The Lydia McGrew Podcast

Here I continue reading sample passages. This time the section is from The Mirror or the Mask, aka TMOM.  I explain how blocking the "third option" (that the Gospel authors were sincere non-deceivers but nonetheless changed facts) forces us to confront squarely their claims to being scrupulously factual. They would have had to be *really* deep deceivers to exploit their hearers' expectations...

Here I'm beginning a series of videos featuring short readings from my recent books. This one is from The Eye of the Beholder and is about how Jesus suffers mentally from his knowledge that his closest friends will fail him. This is a unified aspect of Jesus' personality across all four Gospels, including John, and across very different passages. We can see from this that the so-called "Jesus of J...

Here I finally get to answering that question: Why I am not an inerrantist. I give several relevant examples (not a comprehensive list!) and a bit of history. I also discuss how this can be seen as related to the Problem of Evil.   One of my goals is to show how a very conservative position is possible that is not inerrantist but also not averse at all to harmonization of alleged contrad...

Here I'm setting up the discussion of some of my reasons for not being an inerrantist by making a four-part taxonomy of kinds of traditional inerrancy.  This episode also contains a little bit of autobiography about the types of inerrancy I held when I was an inerrantist.  This taxonomy of kinds of inerrancy should be useful to everyone, and there is one type that I have never seen anyon...

In which I discuss the centurion incident recorded in Matthew 8 and Luke 7 and the discrepancy between them. Was the centurion there or not? I distinguish between "transferral" in a non-fact-changing sense (as if you said, "John is building a house" when John is hiring contractors) and in a fact-changing sense (as if you described John as personally building the house when you knew that he didn't...

In which I explain how what I call the "reportage model" of the Gospels intersects with the doctrine of the inerrancy of the Bible. In fact, if you hold to inerrancy, you probably already believe the reportage model!  I also talk about how the attempt to make the compositional device views compatible with inerrancy creates confusion. What is the point in saying that a book that looks historic...

Here I continue with my response to a video that was drawn to my attention that was posted on Inspiring Philosophy. In that video Michael Jones did some quite ordinary harmonization of the resurrection accounts but strongly implied that this was made possible chiefly by reliance on special, expert knowledge gained from Dr. Licona's work on ancient "compositional devices." In the previous video I d...

Here I talk about a probabilistic "bottleneck" and argue that piling on more and more evidence that the disciples believed that Jesus was risen physically, without further details of their reasons and without a defense of the non-embellished nature of the Gospel accounts, is no substitute for a more robust approach.  Here is the blog post that I mentioned in the video. The cordial exchange wi...

In this episode, I discuss the Maximal Data approach to the resurrection and contrast it with a modified or enhanced version of the Minimal Facts approach. This version attempts (like the ordinary MFA) to avoid defending the reliability of the Gospels but tries to make up for this refusal by arguing indirectly that the disciples must have had physical-type experiences of the risen Jesus, thereby d...

In this first new channel episode since the trailer for The Eye of the Beholder I discuss a 2018 book called Theology and History in the Fourth Gospel by mainstream New Testament scholar Jörg Frey. Frey accuses more conservative scholars of following "aprioristic" methods, but the shoe is on the other foot. It is Frey himself who so strongly assumes that John is at least partially ahistorical, and...

The Eye of the Beholder is now available for purchase! In this video I go through the table of contents at a rather leisurely pace describing the contents of the book and explaining why it is unique.  Here is the link at Amazon.  https://www.amazon.com/dp/1947929151/?fbclid=IwAR38tRMeIYMYH7X03nFUg-KvOZ-T0PZMq4YYb5XIOgZfOp9dzOM_XaG7Ml8  Here is the link at Barnes & Noble:  h...

Here I discuss a rather surprising scholarly theory that John narrates "theologically" by inventing the incident in which Jesus breathes on his disciples and says, "Receive the Holy Spirit." I point out that, aside from questioning the resurrection appearance itself, there is no special reason to doubt this particular sub-incident. So why do scholars do so? Why do they talk about a "Johannine Pent...

We're getting closer to the release of my new book, The Eye of the Beholder, all about the Gospel of John! Here I discuss what I call three "false facts" about John. A false fact is something that is taken to be a fact (though it really isn't) that all theories must take into account. It often goes unquestioned and thus distorts theories. The three false facts I discuss here all concern the way th...

This is another methodological discussion. What do I mean by the "passage-by-passage" approach to Gospel historicity, why is it a bad idea, and how do you know if someone is using that approach? What are "the criteria of authenticity" in studying Jesus and history? If you say that a passage is likely historical because it would be embarrassing to the Christians to include it, does that mean that y...

Today I pivot to starting to talk about the Gospel of John as we ramp up to the release of my new book, The Eye of the Beholder, in March 2021. I argue that the account of the healing of the man born blind in John has marks of realism that contribute to its own credibility. One involves a small mark of consistency in the narrative. One involves an undesigned coincidence with the Synoptic Gospels....

In this "nerdy" addition to our podcast collection, I discuss how the issue of mutual support relates to the issue of circular reasoning and how both of those relate to miracle reports. How can we acknowledge that the deity of Jesus supports the claim that he performed a miracle and that a report of a miracle supports the deity of Jesus without reasoning in a circle?  Here is the JSTOR link f...

In this final episode of my Virgin Birth series I treat the viewer to a reading of various interesting quotations from, unfortunately, evangelical scholars expressing...well, you can decide for yourself what they are expressing. Something about the infancy narratives in the Gospels. Something about how defensible they are or are not, historically.  What's the point? When you hear doubts raise...

Here I discuss the last two objections I plan to cover to the accounts of the infancy and Virgin Birth of Jesus. These are 1) the claim that Luke contradicts Matthew about when Mary and Joseph returned to Nazareth and 2) the claim that Luke's genealogy of Jesus contradicts Matthew's. Note that the second of these strictly speaking goes outside Luke's birth and infancy story, since he gives the gen...

Here I counter the objection that, if the name "Jesus" were not connected with both accounts, you'd never suspect that the infancy stories in Luke and Matthew were about the same person. They are just sooo different!  If interested, you can see more along the same lines in a couple of old blog posts that I wrote in 2016, including one called "The extreme probability of one's own life," a phra...

When we start to talk about objections to the birth stories about Jesus in the Gospels, the supposed problem of the census mentioned in Luke 2:1-2 has pride of place. Luke seems to be saying that Jesus was born at the time of a census ordered by Caesar Augustus for the whole world, and that this "first" census has something to do with a Roman governor named Quirinius. But the only census of Judea...

In this episode I discuss the realistic picture that we get in Matthew and Luke in which both Nazareth and Bethlehem play a role in the lives of Joseph and Mary at the time of Jesus' birth. I suggest that Mary was from Nazareth and that Joseph was from Bethlehem as his home town, though he may have been living for a time in Nazareth. Mary had family down in the Judean hill country as well. If the...

Here I talk about the importance of not conceding that the birth narratives of Jesus are late additions coming from who-knows-where. Not only is there no evidence that the Gospel authors felt free to make up stories, and not only is there evidence for their care and veracity otherwise, there are signs of truth in the birth stories themselves. Here I emphasize their Jewish character. The stories ap...

This episode begins what will probably be a five-part series on the Virgin Birth in the larger series on Gospel reliability and miracle reports. Here I focus on what it would mean for the evidence for the Virgin Birth if Mary herself was Luke's witness and told him (or affirmed to him in some other way--e.g., by presenting him with a document or notes) the material that we find in Luke's accounts...

This wraps up my series on the feeding of the five thousand with two more undesigned coincidences, several more indications of independence and individual veracity, and a discussion of the intersection of the miraculous and the non-miraculous aspects of the accounts. Originally uploaded to YouTube Nov 30 2020

Here I turn to the positive evidence contributed to the case for Gospel reliability by the stories of the feeding of the five thousand. I discuss four undesigned coincidences that confirm details of the feeding--two about place and two about time. Originally uploaded to YouTube Nov 27 2020