The Lydia McGrew Podcast

Does the Jesus Seminar acknowledge that group appearances of the risen Jesus to his disciples are multiply, independently attested? Short answer: No. But unfortunately, in volume 1 of his recent set of books on the resurrection, Gary Habermas emphatically says that they do. Here I read several of the places where Habermas says so and also undeniable quotations where they say to the contrary. Haber...

Does the Jesus Seminar acknowledge that group appearances of the risen Jesus to his disciples are multiply, independently attested? Short answer: No. But unfortunately, in volume 1 of his recent set of books on the resurrection, Gary Habermas emphatically says that they do. Here I read several of the places where Habermas says so and also undeniable quotations where they say to the contrary. Haber...

Over the next few weeks I'm going to look at some rather severe problems with Dr. Gary Habermas's interpretations of more liberal New Testament scholars, as represented in Volume 1 of his magnum opus on the resurrection. Regular viewers know that I have a lot of criticisms of the Minimal Facts Argument for the resurrection. In many of these I'm discussing the epistemology of the argume...

In this final installment of my series on the Pharisees in the Gospels, I reply to the last argument I could find in Dr. Keener's commentary on John. This is an attempt to use redaction criticism to line up John's account of the messengers from the Pharisees and treat it as a redactive adaptation (i.e. at least partially non-historical) of statements in Luke and Matthew. The astonishing th...

Today I'm discussing one of the remaining arguments that Craig Keener gives in his commentary on John for thinking that John exaggerates the role of the Pharisees in a partially non-historical way. We've already seen in detail that statistical arguments about the number of times the Pharisees are treated as the opposition, or even the extent to which they work *alone* as the opposition in...

We've been systematically refuting the claim that Matthew and John modify stories to make the Pharisees do things that they didn't historically due, allegedly to make their Gospels more relevant to their readers. This week I examine a variant on this theory--namely, that (regardless of whether he has numerically more negative portrayals of the Pharisees than the Synoptics) John tries to fo...

Here we hit two more categories of "engagement with Pharisaism" in the Gospels, plus a list of a series miscellaneous mentions of the Pharisees that don't fit into any other categories. As this series has copiously documented, the data simply don't back up Craig Keener's claim that Matthew "engages with Pharisaism" more than Mark and Luke or that John focuses negati...

I'm continuing a series documenting, step by step, just *how wrong* the thesis is that Matthew "engages with Pharisaism" more than Mark and Luke and that John does so more than Matthew, allegedly to make their Gospels more relevant to their audiences, even at times going so far as to attribute non-historical actions to the Pharisees. How wrong is it? It's *so wrong* that it doesn...

I begin systematically dismantling the completely false theory that Matthew "engages with Pharisaism" more than Luke or Mark and that John does so more than Matthew. Even if there were more stories "engaging with Pharisaism" in Matthew than in Luke, this wouldn't be a good argument for some kind of trend or development, nor that Matthew was written later than Luke. The enti...

Today I'm starting a new series on a Gospel development theory. This particular theory alleges that Matthew contains more "engagement with Pharisaism" than either Mark or Luke, that John contains more "exclusive engagement with Pharisaism" than Matthew, and that this arises from the fact that Matthew and John were both trying to make their Gospels more relevant to their aud...

In this last video in my Matthean discourses series, I examine places where, yep, we have a saying in one context in Matthew and in what really does look like a different context in Luke, and that's it, and this is no biggie. In other words, with all the other evidence we have of Jesus' tendency to repeat important teachings (and the tendency of other teachers to do this quite normally), w...

Sometimes when scholars claim that Matthew made dyschronological composite discourses, they ignore the fact that we find Jesus teaching that same teaaching (which they are using) twice in a single Gospel. Sometimes this is Matthew, sometimes another Gospel (like Luke or John). This in itself shows that it was a saying that Jesus was fond of and repeated, so it isn't an argument for a composite...

Is it more likely that the Sermon on the Level Place in Luke 6 is the same event as the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5-7, or a different event? If it's the same event, does that mean that Matthew changed the facts and fictionally moved the sermon to a mountain for a symbolic purpose? (Spoiler: No, it definitely doesn't mean that.)I argue that it probably is the same event but that this *...

This year I weigh in on a couple of alleged contradictions in the Easter stories that I've never discussed elsewhere (as far as I can remember). One of these concerns when the women bought and prepared spices. The other, on which I spend more time, is the claim that Matthew contradicts Luke and Mark about where the women saw an angel at Jesus' tomb. Blessed Easter to everyone! Here is a go...

This video will be released on Palm Sunday, 2025, but it isn't about Palm Sunday, at least not directly. Here I'm talking about the insistence that Matthew engages in dyschronological narration by deliberately gathering together sayings that he knows weren't uttered on the same occasion and putting them in bracketed discourses, which makes it appear that they were uttered on the same o...

This week I begin a new series on the claim that Matthew contains composite discourses of Jesus. I define the phrase "composite discourses," discuss reasons for caring whether Matthew contains them, and read interesting quotations from D.A. Carson giving some reasons for questioning the scholarly consensus on this. Is Carson a "critical scholar"? How is the phrase "critica...

It's easy (especially for skeptics) to be anachronistic when thinking about the Gospels' indications of realism and reliability. A keen awareness of *just how recent* elaborate, fictional world-building is in literary history can help to counter certain types of anachronism.

What about those "other gospels that didn't make the cut" of going into the canon? Today I talk about the portrayal of Jesus' crucifixion in the "Gospel" of Peter. I show that even though the author clearly had access to the canonical Gospels, he didn't even know enough about the real historical background to know what he needed to retain from the canonical crucifixion stories, causing his own ver...

Today's discussion was inspired by this post on Bart Ehrman's blog. https://ehrmanblog.org/john-versus-the-synoptics-how-does-jesus-raise-the-dead/Most of it is behind a paywall for subscribers, but Ehrman says that he makes the same argument in _The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings_.Ehrman claims that the raising of Lazarus, contrasted with the rais...

Today's discussion is a follow-up to this recent stream with Dale Glover and David Kemball-Cook, which aired several weeks agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrO3QZ4DsXYDavid and I disagreed in the discussion about whether we should compare the resurrection to the negation of the resurrection when asking how to evaluate the explanatory power of the hypotheses. Should we instead, as David argue...

I've sometimes called myself a rampaging evidentialist. Picking up on an exchange I had recently on Facebook, I respond here to the concern that rampaging evidentialism seems to mean that, if a Christian is doubting his faith, I wouldn't tell him to pray since that would be a non-rational activity. And similarly, the concern that all sorts of Christian practices like taking the Sacrament/C...

Recently Capturing Christianity suggested that the maximal data case for the Gospels is burdensome because (he alleged) you have to defend *all* these different things, including traditional authorship and undesigned coincidences, and if any of these arguments don't work, the case is "weakened."I argue that this is backwards. These things are conduits for data that really is there an...

Sometimes it's a bit surprising that mainstream Gospels scholars who don't even claim to be inerrantists are not more inclined toward theories of minor good-faith errors. For example, why wouldn't more mainstream scholars suggest that Matthew just misunderstood something and sincerely thought that the centurion came to Jesus in person? They don't have any social reason to avoid the...

Classicist Christopher Pelling says that Plutarch made up a surrounding scene in which a certain conversation took place between two ancient Romans (Antony and Trebonius). According to Pelling, all that Plutarch knew was that something like this conversation had happened, but he filled it out, stating exactly what journey it took place on and so forth, without any historical warrant. Michael Licon...

It's important to remember: If an ancient author is changing the facts in order to deceive someone, then what he's doing *cannot be* a non-deceptive "compositional device" or "accepted variation in the genre." The claim that a change (even if it really is a deliberate change) in a non-biblical author is non-deceptive because it was an "accepted" thing in his g...