024 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
@GraniRau Another pile of nonsense.
(i) THey put *uncorrected* copies of Copernicus on the Index. This meant copies had to have a few corrections pasted in that made it clear the cosmology was a hypothesis, not a fact. This injunction was also totally ignored outside Italy. So it hardly... @GraniRau ... mattered at all as a restriction on the book. And this was in 1616 , in reaction to the writings on *theology* by Galileo and Foscarini. So that's a full 73 years after Copernicus published and 106 years after he first began publicising his theory. If the problem was just ...
Mar 28, 2024 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
This thread is ... 🙄 ugh. So @Gennerveevy is a "Science and Mathematics Educator, Intersectional Feminist" and so feels qualified to lecture people about history, for some reason.
"Eostre is a Spring goddess in Germanic pagan religions" she informs us. Except we have no actual evidence that Eostre ...
Mar 27, 2024 • 31 tweets • 6 min read
Well, @Peter_Fitz I've read *Dark Emu* and quite a bit about it and its author. So I know it needs to be handled with extreme care, since it's a flawed book that has become a political football in an ongoing culture war.
So, a thread ... 🧵 For those outside Australia, *Dark Emu* is a non-fiction book by Bruce Pascoe that became a bestseller when it was published in 2014. Written by an amateur and aimed at a popular audience, the book argued that Australian Aboriginal people were not the semi-nomadic hunter ...
Mar 24, 2024 • 28 tweets • 6 min read
This tweet by @AdvanceHumanism is a perfect encapsulation of the low level, cartoonish grasp of the history of science that many online anti-religion activists operate with. Essentially, every single statement he makes here is wrong. No historian of science would agree with ... ... *any* of these claims. So, a thread. 🧵
Let's begin with "science persisted in spite of church suppression". This is a classic statement of the old Conflict Thesis, aka the Draper-White Thesis - the nineteenth century idea that religion has been trying to suppress science ...