Avsnitt
-
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 audiences by changing the groups involved in certain incidents, since their audiences several decades after Jesus were suffering persecution from the Pharisees of their own time.I illustrate this theory by reading quotations from Craig Keener's commentaries on Matthew and on John. I show that these are really fact-changing theories even though Keener characterizes the theory by saying that John "updates language."As we'll see in this series, it turns out that even at the descriptive level, this theory fails disastrously. It just isn't anywhere close to being true that Matthew contains more "engagement with Pharisaism" than Luke and Mark or that John contains more than the Synoptics. Next week we'll start seeing that in detail.
-
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), we shouldn't flinch from attributing these distinct contexts to repetition by Jesus. This isn't desperate, fundamentalist, inerrantist harmonization but responsible practice. If you want to find my content in audio-only format, check out my webpage for all the links to that format--both Apple and Spotify. lydiamcgrew.com has them all!
-
Saknas det avsnitt?
-
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 discourse in Matthew at all. In fact, sometimes Matthew has the same teaching in the very same setting as in another Gospel, as well as in a discourse (so Matthew is conveying that Jesus taught it twice), and scholars will illicitly parallel the other Gospel setting to the *wrong parallel* in Matthew--not the one where Matthew is clearly agreeing with the other Gospel.Watch to learn more! (And don't forget to like and subscribe.)
-
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 *does not* support fictionalization of any kind. In this presentation I read a lot of helpful quotes from D. A. Carson's commentary on Matthew. One of the best things about the commentary is that Carson doesn't buy into the rigid rule of all-or-nothing dependence. The idea that Jesus was standing on a level plateau within the hill country, possibly with his audience seated above as in an amphitheatre, is entirely consistent with Matthew's and Luke's language and entirely plausible. It looks like not only did Matthew have more information than Luke (for many verses) about what Jesus said on that specific occasion, Luke also had some independent evidence from a non-Matthean source about some things Jesus said on that occasion.
-
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 good post by Jonathan McLatchie that I'm agreeing with and supplementing:https://jonathanmclatchie.com/do-the-resurrection-narratives-contradict-a-reply-to-dan-mcclellan/Here are a whole bunch of videos from earlier Easters, some of them more inspirational: https://www.youtube.com/@LydiaMcGrewChannel/search?query=EasterHere is a specific one I'm especially fond of about Jesus saying, "I told you so" through the message of the angel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZeV7VPUM1U&t=1s
-
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 occasion. I explain here again how my spine was stiffened by D.A. Carson's taking the minority position against Matthean composite bracketed discourses. Here I'm emphasizing the strange critical scholarly inclination (on this point) to pit Luke against Matthew, treating Luke as representative of "Q", and rigidly assuming all-or-nothing dependence, so that if Luke represents "Q" and Matthew is based only on "Q," then any contextual indicators found in Matthew but not found in Luke must be invented by Matthew. This is particularly backwards, when Luke strongly appears to be narrating achronologically, yet Matthew is treated as the one narrating in a non-chronological way.Here's my video on the rigid rule of all-or-nothing dependence and independence:https://youtu.be/jp9hnV-JqEMHere is more on the distinction between achronological and dyschronological narration:https://youtu.be/n4TzGiFCeLEOne could argue that the issue of dyschronological Matthean discourses relates to the reliability of Matthew, which is *indirectly* related to the reliability of Matthew's account of Palm Sunday, which has some unique features, most notably the two donkeys, which are mentioned only in Matthew (one donkey colt is mentioned in the other Gospels). So if you want a more seasonal Palm Sunday video, here you go--my video on the two donkeys in Matthew:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muD3cPzmUn8&t=3sFinally, here are four other videos in which I discuss Luke's central section, which is often achronological, and the puzzles it provides:https://youtu.be/OLTHeM7V1Gghttps://youtu.be/2AGfi81iCq0https://youtu.be/wlmNTXzoOxshttps://youtu.be/UBf0tjISpI8
-
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 "critical scholar" used equivocally to bludgeon people into agreeing with a conclusion? Do we really have independent reason to believe that there was a known compositional device of producing composite discourses while giving what appears to be a single historical setting for a speech?
-
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 version of the crucifixion to be objectively historically inaccurate and unclear. Here is the translation of the "Gospel" of Peter that I'm reading from:https://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/gospelpeter-brown.htmlHere is a post with the quote from George Rawlinson and more on how the Gospels bear out what he says: https://lydiaswebpage.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-annotated-rawlinson.html
-
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 raising of Jairus's daughter, illustrates an overall tendency which shows that John's Gospel is significantly ahistorical. This is the supposed tendency of John to make Jesus' miracles more of a public spectacle than in the Synoptics, to make Jesus use his miracles as signs of his power and identity, and to make Jesus far more focused on himself. Supposedly, in the Synoptics Jesus *refuses* to use his miracles as signs.I show that *every single other miracle* that is unique to John is a counterexample to Ehrman's claim. There are also numerous other points of evidence that show that his claim about this "different Jesus" in John and the Synoptics is just false.If you're interested in more on Jesus in John, check out _The Eye of the Beholder: The Gospel of John as Historical Reportage_:https://www.amazon.com/Eye-Beholder-Gospel-Historical-Reportage/dp/1947929151/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2P5N15K1P8TIJ&dchild=1&keywords=the+eye+of+the+beholder+lydia+mcgrew&qid=1617757441&s=books&sprefix=the+eye+of+the+beholder%2Cstripbooks%2C185&sr=1-1
-
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 argued, compare R to the "best alternative" to R which proposes to explain the evidence in various ways under the theory that R never happened? Here I explain why it's important in historical investigations to use a partition ("this event happened" vs. "this event didn't happen") to evaluate the force of the evidence.Since the stream got a little techy, it seemed good to take some more time on these issues.Here are those images to study at your leisure:https://lydiaswebpage.blogspot.com/2025/03/bayesian-analysis-resurrection-and.html
-
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/Communion, going to church, having fellowship with other Christians, and singing Christian songs are, according to evidentialism, non-rational and therefore, at best, unimportant. But none of that is implied by evidentialism, as you'll see by watching.Here's a post I did quite a few years ago on what evidentialism is not:https://lydiaswebpage.blogspot.com/2020/08/what-evidentialism-is-not.htmlHere's a more recent blog post on the same topic:https://lydiaswebpage.blogspot.com/2025/01/evidentialism-and-apostasy-round-2.html
-
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 and that really does raise the probability that the Gospels are reliable. Therefore, the more such conduits we have, the better. To say that the case is "weakened" if some part of a massively strong case were to fall through is, at best, a pointless tautology: If you had less evidence you'd have less evidence. Or it's like saying that if you had one less good friend than you in fact have, you'd have fewer good friends than you do have. But of course that doesn't mean that it would be less burdensome to have fewer good friends to begin with, because then you'd have fewer that you could (in principle) lose and you wouldn't have to worry about losing some of them.Here's the "burden" comment on CC's stream:https://youtu.be/n5wxSrxFzz0?si=QBr1WRJW5_5CtmJM&t=284Here is the stream with Jonathan McLatchie and Tony Costa. Jonathan mentions this issue around minute 4:55.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3xlT0HXjmw&t=357sHere is a closeup of the chart:https://lydiaswebpage.blogspot.com/2025/02/is-chart-that-i-used-in-my-youtube.html
-
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 word "error," so what gives?Our series on bad methodology in non-biblical history and classics helps to answer this. It has shows a preference for more "exciting" literary theories over more "boring" common sense theories, an assumption that an author has only one source for his information, based on a very weak argument from silence, and an assumption that authors felt free to make things up. All of these blind scholars to simpler theories such as misunderstanding and good-faith error, as well as to reasonable harmonizations.Check out The Mirror or the Mask, chapter IV, for more on the relationship between my views, traditional inerrancy, literary device theories, and reliability.Here is my older video on the centurion:https://youtu.be/pJ8e7zUvI-sSee also this video on why literary device views *especially* undermine historical reliability, even more than good-faith error:https://youtube.com/live/pS9pFGV8l8w
-
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 Licona says we should just take Pelling's word for it, because he's such an eminent classicist, without even knowing his reasons! But there's no reason to have such blind faith in an academic. In fact, we can look up Pelling's reasons, and they are very weak, amounting to a mere tacit argument from silence to support the assumption that Plutarch had one and only one real historical source for the conversation (which doesn't mention those details). Why should we accept that?Recognizing that even classicists often have very poor methodology when it comes to non-biblical literature should prevent us from blindly accepting their conclusions and then porting over similar assumptions of invention and fact-changing to the Gospels.https://youtu.be/EYelDR9kFFc?si=ms19s24lG_09I4JH&t=3255
-
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 genre is a substantive claim in itself. If his purpose was to make people think or feel that something was true, which he knows was actually false, then this is propaganda and deception and by definition can't be non-deceptive.This is illustrated by Josephus's probably changing his own role in Israel prior to the Jewish war from preparing the Jews to fight the Romans (as he admits in _The Jewish War_) to merely trying innocently to keep the peace and oppose robbers (as he portrays it in his autobiography). It's plausible he was trying to avoid the anger of the Romans by the latter portrayal. But if that's the case, then this can't be non-deceptive.This lesson is relevant when we look at a change that Dr. Licona suggests Mark might have made. If Mark did that for the reason he suggests, then this wouldn't be a non-deceptive device, because the motive is supposedly to make people feel like Jesus was "rejected by all" when (supposedly) Mark knew that he wasn't!Check out The Mirror or the Mask (TMOM) for more:https://www.amazon.com/Mirror-Mask-Liberating-Gospels-Literary/dp/1947929070/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=mirror+or+the+mask&qid=1600272214&sr=8-1
-
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-historical, apocalyptic "special effects" at someone's death. Say what?Here is my post on Licona's argument concerning the rising saints passage in Matthew.https://whatswrongwiththeworld.net/2019/02/on_that_infamous_saints_rising.htmlThe pages on which Dr. Licona lists Lucian's deception as if it is a data point that helps to support a device of apocalyptic language surrounding a death are 548-549 in The Resurrection of Jesus.Get The Mirror or the Mask if you're interested in more detail about how the literary device theorists misunderstand ancient literature and history:https://www.amazon.com/Mirror-Mask-Liberating-Gospels-Literary/dp/1947929070/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=mirror+or+the+mask&qid=1600272214&sr=8-1
-
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. But next, let's think about how easy it would have been for Sallust to make a mistake about when Catiline threatened to bring down Rome in "general ruin."Since precisely what is at issue is whether changing sayings to times when they didn't occur was a known and accepted "compositional device of the time," the literary device theorists can't assume that Sallust was likely to make such a deliberate change. That would be circular. Supposedly this incident in which Sallust makes this change is *evidence for* the existence of such a device. It's therefore a real problem when those making that argument are blind to the plausibility of more common causes of the discrepancy like ordinary error.
-
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 such factual changes, and c) Plutarch was using a known "compositional device"? Of course not. All of those additional conclusions require further evidence, beyond just finding a discrepancy between two documents. But the compositional device theorists don't realize that. They allege a discrepancy and move immediately to concluding a "device." What about far more natural and common types of explanations, such as that Plutarch made a simple mistake? These are skipped over. So it just isn't the case that a fact-changing device has been objectively "found" or "observed" in Plutarch.For more details, see _The Mirror or the Mask_:https://www.amazon.com/Mirror-Mask-Liberating-Gospels-Literary/dp/1947929070/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=mirror+or+the+mask&qid=1600272214&sr=8-1Here is my 2020 series on these subjects:https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLe1tMOs8ARn0S9CsFG47bKjcYxsnHujhg
-
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 errors (like not remembering quite correctly what one of your sources said, or misunderstanding a source) but are automatically treated as deliberate. Then, further, these allegedly deliberate factual changes are treated as examples of a "compositional device," which "everybody" knew might be found in a document of this genre. All of this is wrong, and each one of these steps is open to very serious doubt.This week's presentation shows this discrepancy hunting method applied in a strained and strange way to a debate in the Roman Senate discussed by Plutarch in two of his _Lives_. Ever heard of talking points repeated by those who agree with one another in political discussions? Ever heard of one person making a motion and someone else agreeing with it? Of course. These are normal activities in political bodies. This insight could prevent the rather bizarre claim that Plutarch conflated two "logia" and "transferred" them (for no apparent reason) to another Roman senator.This playlist contains, among other things, my 2020 response series on my book The Mirror or the Mask. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLe1tMOs8ARn0S9CsFG47bKjcYxsnHujhgFor more, read The Mirror or the Mask: https://www.amazon.com/Mirror-Mask-Liberating-Gospels-Literary/dp/1947929070/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2MG4IKY4L0NB2&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.G-yPCsIV5FQF394zjJ2GEw.QlTf0AoaLD2fq9NT4YbnXgXNse43nZTvv1u1y5l1aVo&dib_tag=se&keywords=the+mirror+or+the+mask+lydia+mcgrew&qid=1735743296&sprefix=the+mirror+or+the+mask+%2Caps%2C157&sr=8-1
- Visa fler
