Lydia McGrew, Author

Beginning today: New series on the name statistics argument (originated by Richard Bauckham) and a recently published critique of it.

Name Statistics Argument 1: What's it all about? I give a brief overview of the name statistics argument for the Gospels and Acts as found in the work of Richard Bauckham, Peter Williams, and others. I also...

It's become fairly common to see a sign that says, "You are loved." Or even more enthusiastically, "You are so loved and valued." On a business, on a church.

The passive voice is instructive: Loved by whom? Presumably the sign (especially on a prima facie secular business) is supposed to make the reader think of people in his life who love him, and feel encouraged. Or perhaps it's supposed to tell the reader that the proprietor is filled with love for all mankind and hence, in a sense, for everyone who passes by.

But the tragic fact is that there are all too many who are unloved by any living human being. What happens if the perky declaration that "you are so loved and valued" merely makes the passerby perform a brief mental survey and say to himself, "Um, no, actually, I'm not"? Worse, what if he's right?

Abstract philanthropy cannot fill this void, for the sign proclaims (and people want and need to believe in) love for "you"--that painfully unique self. And there are all too many alleged lovers of mankind who find it impossible to love individual men. For that matter, this is, in the case of some people, understandable. Many of us are unlovable or even actively cruel and evil.

There is only One who is infinite in wisdom and love and thus capable of loving each "you," through all the teeming billions. And this same One manifested His love towards us in that, while we were sinners, He took on our human nature and died for us.

So if you want to make a sign that declares universal benevolence, don't use the passive voice. Use the active voice. "God loves you." "Jesus loves you." "God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten Son."

Yes, this is a distinctively religious message. But unlike the sign cast in a queasily cautious passive voice, the religious message has a cardinal virtue:

For every individual human being who reads it, it's true.

Philosophia has now officially published my article "Be Careful What You Grant." It has a digital object number, etc. As previously announced, the author's accepted version is available for free on my personal website. (Link was posted the other day. I give it again in comments.) If you need a more official version, you can get it via institutional access from Springer.

link.springer.com

Last in my undesigned coincidence 2023 series: "Do you love me more than these?" The Synoptic Gospels explain something in John. Once more, apparent casualness is more important to evaluating independence than the "direction" of explanation. I also spend some time debunking the idea that the "these" refers to...the fish. :-)

Undesigned Coincidences: "Do you love me more than these [love me]?" In this last installment of my 2023 undesigned coincidence series, I touch on a lot of topics. Which is stronger, a UC where something in a later work explai...

Per agreement with Springer Nature (publisher of the journal Philosophia), the author's accepted version of "Be Careful What You Grant" has now been uploaded to my personal website. The digital object number of the official version will be posted on my curriculum vitae as soon as it becomes available. You can download a docx version of the author's accepted version by going here: https://lydiamcgrew.com/wp-content/uploads/Be-careful-what-you-grant-accepted-1.docx

My most popular archived article is the pre-print version of Tim's and my Resurrection article from the 2009 Blackwell Companion. This now has a new permalink at my new website, so if you have linked it or want to find it, go here:https://lydiamcgrew.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Resurrectionarticlesinglefile.pdf

My personal author web page has been updated! Thanks to Erik Manning (Testify) for a great job! Check out the new look at

Lydia McGrew – Making Common Sense Rigorous I’m Lydia McGrew. I’m a Christian analytic philosopher doing work in both theory of knowledge and New Testament studies. My motto as a scholar is “Making common sense rigorous.” See curriculum vitae NOTE: Welcome to my new site! If you’re seeing an error message using an old link starting ...

So what is the plausible undesigned coincidence between Matthew's and Luke's versions of the Parable of the Vineyard? Watch to find out!

Undesigned Coincidences: Parable of the vineyard 2 Today I wrap up the discussion of an undesigned coincidence between Matthew and Luke concerning the parable of the wicked tenants. Differences of detail betw...

I recently encountered the following idea: It has to be possible for us to be justified in believing that Jesus rose from the dead aside from using the accounts in the Gospels, because the earliest Christians, prior to the time when the Gospels were written, had to learn about the resurrection aside from the Gospels.

Can you spot the problem with this reasoning?

The early Christians had access to the apostles or to those who had known the apostles. We can't be justified in believing in the resurrection without the testimony of the original witnesses. They could acquire this testimony orally, often directly from the Apostles themselves.

But we don't have that opportunity. We don't have any better (or even equally good) sources giving us the detailed testimony of the original alleged witnesses other than the Gospels and Acts. Apart from those we are in a really weak epistemic position.

So the attempted analogy between ourselves if we don't use the Gospel accounts and the earliest converts is a poor one.

Since I am not an inerrantist, it might seem that I don't have a "dog in" the discussion over revising the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy. But I do have a stake in continuing to plead for openness and honesty among evangelical scholars about what they really believe. My own open statement that I'm not an inerrantist has been somewhat inconvenient for me. Yes, I'm lucky in a way that my livelihood doesn't depend upon asserting a particular statement of faith that includes inerrancy. I *hope* that even if I did I would be completely open about my views anyway.

By and large, advocates of traditional inerrancy have appreciated my honesty, even if they are reluctantly forced to concede that I can't belong to this or that organization due to my open non-inerrancy. But at least I'm not confusing anybody about what I really think.

"I affirm the Chicago Statement on inerrancy" has become a kind of social indicator of where a person is coming from ideologically. If that changes to "Chicago Statement 2.0" which has more latitude for what would traditionally be considered errantist views, making such a claim (that one "affirms the Chicago Statement") will become that much less informative. There will be that much more confusion about where people really stand.

Far more than traditional inerrantists, those who apparently have a stake in keeping things unclear have given me a hard time for trying to bring clarity to discussions of issues like Gospel reliability and questions like, "Did the Gospel authors sometimes make things up? Did the Gospel authors sometimes knowingly change the facts?" This sort of plain speaking has been condemned just *because* it is clear and plain, even though it does accurately express what is at issue. I can't help thinking that the move to write a revised statement on inerrancy for use by organizations like the ETS while still *calling* it "the Chicago Statement" is part of this same overall preference for unclarity over clarity. And to be blunt, that is unbecoming to Christian scholars. And that's why I have a stake in this question.

Can there be an undesigned coincidence between two Synoptic versions of the same incident? This week I start to explore that question using Jesus' Parable of the Vineyard.

Undesigned coincidences: Parable of the vineyard 1 Here I discuss the Synoptic parable of the vineyard or parable of the wicked tenants. I'm going to suggest (next time) an undesigned coincidence between Matt...

J. Gresham Machen on harmonizing the infancy narratives. (HT to Shane Rosenthal for the quote.)

"What right have we, [say many modern scholars] to insist that two ancient narratives must be so interpreted as that they shall agree; why should we not interpret each of them by itself, according to the interpretation that is inherently most probable, and entirely without reference to the other; is not this whole business of harmonization a mere unscientific apologetic expedient?

But surely such a method of approach begs the question in a very unscientific way. In countless cases, where we hear two independent and perfectly trustworthy witnesses, A and B, testify to the facts regarding the same event, there are questions that arise in our mind. We say to A: "How is that? I do not understand; you say one thing, and B says another, and I do not see how your testimony agrees with that of B." And then in countless cases a few words of explanation will clear the whole matter up, and our difficulty results only in a clearer and more complete account of the course of events. In such cases the harmonizing method is not unscientific at all. What is true, moreover, with regard to contemporary testimony is also true with regard to ancient documents. If we have two historical documents, for whose trustworthiness there is any evidence at all, it is not unscientific, but on the contrary in accordance with sound common sense, to favor, other things being equal, that interpretation of each of them which will permit us to regard both of them as true. We may well ask, with Andrews, "Is there any consistent history which is not the result of harmonistic expedients?" Surely, then, we should approach without unfavorable prejudice the question of the harmony between the infancy narratives in Matthew and in Luke."

I'm very pleased to announce that I've had a paper accepted in the peer-reviewed journal Philosophia. The paper is called "Be Careful What You Grant" and examines the phenomenon of granting for the sake of the argument from a probabilistic perspective. As a concrete example, the paper focused on Intelligent Design and issues like the origin of life and the origin of more complex living creatures. What is the probabilistic effect of granting even just for the sake of the argument that there is no separate biological design argument (BDA) that has any force in favor of theism beyond arguments like the cosmological argument and the fine-tuning argument? Does this amount to granting an "explaining away" effect whereby natural mechanisms take away the force of some evidence for theism? I argue that it does and therefore that there is no way to tell whether science has (to some extent) "explained away" evidence for theism without getting involved in the scientific details and deciding whether the biological design arguments have force. One can't merely punt by saying that it doesn't matter anyway because there would still be, say, a fine-tuning argument.

This type of point has relevance to New Testament studies as well, though I don't explore that relevance in this paper. If one grants even just "for the sake of the argument" that the Gospels are unreliable, this is going to have all sorts of probabilistic effects. It will undermine one's right to use details of the Gospel accounts (say, the fact that Jesus eats with the disciples in a resurrection appearance) in one's argument as if these are witness-attested propositions.

Not sure when the article will be out or what the terms of publication will be as far as archiving a preprint version on the author's site, but I'll post when and if I have a link to a public version.

If you've ever made the argument from undesigned coincidences for Gospel historicity, you have probably encountered someone who says, "Undesigned coincidences don't work because of somethingsomethingsomething Synoptic problem."

In this continuation of my 2023 undesigned coincidences series I talk about why this sort of dismissal doesn't work.

Undesigned Coincidences: "To his servants" Anyone who has made an argument from undesigned coincidences in the Gospels has likely encountered hasty dismissal because of "Something something Synoptic p...

I wish I were as clever as Testify!

Jesus Wants to Help But Refuses to Copy Asclepius What's Jesus to do when Asclepius has already performed the best miracles? Jesus can't let himself be accused of plagiarism by skeptics centuries from now. F...

Here's internal evidence of independence in a Gospel undesigned coincidence: John's record of a thing Jesus said after cleansing the Temple explains Mark's record of what the hostile witnesses said about Jesus at his Sanhedrin trial. But get this: This saying of Jesus in John occurs in a passage that constitutes one of the most famous alleged contradictions between John and Mark--the early Temple cleansing.

Undesigned coincidences and evidence of independence: Destroy this Temple We've been talking about internal evidence of independence for a couple of weeks now. Now let's see how this works in a Gospel example of an undesigned coinc...

This may come as a surprise, but there hasn't really been a "movement in recent years" toward a more conservative view of the Gospels. The few small concessions to sanity that the world of mainstream biblical scholarship has made since the days when (say) it was considered quite respectable to date the Gospel of John well into the 2nd century were made *decades* ago.

To hear some people talk, one would think that it was just last year that (ecstatic gasp) scholars decided that the so-called "creed" in I Corinthians was circulating in early years after Jesus' crucifixion. But actually that particular concession was a) not all that helpful anyway to arguing for Christianity and b) made quite a long time ago. Not "in recent years."

Richard Burridge's book on the Gospels as Greco-Roman bioi was first published over 25 years ago and wasn't, in any event, much of a challenge at all to mainstream New Testament criticism. It comes as a shock to too many evangelical laymen to learn that Burridge probably wouldn't want to be called a conservative scholar if offered the label and that he is quite open about telling us how, supposedly, "the negative connotation of 'fabrication' is modern" (that is an exact quote) and the author of John had no such "modern" hangup!

If anything the supposed advance of labeling the Gospels as "Greco-Roman bioi" has had far more of an effect of pulling evangelicals in the direction of mainstream scholarship, leading them to take a more positive view of the idea that the Gospel authors felt free to invent, than pulling mainstream scholarship in the direction of acknowledging Gospel historicity.

It is unfortunate that conservative Christians like to tell themselves that there is some sort of new, recent, hot movement going on in "our" direction. I hate to break it to ya', but it just isn't so. Stake your positions out on the basis of where the evidence leads, and don't worry about whether you're part of a "recent movement" or not.

If witnesses to an event had a chance to talk with one another, does that render their separate testimony completely independent? What if they probably knew one another? Too often critics of undesigned coincidences imply that such coincidences are evidentially worthless unless the authors were "witness separated." Learn more about why that isn't true with an example of internal evidence from independence from the Saville inquiry into Bloody Sunday.

Undesigned Coincidences: Bloody Sunday and internal evidence of independent testimony Here I discuss a modern example of the way that internal evidence of independence can allow us to use two reports as evidence even when we know that the peop...

Check out this satire mockumentary by Erik Manning (Testify) premiering tomorrow!

The Napoleon Myth | Full Documentary Prepare for a thought-provoking and totally serious documentary that peels back the layers of the historical legend, Napoleon Bonaparte. "The Napoleon Myth" ...

Herewith, a bit of satire:

Bill: On Wednesday I had a Big Mac and fries for lunch.

Jody, Bill's wife: On Friday I made hamburgers for dinner for the family.

Critical scholar A: We can clearly see that Jody has moved the consumption of hamburgers from Wednesday to Friday. (It would be absurd to try to harmonize the two utterances by saying that hamburgers were consumed on both days. Only a fundamentalist who thinks that Jody and Bill are infallible would do that.) It is reasonable to hypothesize that she did this to emphasize the theme of freedom in Christ. Because Bill and Jody are Protestants, they do not believe that they have to abstain from meat on Fridays. This theory is all the stronger since the utterances occurred in February, which is in Lent, when faithful Catholics abstain from meat on Fridays.

Critical scholar B: Jody has clearly moved the consumption of hamburgers from Wednesday to Friday. (It would be absurd to try to harmonize the two utterances by saying that hamburgers were consumed on both days. Only a fundamentalist who thinks that Jody and Bill are infallible would do that.) Jody did this because secretly she wishes that her family could be vegetarian and is frustrated by Bill's opposition to such a move. She wished to portray the cows killed for their hamburgers as being parallel to Jesus' death on the cross. And she has expanded the eating to the entire family in order to emphasize that we are all complicit in the exploitation of animals.

Critical scholars A and B on social media: [Click "like" on each others' posts advocating these different theories.]

In this methodological discussion I'm talking about what kind of independence is relevant to undesigned coincidences and about how we can know that two accounts have that kind of independence. Too many critics of the idea seem to be under the impression that only "witness separation" independence could possibly underlie any important undesigned coincidence. If the authors or speakers knew one another, if they could have talked to each other after the event, that's supposed to spell DOOM for any undesigned coincidence argument from their testimony.

But matters aren't that simple. Learn here about external and internal evidence of independence and how the more we have of one kind, the less we need of the other kind.

Undesigned coincidences: What kind of independence? In this methodological discussion I'm talking about what kind of independence is relevant to undesigned coincidences and about how we can know that two accou...

Critical scholars often claim that the mention of Galilee in Luke's resurrection narrative, where the angel reminds the women that Jesus foretold his resurrection when they were in Galilee, is invented. The claim is that Luke was going to change the facts and put all of Jesus' appearances in Jerusalem on the very day of his resurrection, so he had to erase the mention of appearances in Galilee found in Mark. So, goes the theory, he changed the angel's prediction of an appearance in Galilee to a reminder that Jesus foretold his resurrection in Galilee. This factual change is unfortunately a widely accepted view, even by at least one "evangelical."

A real-world factor that critical scholars almost never consider: If they were right, and Luke wanted to eliminate the angel's reference to an appearance in Galilee due to his own intention to "move" all appearances to Jerusalem, *why not just eliminate the angel's reference to Galilee*, period??

The critic must hypothesize a quite unmotivated psychological attachment to the word "Galilee" so that Luke felt that he should *invent* an angelic message that referred *somehow* to Galilee. But it would have been easier just to cut out those words of the angel and not replace them with anything that mentioned Galilee. Why should Luke have been so determined to retain the word "Galilee"? It's not as though his readers would be unable to notice that the words were different from those in Mark! (To be clear, I think the angel said both things. Why not? Nobody claims to be giving a *complete* account of all the words of the angel. And the women who were with Jesus in Galilee are explicitly mentioned in the Synoptics elsewhere.)

Critical scholars do these strange, strange things. They imagine an author not wanting (for some literary or theological reason) to record some bit of text or some fact X (in this case, the reference to meeting Jesus in Galilee) and then imagine the author replacing it pointlessly with some bit of text Y that bears some now-pointless resemblance to X but is supposed to be more acceptable to the author's agenda.

A little real-world imagination would have prevented that!

I heard recently that a skeptic challenges the use of details, even in undesigned coincidences, to confirm that the Gospels are based on witness testimony. The claim is that "people don't remember those kinds of details."

This is obviously false, as most of us can attest. I could paralyze you with boredom for hours by relating minuscule, random details that are stored in my memory from things I have experienced.

In Testimonies to the Truth I give the example of Jimmy Fortune telling about his interview with the Oakridge Boys and relating that their driver (whose name he remembers) picked him up at the airport in a Lincoln Continental--a point that has no other relevance to the story.

Just for fun, share below a pointless detail that you remember from at least ten years ago. If you remember approximately how long ago, mention that.

Be sure not to share anything that you are likely to want to use for a s*cur*ty question answer, but note: The very existence of such questions as a means of confirming identity shows that people are, indeed, expected to remember some small details from their lives.

I'll start: I remember that the slowest horse for trail rides at the camp I attended when I was a kid was named Rusty.

One more: I remember the smell of ci******es on the Chicago buses whenever I rode them.

One more: I remember buying a red comb in the bookstore at summer camp with my camp paper tokens (which they converted our spending money into), and not having enough. A boy named Colin (I think his last name was Brotherton) helped out with some of his tokens so I could buy the comb.

All of these memories go back more than forty years.

I could go on like this all day. See what I mean about boring you?

Your turn!

In _Testimonies to the Truth_ I said that we are "to a large extent guessing" what was contained in the conjectured Q source, even if it did exist. In the very next sentence I stated that the material common to Matthew and Luke but not found in Mark is considered "Q material." I understand that the "Lydia McGrew doesn't understand the Synoptic problem" trope has been recently supported based on the first sentence (about guessing) while ignoring the second, the idea being that I'm unaware of what is meant by "Q material." The implication as well is that there is therefore no significant amount of guesswork concerning what was contained in Q, because *everybody knows* that it was the material common to Luke and Matthew but not found in Mark.

But this is simply false. There is a *huge* amount of guesswork that goes into a scholar's views about what was in Q, and this is not removed by the broad category "what is found in both Matthew and Luke but not in Mark." The story of the healing of the centurion's servants is "Q material," but were the intermediaries found in Q, or did Luke invent them? Scholars who accept Q differ on this question. Did Q contain a common source for the parables of the minas and talents in Luke and Matthew? Scholars argue this question. Can we discern *layers* of Q and its development over time? What about Robert Gundry's idea of an "extended Q" that included Luke's infancy narrative (even though this isn't material common to Luke and Matthew)? All of these questions and more are what I mean by "to a large extent guessing."

If we want to ask who does and doesn't "understand" scholarly views on the Synoptic problem and the hypothetical Q source, I would say that those who act completely unaware of this guesswork involved in supposedly reconstructing Q are the ones who don't know what they're talking about. Here are a few relevant links: https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Q_Document
https://biblicalstudies.org.uk/pdf/4gospels_streeter/chapter-10.pdf

https://www.jstor.org/stable/1561530?typeAccessWorkflow=login

Luke's Motives for Redaction in the Account of the Double Delegation in Luke 7:1-10 on JSTOR Robert A. J. Gagnon, Luke's Motives for Redaction in the Account of the Double Delegation in Luke 7:1-10, Novum Testamentum, Vol. 36, Fasc. 2 (Apr., 1994), pp. 122-145

Today I'm starting a series on methodology and undesigned coincidences. Today's includes a non-biblical undesigned coincidence in the biography of actor Dirk Bogarde.

Can you refute undesigned coincidences? Dirk Bogarde and Bergen-Belsen I'm kicking off a new series on undesigned coincidences with the question, what does it mean to ask if we can refute the argument from undesigned coincidence...

This will be a somewhat technical post.

Back in the early 00s, Tim and I rebutted Alvin Plantinga’s critique of an evidential case for Christianity. Plantinga based that critique on something he called the “principle of dwindling probabilities.” We showed that Plantinga had committed a very serious probabilistic error by confusing the prior probability of “God exists,” based only on non-historical arguments (general natural theology arguments) with the posterior probability of “God exists” based on specific evidence for a miracle. He then used that prior probability (which he just made up off-the-cuff) in a way that “baked in” a much lower probability for “Jesus rose from the dead.” This was probabilistically illicit.

Another prominent feature of his argument was the steadfast refusal to examine detailed evidence for “Jesus rose from the dead,” coupled with the claim that he was estimating “generous” probabilities for this proposition that were literally just made up based upon the observation that “experts disagree.” This was obviously a big problem.

Others who followed in his footsteps made similar mistakes, especially estimating probabilities based only on “experts disagree.”

But I want to correct the impression that there are *no* circumstances in which probabilities really do dwindle. An example: Suppose that Jim says that his intention to attend a party on Saturday greatly raises the probability that he will get married. When asked why, Jim says that if he attends the party, he expects to see Jenny there. If he sees Jenny, he will ask her to go on a date. If they go on a date, they will get along wonderfully well and will have romantic chemistry. And if they have romantic chemistry, they will get married.

It’s a true act of friendship to point out to Jim that he’s getting ahead of himself and that there are a lot of “ifs” in that chain of events.

Notice that Jim is *not* bringing up specific testimonial evidence for his having an actual romantic relationship with Jenny. (As we were bringing up specific testimonial evidence for Jesus’ resurrection.) Rather, he’s *just* adding a chain of optimistic “ifs” to his intention to go to the party.

Perhaps Jim thinks that he can support each of those “ifs.” But he’s going to have to work hard to do so, and on the face of it he’s making a very shaky argument. His mere attendance at the party doesn’t seem to have a very strong probabilistic effect on his eventual marriage. Moreover, even if he does have arguments for all of those “ifs,” these are arguments that are available right now. It’s not as though there is some natural set of evidence (like testimonial evidence to a specific event) that he can bring up at some later “stage” of a diachronic argument, as there was in the case of Jesus’ resurrection. Jim’s argument doesn’t naturally lend itself to such a staged approach. If he really thinks that his going to the party greatly raises the probability of his getting married, he should be able to tell us why based upon a univocal set of evidence. Nor are you opposing his optimism on a hand-wavy basis like “experts disagree.” There are plenty of things that could, in fact, go wrong between his attending the party and his actually marrying Jenny, and you’re presumably prepared to point this out in some detail an effort to curb his enthusiasm and protect him from too much disappointment.

Jim’s argument is one case where the probabilities plausibly really do dwindle. It’s what I call a “weak chain argument.”

There are other types of arguments where the multiplication of probabilities is relevant. For example, concerning fact-changing literary devices, in The Mirror or the Mask I pointed out how many different places exist where the argument breaks down. These fact-changing devices have to *exist* at the time. Even if they existed, the Gospels have to be written in a genre in which those fact-changing devices would be plausibly expected. In order for that to be the case, the Gospel authors (or co-authors?) would have to *know* about such devices and such a genre. And even if those devices existed and they knew about them, they would have to choose to use them. *Each* of these is subject to serious question, and they *all* have to be true in order for the literary device view to go through.

There are plenty of arguments floating around in which the multiplication of probabilities are relevant (and point to a weakness in the argument). Nothing that Tim and I did in response to Alvin Plantinga means that there is never any such thing as "dwindling probabilities."

Since I've realized that there may be some confusion about this, I thought it would be a good thing to state that clearly and publicly.