The Lydia McGrew Podcast

I'm continuing to show how misunderstandings and misapplications of ancient non-biblical literature carry over to misinterpretations of passages in the Gospels. Here I show how Dr. Licona strangely misapplies a case where the satirist Lucian is *blatantly lying* (and even bragging about how he misled some credulous people by his tall tale) as if it helps to support a mini-genre of non-historic...

Today I'm continuing to discuss bad methodology as applied to non-biblical ancient history. Did Sallust deliberately move a saying by the conspirator Catiline to a different meeting with the Senate? First, we should consider the (actually not terribly implausible) possibility that Catiline was just fond of the sound of his own threat against Rome and that he used it on more than one occasion....

This week I continue to talk about non-biblical history and the deep problems with the compositional device methodology. In this case I talk about a discrepancy between two of Plutarch's _Lives_ that appears to be a real discrepancy--harmonization between the accounts doesn't quite work. But does it follow that a) Plutarch changed the facts on purpose, b) Plutarch's audience would have expected su...

Even non-biblical historical works should often be harmonized. That's just part of applying common sense to history. For the next few weeks I will talk about the epistemologically bad discrepancy hunting method and how it applies to non-biblical history. In this method, mere differences are often exaggerated into discrepancies. Then further these discrepancies aren't attributed to common human err...

The oft-repeated claim that there would *never* be a Roman census in a "client state," used to discredit Luke's mention of a census in the Christmas story, is an example of a priori history. Those who insist on this claim have only the thinnest justification for it--namely, the fact that client states under Rome had *some* measure of independence in matters of taxation. They also ignore or fumble...

What do the Virgin Birth and the bodily resurrection of Jesus have in common? For one thing, they both emphasize the fact that Jesus had real body. Today I discuss why that is important from the perspective of knowledge (epistemology) and why we Christians shouldn't confuse a theological mystery with a lack of hard evidence. Have a very merry evidential Christmas! Links mentioned in today's broadc...

In this last segment on the rigidity of critical scholars, I examine a bad methodological assumption--that if the wording of parallel passages is somewhat similar, but there are small differences, these differences very likely resulted from *deliberate editing* (redacting, substituting, etc.) of the earlier version of the story. This rule is also wrongly applied to the evangelists' quotations of S...

In this video I read four quotations in which scholars make fun of harmonization by comparing reasonable harmonizations with far-fetched ones, sometimes using views that have never even been seriously advocated as a straw man of harmonizing. This is a tactic that one should be prepared for. This sort of condescension and mockery can make anyone more conservative than the "scholarly consensus" feel...

What did Jairus say about his daughter when he came to Jesus? Did he tell him that his daughter had died or that she was dying? This relatively minor question has fueled many-a conversion to the acceptance of fact-changing literary devices. This is why I call it a "gateway drug" to fact-changing by the evangelists. A reasonable approach to this difference is to attribute it to the normal variation...

Today I'm discussing another aspect of the rigidity of critical scholarship: Among the Synoptic Gospels, they assume that if Matthew and/or Luke is "using Mark" for a story, then we shouldn't take seriously the possibility that Matthew and/or Luke is also supplementing Mark from additional factual information to which he has independent access. Factual independence is treated as all-or-nothing. So...

Critical scholars who reject harmonization like to portray those who harmonize the Gospels as ignorant, rigid, and unhistorical. Supposedly this all arises from allowing one's theological preoccupations to cause one to engage in bizarre behavior (harmonization) that one wouldn't use in other contexts. Perhaps no one is better at giving this impression than Bart Ehrman, and sadly, it's an evaluatio...

Today I'm starting a series in which I especially emphasize the rigidity of critical Gospels' scholars who create strained contradictions and reject sensible harmonizations. This theme has been implicit in much of my work, but I'm trying to make it more explicit. The claim that conservatives interpreting the Gospels lack nuance and are rigid is so misguided that the truth is exactly the opposite....

In this video I respond carefully to the unfortunate and incorrect comparison that Dr. Licona has recently made between Mark's hyperbolic language in Mark 1:5 (that all Jerusalem and Judea was coming out to be baptized by John) and the fact-changing literary devices that I have argued the Gospel authors did not use. Licona has literally said that Mark is "changing the facts" in that verse, which i...