The Lydia McGrew Podcast

Is consensus in Gospels scholarship really diverse? The sad fact of the matter is that there is a great deal of social pressure not to be "too conservative," and even some Christian scholars engage in subtle and not-so-subtle pressure tactics against conclusions that are deemed overly conservative. These include name-calling without engaging arguments, straw-manning harmonization, blurri...

It's strange, but it's true: Evidence that is *improbable* even given the hypothesis that it supports can provide as strong an argument as you could want in favor of that hypothesis. At the same time, such evidence, if we don't happen to have it, is resistant to being used in an argument from silence. And historical evidence fits this pattern very well. This sounds a warning: Don't...

Here I return to a point I discussed a couple of weeks ago, here:https://youtu.be/Xs4mRIzICKwThe historical reportage model and the fact-changing literary device model give quite different probabilities to finding details in the Gospels confirmed. The literary device model says that it was part and parcel of the Gospels' genre that their authors felt licensed to change details. In fact, Dr. Li...

Here I'm anticipating a possible criticism--namely, that no matter what the details are like or even could be like in the Gospels, I'm always going to say that they indicate truthfulness or at least don't constitute any evidence worth speaking of against truthfulness. I give three categories (and I stipulate these aren't exhaustive) of kinds of details that *could be* in a document...

Today I'm taking a hypothetical police case in which a mother and daughter testify. Since they live together and haven't been kept separate before they testify, it seems like their testimony can't possibly be regarded as independent, right? And that lessens the force of their two testimonies for what they agree on, right? I mean, c'mon. They've got to be influencing one another...

Anybody who is trying to study the Gospels honestly is trying to get a good model of what they are like. Those who think that the Gospel authors were writing in a genre in which they were licensed to change and fabricate even details are making non-deductive arguments for their own model. (And it's disturbingly misleading to say that these claims are restricted to just details, but that's...

It's important to remember that unexplained allusions are not just realistic details. In fact, they are awkward and puzzling and in that sense "unliterary." I illustrate this by reviewing the "dispute about purification" allusion in John 3 and then reading a passage from one of the widows of Civitella that contains an unexplained allusion.

Unnecessary details provide a commonsense clue to truthfulness. See how this works in the testimony of a witness to the horrific Civitella massacre, which took place in 1944. We also find unnecessary details in the Gospels. "The Witnesses of Civitella," translation of testimonies, found here:https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1535685X.1991.11015699Thanks to Luuk Van de Weghe for...

Two years ago I discussed Dirk Bogarde's visit to Bergen Belsen, his biographer's doubts, and the unexpected confirmation from an independent source. Go here to watch that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zW1nLyn70ZE&t=922sI've been revisiting that topic recently in my research, and I was struck by an unnecessary detail in one of Bogarde's interviews that all by itself is notew...

Have you heard this critique of the "green grass" undesigned coincidence between John 6:4 and Mark 6:39? Here's how it goes: "The green grass around the time of Passover doesn't help to confirm the reliability of John and Mark, because there are times other than Passover when the grass is green in the Holy Land." But we aren't saying that the green grass *predicts*...

Here Than and I talk about two pieces of mathematical malpractice in Blais and Paulogia's video on Bayes' Theorem and the resurrection. Blais tried to give the impression that Than made a mistake by his in-principle argument that testimony can (in principle) overcome even a very low prior. Blais implied that Than somehow neglected to admit that this "only holds when" the number o...

Than and I get into the much-vaunted issue of the prior improbability of miracles. Is it really true that a miracle has such a low prior probability that no testimony can overcome it? Is it really true that one would have to throw out one's knowledge of science and the laws of nature in order to believe that a miracle occurred? Is it true that one would have to be able, on theism alone, to pre...

Than and I continue our detailed rebuttal to Brian Blais and Paulogia, who claim to be telling us what Bayes' Theorem says about the resurrection. One topic is a set of truly dreadful items of evidence against the resurrection via arguments from silence. Here is Timothy McGrew's published paper on arguments from silence:https://timothymcgrew.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/The-Argument-from...

Happy Easter, 2026!Here Than and I discuss three alternative "explanations" for the resurrection evidence which Brian Blais claims are just as good as the actual resurrection for explaining the data. These are Kamil Gregor's pareidolia suggestion:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FWyZRnI4e8James Fodor's RHBS theory:https://jamesfodor.com/2017/04/02/the-resurrection-of-jesus-explai...

Than and I continue to discuss objections to the resurrection case. Here we talk about the technical question of whether Tim and I overestimated the Bayes factor (a mathematical expression meant to represent the force of the evidence) in favor of the resurrection in our 2009 resurrection article in the Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology. That article, with a few updates, is available here:htt...

The first techy topic here: Why you need to use a partition when talking about Bayesian arguments in history. Here is an earlier video I did on this:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7umQEVtbx4&t=2sThe next techy topic here: Independence! This is a big and important topic for the resurrection case. In this video I mention Brian Blais's attempt to model independence to critique Tim's and...

The topic here: The Bible tells me so jingleThan and I discuss the abuse of the jingle "The Bible Tells Me So" by skeptics to trash the legitimate historical use of material in the canonical documents. Why is it wrong to throw out data because we have it only in a single source/Here is Timothy McGrew's article, published in Acta Analytica, on the argument from silence in history:http...

Than Christopoulos and I continue discussing the resurrection, the max data case, and skepticism. In this video our topic is the fact that Brian Blais and Paulogia simply dismissed all the evidence for the historical reportage model of the Gospels despite its relevance to the resurrection. Here is their video which we're responding to:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6QenX4Oo78Here is a long v...

Several months ago Than Christopoulos and I got together to record a *lot* of material on Bayes's Theorem and the Resurrection. Our intention was to respond to this video by Youtube skeptic Paulogia and physicist/statistician Brian Blais, which claims to tell you what Bayes *really* says about the resurrection. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6QenX4Oo78The topic we discuss here: How are munda...

In this second-to-last video in my series on the authorship of the 4th Gospel, I discuss a collection of forceless arguments from such things as John's emphasis on Jerusalem, not having "enough" unique stories about Galilee, and not mentioning some people who aren't mentioned in the Synoptics. The argument from not "enough" Galilee stories involves not even accurately c...

In this last video of the series I turn to the question, "Who was at the Last Supper?" If only the twelve were present with Jesus, and if the author of the Gospel is the Beloved Disciple and was named "John," then he must be John bar Zebedee. Commentators have long emphasized the fact that it's a natural interpretation to take from the Synoptic Gospels that only the twelve...

Here I discuss a second much-used line of argument that the author of the 4th Gospel can't be John the son of Zebedee--namely, that Mark (and the other Synoptics) don't mention his presence at the cross. Richard Bauckham admits that this argument is used to claim that the entire idea that the Beloved Disciple was present at the cross is fictional. He rightly rejects that conclusion but tri...

Could the son of a Galilean fisherman have been "known to the high priest"? Sure, why not?!Here I argue against what is taken to be one of the strongest arguments against authorship of the Fourth Gospel by John the son of Zebedee. I argue that the argument is a combination of over-reading the meaning of the word "known" and a priori history about who couldn't possibly have...

According to Richard Bauckham, the church father Irenaeus of Lyon believed that the author of the fourth Gospel was the Beloved Disciple but was not the son of Zebedee. Yet in his urgency to find some way to interpret Irenaeus's works as compatible with this view, Bauckham has robbed Irenaeus of terms that would otherwise make it clear whom he is speaking of. Bauckham says that you needed spec...

Does Irenaeus maintain a distinction between John the evangelist who wrote the fourth Gospel and John the son of Zebedee who led the early church with Peter in the first chapters of Acts? I argue that there is no reason at all to think that he distinguishes these and some reason to think that he is treating them as the same person. I answer Richard Bauckham's claims on this point and show that...