The Lydia McGrew Podcast

Mark Goodacre says that Luke invented a new Parable of the Minas (Luke 19:11-27), trying to make it different from the Parable of the Talents told in Matthew 25:14-30. But, says Goodacre, Luke made up a clunky parable (that Jesus never really told) due to "editorial fatigue," and we can find the signs of this in the parables themselves. Here I discuss the question of whether a 10 vs. 1 p...

Here I discuss Mark Goodacre's claim that the feeding of the five thousand in Luke shows signs of "editorial fatigue." According to Goodacre, Luke factually changes the location of the feeding to a city and then just two verses later slips back into including elements of the story that are incompatible with this made-up setting. So he "ruins the story." I bring a little rig...

Today I start a new series on Mark Goodacre's claims that we find what he calls editorial fatigue in the Synoptic Gospels. These are theories that the Gospel authors started out trying to change something in a source but then grew fatigued and stopped making edits consistent with that change. In this introductory episode I explain more about what "editorial fatigue" is and how it rel...

Recently Dr. Michael Licona claimed on the Potential Theist channel that a majority of critical scholars writing today affirm that Mark wrote the Gospel traditionally attributed to him and that Peter was his main source. He also said that what these scholars grant means that the resurrection narrative in Mark is "carefully rooted" in eyewitness testimony. The claim that a majority of cri...

In a recent discussion with Potential Theist, Dr. Michael Licona said that most critical scholars, even if they don't acknowledge traditional authorship of the 4th Gospel, do acknowledge that a personal disciple of Jesus was a "primary source" for the information in the Gospel. He tried to apply this to strengthen the case for the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Do the majority of crit...

Happy Easter, 2024! Today's episode tackles this question: Since the New Testament documents contain no narration specifically of the appearance to James, Jesus' brother, listed briefly in I Cor. 15:7, does this mean that that appearance has no place in a maximal data approach to the argument for Jesus' resurrection? The answer is that it does have a place, but that putting it together...

Today, one more co-incidence between Whittaker Chambers's testimony and that of Alger Hiss--where did Hiss's wife grow up? Chambers says "near Paoli," Hiss says "Frazer." Both are true, and the similarity with natural variation provides evidence for Chambers's close acquaintances with the Hisses. I compare this to the evidence of undesigned coincidences that the aut...

Continuing to talk about undesigned coincidences in the Chambers-Hiss testimony, I discuss the detail Chambers knew about Hiss's childhood business collecting and selling spring water from Druid Hill Park, at that time on the outskirts of Baltimore. I compare this connection to the undesigned coincidences discussed in Hidden in Plain View between Acts and II Corinthians, concerning Paul's...

I'm often asked if "real historians" use undesigned coincidences. I answer that of course they do, if they're good historians, even though it's unlikely that they use that exact phrase. Here I begin to explore confirmations in the Chambers-Hiss hearings in 1948. Alger Hiss had claimed (at first) that he didn't know Whittaker Chambers at all. Later he changed that and said...

The quotation from Dr. Craig from Norman Perrin is found here: https://www.reasonablefaith.org/podcasts/defenders-podcast-series-3/s3-doctrine-of-christ/doctrine-of-christ-part-40#_ftnref7 Perrin's book is found here. I am reading from the conclusion, pp. 80 and following. Perrin's book can be electronically checked out fully legally from Open Library. https://openlibrary.org/works/OL59203...

In principle it would have been barely possible for someone to make use of the works of Josephus to learn about 1st-century Palestinian male name statistics. In this respect the Josephus suggestion by Gregor and Blais passes a very minimal threshhold of possibility, unlike their other suggestions for sources of invented persons, which can't explain anything even aside from their intrinsic impr...

Gregor and Blais suggest that the lists of Jesus' brothers and of the twelve apostles circulated prior to, and separately from, the Gospels and constituted a source from which realistic name statistics made their way into the rest of the Gospels and Acts. They suggest this despite the fact that the lists of the twelve and of Jesus' brothers are *part* of the Gospels and hence part of the d...

Do the books of Maccabees and the popularity of Maccabeean names help to explain away the name statistics evidence for the historicity of the Gospels and Acts? Nope. If anything, for a fictionalizer to notice this pattern and invent names based upon it (rather than just basing them directly on the Old Testament) would be more difficult, requiring extra steps in addition to the brute collection of...

It's getting weird now! This week I examine Gregor and Blais's suggestion that Macdonald "doublets" of names would (if true) help to explain the accurate name statistics in the Gospels in a non-veridical way. The theory in question is that Mark made up mirror image pairs--one Simon who denies Jesus, one who carries his cross, etc. To be clear, they say that they consider the theo...

Now that we've talked about unnecessary clumps, what about more unnecessary disambiguations? Like Jesus of Nazareth and Lazarus of Bethany, these are additional places where there's no reason *within the narrative of a particular book* to give an extra qualifier with a name. Even if it's a popular name, if there's only one person in the book by that name, or if his identity is made...

Just in case you didn't get enough two weeks ago on unnecessary clumps and disambiguators, here are two more: If the other Judas among the twelve were not historical, why did John go to the trouble of awkwardly attributing a unique question to him in the farewell discourse, which required John to distinguish him from Judas Iscariot by calling him Judas, not Iscariot? And then there's Josep...

The names "Jesus" and "Lazarus" were quite popular at the time of Christ, but they are not highly represented in the Gospels and Acts. But the use of classic disambiguators for Jesus and Lazarus are well explained by the fact that there would have been others with the same name at the time. In the case of Jesus, this is illustrated even in a separation between the way the narra...

What is the disambiguation argument, and how does it intersect with the broader name statistics argument? Does the use of disambiguators ("second" names like "bar Jonah") in the Gospels and Acts provide evidence that supports historicity in a way that goes beyond the use of popular names for more characters? I'll argue that the answer is "yes" and I'll show ho...

In this second episode to be released on January 7, 2024, I examine Gregor and Blais's criticism that the Gospels and Acts percentage of rare names is too low. I point out the "elephant in the room" that they have overlooked--the comparison between the percentage of rare names in the Gospels and Acts, on the one hand, and the percentage expected in a sample taken from a flat chance d...

In my two discussions today I discuss a hypothetical chance model used by Gregor and Blais to emphasize the supposedly uninformative nature of the Gospel and Acts name statistics. First I discuss how they ignore the "shape" of the data in the Gospels and Acts--"swoopy" rather than flat--which resembles the data in Ilan's statistics far better than does a random set of draws...

As my response to recent criticisms of Richard Bauckham's name statistics argument continues, I disagree with a move to add over 400 "artificial occurrences" to Tal Ilan's name database. I note how this move tends to flatten the database and blur the distinction between more popular and less popular names.

I continue discussing the decision made by Gregor and Blais to remove from the Gospels and Acts sample all persons whose existence is separately attested--approximately a third of the sample used by Richard Bauckham in his name statistics argument. Although the full impact of this decision (combined with other aspects of their methodology) can only be assessed with a full statistical re-analysis,...

I critique a central pillar of Blais and Gregor's attempted refutation of Richard Bauckham's name statistics argument: They remove from the sample of persons in the Gospels and Acts any person whose existence is attested in other documents--specifically Josephus, the acknowledged Pauline epistles, and Papias. This reduces the sample of persons from the Gospels and Acts from 79 to 53. They...

I give a brief overview of the name statistics argument for the Gospels and Acts as found in the work of Richard Bauckham, Peter Williams, and others. I also give a brief overview of the recently published critique by Kamil Gregor and Brian Blais. Over the next weeks I'll be talking about some things I see right away as problems with Gregor and Blais's critique. The official link for their...

In this last installment of my 2023 undesigned coincidence series, I touch on a lot of topics. Which is stronger, a UC where something in a later work explains something in an earlier work or a UC where something in an earlier work explains something in a later work? I suggest that neither is per se stronger and that apparent casualness is far more important than the direction of explanation. I al...