Seven years ago, Neil registered with WordPress.com and Vridar was born. Thanks, Neil!
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Tim Widowfield
Tim is a retired vagabond who lives with his wife and multiple cats in a 20-year-old motor home. To read more about Tim, see our About page.
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Thank you for providing this excellent site for informed and respectful discussion of cutting-edge scholarship. I have learned a great deal and expect to keep following Vridar for a long time to come.
Hear hear!
I can count on one hand all the websites that I visit regularly. This is one of them.
I can count on one hand, too. HBV!
Tim, can you tell me how to view the beginning few weeks (or months) worth of Vridar postings?
Are there shortcuts?
Yes.
Try these:
http://vridar.org/2013
http://vridar.org/2013/1/
So if November 20, 2006 is the first posting or “birth” of Vridar (c.f. ReneT), how is it that you are claiming only a 7th anniversary for Vridar?
Good point. I was going off a message from WordPress.com. Neil can verify the true incept date.
Could it be that before June of 2010 Vridar had a different host than WordPress? That would give a 7th year anniversary date for the new hosting agent.
Seven years only? Are you sure?
I think I’ve almost been reading this blog for that long already.
The first post I could find is from November 20, 2006: http://vridar.org/2006/11/20/hezbollah-not-a-terrorist-organization/
Anyway, this is a good time and place to thank Neil for this blog and I hope he’ll continue for aeons. And you too Tim.
Happy birthday! I started reading this site I guess a year or so ago… (Wait no I see “On the Historicity of Jesus” came out in 2014 so it’s been three years at least! time truly flies) around the time I started hearing about and took an interest in Jesus mythicism and it’s been a site I come back to regularly when not daily since, where I can count on an interesting read that will give me a new look on some aspect of the Bible, or teach me new things about the history of the period. It has been quite a ride really.
Thank you for all your work! And hope Thailand is treating Neil right 🙂
I can’t recall what happened seven years ago. Perhaps I upgraded with WordPress when I changed to the present page design. My first post was indeed 26th November 2006. Check Archives, in between Recent Posts and Calendar in the right column of this page.
It’s been an interesting journey. I had scholars pull out all stops to denigrate me personally (see Aw, gee, thanks guys) but still the blog continued to climb in the Alexa rankings rubbing shoulders with the best of them in the top 10 from around May 2011 when it reached #6 in the top ten of the Alexa rankings. (The other measurement was vulnerable to bibliobloggers like Joel Watts rigging the count in his favour by enlisting thousands of more of URLs from Pakistan, etc.) The “funny” thing about it was that up until then whenever a new blog hit that top 10 rank there would be all sorts of congratulations from the biblioblogging community, but when Vridar entered the ranks there was total silence.
Some months later, with Vridar refusing to bow out of the top 10, the bibliobloggers changed the rules and removed Vridar from the list completely. It was relegated to some wacko “conspiracy theorist” blog.
Interesting also to observe in the comments of the early years there were several somewhat prominent scholars who were engaged here in a positive way. Once I started directly questioning the methods underlying their historical Jesus assumptions they ran like a house on fire.
I originally thought of keeping my political posts in a separate blog but soon decided that was not right for me. I know many readers don’t like the way I mix them up in the one blog, but the “Vridar” journey has been much more than simply a religious one. It’s an approach to vital issues. It’s about my journey after my escape from religion, and that opened up horizons well beyond the Bible. It could not have been otherwise.
Just seven years! I really thought it was almost ten. I took an interest in Jesus mythicism when I stumbled on Kenneth Humphries’ Jesus Never Existed website. Recently I looked into the Talipot tomb business and figured that this sepulchre is probably the final resting place of the best candidate for an historical Jesus. Even so, it still doesn’t cancel out Jesus mythicism because (1) the esteemed scholars of the guild save one, James tabor, won’t believe it for a second and (2) what Paul wrote concerning Christ Jesus leads me to believe that Paul stole the poor bloke’s identity–and Paul may have met him, still alive and kicking!
I’ve been slowly working my way back through posts of years past, and am continually thrilled at discovering marvelous gem after gem. Looking forward to many more years of outstanding & though-provoking content.
This is clearly a labor of love, and it is much appreciated.
I thought it was longer than seven years too. In any event, I didn’t realize your blog was relatively new when I started reading it. I found it when I started getting back into ancient history again (after taking a break for several years) and saw it come up a lot in my internet searches. My biggest take away has been the subject of mythicism, which I was previously unacquainted with, and it was interesting to consider that point of view. Thanks, Neil.