The Lydia McGrew Podcast

Did David Friedrich Strauss refute forever the method of harmonizing Gospel accounts, as Dale Allison has claimed? Not at all. In fact, Strauss's own theories about the way that Gospel narratives were supposedly invented are enormously complex and improbable, showing that his judgement about the factuality of the Gospels is far off-base.  We welcome Tim McGrew giving a reading from William Lindsay Alexander on the Straussian approach to the Gospels, with reference to the birth of John the Baptist.  

This new coincidence connects Jesus' words about Herod Antipas in Luke 13, the Perean ministry described in the other three Gospels, and Josephus. Did Luke make a mistake about Herod or make up an event? Nope.  Here is my older post on the chronology of Luke's central section and Jesus' seemingly endless "journey to Jerusalem."  http://lydiaswebpage.blogspot.com/2020/08/a-possible-solution-to-long-standing.html

Here I give you an undesigned coincidence between Paul's letters and Acts 20:4-5. This was part of a section that had to be cut in an article I'm currently writing.  The earlier video and audio concerning Acts and the epistles is here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xq7EDxPC3Fw&t=1123s https://anchor.fm/lydiamcgrew/episodes/Just-HOW-WRONG-can-Bart-Ehrman-be-about-Acts-and-Pauls-epistles-e1m8eop

In this last video about evidentialism and reformed epistemology, I tackle some analogies that have been made, such as knowing that you are innocent of a crime when the forensic evidence is against you. I point out important disanalogies between the alleged defeater-defeating witness of the Holy Spirit and these cases. RE folks cannot simultaneously say that the IWHS is self-authenticating and defeater-defeating while also claiming that it's epistemologically similar to more ordinary types of events.  Here is the transcript of the talk by Dr. Craig that I read from: https://www.reasonablefaith.org/videos/lectures/epistemic-justification-of-christian-faith-for-talbot-school-of-theology

Here I answer a potential objection to the discussion in Part 3. The potential objection, based on Hebrews 6:4-6, is that reconversion after apostasy is impossible. Therefore (the objection would go), if God is going to be faithful and provide what man needs to be saved, he is going to have to provide a Christian in an evidence-poor situation with some other powerful defeater-defeater before that person deconverts, because otherwise it will be too late.   I've never heard anyone make this precise argument for the defeater-defeating internal witness of the Holy Spirit for believers, but it seems like a reasonable thing to try. Here I suggest four alternative interpretations of that passage which would retain the possibility of reconversion.

Continuing my series on evidentialism and its contrasts with reformed epistemology, here I tackle the question: Is rational deconversion possible? My answer is, yes, but...

This is the second part of my attempt to answer misconceptions of evidentialism. Here I discuss the evidentialist's proper attitude toward objections. No good evidentialist should be telling someone that he should deconvert if he can't answer all objections to Christianity, in order to show that he is open to evidence. That is a caricature which both friends and foes of evidentialism sometimes adopt.

There are plenty of misconceptions going around about evidentialism as opposed to Reformed Epistemology or presuppositionalism. Here I start a series intended to lay some of those confusions to rest.  Here is my former video on this topic:  https://youtu.be/k2Tv90y2G58 Here is a post I wrote on this topic some years back:  http://lydiaswebpage.blogspot.com/2020/08/what-evidentialism-is-not.html

This is the second part of my discussion of the statement, "We have to use ancient standards of reliability to interpret and evaluate the Gospels." Last time we saw that this is false both because it is internally inconsistent and because it conflates seeking information with being pressed into evaluating a practice in one particular way. Saying, "The ancients accepted this," even if it were true (and it often isn't) shouldn't automatically mean, "You have to think it's no big deal."  In this part I discuss uncontroversial things like simple figures of speech, achronological narration, and rounding and explain why even for these we shouldn't refer to "ancient standards of reliability." Paradoxically, the use of such phrases leads to our being less well-informed.  If you want to know more about achronological narration, see this video which is part of my series on the Temple cleansing, or see Chapter II of The Mirror or the Mask or Chapter II of The Eye of the Beholder.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4TzGiFCeLE&t=6s

"We have to use ancient standards of reliability when studying the Gospels" is the kind of thing you'll hear pretty frequently. At first it sounds obviously true, even profound. The initial instinct is to agree with this statement, because to disagree sounds like endorsing ignorance and unfairness.  In this first of (probably) two videos, I examine the inherent contradiction in this claim. If the alleged "standards of reliability" are so different that we have to make a big effort to know and apply them, then why is the modern English term "reliability" the right word? I discuss how the application of the phrase "ancient standards of reliability" to fact-changing literary device confuses *information* with *evaluation* and amounts to a kind of illicit pressure to say that something is unimportant even when it is entirely legitimate to think that it's important.  Part of what I bring to New Testament that is fresh and different is an analytic philosopher's willing to ask, "What do you mean?" and "If that's what you mean, is that really true?"