The Lydia McGrew Podcast

Is it more likely that the Sermon on the Level Place in Luke 6 is the same event as the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5-7, or a different event? If it's the same event, does that mean that Matthew changed the facts and fictionally moved the sermon to a mountain for a symbolic purpose? (Spoiler: No, it definitely doesn't mean that.)I argue that it probably is the same event but that this *...

This year I weigh in on a couple of alleged contradictions in the Easter stories that I've never discussed elsewhere (as far as I can remember). One of these concerns when the women bought and prepared spices. The other, on which I spend more time, is the claim that Matthew contradicts Luke and Mark about where the women saw an angel at Jesus' tomb. Blessed Easter to everyone! Here is a go...

This video will be released on Palm Sunday, 2025, but it isn't about Palm Sunday, at least not directly. Here I'm talking about the insistence that Matthew engages in dyschronological narration by deliberately gathering together sayings that he knows weren't uttered on the same occasion and putting them in bracketed discourses, which makes it appear that they were uttered on the same o...

This week I begin a new series on the claim that Matthew contains composite discourses of Jesus. I define the phrase "composite discourses," discuss reasons for caring whether Matthew contains them, and read interesting quotations from D.A. Carson giving some reasons for questioning the scholarly consensus on this. Is Carson a "critical scholar"? How is the phrase "critica...

It's easy (especially for skeptics) to be anachronistic when thinking about the Gospels' indications of realism and reliability. A keen awareness of *just how recent* elaborate, fictional world-building is in literary history can help to counter certain types of anachronism.

What about those "other gospels that didn't make the cut" of going into the canon? Today I talk about the portrayal of Jesus' crucifixion in the "Gospel" of Peter. I show that even though the author clearly had access to the canonical Gospels, he didn't even know enough about the real historical background to know what he needed to retain from the canonical crucifixion stories, causing his own ver...

Today's discussion was inspired by this post on Bart Ehrman's blog. https://ehrmanblog.org/john-versus-the-synoptics-how-does-jesus-raise-the-dead/Most of it is behind a paywall for subscribers, but Ehrman says that he makes the same argument in _The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings_.Ehrman claims that the raising of Lazarus, contrasted with the rais...

Today's discussion is a follow-up to this recent stream with Dale Glover and David Kemball-Cook, which aired several weeks agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrO3QZ4DsXYDavid and I disagreed in the discussion about whether we should compare the resurrection to the negation of the resurrection when asking how to evaluate the explanatory power of the hypotheses. Should we instead, as David argue...

I've sometimes called myself a rampaging evidentialist. Picking up on an exchange I had recently on Facebook, I respond here to the concern that rampaging evidentialism seems to mean that, if a Christian is doubting his faith, I wouldn't tell him to pray since that would be a non-rational activity. And similarly, the concern that all sorts of Christian practices like taking the Sacrament/C...

Recently Capturing Christianity suggested that the maximal data case for the Gospels is burdensome because (he alleged) you have to defend *all* these different things, including traditional authorship and undesigned coincidences, and if any of these arguments don't work, the case is "weakened."I argue that this is backwards. These things are conduits for data that really is there an...

Sometimes it's a bit surprising that mainstream Gospels scholars who don't even claim to be inerrantists are not more inclined toward theories of minor good-faith errors. For example, why wouldn't more mainstream scholars suggest that Matthew just misunderstood something and sincerely thought that the centurion came to Jesus in person? They don't have any social reason to avoid the...

Classicist Christopher Pelling says that Plutarch made up a surrounding scene in which a certain conversation took place between two ancient Romans (Antony and Trebonius). According to Pelling, all that Plutarch knew was that something like this conversation had happened, but he filled it out, stating exactly what journey it took place on and so forth, without any historical warrant. Michael Licon...

It's important to remember: If an ancient author is changing the facts in order to deceive someone, then what he's doing *cannot be* a non-deceptive "compositional device" or "accepted variation in the genre." The claim that a change (even if it really is a deliberate change) in a non-biblical author is non-deceptive because it was an "accepted" thing in his g...

I'm continuing to show how misunderstandings and misapplications of ancient non-biblical literature carry over to misinterpretations of passages in the Gospels. Here I show how Dr. Licona strangely misapplies a case where the satirist Lucian is *blatantly lying* (and even bragging about how he misled some credulous people by his tall tale) as if it helps to support a mini-genre of non-historic...

Today I'm continuing to discuss bad methodology as applied to non-biblical ancient history. Did Sallust deliberately move a saying by the conspirator Catiline to a different meeting with the Senate? First, we should consider the (actually not terribly implausible) possibility that Catiline was just fond of the sound of his own threat against Rome and that he used it on more than one occasion....

This week I continue to talk about non-biblical history and the deep problems with the compositional device methodology. In this case I talk about a discrepancy between two of Plutarch's _Lives_ that appears to be a real discrepancy--harmonization between the accounts doesn't quite work. But does it follow that a) Plutarch changed the facts on purpose, b) Plutarch's audience would have expected su...

Even non-biblical historical works should often be harmonized. That's just part of applying common sense to history. For the next few weeks I will talk about the epistemologically bad discrepancy hunting method and how it applies to non-biblical history. In this method, mere differences are often exaggerated into discrepancies. Then further these discrepancies aren't attributed to common human err...

The oft-repeated claim that there would *never* be a Roman census in a "client state," used to discredit Luke's mention of a census in the Christmas story, is an example of a priori history. Those who insist on this claim have only the thinnest justification for it--namely, the fact that client states under Rome had *some* measure of independence in matters of taxation. They also ignore or fumble...

What do the Virgin Birth and the bodily resurrection of Jesus have in common? For one thing, they both emphasize the fact that Jesus had real body. Today I discuss why that is important from the perspective of knowledge (epistemology) and why we Christians shouldn't confuse a theological mystery with a lack of hard evidence. Have a very merry evidential Christmas! Links mentioned in today's broadc...

In this last segment on the rigidity of critical scholars, I examine a bad methodological assumption--that if the wording of parallel passages is somewhat similar, but there are small differences, these differences very likely resulted from *deliberate editing* (redacting, substituting, etc.) of the earlier version of the story. This rule is also wrongly applied to the evangelists' quotations of S...

In this video I read four quotations in which scholars make fun of harmonization by comparing reasonable harmonizations with far-fetched ones, sometimes using views that have never even been seriously advocated as a straw man of harmonizing. This is a tactic that one should be prepared for. This sort of condescension and mockery can make anyone more conservative than the "scholarly consensus" feel...

What did Jairus say about his daughter when he came to Jesus? Did he tell him that his daughter had died or that she was dying? This relatively minor question has fueled many-a conversion to the acceptance of fact-changing literary devices. This is why I call it a "gateway drug" to fact-changing by the evangelists. A reasonable approach to this difference is to attribute it to the normal variation...

Today I'm discussing another aspect of the rigidity of critical scholarship: Among the Synoptic Gospels, they assume that if Matthew and/or Luke is "using Mark" for a story, then we shouldn't take seriously the possibility that Matthew and/or Luke is also supplementing Mark from additional factual information to which he has independent access. Factual independence is treated as all-or-nothing. So...

Critical scholars who reject harmonization like to portray those who harmonize the Gospels as ignorant, rigid, and unhistorical. Supposedly this all arises from allowing one's theological preoccupations to cause one to engage in bizarre behavior (harmonization) that one wouldn't use in other contexts. Perhaps no one is better at giving this impression than Bart Ehrman, and sadly, it's an evaluatio...

Today I'm starting a series in which I especially emphasize the rigidity of critical Gospels' scholars who create strained contradictions and reject sensible harmonizations. This theme has been implicit in much of my work, but I'm trying to make it more explicit. The claim that conservatives interpreting the Gospels lack nuance and are rigid is so misguided that the truth is exactly the opposite....