The Lydia McGrew Podcast

Just in case you didn't get enough two weeks ago on unnecessary clumps and disambiguators, here are two more: If the other Judas among the twelve were not historical, why did John go to the trouble of awkwardly attributing a unique question to him in the farewell discourse, which required John to distinguish him from Judas Iscariot by calling him Judas, not Iscariot? And then there's Joseph Barsabbas aka Justus. He's just the other candidate besides Matthias for being elected to the twelve (in place of Judas Iscariot) in Acts 1. Luke gives him three different names--Joseph, Barsabbas, and Justus. If Luke didn't distinguish him, he might have been confused with Joseph Barnabas, whom Luke introduces several chapters later. But why call him Joseph at all? Why not just call him Justus and avoid the possible confusion in the first place? Most likely because Luke really did have evidence that there was a second candidate and that he had all these names, which Luke decided to report. These touches of realism are worth taking account of in evaluating the Gospels and Acts.

The names "Jesus" and "Lazarus" were quite popular at the time of Christ, but they are not highly represented in the Gospels and Acts. But the use of classic disambiguators for Jesus and Lazarus are well explained by the fact that there would have been others with the same name at the time. In the case of Jesus, this is illustrated even in a separation between the way the narrators consistently speak of Jesus in the narrative voice, without needing to disambiguate (since there is only one Jesus that anyone would think they are talking about) and the use of disambiguators by persons in the stories set at the time, where it would be understandably unclear which "Jesus" was in view. I also examine a convoluted and rather garbled attempt on the part of Gregor and Blais to claim that they have a superior fictionalization hypothesis to explain the low frequency of the name "Lazarus" in the Gospels and Acts.

What is the disambiguation argument, and how does it intersect with the broader name statistics argument? Does the use of disambiguators ("second" names like "bar Jonah") in the Gospels and Acts provide evidence that supports historicity in a way that goes beyond the use of popular names for more characters? I'll argue that the answer is "yes" and I'll show how this works with unnecessary clumps of three names--Simon, Judas, and Mary.

In this second episode to be released on January 7, 2024, I examine Gregor and Blais's criticism that the Gospels and Acts percentage of rare names is too low. I point out the "elephant in the room" that they have overlooked--the comparison between the percentage of rare names in the Gospels and Acts, on the one hand, and the percentage expected in a sample taken from a flat chance distribution of 451 names. That comparison yields a result vastly to the advantage of the Gospels and Acts.

In my two discussions today I discuss a hypothetical chance model used by Gregor and Blais to emphasize the supposedly uninformative nature of the Gospel and Acts name statistics. First I discuss how they ignore the "shape" of the data in the Gospels and Acts--"swoopy" rather than flat--which resembles the data in Ilan's statistics far better than does a random set of draws from an unweighted set of names. Please note that another episode will be published a bit later today on Youtube (this is unusual) on the comparison between the Gospels and Acts and a random model.

As my response to recent criticisms of Richard Bauckham's name statistics argument continues, I disagree with a move to add over 400 "artificial occurrences" to Tal Ilan's name database. I note how this move tends to flatten the database and blur the distinction between more popular and less popular names.

I continue discussing the decision made by Gregor and Blais to remove from the Gospels and Acts sample all persons whose existence is separately attested--approximately a third of the sample used by Richard Bauckham in his name statistics argument. Although the full impact of this decision (combined with other aspects of their methodology) can only be assessed with a full statistical re-analysis, we can already see places where it is likely to have an impact. This is unsurprising, as Gregor and Blais state quite clearly that this alteration of the sample set is a crucial part of their critique.

I critique a central pillar of Blais and Gregor's attempted refutation of Richard Bauckham's name statistics argument: They remove from the sample of persons in the Gospels and Acts any person whose existence is attested in other documents--specifically Josephus, the acknowledged Pauline epistles, and Papias. This reduces the sample of persons from the Gospels and Acts from 79 to 53. They justify this strange procedure on the grounds that they themselves do not contest the existence of these persons, due to their outside attestation, as if it were simply obvious that therefore their occurrence in the Gospels and Acts is simply irrelevant to the name statistics argument so that they should be removed from the sample. I argue that this is an important mistake.

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 give a brief overview of the recently published critique by Kamil Gregor and Brian Blais. Over the next weeks I'll be talking about some things I see right away as problems with Gregor and Blais's critique. The official link for their article is here: https://brill.com/view/journals/jshj/21/3/article-p171_002.xml

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 explains something in an earlier work or a UC where something in an earlier work explains something in a later work? I suggest that neither is per se stronger and that apparent casualness is far more important than the direction of explanation. I also suggest that if someone is going to dismiss a UC because he can come up with a hyper-subtle possibility in which an author deliberately connects his work with another work but makes it look like he's doing it casually, that person isn't going to be fazed by either direction of explanation. But if you think that one direction is stronger than the other, you should know that we do have apparent UCs both directions. I then discuss the scene where Jesus asks Peter, "Do you love me more than these?" I suggest that this forms an undesigned coincidence with Peter's earlier boast that even if the other disciples forsook Jesus, he never would do so. That boast is reported only in the Synoptics. I also talk about what I think is wrong with the interpretation that by "these" Jesus is referring to the fish, the boats, or the "worldly" life of a fisherman. Finally, I give a hint of where I'll be going next on this channel, where we're making common sense rigorous. Thumbnail courtesy of FreeBibleimages.org