The Lydia McGrew Podcast

Dale Allison says that bereavement apparitions (sometimes called grief hallucinations) provide useful and enlightening "parallels" to the content of the Gospel stories when they describe Jesus' appearances to the disciples. Grief hallucinations are often a skeptical go-to theory to account for the beginning of Christianity. Allison himself uses these alleged parallels to support his...

A skeptic recently sent me a link to this article about an ancient novel, the Aithiopika (or Aaethiopica) of Heliodoros.https://www.jstor.org/stable/25010772?read-now=1&seq=22#page_scan_tab_contents(If you are interested in the article, you can log into Jstor using your Google account and read it for free.)Here is a copy of the novel in translation (along with some other works). Find "THE...

In this final (for now) video on the question of what skeptical and moderate scholars grant about the resurrection appearances, I argue that the majority of skeptical scholars probably do not even grant a group vision-like appearance experience with some degree of intersubjective content. I discuss how I think Dr. Habermas got, and gave, the impression that at least a lot of skeptical scholars do...

Do the vast majority, or virtually all, scholars across the critical spectrum grant appearances of Jesus to his disciples *that seeemed to them like what is told in the Gospels*? Emphatically not. When skeptical and even moderate scholars grant some kind of group appearance or other, they absolutely do not grant that it seemed to them like Jesus was eating with them as a group, having long convers...

Dr. Habermas has astonishingly now claimed that he never gave any definition of "the vast majority of scholars" and that, except for the empty tomb (which he emphasizes is not a minimal fact anyway) he never made any head count of how many scholars affirm a proposition. Here is a blog post I did on this issue recently, with links.https://lydiaswebpage.blogspot.com/2025/08/habermas-now-sa...

In this final video in the series I discuss the use of fudge factors. These are ad hoc changes in a hypothesis of unstated symbolism that occur while the theorist still states that the resemblance between the numbers, events, passages, etc., is just too much for coincidence and hence favors some sort of intentional but unstated symbolism by the author. I discuss two places where people have overtl...

We're talking about the "Gilbert and Sullivan" problem for dreaming up far-fetched symbolic meanings for narrated Gospel details. "If everybody's somebody, then no one's anybody." This week we see the "it's too easy" objection by considering this: If you can use "the sevenfold gift of the spirit plus the ten commandments, and then take the triangu...

What do I mean by saying that it's too easy to come up with theories of unstated symbolism in the details of the Gospels? And why does the fact that it's too easy create a problem for those theories? A song from an operetta by Gilbert and Sullivan says, "If everybody's somebody, then no one's anybody." If you're willing to go far enough to come up with an unstated sym...

I return here to a topic that I think is important, though I'm taking an unpopular position: I think that there is probabilistic tension between the occurrence of *unstated* symbolic or allusive meanings in the details of the Gospels' narratives. This does not mean that it is *strictly impossible* that a detail could be both historical and intended by the author to have an unstated symbolic meanin...

In this last video in this series about Dr. Habermas's misinterpretations of liberal scholars, I discuss what I call "pseudo-updating" of references to Dale Allison, apropos of the conversion of James. Allison apparently changed his mind after he wrote in 1985 accepting the idea that Jesus' brother James was converted by a post-resurrecion appearance. In both 2005 and 2021 Alliso...

Bart Ehrman has insisted that he never thought and never said that Paul went to Jerusalem to interview Peter or that Peter gave Paul eyewitness testimony about Peter's resurrection experience. That's very likely true. Ehrman seems to have a fair complaint against Habermas for over-claiming on those points, and such over-optimistic interpretation is only too typical of Habermas, as we'v...

In Dr. Gary Habermas's recent volume on the resurrection, he claims that the members of the Jesus Seminar show a degree of "respect" for the story of Jesus' first appearance to his male disciples in John 20:19-23 which is "rather amazing." He also implies that they show *some* degree of respect, though a lesser degree, to the story of Doubting Thomas later in that chapt...

I'm reading further quotations from the book of Jesus Seminar conclusions cited by Gary Habermas. According to Habermas, the Seminar acknowledges that a group appearance of Jesus to his disciples is attested by multiple, independent sources. This is not the case. We saw last time that Habermas misunderstands lists of sources by the Jesus Seminar, jumping to the conclusion that these are suppos...

Does the Jesus Seminar acknowledge that group appearances of the risen Jesus to his disciples are multiply, independently attested? Short answer: No. But unfortunately, in volume 1 of his recent set of books on the resurrection, Gary Habermas emphatically says that they do. Here I read several of the places where Habermas says so and also undeniable quotations where they say to the contrary. Haber...

Does the Jesus Seminar acknowledge that group appearances of the risen Jesus to his disciples are multiply, independently attested? Short answer: No. But unfortunately, in volume 1 of his recent set of books on the resurrection, Gary Habermas emphatically says that they do. Here I read several of the places where Habermas says so and also undeniable quotations where they say to the contrary. Haber...

Over the next few weeks I'm going to look at some rather severe problems with Dr. Gary Habermas's interpretations of more liberal New Testament scholars, as represented in Volume 1 of his magnum opus on the resurrection. Regular viewers know that I have a lot of criticisms of the Minimal Facts Argument for the resurrection. In many of these I'm discussing the epistemology of the argume...

In this final installment of my series on the Pharisees in the Gospels, I reply to the last argument I could find in Dr. Keener's commentary on John. This is an attempt to use redaction criticism to line up John's account of the messengers from the Pharisees and treat it as a redactive adaptation (i.e. at least partially non-historical) of statements in Luke and Matthew. The astonishing th...

Today I'm discussing one of the remaining arguments that Craig Keener gives in his commentary on John for thinking that John exaggerates the role of the Pharisees in a partially non-historical way. We've already seen in detail that statistical arguments about the number of times the Pharisees are treated as the opposition, or even the extent to which they work *alone* as the opposition in...

We've been systematically refuting the claim that Matthew and John modify stories to make the Pharisees do things that they didn't historically due, allegedly to make their Gospels more relevant to their readers. This week I examine a variant on this theory--namely, that (regardless of whether he has numerically more negative portrayals of the Pharisees than the Synoptics) John tries to fo...

Here we hit two more categories of "engagement with Pharisaism" in the Gospels, plus a list of a series miscellaneous mentions of the Pharisees that don't fit into any other categories. As this series has copiously documented, the data simply don't back up Craig Keener's claim that Matthew "engages with Pharisaism" more than Mark and Luke or that John focuses negati...

I'm continuing a series documenting, step by step, just *how wrong* the thesis is that Matthew "engages with Pharisaism" more than Mark and Luke and that John does so more than Matthew, allegedly to make their Gospels more relevant to their audiences, even at times going so far as to attribute non-historical actions to the Pharisees. How wrong is it? It's *so wrong* that it doesn...

I begin systematically dismantling the completely false theory that Matthew "engages with Pharisaism" more than Luke or Mark and that John does so more than Matthew. Even if there were more stories "engaging with Pharisaism" in Matthew than in Luke, this wouldn't be a good argument for some kind of trend or development, nor that Matthew was written later than Luke. The enti...

Today I'm starting a new series on a Gospel development theory. This particular theory alleges that Matthew contains more "engagement with Pharisaism" than either Mark or Luke, that John contains more "exclusive engagement with Pharisaism" than Matthew, and that this arises from the fact that Matthew and John were both trying to make their Gospels more relevant to their aud...

In this last video in my Matthean discourses series, I examine places where, yep, we have a saying in one context in Matthew and in what really does look like a different context in Luke, and that's it, and this is no biggie. In other words, with all the other evidence we have of Jesus' tendency to repeat important teachings (and the tendency of other teachers to do this quite normally), w...

Sometimes when scholars claim that Matthew made dyschronological composite discourses, they ignore the fact that we find Jesus teaching that same teaaching (which they are using) twice in a single Gospel. Sometimes this is Matthew, sometimes another Gospel (like Luke or John). This in itself shows that it was a saying that Jesus was fond of and repeated, so it isn't an argument for a composite...