The Lydia McGrew Podcast

Did David Friedrich Strauss refute forever the method of harmonizing Gospel accounts, as Dale Allison has claimed? Not at all. In fact, Strauss's own theories about the way that Gospel narratives were supposedly invented are enormously complex and improbable, showing that his judgement about the factuality of the Gospels is far off-base.  We welcome Tim McGrew giving a reading from William Li...

This new coincidence connects Jesus' words about Herod Antipas in Luke 13, the Perean ministry described in the other three Gospels, and Josephus. Did Luke make a mistake about Herod or make up an event? Nope.  Here is my older post on the chronology of Luke's central section and Jesus' seemingly endless "journey to Jerusalem."  http://lydiaswebpage.blogspot.com/2020/08/a-possible-soluti...

Here I give you an undesigned coincidence between Paul's letters and Acts 20:4-5. This was part of a section that had to be cut in an article I'm currently writing.  The earlier video and audio concerning Acts and the epistles is here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xq7EDxPC3Fw&t=1123s https://anchor.fm/lydiamcgrew/episodes/Just-HOW-WRONG-can-Bart-Ehrman-be-about-Acts-and-Pauls-epi...

In this last video about evidentialism and reformed epistemology, I tackle some analogies that have been made, such as knowing that you are innocent of a crime when the forensic evidence is against you. I point out important disanalogies between the alleged defeater-defeating witness of the Holy Spirit and these cases. RE folks cannot simultaneously say that the IWHS is self-authenticating and def...

Here I answer a potential objection to the discussion in Part 3. The potential objection, based on Hebrews 6:4-6, is that reconversion after apostasy is impossible. Therefore (the objection would go), if God is going to be faithful and provide what man needs to be saved, he is going to have to provide a Christian in an evidence-poor situation with some other powerful defeater-defeater before that...

Continuing my series on evidentialism and its contrasts with reformed epistemology, here I tackle the question: Is rational deconversion possible? My answer is, yes, but...

This is the second part of my attempt to answer misconceptions of evidentialism. Here I discuss the evidentialist's proper attitude toward objections. No good evidentialist should be telling someone that he should deconvert if he can't answer all objections to Christianity, in order to show that he is open to evidence. That is a caricature which both friends and foes of evidentialism sometimes ado...

There are plenty of misconceptions going around about evidentialism as opposed to Reformed Epistemology or presuppositionalism. Here I start a series intended to lay some of those confusions to rest.  Here is my former video on this topic:  https://youtu.be/k2Tv90y2G58 Here is a post I wrote on this topic some years back:  http://lydiaswebpage.blogspot.com/2020/08/what-evidentialism...

This is the second part of my discussion of the statement, "We have to use ancient standards of reliability to interpret and evaluate the Gospels." Last time we saw that this is false both because it is internally inconsistent and because it conflates seeking information with being pressed into evaluating a practice in one particular way. Saying, "The ancients accepted this," even if it were true...

"We have to use ancient standards of reliability when studying the Gospels" is the kind of thing you'll hear pretty frequently. At first it sounds obviously true, even profound. The initial instinct is to agree with this statement, because to disagree sounds like endorsing ignorance and unfairness.  In this first of (probably) two videos, I examine the inherent contradiction in this claim. If...

We're wrapping up our series on how Jesus sounds in John's Gospel and we've seen how argument after argument fails to support the claim that John embellishes, elaborates, invents, or puts his own interpretations into Jesus' mouth.   Today we're getting into the nitty gritty of some specific Greek aspects of what is called Johannine idiom. All too often, the fact that an argument concerns...

Did John systematically replace "Kingdom of God" in reporting Jesus' words with "eternal life" to emphasize Johannine themes? Probably not. Here we see how the attempt to create a statistical contradiction results in a strained scholarly theory.

Here I introduce explicitly what I call the "two-step argument" that John elaborated Jesus' teaching in John. It consists of arguing that Jesus sounds suspiciously like the narrator of John and the author of I John, then *rejecting* the explanation that John was influenced by Jesus and talked like Jesus, on the grounds that Jesus sounds too different in the Synoptics.  I emphasize the exagger...

Here I tackle the claim that Jesus gives longer discourses in John than in the Synoptic Gospels and that this raises a reasonable suspicion that John is elaborating Jesus' teachings, knowingly putting words into his mouth.  The article by Bauckham mentioned in the video appears to be no longer available in full freely on the Internet. (I acquired a copy of it when it was on his website in ful...

Here I tackle the claim that Jesus sounds in certain discourses in John so oddly literary, his words uncannily similar (for many verses) to an "I am" way of speaking supposedly characteristic of Lady Wisdom of the Old Testament and extra-canonical Wisdom literature, that it raises the suspicion that these passages are in a different genre and are not intended to be historical. Short version: Nope....

Today we examine another "false fact"--the claim that there are seven, or even about seven, discourses in John that combine the properties of being about an "I am" saying and being fairly lengthy. Sometimes scholars will add the (also false) claim that each of the "I am" sayings with a predicate is combined with both a miracle and a discourse. Of course, nothing would follow either deductively or...

Charles Darwin said that a false fact is an injurious thing. One of the false facts that gets repeated in New Testament studies, without checking, is the claim that we're often unable to tell in John's Gospel who is speaking--Jesus or the narrator. This alleged fact is then used to support the conclusion that John thinks he's licensed to put his own interpretations and elaborations into Jesus' mou...

John 8:58 and John 10:30 contain quite clear references to Jesus' deity. The fact that these don't appear in the Synoptic Gospels is used as an argument that John invents material. Sometimes the argument is a pure argument from silence. Sometimes an added argument will be that Jesus "wouldn't have" spoken this explicitly about his own deity since, in the Synoptics, he sometimes told people not to...

I'm starting a series this week on the claim that Jesus in John sounds soooo different from Jesus in the Synoptics. This is used to argue both for the lesser historicity of the sayings and discourses of Jesus in John's Gospel and for the generally looser grip on history in the Gospel of John.  In this first part in the series, I challenge straight-up the claim that there is virtually nothing...

The reference to a revolutionary named Theudas in Gamaliel's brief speech recorded in Acts 5 is a famous "crux," a place where some critics allege that Luke at least partially made up a speech and in doing so created a historical impossibility. If Gamaliel is referring to the same Theudas mentioned in Josephus, they can't both be right. In fact, that Theudas hadn't even carried out his attempted r...

Paul's goodbye speech to the elders of the Ephesian church at Miletus is recorded in Acts 20:18-35. It shows numerous indications of the accuracy of Luke's record, to the point that it seems likely that at least to some extent, in this case, Luke is recording Paul's exact words. It's striking how clearly we hear the authentic voice of Paul himself, recognizable from his letters. And yet there are...

Here's some evidence you probably never heard of that Luke didn't make up speeches.   Check out the whole book The Evidential Value of the Acts of the Apostles, by J.S. Howson.  It's totally free!  https://books.google.com/books?id=qnsXAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false  For more info. on ancient speeches and...

If you're into minimalist or minimal-ish arguments for Jesus' resurrection you may be tempted to include the empty tomb as one of your "core facts" because you've heard that it's granted by 75% of New Testament scholars. That isn't a high enough percentage for the minimal facts method as practiced by Gary Habermas and Michael Licona, but you might think, "Hey, that's still pretty good, and it will...

But you have to listen to hear it.. (Hint: It comes at about minute 22. But don't mess up my organization. Listen to the whole thing!)   Bart Ehrman claims that in Acts Paul agrees with Peter and James about EVERYTHING of theological or practical importance. Out of this he creates a so-called contradiction with Galatians, which records a conflict between Paul and Peter concerning eating with...

Last time I gave a series of undesigned coincidences that confirm the reliability of Acts, using three of what are known as the undisputed Pauline epistles--I and 2 Corinthians and Romans.  But what good are undesigned coincidences in arguing for the reliability of Acts if they come from epistles that skeptical scholars dispute the authorship of, like 2 Timothy? Is it necessary to first get s...