The Lydia McGrew Podcast

Does the Muratorian Canon imply that John, the author of the Fourth Gospel, was not a member of the twelve? Here I reply to Richard Bauckham's strained argument to that effect. I briefly mention the "orthodox Johannophobia" thesis at the beginning of the video. Here is Charles Hill's (unfortuately expensive) book that addresses it: https://www.amazon.com/Johannine-Corpus-Early-Ch...

Did Irenaeus, or a mid-second-century compiler, invent the authorship of John to help oppose Gnosticism? Nope. Turns out, the debate with the Gnostics was over the interpretation of John, not its authorship.

Everybody who's interested in the authorship of John would like to know what the early church father Papias said about the subject. But alas! We have no unquestionable statement from Papias about who wrote John. Though probably he did say something explicit, this is another illustration of the way that the chances and changes of this mortal life leave us missing a lot of things written in the...

A blessed Christmas to all my listeners and viewers. Here we pause in discussing authorship for a Christmas reflection: The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us. John's Gospel emphasizes truth because literal truth is, in John's view, inherently bound up with the Incarnation of God. The true anachronism is not holding John to this literal, historical standard. The real anachronism is co...

Here I talk about the earliest evidence we have about the authorship of John. as it happens, the author isn't named as "John" in this evidence, but it is still very valuable. It's very important to remember that "the earliest evidence that has come down to us" isn't "the earliest evidence that ever existed." Many ancient writings have simply been lost. See...

Today begins a series on the authorship of the Fourth Gospel. In this introduction I explore what one might mean by authorship and what assumptions you shouldn't make when hearing that someone affirms traditional authorship. And just how important is authorship, anyway? Get more content on the Gospel of John in _The Eye of the Beholder: The Gospel of John as Historical Reportage_:https://www.a...

Recently Dr. William Lane Craig has claimed that what we "should be talking about" is how great it is that Dale Allison acknowledges "the appearance to the twelve" and Allison's arguments for it. Craig earnestly urges that we should accentuate the positive when it comes to Allison, emphasizing how very impressive it is that a person who thinks the Gospels have many legendar...

Dale Allison admits that there are apparition accounts in which not everybody present can see the apparition. (Ya think?) But despite his insinuation that this has some connection with the "recurrent notice of doubt" in the Gospel accounts, this is actually a strong *dissimilarity* with the Gospel accounts, in which it is strongly implied that everybody present can see and interact with...

How do bereavement apparitions (assuming that they occur) typically end? *Not* with something like the ascension scene as described in Acts 1. Here again I'm investigating whether the bereavement apparition literature, even taken on its own terms, provides a good fit for what is *claimed* in the canonical Gospels and Acts. Dale Allison frequently implies or even states that there are significa...

Dale Allison asserts that reports of tangible apparitions create "real ambiguity" concerning the evidential force of the Gospel stories about Jesus being tangible and eating. Is this true? I argue that it isn't. Even aside from the quite uncritical approach that Allison takes to modern apparition reports, the reports as he recounts them are evidentially far less clear than the Gospel...

In his book on the resurrection, Dale Allison claims that, in the canonical Gospels, the post-Easter Jesus does not approach but just appears suddenly at once. He also claims that he cannot be followed. But there are specific counterexamples to both claims. If you're going to claim that there are significant parallels between your favored non-bodily explanation and the canonical Gospels, you n...

I'm continuing to go through telling admissions that Dale Allison makes (without realizing that they are telling admissions) about the apparition literature. These show that there is no significant similarity to what we find in the Gospel accounts, even though Allison suggests that there is. Yes, he also thinks the Gospel accounts are embellished...at just the points where they don't resem...

Dale Allison says that bereavement apparitions (sometimes called grief hallucinations) provide useful and enlightening "parallels" to the content of the Gospel stories when they describe Jesus' appearances to the disciples. Grief hallucinations are often a skeptical go-to theory to account for the beginning of Christianity. Allison himself uses these alleged parallels to support his...

A skeptic recently sent me a link to this article about an ancient novel, the Aithiopika (or Aaethiopica) of Heliodoros.https://www.jstor.org/stable/25010772?read-now=1&seq=22#page_scan_tab_contents(If you are interested in the article, you can log into Jstor using your Google account and read it for free.)Here is a copy of the novel in translation (along with some other works). Find "THE...

In this final (for now) video on the question of what skeptical and moderate scholars grant about the resurrection appearances, I argue that the majority of skeptical scholars probably do not even grant a group vision-like appearance experience with some degree of intersubjective content. I discuss how I think Dr. Habermas got, and gave, the impression that at least a lot of skeptical scholars do...

Do the vast majority, or virtually all, scholars across the critical spectrum grant appearances of Jesus to his disciples *that seeemed to them like what is told in the Gospels*? Emphatically not. When skeptical and even moderate scholars grant some kind of group appearance or other, they absolutely do not grant that it seemed to them like Jesus was eating with them as a group, having long convers...

Dr. Habermas has astonishingly now claimed that he never gave any definition of "the vast majority of scholars" and that, except for the empty tomb (which he emphasizes is not a minimal fact anyway) he never made any head count of how many scholars affirm a proposition. Here is a blog post I did on this issue recently, with links.https://lydiaswebpage.blogspot.com/2025/08/habermas-now-sa...

In this final video in the series I discuss the use of fudge factors. These are ad hoc changes in a hypothesis of unstated symbolism that occur while the theorist still states that the resemblance between the numbers, events, passages, etc., is just too much for coincidence and hence favors some sort of intentional but unstated symbolism by the author. I discuss two places where people have overtl...

We're talking about the "Gilbert and Sullivan" problem for dreaming up far-fetched symbolic meanings for narrated Gospel details. "If everybody's somebody, then no one's anybody." This week we see the "it's too easy" objection by considering this: If you can use "the sevenfold gift of the spirit plus the ten commandments, and then take the triangu...

What do I mean by saying that it's too easy to come up with theories of unstated symbolism in the details of the Gospels? And why does the fact that it's too easy create a problem for those theories? A song from an operetta by Gilbert and Sullivan says, "If everybody's somebody, then no one's anybody." If you're willing to go far enough to come up with an unstated sym...

I return here to a topic that I think is important, though I'm taking an unpopular position: I think that there is probabilistic tension between the occurrence of *unstated* symbolic or allusive meanings in the details of the Gospels' narratives. This does not mean that it is *strictly impossible* that a detail could be both historical and intended by the author to have an unstated symbolic meanin...

In this last video in this series about Dr. Habermas's misinterpretations of liberal scholars, I discuss what I call "pseudo-updating" of references to Dale Allison, apropos of the conversion of James. Allison apparently changed his mind after he wrote in 1985 accepting the idea that Jesus' brother James was converted by a post-resurrecion appearance. In both 2005 and 2021 Alliso...

Bart Ehrman has insisted that he never thought and never said that Paul went to Jerusalem to interview Peter or that Peter gave Paul eyewitness testimony about Peter's resurrection experience. That's very likely true. Ehrman seems to have a fair complaint against Habermas for over-claiming on those points, and such over-optimistic interpretation is only too typical of Habermas, as we'v...

In Dr. Gary Habermas's recent volume on the resurrection, he claims that the members of the Jesus Seminar show a degree of "respect" for the story of Jesus' first appearance to his male disciples in John 20:19-23 which is "rather amazing." He also implies that they show *some* degree of respect, though a lesser degree, to the story of Doubting Thomas later in that chapt...

I'm reading further quotations from the book of Jesus Seminar conclusions cited by Gary Habermas. According to Habermas, the Seminar acknowledges that a group appearance of Jesus to his disciples is attested by multiple, independent sources. This is not the case. We saw last time that Habermas misunderstands lists of sources by the Jesus Seminar, jumping to the conclusion that these are suppos...