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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
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 ...
Mar 13, 2024 • 20 tweets • 5 min read
We're still a couple of weeks away from Easter, but the crappy "aCksHuLLy, eAsTer iz pAgan!" memes have begun already. No, actually, it isn't.

The date of Easter is not based on any pagan festival and there is no such festival that fell on the *very* specific date in ... t.co/gkALXSAHKU ... question: the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after 21 March - a fixed approximation of the March equinox. Easter falls on this date for purely Christian and Jewish reasons. The gospels says Jesus died and rose at Passover. So Christians began celebrating ...
Feb 9, 2024 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
Sigh, here we go again ...

(i) No, Hypatia was not "the first woman in history to make contributions in her fields". Centuries before she was born we have references to female scholars like Aspasia, Diotima, Arete, Hipparchia and Pamphile. Closer to her time we have ... ... Pandrosion in Alexandria and Sosipatra in Pergamon. She was also not the first female writer on mathematics.
(ii) There was no "Platonist School" for her to be head of. Like all philosophers in her time, she had her own group of followers and pupils and so she was head ...
Feb 3, 2024 • 24 tweets • 5 min read
Okay, returning to this now that I'm at home and have access to my books on the subject.
So, way back up that thread, you (@AndrewPaulWood) claimed that my noting of Cusa's extensive discussion of multiple worlds was some kind of exception that could be dismissed because he ... ... and Nicole Oresme before him had "protection of high rank within the Church and strategic political importance to the Papacy." So I asked you "who in the time of Oresme, Cusa and Vorilong were persecuted over this idea" knowing the answer was "absolutely no-one". So you ...
Dec 21, 2023 • 25 tweets • 5 min read
Okay, so this incredibly stupid meme is being circulated yet again. This @mzgreen66 person has posted it as though it's somehow credible information and has received 177+ likes and had it reposted 116 times. Despite the fact it's complete crap. Let's count the ways.
... 1. "Mistletoe - pagan fertility ritual" - Like pretty much any plant and animal you care to mention, mistletoe had various pre-Christian traditions associated with it. But none of them involved "fertility" and there is no evidence anywhere of any pagan "ritual" involving ...
Oct 30, 2023 • 21 tweets • 4 min read
Just in time for Halloween, @Medievalists has decided to make work for all real historians of traditions and folklore by posting an article full of outdated and debunked crap. For many decades, historians have worked hard to debunk the endless stream of terrible pop (pseudo) ... ... history articles that flood the media at this time of year perpetuating the antiquarian myth of "the pagan origins of Halloween". So why @Medievalists chose to *perpetuate* those myths with this terrible article is a mystery, but the rest of us will have it thrown in our ...
Aug 24, 2023 • 28 tweets • 6 min read
Did Christian theologians discourage everyone from washing or bathing and cause medieval Christians to avoid hygiene? Short answer - no.
Long answer - a thread 🧵 So let’s start with this tweet and the pooling of ignorance and prejudice in its comments. It makes a contrast between the “pagan virtue” of cleanliness - personified in the goddess Hygieia - and a quote from Jerome declaring no Christian needed a …

Jul 15, 2023 • 20 tweets • 4 min read
It seems @Maximumatheist is the gift that keeps on giving - the kind of "rationalist" who gets his information from memes, which he never questions so long as they conform to his dimwitted confirmation bias. In a discussion on another dumb meme, he rolled out this gem: Image ... I've come across this stupid meme before, though this time I actually stopped to look up who the hell David Cross is. It will surprise no-one that he's an American stand up comic, not a historian. So I suppose he can be forgiven, sort of, for taking a common ignorant ...
Jun 9, 2023 • 29 tweets • 6 min read
More bad history on TikTok. A creator called @romanhelmetguy makes TikTok videos of the "interesting history" variety, while speaking in an odd sing-song intonation and ... umm, wearing a Roman helmet. His most recent effort is about Hypatia of Alexandria - a topic where the ... ... sources are brief, the evidence is hard to parse and which is obscured by centuries of myth and misinformation. Essentially, "Hypatia" has become a legend who bears only a passing resemblance to the historical person. Unfortunately, @romanhelmetguy happily perpetuates many...