The Lydia McGrew Podcast

Happy Easter, 2024! Today's episode tackles this question: Since the New Testament documents contain no narration specifically of the appearance to James, Jesus' brother, listed briefly in I Cor. 15:7, does this mean that that appearance has no place in a maximal data approach to the argument for Jesus' resurrection? The answer is that it does have a place, but that putting it together requires fitting in the missing piece: The original disciples apparently testified that Jesus left our world entirely on a particular day, from a particular place, after he had appeared for weeks to them on multiple occasions. This claim of the ascension apparently marked a *sharp* distinction between kinds of appearances of Jesus. After that point, the disciples never seem to have seen Jesus in the 3-dimensional, on-earth way that is narrated in the Gospels. This sharp distinction between pre-ascension and post-ascension appearances is one which Allison rejects, due to his skepticism about the *bodily* nature of Jesus' resurrection and his belief that the robustly bodily aspects of the resurrection appearances in the Gospels were later apologetical embellishments. Combining the missing piece of the Ascension with the apparently chronological list of Jesus' post-resurrection appearances in I Cor. 15 and noting that a group appearance to all the apostles is listed there after the appearance to James yields an argument that James probably said that he had an on-the-earth-like appearance experience like those recounted in the Gospels. I don't mention it in the video, but we do have a mention of the death of James by Josephus and a narration of its circumstances from Hegesippus, and this attests to James's steadfastness as a Christian believer. Here is the conversation, which I mention in the video, between Dr. Licona and Dr. Allison about the conversion of James: https://youtu.be/xHxl1vk4vwg?si=pd3bAPWBbrKw04c3&t=2223

Today, one more co-incidence between Whittaker Chambers's testimony and that of Alger Hiss--where did Hiss's wife grow up? Chambers says "near Paoli," Hiss says "Frazer." Both are true, and the similarity with natural variation provides evidence for Chambers's close acquaintances with the Hisses. I compare this to the evidence of undesigned coincidences that the author of Acts really knew the Apostle Paul.

Continuing to talk about undesigned coincidences in the Chambers-Hiss testimony, I discuss the detail Chambers knew about Hiss's childhood business collecting and selling spring water from Druid Hill Park, at that time on the outskirts of Baltimore. I compare this connection to the undesigned coincidences discussed in Hidden in Plain View between Acts and II Corinthians, concerning Paul's escape from Damascus. Are undesigned coincidences some distinctively religious "apologist" thing? Not at all.

I'm often asked if "real historians" use undesigned coincidences. I answer that of course they do, if they're good historians, even though it's unlikely that they use that exact phrase. Here I begin to explore confirmations in the Chambers-Hiss hearings in 1948. Alger Hiss had claimed (at first) that he didn't know Whittaker Chambers at all. Later he changed that and said that he had known him slightly as a down-and-out named George Crossley who took advantage of Hiss's good nature to get money loans. Chambers, in contrast, swore that they had been close friends for years while they were both Soviet spies. The details that Chambers knew about Hiss were not the sorts of things that could plausibly have been researched in a world without social media. Nor were they the kinds of things that one would be likely to share with a down-and-out whom one was never close to. The Congressional committee carefully separated the two men, and Hiss's testimony in which he confirmed details about himself was given after Chambers's testimony, so even if someone on the committee were "feeding" Hiss's answers to Chambers (for which there was no good motive in any event), this would not have helped Chambers with the details in question. Today I discuss the prothonotary warbler, a bird that, Chambers testified, Hiss had seen and spoken of with excitement.

The quotation from Dr. Craig from Norman Perrin is found here: https://www.reasonablefaith.org/podcasts/defenders-podcast-series-3/s3-doctrine-of-christ/doctrine-of-christ-part-40#_ftnref7 Perrin's book is found here. I am reading from the conclusion, pp. 80 and following. Perrin's book can be electronically checked out fully legally from Open Library. https://openlibrary.org/works/OL5920323W/The_Resurrection_according_to_Matthew_Mark_and_Luke?edition=key%3A/books/OL4902689M

In principle it would have been barely possible for someone to make use of the works of Josephus to learn about 1st-century Palestinian male name statistics. In this respect the Josephus suggestion by Gregor and Blais passes a very minimal threshhold of possibility, unlike their other suggestions for sources of invented persons, which can't explain anything even aside from their intrinsic improbability. But the Josephus suggestion suffers from severe problems as well. How cumbersome would the process of collecting name statistics from Josephus have been under ancient conditions? Given that none of Gregor and Blais's other suggestions explain anything, how many different people would have had to undertake such an incredibly cumbersome, complex, self-conscious process? How likely is it that anyone would even think of doing so? What is the relevance of the fact that the realistic name statistics in the Gospels and Acts are the result of a few persons of each name in different documents, put together? Learn all that and more in this last presentation on the Gregor and Blais critique of Bauckham's name statistics argument.

Gregor and Blais suggest that the lists of Jesus' brothers and of the twelve apostles circulated prior to, and separately from, the Gospels and constituted a source from which realistic name statistics made their way into the rest of the Gospels and Acts. They suggest this despite the fact that the lists of the twelve and of Jesus' brothers are *part* of the Gospels and hence part of the data to be explained! They also suggest it despite the fact that they regard the existence many of the persons in these lists to be "contested," as elsewhere in the Gospels and Acts. All of this means that these lists don't really help in explaining the data. The presence of popular names, sometimes multiples of popular names (such as Simon and Jude) in the lists requires Gregor and Blais to "piggyback" the lists theory onto the Maccabean theory (discussed last time), so that they now have multiple stages at which informed invention is supposed to have happened. And there are more problems beyond this with this theory. The theories discussed so far don't even clear the first hurdle that a source of non-factual invention would have to get past! Thumbnail courtesy of freebibleimages.org

Do the books of Maccabees and the popularity of Maccabeean names help to explain away the name statistics evidence for the historicity of the Gospels and Acts? Nope. If anything, for a fictionalizer to notice this pattern and invent names based upon it (rather than just basing them directly on the Old Testament) would be more difficult, requiring extra steps in addition to the brute collection of statistical data. Gregor and Blais's attempt to suggest that the Pauline epistles are a source of information about Palestinian male name statistics only underlines the feebleness of their suggestions and the very real difficulty a person at the time of the Gospels would have in gathering name statistical data. Paul's epistles would be a very poor source of information on this topic. Two additional notes not made in the presentation: 1) Paul in his letters never refers to Peter by the popular name "Simon." He always calls him either "Peter" or "Cephas." So Paul's letters offer no clue at all about the popular name "Simon." In fact, he never refers to anyone by that name. 2) Lazarus (Eleazar) is a Maccabean name but occurs only once for a person presented as real in the Gospels. This is as much of an anomaly for the idea that the authors or community tale-tellers were making up fictional characters with Maccabean names as it is for the theory that the authors were merely telling about rel people. Just for fun: "Candlelight" Hanukkah song by the Maccabeats, parody of "Dynamite." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSJCSR4MuhU

It's getting weird now! This week I examine Gregor and Blais's suggestion that Macdonald "doublets" of names would (if true) help to explain the accurate name statistics in the Gospels in a non-veridical way. The theory in question is that Mark made up mirror image pairs--one Simon who denies Jesus, one who carries his cross, etc. To be clear, they say that they consider the theory implausible (low prior) but they say that if it were true it would have explanatory value. But this is completely false as well. Such invented doublets have no explanatory power whatsoever for the fact that the Gospels and Acts track the actual name statistics of Palestinian males at the time.

Now that we've talked about unnecessary clumps, what about more unnecessary disambiguations? Like Jesus of Nazareth and Lazarus of Bethany, these are additional places where there's no reason *within the narrative of a particular book* to give an extra qualifier with a name. Even if it's a popular name, if there's only one person in the book by that name, or if his identity is made amply clear by context, there's no need to add another qualifier. First of all I discuss evidential "noise," where the information in question would likely be given regardless of whether the name was popular or unpopular. This applies for example to titles like "the high priest" that are important to the story. It also applies to obviously interesting pieces of information like the fact that Manaean was brought up with Herod or the fact that Andrew was Simon Peter's brother. Using fairly stringent standards for "unnecessary," so as to filter out such "noise," I come up with eight narratively unnecessarily qualified names in the Gospels and Acts. In two cases we do have narratively unnecessary qualifiers for not-very-popular names: Levi son of Alphaeus and Nathanael of Cana. These may just be included as examples of unnecessary details more generally. But in six out of the eight (3/4), the first names are either Tier A or Tier B popular names, based on Bauckham's Table 6 of name popularity. (I designate Tier A as place 1-9, Tier B as place 10-12, and Tier C as anything lower.) The list is: Jesus of Nazareth Lazarus of Bethany Levi son of Alphaeus Nathanael of Cana John the Baptist James the Less Judas the Galilean (in Gamaliel's speech in Acts) Joseph of Arimathea (in particular in Mark) For further details, watch the video or listen to the podcast!