The Lydia McGrew Podcast

Mark says Jesus "couldn't" do many miracles in Nazareth because of the people's unbelief. Matthew says he "didn't." Is this a sign that Matthew is redacting Mark in the service of a higher Christology? Nah, probably not! Scholars who explain trivial wording differences by such redactive agendas are often relying on cherry-picked data. Watch for more evidence!

Was Jesus rejected at Nazareth, his home town, only once or more than once? I'm arguing that the incidents recorded in Mark and Luke are different incidents. Here I examine the only really close parallel between the two stories--the fact that Jesus says to the people in the synagogue that a prophet is without honor in his home town. I argue, using both the "How Dad Are You?" meme and a Ronald Reagan reference, that this doesn't amount to an uncanny resemblance between the two stories. I also discuss some more differences between the two accounts.

This week I start comparing Mark 6:1-6 and Luke 4:16-30. These passages portray Jesus being rejected in his home town of Nazareth, but there is at least a weak prima facie case from narrative order that they describe different events. Plus they don't really sound all that much alike. Something I meant to say in the video (but forgot to say) is that we don't want to reach for achronological narration as our only tool. It is one tool, but the possibility of more than one broadly similar event is another legitimate tool. And being a non-inerrantist, I would also say that the possibility of good-faith error is another tool. In this case, I think the best conclusion is that these were two broadly similar events. I list five similarities in a way that makes it sound like the two passages are uncannily similar. If that were true, it would be strained to think of these as different events. But upon further examination, the appearance of uncanny similarity disappears. Watch or listen to find out why! I wanted to clarify that when I refer to the ugliness of my personal web page, that is no one else's fault but my own. Erik Manning of  @TestifyApologetics  helped me to fix a security certificate issue and to get Google off my back, but he is *in no way* responsible for the appearance of the website. I "designed" it myself, which is why it looks like it was made in 1990 by a couple of 10th graders. Eventually I'll have a better site built!

Is a bias against miracles the only problem we need to guard against in biblical studies? By no means. Many problematic methodological assumptions have become entrenched in the field. Even if they may have originated due to an anti-supernatural bias long ago, they have become disconnected from that origin and have taken on a life of their own. Even Christian scholars often mistake these biases for legitimate professional norms. One of the most common is an allergy to the possibility that events have happened on multiple occasions that are broadly similar to each other. Here I discuss three ways in which that bias is passed down by sociological mechanisms having nothing to do with the evidence. If you're interested in more on the Temple cleansing, that playlist is here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLe1tMOs8ARn0QhpT_JgxzoxmUolEg9d3K Here is Allan Chapple's article on the Temple cleansing: https://www.etsjets.org/files/JETS-PDFs/58/58-3/JETS_58-3_545-69_Chapple.pdf

Today I'm discussing one argument that might be made against the max data proponent from the perspective of a "classical" approach to apologetics. The classical approach says that you *must* (for epistemological reasons) argue for theism before arguing for a historical miracle like the resurrection. Here I consider an argument that the classicist might make: The max data person asks the skeptic and others to consider the Gospels as "wholes" and evaluate their reliability. But the skeptic will say that he dismisses the Gospels for that very reason, since they record miracles, and he rejects miracles altogether. Does the max data holist have to beg some question against the skeptic by asking him to consider the evidence that the Gospels are highly reliable? Here I explain why the answer is "no."

Are there aspects of the religious context of Jesus' ministry, prior to his resurrection, that provide evidence that he was who he claimed to be? Here I answer yes and highlight C.S. Lewis's trilemma argument, specific confirmations of miracle stories, and prophecy,. My goal is to separate various strands of what might be called the religious context of Jesus' ministry and to show what role they play, or don't play, in the overall argument for Jesus' identity and resurrection.

There is an intuition that it's important that Jesus wasn't just some random guy. How does the religious context of Jesus' ministry help to raise the probability that he rose from the dead? How are claims for Jesus different from claims that a random suburbanite suddenly found himself able to fly? Watch more of this video for a bonus bit on what is epistemically incorrect about the "classical" approach to apologetics according to which we *must* argue that God exists before arguing for any specific miracle claim.

The Jesus seminar acknowledges that Jesus "healed" (quote-very-much-unquote) at least one blind man. How excited should we be about this? I argue that this is barely admitting anything more than the falsehood of Jesus mythicism. So it isn't a big deal. But it does seem that the religious context of Jesus' life is important to the prior probability that he rose from the dead. Next time I will be saying more about what is right in this intuition.

A brief personal discussion of three different directions in which unresolved suffering pulls the Christian.

This is another video in which I address the strange claim that real historians don't even talk about the reliability of a document or author as a whole but rather just use the passage-by-passage approach. Here I discuss a passage from a book on Latin Historians in which the authors, while advocating the theory that Tacitus moved the date of a trial, reveal the fact that this is part of an on-going discussion among historians about how reliable Tacitus is about chronology. They make it clear that Tacitus was at the time (1997) generally regrded as quite reliable chronologically, but that this view would have to be revised if it were true that he dyschronologically moved a trial in his history. In passing, I should mention that there were historians even then who thought that Tacitus did *not* change the trial date, and one historian (named Mellor) who apparently changed his mind on the matter, so that in 2010 he concluded that indeed Tacitus didn't change the date. For purposes of this video, my only point is that yes, of course, historians concern themselves with whether Tacitus can be regarded as a reliable author and whether, therefore, his implicit and explicit chronological indicators can be taken as prima facie accurate. Hearty and humble thanks to David Yuen of Digital Pizzazz, who helped me to fix a slip in the audio of this video (three of them, actually) and did it so seamlessly that it is hard to find. Here is an earlier video in which I discuss this same odd claim that real historians just use passage-by-passage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXj4KtFLuno And here from last week is the discussion of probability theory and the rejection of the passage-by-passage approach: