Resources for Further Study:

• Dr. Lydia McGrew’s Website
• The Eye of the Beholder: The Gospel of John as Historical Reportage by Dr. Lydia McGrew

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Transcript

Welcome to the Kathleen Noller podcast brought to you by the C.S. Lewis Institute. I'm your host, Dr. Noller, former atheist turned Christian and biomedical scientist. Let's interrogate Christianity together and see if it can stand up to some of our toughest objections. So today, the main objection that we're going to address concerns the Gospel of John. So, the modern mainstream scholarly views on the historicity of this gospel range from the proposition, quote, that it is historically quite worthless to the proposition that it has some historical material in it, but that we find the historical bits only by painstakingly sifting to separate them from the large amount of unhistorical embellishment. This quote is from our guest today from her book, The Eye of the Beholder, Dr. Lydia McGrew. And so, she discusses in this book how the Gospel of John is painted by some scholars to have deliberately changed or invented the fact that he appears to report. Other scholars try to repair the big picture by stating that the Gospel of John is true in a higher sense or metaphorically, perhaps allegorically, even perhaps in a genre of wisdom literature, but it's not on the same historically reliable plane as the synoptic Gospels. So, to discuss this monumental objection, we have Dr. Lydia McGrew. She is a widely published analytic philosopher and author. She has a PhD in English from Vanderbilt University, and she has published extensively in the theory of knowledge, specializing in formal epistemology and in its application to the evaluation of testimony and to the philosophy of religion. She defends the reliability of the gospels and of acts in four books, Hidden in Plain View, Undesigned Coincidences in the Gospel and Acts, The Mirror or the Mask, Liberating the Gospels from Literary Devices, The Eye of the Beholder, which we'll discuss today, The Gospel of John as Historical Reportage, and Testimonies to the Truth, Why You Can Trust the Gospels.

Welcome, Dr. McGrew.

Lydia McGrew: Thank you, Kathleen. Thanks for having me.

Kathleen Noller: Yes, thank you so much for being here and for those of you who might remember her last name, we had Dr. Timothy McGrew on, which is her husband, several episodes ago to talk about whether it's rational or reasonable to believe in miracles. So, for those of you who are interested in that, please check that out from several months ago. But let's get started with our discussion. So, Dr. McGrew proposes what she calls a reportage model where the gospel authors, including John, are trying to tell the historical truth in a straightforward sense and are highly successful in doing so. So, if you wouldn't mind telling us a little bit about how your reportage model differs from some other readings or even allegations pertaining to the gospel of John generally before we dive in.

Lydia McGrew: Yeah, the way I look at John as at the other Gospels is that we can find out enough about the author's intentions and his ability, his access to the facts, that we have reason to trust when he narrates something. And so, this is not like a presupposition, you know, we just must assume that it's God's word and therefore we must trust it. It's a historical evaluation based on evidence that allows us to trust it. And when it narrates something miraculous, at least we can take it to indicate what people who were there claimed. You know, at least we can go that far. And when it comes to something non-miraculous, including Jesus saying something, saying something isn't a miracle, we should take it to be prima facie, you know, on the face of it, probably an accurate representation of what he said and what he did. And that is it sounds like a modest view. intend it to be modest. And yet it's surprisingly controversial in today's scholarly realms.

Kathleen Noller: Yeah, so when you discuss sort of how we're approaching reading the Bible in general, a lot of folks are familiar with the term inerrancy, and we'll sort of apply that to this discussion. So, what's the relationship of your reportage viewpoint to biblical

Lydia McGrew: The way I like to say it is, imagine a Venn diagram. And so, your largest oval reportage model. Here it is. And then there's a smaller oval inside there, inerrancy. So, what that means is that if you're an inerrantist, a traditional inerrantist, you already believe the reportage model. Automatically. So being a traditional inheritance just entails reportage because that oval is completely inside of the reportage oval. But there is then some space outside of inerrancy that's also within the reportage oval, where you think that the Gospels are very highly reliable, that they never try to change any facts or whatever, but you think that they may have some minor, what I call, good faith errors that could be made by someone who is knowledgeable, who's very reliable, but it's just an understandable thing that happened because of a misunderstanding or a memory slip or something like that. So, inerrancy what you might call a limiting case of reportage. It’s like the ultimate reportage model where there are no errors whatsoever, but then you could affirm the reportage model while not being an inerrantist.

Kathleen Noller: I see. So, you can affirm the reportage model, would you say, even if you are not a Christian, just from a historical viewpoint?

Lydia McGrew: You know, it's an interesting point. Theoretically, yes. I would find it surprising, just sociologically, to find someone who isn't a Christian at all who affirmed the reportage model. And in fact, I've never met one. Partly because when you affirm the reportage model, then that has a lot of implications. ah So, for example, I don't want to go on a big digression, but with respect to the resurrection of Jesus, if you think that these accounts in the Gospels came from people who are, you know, reporting at least what was claimed and that Acts reports all the persecution they endured and that kind of thing accurately, it's going to put a lot of pressure on you if you don't think Jesus rose from the dead. It's not going to entail Jesus rose from the dead. It's not simplistic like that. You know, like the gospel say Jesus rose from the dead, they reported therefore automatically he rose from the dead. But in a non-detective sense, it's going to push you in that direction. So that's why it's an unusual to the point that I've never experienced it to find a non-Christian who affirms the reportage model.

Kathleen Noller: That makes sense. So, let's discuss some of the other readings of gospel of John. So, in your book, you cite in the, in the first few chapters, you cite several New Testament scholars and essentially what they think of the Gospel of John, of its historicity. So, my first question for you is, what methodology are they using to assess the historicity of this document? And what methodology do they use or perhaps they should use?

Lydia McGrew: Right, well, a very common methodology for all the four Gospels, but it really gets wielded against John especially, is what I call the passage-by-passage approach. And so, in the passage-by-passage approach, you never draw a strong conclusion about the reliability of the Gospel as a whole, unless a negative one, but you certainly never draw a strong positive conclusion about the reliability of the document.

Kathleen Noller: Thank you

Lydia McGrew: Instead, you go to one passage and you're like, okay, does this contain some history? And then you debate about that and maybe you conclude that it does. Well, then you kind of reset and you go to the next passage, okay, does this little story or saying contain history? And you discuss and argue with that amongst scholars, and then you come to some conclusion, yes or no. And it never is allowed to build up an inductive case. So even if you're saying yes at various points that this looks historical, you're always resetting when you come to the next passage. And I think that's wrong. I think that's anti-inductive, and it's something we would never do with a person we knew or, you know, maybe a given journalist. Let's say you have a given journalist, and you check out how good an objective seems to be in reporting things. You would eventually conclude, yeah, I can trust this guy. He appears to know what he's talking about. He appears to be careful, et cetera. You wouldn't just say, well, you know, I found that one and that one and that and that one when he looked like he knew what he was talking about, but who knows what I'm going to think about the next thing he says. And so, it's very odd ah approach that originated in the quest for the historical Jesus, where it was assumed that these Gospels were unreliable, but then, you know, the big triumph was supposed to be, well, maybe we could still find some history in them. Whereas I think we need to hold it open that they are really ah very strongly historic and therefore not approaching this passage by passageway.

Kathleen Noller: Yes, the passage by passageway is very interesting to me because it almost assumes as if We can't reliably say that the same person who wrote the previous passage has written the next passage. And so, it's as if you're not treating it by the same author or as if it's the same cohesive, coherent document. Is there any credence to that whatsoever that perhaps, you know, fragments of the document were discussed in sources, but not other fragments? Or is there any point at which it would be appropriate to treat it as piecemeal or break it up? or do you really approach the sort of whole gospel? Yeah.

Lydia McGrew: In the gospels, I don't think there is.

Kathleen Noller: other

Lydia McGrew: You know the only time I've ever come close to thinking that something might come from a different source, and if anything, I think this increases reliability, is that the first couple chapters of Luke may come from a member of Mary's family, or maybe Mary herself.

Kathleen Noller: Okay.

Lydia McGrew: But if and they seem to have a somewhat different style to them. But if anything, that puts them closer to the fact, since Jesus' birth obviously occurred about years before his ministry, it that would be great, you know. I think there are some Old Testament books where that would make more sense, especially where it says this is from the, you know, the Chronicles of the Kings or whatever, and then it covers many hundreds of years that one person couldn't possibly have been an eyewitness to all these things, and...

Kathleen Noller: Okay, Thank you.

Lydia McGrew: So probably what you had was a royal chronicler position whose job was to write down things that happened within the reign of a given king, and then that position would be passed on to a different chronicler and so forth. So that's plausibly by multiple authors. But in the case of the Gospels, it really looks to me like, and often this is even true of more liberal scholars, they'll be like, yeah, it's all written by one author. And that one author thought it was okay to make stuff up. You know, they'll draw the opposite conclusion about what that one author was doing. But I think it looks like each of these documents was written by a single author. And the Gospel of Acts, not the Gospel of the Book of Acts, written by the same author as wrote Luke.

Kathleen Noller: Yes, that's very helpful to know and to clarify. So, as we're talking about an authenticity of these documents, or this gospel, what are the criteria that you put forth for authenticity? And how does the criteriological approach differ from the method that you think should be used?

Lydia McGrew: Right, so that the criteria of authenticity are often used in this passage-by-passage approach. And so, scholars who use passage-by-passage will be looking for a passage to satisfy, sometimes it's said two or more of these. Some scholars will settle for one, but an example would be the criterion of embarrassment. If something looks like it's embarrassing to the early church. So, for example, that Mary Magdalene was the first person to find the tomb of Jesus empty. It says that in John. Well, you know, they'll say, and there's legitimacy to this, that, you know, why would they say that if it weren't true because women were not highly regarded in that society. So that would be an example. Another criterion would be multiple attestation ah if the same if the same incident is said in multiple Gospels or multiple sources, but with some differences. So, feeding for example, is the only miracle told in all four Gospels, but has differences in the way that it's told. So, with most of these criteria, I don't think that they're inherently wrong to use, but the way that I like to put it is, they indicate that it's especially unlikely that this was made up. Not that we just remain agnostic, like we have no idea whether this was made up or not until we see that they are attested by one or two of the criteria. But instead of that we would say that satisfaction with one of these criteria could strengthen yet further the case for historicity or could be one indication. And yet we ah allow that inductive case to build up. We allow ourselves to get a holistic view of the reliability of the document. And then these criteria are just one set of contributing factors to that.

Kathleen Noller: Okay, so would you say, is it correct to say that the New Testament scholars that we're discussing are using these criteria as more of a filtering out method rather than sort of a holistic means of assessing the authenticity of the document as a whole?

Lydia McGrew: Yeah, I'd say there's two, broadly speaking, approaches, both of which I disagree with. One is the purely negative approach. it's If this doesn't satisfy one or even two of these criteria, it didn't happen. That would be sort of the Jesus Seminars approach, purely negative. But there's another approach, which is still negative, though, in a more subtle way, and well, we're not going to automatically conclude it didn't happen if it doesn't satisfy them. But if it doesn't, I must be agnostic. We have no other way of knowing if this saying was spoken by Jesus or if this event took place. You know as historians, we just have to remain agnostic. That is also negative in a way because it's setting agnosticism as a kind of upper ceiling of the degree of historicity that we can grant to something and so then it's not allowing holistic reliability to play a role.

Kathleen Noller: Yes, that makes sense. So now I'd like to go into a few of the terms that you discuss in your book as well. So oftentimes, some of these scholars will throw out terms like the author was paraphrasing, and so I'd love to touch on that first. You go through several terms in your book, but sometimes we hear that in the Gospel of John, there are paraphrases and that John is paraphrasing what Jesus is saying or what's happening. So, this can be paraphrasing can be legitimate, it can be ahistorical. How do we determine what is a legitimate use of paraphrasing versus something that leads to an extrapolation or a de-historicizing change in the document.

Lydia McGrew: Yeah. It's a very good question. The word paraphrase is abused a lot, and it surprised me when I got involved in New Testament studies. I thought people would all be on the same page. You know, there's just kind of a commonsense use of the word. But instead, what I found was that the term is used so broadly that it can mean making something up completely, you know, out of whole cloth. An example that I've used... The scholar John West gave an interview in which he pinned on this, you know, jumped on this, I think, quite rightly, that Jesus didn't say, I'm thirsty on the cross. Instead, he said, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? And, you know, I'm thirsty is a paraphrase of My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Kathleen Noller: Oh, good.

Lydia McGrew: and as John rightly said, if you got a thousand people in a room and you said, go ahead, paraphrase, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? None of them would come up with, I am thirsty. It's just like not a paraphrase at all. So, I think sometimes the term is used in a sense to bludgeon, layman. So, the idea is that you're just kind of an ignorant layman. If you don't think that John made up stuff that Jesus said, don't you realize that they didn't have tape recorders at the time? And so, it couldn't have been verbatim. And then, you know, the layman hears this. He's like, yeah, that's a good point, you know. And then it's used to say, so anything that the scholar chooses to call paraphrase, however far-fetched, you must allow it to be. So, the way that I think we should use the term legitimately, I use the concept of being recognizable both in content and context. So, if you were there at that conversation, like when Jesus is said to be walking in the Solomon's court in the temple in John, and he's having this conversation with his opponents, right? And if you knew the language, what he was speaking, be it Greek or Aramaic, it could have been either, so you could understand what everybody was saying. And if you knew the passage in the Gospel of John as we, have it, you could recognize the context and the content. You could say, oh, this is John. I'm witnessing, you know, you remember that show, radio show where the kids could go back in time to biblical stories. I can't remember the name of the radio show, but, and they could walk around and they could watch things happening in Jesus' day, you know, a little bit like that, but that you could say, oh, this is the bread of life discourse in John, a synagogue in Capernaum, and he's saying this.

Kathleen Noller: Yeah.

Lydia McGrew: So, you know, maybe he says more than what's recorded there. If anything, you know, some of these things are Don't take very long to say he probably said more at the time. And yet you could recognize what is said as being sufficiently similar to what we have recorded that you can put it together with our record in the Gospels. And I think that's a good way to maintain a commonsense grip on paraphrase.

Kathleen Noller: Thank you for that. And you also discuss, in addition to paraphrasing, sort of alteration of facts deliberately by the author. So, sort of taking a step beyond, you call it fictionalizing literary devices or alteration of facts deliberately in a way that's invisible to the audience. So where do scholars think that John has done this? And why would they think that any narrator who could produce any, even one nugget of risk reliable information is doing something that seems so intentionally deceptive to me.

Lydia McGrew: Yeah, good point. Well, there's a whole backstory to that in terms of scholarship. But I think there's a kind of belief that John and the other gospel authors thought they could get his ah theological significance out of false facts. That, you know, even if Jesus didn't, ah let's say, say, i thirst, nonetheless, you know, it was theologically significant to pretend that he did. And so that's what John is sort of going for.

Kathleen Noller: Yeah.

Lydia McGrew: And that, therefore, because John is interested in theology, especially John, you have that whole preamble by the narrator, you know, about in the beginning was the word. So, because he was interested in theology, then that would mean that he was more willing to change facts to make theological points.

Kathleen Noller: Yeah

Lydia McGrew: But I, I respond to that by saying that in John's view, fake points don't make points. So, the example I like to use is when the narrator talks about the spear going into Jesus' side, you know, and water and blood comes out. And he says in it that it might be fulfilled. They will look at him whom they have pierced, and not a bone of him shall be broken. He quotes these Old Testament texts. And he says, and he who saw it bore a record and his record is true. So, what this tells you is that the author doesn't think the Old Testament can be fulfilled unless the thing really happens. If it didn't really happen, it couldn’t fulfill the Old Testament, right? And so, it's a very different view of the way the author thought than this kind of strange, twisted view that modern scholars well, you know, he thought it was theologically important, so he thought it was okay to change it. An example of this which is so far-fetched is moving the Temple cleansing from the end to the beginning of Jesus ministry, which I don't think the author did and so then they'll put in some strange Motives like to make the entire Ministry of Jesus appear to be one long passion week Who's going to get that out of that like who has ever recognize that. It would be so private in the author's mind that if this was supposed to enrich the lives of his audience, I think it would fail. Because I don't think his audience would be going, oh, cool. It looks like the entirety of Jesus' ministry is one long Passion Week. I don't think that would ever even occur to them. There'd be no way for it to do so. So, I think these scholars end up being sort of in their own little bubble and they're talking to one another, and they don't get enough of ah an outsider coming in and giving this the test of common sense, which is something I'm trying to do.

Kathleen Noller: Yes, absolutely. I've sort of had a tangential question from some non-believers related to this, they look at something like the Testimonial Flavian, and they say, well, you know ah scholars have had to sort of distill that to its true original fragments, and it has these additions and later embellishments in it. So how can we be confident that something similar didn't happen with the Gospel of John under a similar motive of sort of trying to perpetuate Christian theology? And so, what would you say to somebody who has that sort of concern?

Lydia McGrew: Well, in the Testimonial Flavian, there are textual reasons. Well, a couple things. There are textual reasons, and there's another knowledge of Josephus as a person. He doesn't appear to have been a convert to Christianity, whereas the longer text of that would lead us to think that the person was a Christian personally.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

Lydia McGrew: So that made it suspect to begin with. But also, that the text was reconstructed and then if I recall correctly, we found a manuscript of Josephus that had the text independently as it had been conjecturally reconstructed, which is quite a feat, quite a confirmation. The places where scholars say these things about the Gospel of John are not for the vast majority places where there's any textual question. Okay, in other words, if you know the textual artifacts that we have, there's no reason to question, for example, the temple cleansing.

Kathleen Noller: Yeah. Okay.

Lydia McGrew: It's not like the temple cleansing comes, you know it is in some is at that point in some manuscripts, but at a later point in other manuscripts or anything like that. In fact, Tatian's Diatessaron which was from the second century, has large swaths of the Gospel of John in it. you know So I don't think those are the same kinds of questions. aye they're not They're not even that objective, as in the case of the Testimonial Flavian, as reasons to doubt. Instead, they're much more subjective, scholarly ideas that the author just felt free to do this.

Kathleen Noller: That's very helpful. So, a lot of times when scholars are discussing where John is accused of inventing speech from Jesus, they point to the I am sayings. And so, there's supposed to be seven allegedly I am saying. Can we discuss some of these examples where he's accused of essentially inventing this this speech from Jesus?

Lydia McGrew: Right. So those exact sayings don't occur in the synoptics. And we may be talking more as we go on about the argument from silence. There are good, bad, and ugly arguments from silence. I have a video called the argument from silence, the good, the bad, and the ugly. The ones that are used against John's gospel are ugly.

Kathleen Noller: Yeah.

Lydia McGrew: They're really, and what I mean by that is they're just very poor. They're very weak. The mere fact that something is in the Gospel of John but not in the synoptics is taken as a huge strike against John. Even though the church historian Eusebius, I think probably rightly, said that John was trying to narrate things that weren't in the synoptics. I mean, you come along and you're like, okay, that's already been told.

Kathleen Noller: it...

Lydia McGrew: I want to tell some stuff that maybe people aren't going to know if they only have the synoptics. And so that doesn't make it non-historical. If anything, the motive there is to include more historical material.

Kathleen Noller: Yeah.

Lydia McGrew: An argument against particularly the strongest I am saying that he's got, like before Abraham was I am. It was just an assumption of developmental Christology where supposedly the synoptics don't see Jesus as God. And, you know, Bart Ehrman has a whole book called How Jesus Became God, right? And then, but John thinks Jesus was God, and so he puts that in there. And there are good answers to that.

Kathleen Noller: Yeah

Lydia McGrew: One is that you also have indications of high Christology in synoptics. And I think Dr. Ehrman is overlooking that. I mean, the one of the strongest Trinitarian statements is in Matthew. No doubt he thinks that's non-historical as well, where he says baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.

Kathleen Noller: Yeah.

Lydia McGrew: That's in Matthew. But the point is, it is in Matthew. it's It is in something earlier than the Gospel of John. And if it were in John, for sure, we'd be told, see, it's developmental Christology, right? You know but unfortunately for them, it's in Matthew. That's why I have a whole series of videos called Developmental Theories of the Gospels Are All Bunk. Every single time you have a developmental theory of the Gospels, you find that they’re cherry picked, that you know the evidence is cherry picked.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

Lydia McGrew: So that's part of it. And then there's also a false idea that each that there's this kind of almost artificial thing where each I am saying is connected to a discourse where Jesus expounds upon that I am saying.

Kathleen Noller: Yes

Lydia McGrew: And so, it's taken to be this kind of almost wooden thing where, okay, now we have another I am saying, now we're going to have a discourse about that. And the funny thing is that it's not even true. So, when Jesus says, I am the light of the world, for example, to the Jewish leaders, then the conversation goes off in a different direction. He doesn't have an actual light of the world discourse where he expends upon, I am the light of the world. So that the accusation of artificiality is also kind of a scholarly myth. And so, we have these scholarly myths that develop, and then they tell them to one another, and then they don’t go back to the document and check to see if they're true. And I explore several of those in this book.

Kathleen Noller: Yeah, so I'm curious about some of the perspectives of the New Testament scholars that you've cited in your book. And it seemed to me like this is a relatively modern phenomenon of doubting the historicity of the Gospel of John so strongly. But I'm, of course, not as familiar with history as you are. So, are these perspectives, would you say they're unique or they really caught steam in the century? Or are they less associated with modernity than I'm perceiving?

Lydia McGrew: Well, the century, the s, was the big dawn of higher criticism. David Friedrich Strauss wrote in the s, The Life of Jesus Critically Considered, and he completely, you know, went to town on the Gospels as a whole, including John, for sure, and exaggerated mere silence into contradiction repeatedly in John and the Synoptics which he also took to indicate the unreliability of the synoptics as well. Okay. And Strauss was attacking Christianity as a whole, right? So, the ghost of Strauss is still very much with us in the century. When you go back further than that, like old, you know, ancient, it's, it's much less common. Origin is the only church father that I know of to have said that John cannot be harmonized with the synoptics and then it needs to be taken in a non-literal sense, Origen said in some places.

Kathleen Noller: Yeah.

Lydia McGrew: But Origen is kind of the exception that proves the rule there. He’s the He's the outlier. What was much more common was finding harmonization. Eusebius harmonizes John and the synoptics. Epiphanius harmonizes John in the synoptics. Augustine harmonizes John in the synoptics. So, to take it to be literal was far more the default until we got to the rise of higher criticism in the century. And then another movement that I think is even more recent is in classics. So setting for the moment, setting aside New Testament, going over to secular classics and the eight the late century, and again, I think this is far more recent, older classicists, if they found contradictions or what they thought were contradictions among secular ancient documents and like Roman and Greek, they would just say, he made a mistake or you know he's unreliable or he was lying. That's just sort of common-sense things, right? But in the later twentieth century, that was considered not so cool. okay It was boring, as it were, to say, you know, Plutarch made a mistake, the Roman historian, Plutarch. Oh, boring.

You know, or this quintillion who wrote a handbook for lawyers, he was just a cynical lawyer. He was just telling us to use sleazy lawyer tricks. We know about that, right? you know That's not anything new and ancient. And so instead what they did was to say, oh the ancients looked at things differently from the way that we do. And they thought it was okay. And, too, you know, they had a different view of truth somehow, you know, completely different view of truth. And that, that kind of took off as a meme among classicists at that point, because that was regarded as cooler than just saying that they made a mistake or they were just cynical and, and using tricks or whatever. And so then unfortunately we got a sort of ah hybrid of that then when that higher critical view of the gospels from the century carried over into our own day came together with that new sort of soft postmodern view of the way the ancients thought and ah really seemed to give further confirmation to this view of John and the other gospels as well, which I think is incorrect.

Kathleen Noller: I'm personally curious as I'm hearing you speak about this sort of development of scholarship and the sort of how it's influencing the perception of the gospel of John, whether this also affected perception of Genesis and the creation account at the same time

Lydia McGrew: Well, a lot of things happened in the century. course, Darwin were written in the century, for sure.

Kathleen Noller: Yeah.

Lydia McGrew: you know, and that, I mean, it shook the foundations of Christianity. There were many people who lost their faith as a result of Darwin, because it was just seen as the pronouncement of science, you know, that you couldn't even question, you know, all of this, that, you know, everything developed human beings, you know, the denial of the existence of a historical atom.

Kathleen Noller: yeah

Lydia McGrew: Human beings were descended from you know from a and ape like ape-like ancestors and so forth, common ancestors. ah So sometimes that has been used. What I've seen is sometimes that's used as, again, a sort of and a weapon in in the century against people who look at the Gospels and the genre just, I think, just jumps off the page. You know, you have so many specific references to specific historical events and figures and external things. I mean, it's just, it's so clearly historically intended.

Kathleen Noller: Yeah.

Lydia McGrew: Whereas at least we can discuss, you know, the sort of sweeping poetic sound of Genesis, right?

Kathleen Noller: Yes

Lydia McGrew: In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth covers a lot of things. If nothing else, the author couldn't have been standing there watching it. I mean, at least we can say that, right.

Kathleen Noller: yeah

Lydia McGrew: That whoever wrote Genesis, he wasn't an eyewitness, whereas John could easily have been written by an eyewitness, right? And so, it's kind of a false equivalence, but that will be used. Like, if you think the Gospels are literal history, what do you think about Genesis? You know, again, what kind of an ignoramus do you have to be ah to not recognize that there are some aspects of the Bible taken as a whole collection that are maybe not intended literally. But I think that's really ah an unfair use of Genesis against a commonsense recognition of the historical intention of the gospels.

Kathleen Noller: Yes, absolutely. So I'd love to get your view on the implications of this view of many of these New Testament scholars and classic classicists on the Gospel of John and it’s his historicist city or a historicity, it seems like to me, you know, reading your book, there was such a big gap between the academic and scholarly perspective. And then what I've heard preached from the pulpit or taught in Bible study classes. And so, coming away from that, you know, much of our theology depends maybe is dependent cites famous verses like John, , , , , six. And so where is this discrepancy? Why does this discrepancy exist? And is it bit more because the pastors want to preach certainty but also see this difficulty and the historicity of the gospel of John or is it because there is just such a large gap between the academic perspective and the lay person or pastoral perspective.

Lydia McGrew: Yeah, that's an excellent, excellent question. My friend tom Gilson he who passed away about a year ago, almost exactly, he really emphasized this because he was very concerned about pastoral ministry. And so, he would ask some of these scholars, especially the ones who are evangelical labeled, you know, who are considered relatively conservative scholars like Dr. Michael Lacona, well, how does this...relate to pastoral ministry. You shouldn’t you be out there offering, as it were, you know, classes for pastors? Not that I want them to do this, and I don't think Tom did either, right? But if you really believe this, there are these pastors who would want to know.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

Lydia McGrew: They wouldn't want to be preaching it as something historical that Jesus literally said that I'm thirsty from the cross. I mean, I'm sure you've heard sermons on that. So have I. and indicate that his suffering and his humanity and all of that, if it didn't really happen. And a very strange response, we got a very strange response, which Dr. Lacona reiterated recently in an interview.

Kathleen Noller: Yeah.

Lydia McGrew: I don't know with whom the interview was. I think it was Sean McDowell, but I could be wrong about that. Anyway, it was a recent public interview, so I can tell you this because it's out there in public. He basically said it doesn't matter. that that, you know, the pastor doesn't need to know that, or the people in the pew don't need to know that. Now, to me, that is condescending in the extreme, because what it conveys is, oh, well, it's not going to do any harm if the pastors continue to think that a bunch of stuff is historical that wasn't really historical, and they continue to preach it as historical, and the land in the pews continue to believe it as historical, Because, you know, it's true anyway, the theological truth, you know, whatever the higher theological truth is, that's true anyway. So even if they think it's supported historically in ways that it isn't really, so what? And I imagine there lot of pastors who would be very unhappy with that view of their ministry because they want to be more conscientious than that.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

Lydia McGrew: I think a lot of times it's not recognized that biblical theology is cumulative. Okay, so if we have a verse about the Holy Spirit, I think the doctrine of the Holy Spirit would be one that would be really affected if we took this view of John. And some of our clearest statements from Jesus himself about the Holy Spirit come from the Gospel of John, right?

Kathleen Noller: Yeah.

Lydia McGrew: You know, he keeps referring to him as a person. I mean, I can remember when I was in college, right? What was one of the things you learned? The Holy Spirit is a person. And then you'd have these proof texts, right, that he's not just a force or something, that he's a person. Jesus speaks of him as a person repeatedly in John especially through, right? So those are those are important. But then we'll be told, oh, well, you know, if you cut that out, we'd still have the epistles of Paul. Okay, but it's a cumulative case.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

Lydia McGrew: The case for the proposition that the that the Holy Spirit is a person, and a person of the Godhead, it it's it would then be weakened, right? we If everything just depends on a much smaller number of biblical verses, it's a weaker case, but right? And so there tends to be a kind of cavalier approach to this by saying, oh, well, we'd still have this over here. Even if we cut out all the Yanin stuff, we could still depend defend it based on this other thing. And I think that's a very short-sighted view of what we might call the epistemology of biblical theology.

Kathleen Noller: I think many pastors, like you said, would really be loath to be preaching on some of these in a very certain way, if they knew that this was sort of the backstory that the academics were coming up with. And especially, you know, in the Sola Scriptura approach as a Protestant, it just You really don't want to be on that shaky of a ground. So, you mentioned before that the dismissal of John's historicity is not really confined to liberal theologians. We might just sort something, okay, well, this is in the liberal camp and where we're able to sort it that way. How widespread really is this? And does this separate, if it's not separating liberal versus conservative, does it separate denominationally? Or is it just sort of these views are seen across the board?

Lydia McGrew: Yeah, very good question. think the degree of it is going to be, in general, higher among liberal-identified theologians. And yet, even on a pretty conservative end, what you would find would be that that idea that at least in some places, John is changing the facts.

Kathleen Noller: Yeah.

Lydia McGrew: Okay? that not as many as the more liberal camp would see, but at least in some places, especially regarding some of these sort of gotcha claims like John moved the temple cleansing, John changed the day of the crucifixion, John makes up sayings of Jesus.

Kathleen Noller: Yeah

Lydia McGrew: One of the oddest things I encountered in my research was some statements from conservative labeled scholar of Craig Keener when he thought he was defending john and this was so strange and yet i didn't regard it as a defense so here's my example of that in john  Jesus says something like what shall i say father save me from this hour but for this hour i came into the world something like that i was born into the world And then he just says, Father, glorify thy name. So, he's struggling, right? He says, now is my soul troubled. He’s burdened by the thought of the crucifixion. And the context is clearly he's out among other people. He’s because he's He says, Father, glorify thy name. And then the voice of the Father speaks from above. And the crowd hears it. So, he's in a crowd. Dr. Keener says that that is John's moving the agony in the Garden of Gethsemane. Okay, so that in in Mark, you have, he's in the garden, and only his disciples are there. He's not in a crowd. It’s the very night before his crucifixion. It's completely different setting, okay? And it says, Father, if it be your will, let this cup pass from me. So, Keener's idea is that, you know, this separate thing where he says, now is my soul trouble? That didn't historically happen. John just moved it from the garden, but he says, says that's like a sign of John's reliability. He says, John doesn't invent without sources.

Kathleen Noller: Oh, goodness.

Lydia McGrew: And when I read that, I was like, wait, wait, wait. So, this is better because at least when he invented something for Jesus to say, he was using Mark. Oh, I feel so much better. You know, I mean, I mean, not to sound sarcastic, but it shocked me, okay, that that was a conservative view on John, that at least, you know, he has sources. So unfortunately, it's widespread. As far as denomination, I don't want to paint with too broad a brush, but Raymond Brown, who is well recognized as a pretty liberal scholar, got, I think it was a Nouveau Abschat, which is the Catholic indication that there's nothing here that contradicts Catholic doctrine. You know, it was either a nihilist or an imprimatur. Those are two different Catholic things. It might have been both. On some of his very liberal writings about the Gospel of John. So, there's, for quite a lot of time, has been a tendency in Catholic circles to approve of things that are not I don't think even good from a Catholic perspective, like even from a Catholic perspective, I don't think they should be doing that. But there are exceptions. I think Brent Petrie is a more conservative Catholic writer. So, it's not going to fall sharply even along denominational lines. But I think there is a big problem that I just want to say here, we've been talking about what pastors wouldn't want to think. A big problem that that when a pastor starts studying scholarship, he starts worrying that he's just holding on to the historicity of these things because he can't bear to let them go, okay? And that he's not being intellectually honest. And I think that that creates this cognitive dissonance in people who are going to be pastors or they've already been pastors or whatever,

Lydia McGrew: who start realizing how widespread this is in scholarship and that cognitive dissonance creates anxiety. I want and know I know I'm psychologizing, but i I've had people tell me that this is how it's been for them.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

Lydia McGrew: All right. That only scholarly, scholarly views only serve to weaken their perception of the historicity of John, especially. And that a personal theological commitment is the only support for strong historicity. And then they're like, well, I got to be intellectually honest, I'm going to have to abandon strong historicity.

Kathleen Noller: yes

Lydia McGrew: What I'm doing in this book and in all my books is to try to come in there and say, no, there are historical reasons, there are scholarly reasons for rejecting that even somewhat historic view of John. You don't have to abandon your intellectual honesty and your intellectual rigor. Intellectual honesty and rigor support the traditional view of John as being historical and not changing the facts.

Kathleen Noller: Yes. And let's dive into the historical reportage that you discuss in your book. So, first, I want to talk about this anachronistic perspective that we often have of the ancients. So, I'm going to use a quote from Richard Burridge that I took from your book. He states that, quote, in the ancient world, myth was the whereby profound truth, more truly true than mere facts could ever be, was communicated.

Kathleen Noller: so

Lydia McGrew: Thank

Kathleen Noller: If we extrapolate this to perhaps some of these views of gospels of the Gospel of John, you know one of the scholars cites it as perhaps more akin to wisdom literature than to a historical document. Is this a true perspective of the ancients or is this anachronistic and why is this being read into the ancient world's perception of truth?

Lydia McGrew: Yeah, I think it is anachronistic. And the irony, of course, is that it's supposedly opposed to anachronism, right? So, when you read that thing from Burrage, he's telling you, don't be anachronistic.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

Lydia McGrew: The ancients had a different view of truth. Whereas I would say he's the one being anachronistic. I think he's reading what I've called soft postmodernism back into the ancient perspective. So, I think Burrage is a perfect example of what I was thinking. saying about that development in classics, because Burge is a classic what I you know instead of just saying that Plutarch or one of these guys made a mistake, instead say, oh, they had a different view of truth. In my book, The Mirror or the Mask, which is not the one we're focusing on today but is related, I have a whole chapter called Let Ancient People Speak for Themselves. And so, I give people quote after quote after quoting you know from Aristotle and Lucian and you know ancient person after ancient person, showing that you know they understood that there was such a thing as objective truth. It's not like they just had some weird fuzzy Wuzzy view where they didn't even know what objective truth is. You know, what a strange idea. You know that that's not that's not correct.

Kathleen Noller: Thank you.

Lydia McGrew: And so even when they change the truth, Lucian has some very high ideals for history that he writes about. But then he himself was kind of a jerk. And so, there's a letter he writes about hoaxing some people by putting on make-up and telling them to and seeing if he can get them to believe it. Okay, but that doesn't show a different ancient view of truth. that He's trolling them. We have cat categories for that or ourselves. He knew he wasn't telling them the truth. He just wanted to see how credulous these guys would be that he was speaking to. So, a lot of times ah we try to make it more complicated than it really is when we talk about the ancients as if like we almost can't get into their mind and they mingled myth and fact in a way that we find hard to understand. It's not that complicated. They knew what facts were. They knew what lies were. They knew what truth was. And when they don't tell the truth, they know what they're doing as well.

Kathleen Noller: Yes, absolutely. One of the examples that you gave that I found ah supportive of your points here is the Christian historian Africanus from about  AD and how he actually worked to resolve perceived discrepancies between the genealogies of Jesus and in Gospel of Matthew and Gospel of Luke and so very much was concerned with those details and those facts and that truth as we would understand it today as well. Yeah. I'd love to dive now into the authorship of the Gospel of John. So, there are several questions here that we could discuss. You know, was this written by a disciple of Jesus? Was this written by somebody who traveled with Jesus, was, you know, acquainted with the and his ministry? Is this John, the son of Zebedee or not? So, let's tackle maybe the first question of what are some lines of evidence that it was written by a disciple of Jesus who was named John?

Lydia McGrew: Right. Well, all the external evidence that we have from like church fathers’ points in that direction. So, when I say external evidence, I mean like people talking about who wrote it, you know, sometimes explicitly or quoting it.

Kathleen Noller: Yes, asked

Lydia McGrew: So, one line of evidence would be quoting it. And we have Ignatius, and that's early, that's like early second century quoting John talking about them, or partially quoting, I mean, sometimes they're quoting from memory, but, you know, the Holy Spirit moving as he wills and so forth, which of course we recognize from John. You have Justin Martyr talking about the, you must be born again, you know, same thing, John, that's available. And that's also, you know, sort of early second century. They don't name the author, but they treat it as an authoritative document. And Justin Martyr says that the things they treat as those his authoritative documents are the memoirs of the apostles and their companions. And that's cool because, of course, we have two gospels traditionally written by apostles. That's Matthew and John. and two traditionally written by companions, that's Luke and Mark. So it fits perfectly with what Justin Martyr says. And then we get to like a debate between Irenaeus later in the second century and Ptolemy, who was a Gnostic author, Irenaeus is trying to refute him. And what's really cool there is that the authorship of the Gospel by a disciple named John is just assumed by both. So when you read Bart Ehrman as a perfect example of this, he sees Irenaeus as sort of defensive. He thinks Irenaeus made up. the authors, just like nobody knew previously who the authors were.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

Lydia McGrew: And then Irenaeus came along and like, oh, I got to get it make up some authors, you know, I guess I'll assign this one to John. And that's not the feeling you eat at all in Against Heresies, his thing that he wrote, you know, where he's talking about Gnostics. It's rather like, we all know this was written by John. And then what we're arguing about is the interpretation. And that's it's a much more at ease feeling about the authorship. So, it's just, it's unanimous among the church fathers that this was written by, when they address the question directly, that this was written by a disciple of Jesus named John, and even some heretics as well, like Ptolemy.

Kathleen Noller: So, does it matter that it is John the son of Zebedee specifically, or what do you think about the suggestion that this could be a different disciple who was also named John, but not specifically that person?

Lydia McGrew: Right. Well, of course, it depends on where you take it. I know of people who think it was written by John the son of Zebedee, but they have a partially non-historical view, which is weird. You know, they would say that he felt it was okay to change things, so that even though it was John the son of Zebedee, thought it was okay to change the facts. And then I know of people who think it was written by this other John, who think it's completely historical, right? So, it doesn't it doesn't divide cleanly along those lines. But I do think the evidence is very strong that it was John, the son of Zebedee. And so, I relegated a lot of that to an appendix to the eye of the beholder about that supposed other John, because I wanted the main body to be directed to people who have common ground concerning historicity even if they take the other John approach. There are a few places where I think it does make a difference. For example, the other John approach tends to involve saying that the author did not travel with Jesus in his Galilean ministry. So that would, you know, that it doesn't have to make it unreliable.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

Lydia McGrew: Luke didn't travel with Jesus in his ministry either, and he's very reliable, but it does place like one more gap between the author and the facts, which is, you know, a little bit ah changing our view of his access. Whereas I think it's clear that he did, he was an eyewitness even to the Galilean ministry. So, I disagree with the other John view, but I don't like to make it sound like, you know, everything rides on denying that view.

Kathleen Noller: Yes, that makes sense. And so, we had Peter Williams on the podcast a few months ago as well. And so, he talked about some of the evidence supporting the history of the Gospels, talked a lot about precise locations, the geographic relationship of locations. use of Palestinian Jewish names that were appropriate to the time and a mix of common and uncommon names. So, could you take us through maybe some of the strongest evidence of the sort that support the Gospel of John's historicity in particular?

Lydia McGrew: J. Williams is great on that, and I cite his book, Can We Trust the Gospels, several times. So, these are sometimes called external evidence, and the reason is because they involve comparing what we find in a canonical book to something that we find in some other source. It might be a historian, it might be geography, it might be archaeology or whatever.  So, there are a lot of those in in John, which is part of how we can just tell his historical intention and his historical success. So, for example, he talks about the pool of Bethesda having five porches. So what you found in some century more liberal scholars was the view that this was This was an allegory like that this was an allegory of the five books of Moses i mean really strange right instead of really having five porches and then archaeological diggings made it clear that it really had five that it had So it was a rectangle which is four

Kathleen Noller: Thank you.

Lydia McGrew: And then that there was this wall, you might call it, across the middle in an upper and lower pool. And the wall was between the upper and the lower pool. There you go, five, you know, four plus one. So that whole view of John as making things up gets challenged in this way. Or he mentions the water jars, the stone water jars in Cana and There's been archaeological diggings in the in the hills of Galilee in that region where all the candidates are for Cana. There's more than one candidate for the exact site of Cana. It's small town, but they're all in the same place.

Kathleen Noller: Thank you

Lydia McGrew: Geographical region, where there were stone water jars. And these would have been manufactured of stone because it was easier to purify. Okay If something is porous and you and you use it, then that stuff can sort of sink into the pores and you're never going to get it out. If you've ever seen unglazed pottery, you get a stain on that, you're never going to get it out. And in in Jewish life, it's often very important to purify something thoroughly. So, there's none left of, you know, whatever else this must be.

Kathleen Noller: All right.

Lydia McGrew: well so You can purify stone like that if it's a hard kind of stone because stuff doesn't sink into it like that. So, all that knowledge of ah Jewish purification and finding these stone water jars, you know, supports that. I'll just mention briefly the Palestinian names. I'm sure Peter talked a lot more about that. We find that there's this phenomenon called disambiguation. It's like us using last names. Okay? You know, if you want to know which Bob, Bob is a common name, so you're going to want to give his last name, maybe even his middle name, you know, it's because it's such a common name. They didn't have precisely last names, but they were disambiguated. So, these might be the person's job, his profession, might be ah his father, or might be his brother, whatever. And so, Simon is an example of a common name that gets used in all the Gospels. when ah When John uses it, he also disambiguates it. Even the people disambiguate it Jesus is Simon, son of Jonah. He calls him “you know, do you love me? Why? Well, Simon was one of the most popular names at the time. Judas was another one. Maccabean names were very popular. So, Judas is not just an Old Testament name, but also Maccabean, right? Judas Maccabeus. So, we even have this super awkward disambiguate in John. Judas, not Iscariot, asked him this. And this is in the Last Supper. Like, if you made that up, why would he attribute it to a Judas and then force himself to have to do this super awkward thing? I'm sure he wasn't known as Judas, not Iscariot. I mean, I'm sure nobody said, hey, Judas, not Iscariot, come over here. You know, I think he's called a son of James in in Luke. Luke has a different disambiguate for what's almost certainly the same guy, right? But, you know, John, as he's going through, he doesn't want you to think this was Judas Iscariot. He wants you to know it was the other guy There's two of them, you know, right there in the. And it's a sample of only. Why do we already oh already have two Judas's there? So, I think that's evidence of the historicity even of that question that he attributes to someone in the middle of Jesus, ah in the middle of Jesus discourse there. And I'll just give one more because this one's been used against the Gospels.

Kathleen Noller: Okay.

Lydia McGrew: Caiaphas, John says, was high priest that year. And this has been used against the Gospels. ah It's been used against Luke because he refers to Caiaphas and Annas as being high priests at the same time. And so, it's like, you can only have one high priest at a time. What are you talking about, you know? Or what do you mean high priest that year? It was a lifelong job, etc. Right if you go all the way back to the Old Testament. But at the time of these events, it was not a lifetime job. We know this from Josephus. The ah Romans deposed and put in place high priests because they recognized that it had political clout. They wanted someone in that job who was going to support Roman rule. And Caiaphas himself was deposed not long after. So, when John says Caiaphas was high priest that year, and when at one point he refers to Annas as high priest, at another point he refers to Caiaphas as high priest, that makes sense because Annas had been a high priest earlier and could still have been referred to that way. But Caiaphas was officially the high priest at the time, though not for much longer after that. So, it's great how these things that are supposedly against gospel reliability actually sometimes turn out to favor gospel reliability.

Kathleen Noller: Yes, it's very interesting how some of those turn out. And oftentimes with archaeological support as well. I’ve heard many cases where sort of scholars has said, oh, well, you know, there's no evidence for this. And, you know, we haven't found any archaeological support on this site or the other site. And lo and behold, it turns up. And so, you know, we don't have that for everything. But it's interesting to learn about some of these things that you're bringing up. I'd also love to talk about the undesigned coincidences that you mentioned. And so You discuss this concept of undesigned coincidences at length elsewhere, but I was wondering if you could just walk us through maybe first the concept of what it is for readers that are, or listeners that are unfamiliar. And then if we could go through an example of one that relates John to one of the other gospels.

Lydia McGrew: Yeah, it's a great argument. My husband introduced me to it about years ago. he found it in older century authors. So, I've been talking about bad century authors. These are good century authors, especially, and even further back, it was coined by William Paley in the century.

Kathleen Noller: Yeah.

Lydia McGrew: So, an undesigned coincidence I call an interlocking an incidental detail that points to truth. So, an incidental interlocking that points to truth. I like to give a modern made-up example because it illustrates it neatly. So, if we imagine a bank robbery has taken place and you have two different people who claim to have witnessed the bank robbery. One of them is explaining the clothes that the robber was wearing. He tells us about his jacket and all of that, his hat. And then he says, “And I noticed that his shoes, his shoelace, his shoe was untied.

Kathleen Noller: Okay.

Lydia McGrew: And then second guy comes along. And he's telling his story. And he focuses more on the action. you know and he says, and when the guy ran away, as he was going out the door, he tripped. Right? So, the one who mentions the shoelace doesn't mention that he tripped. And the one that mentions that he tripped doesn't mention the shoelace. That's an undesigned coincidence. These two people do not appear to be trying to confirm each other, right? Because neither one of them tells both parts. Each one only tells one part. And it comes up very naturally, very casually in what he's saying. And yet it fits perfectly with what the other one is saying.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

Lydia McGrew: That's an undesigned coincidence. So, here's an example from John. And it concerns the temple cleansing. John records that they came to him and they're like, show us a sign that you have the authority to do this. They're asking him, “Who do you think you are? And Jesus says, destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up. And they don't know what that means. John says that even the disciples didn't realize what that meant until after Jesus' resurrection. The leaders certainly don't. Okay, that's that in John. Now we go over to the synoptics, and we find that it says at the trial of Jesus before the Sanhedrin, they brought in witnesses to try to testify against him. And the witnesses said, we heard him say he will destroy the temple and raise it in three days. Now that's weird because if they were just trying to get Jesus in trouble, why would they add the bit about raise it in three days? Like, that's strange.

Kathleen Noller: Yeah.

Lydia McGrew: If we heard something like that today, we'd start Googling right away. We would say, it sounds like something got twisted there. you know you Something was sad, but it wasn't exactly that. It got twisted. We tried to find out maybe where this came from. Mark and the synoptics do not tell that Jesus said, destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up. But John doesn't talk about that testimony against Jesus. at his trial before the Sanhedrin. But the two fit together. That you had the saying of Jesus, and then there was some time passing, which supports the idea that he cleansed the temple early, for it to get all jumbled up and garbled, right? So that by the time we get to the, you know, three years later or so to his trial, it's a somewhat it's a somewhat changed saying, but it still bears a resemblance. That's An undesigned coincidence. John is explaining what we find in the synoptics, but he doesn't seem to be trying to explain it. Because if he were trying to explain it, why would he put that saying in a completely different context, in a completely different incident, and then never even mention the testimony against Jesus at his trial? So that's ah a good one that connects John with the synoptics.

Kathleen Noller: That's a helpful one. For those who say that in response to undesigned coincidences, that it could be just reading too much into things, sort of looking back in hindsight is. And now we can put these pieces together, but they don't really stack up against the external evidence, perhaps. How do they stack up and how much stock can we really place in them?

Lydia McGrew: Well, what I find is that all the evidence that I know of, virtually all, I guess I would say, points in the direction of Yohannan historicity.

Kathleen Noller: Yeah.

Lydia McGrew: So, in a sense, I don't see undesigned coincidences as needing to sort of walk up a slope, you know, against some other evidence, against the Gospel of John or the other Gospels.

Kathleen Noller: Yeah

Lydia McGrew: I see it as being in concert with that other evidence. And so that, I think that's pretty, that's cool. Some of those externals, positive items of evidence were some that we were just talking about, right? And I think that it works together to form a cumulative case with the undesigned coincidences. Now, there are stronger and weaker undesigned coincidences. There are ones where someone could disagree and say, oh, i don't I don't think that's the real explanation or whatever. And so even among those of us who are interested in them, there are sometimes disagreements. And someone will say, you know, I don't use that one. I don't think that one's as strong or whatever. And I'll say, oh, I think that one's one of the strongest. but you so you know And I'm not trying to make it out to be just completely subjective, but I agree that there are variations in strength of individual undesigned coincidences, but there are a lot of them. And there are a lot of them that I think are quite strong. What we find when more liberal scholars come along or scholars who don't agree with it is that very often, they're not really explaining the undesigned coincidence at all. So, I'll give a quick example here. Mark mentions that the grass was green at the time of the feeding of them, it just kind of goes past, you know, that they sat down on the green grass. John mentions that the Passover was nearby. Okay, so he mentions the time of year. He doesn't mention the color of the grass. He says there was a lot of grass in the place, but he doesn't say it was green. It could have been brown, like the grass gets here in Michigan sometimes, you know, in the winter or the overly hot summer or whatever. And Mark doesn't mention that it was near the Passover. But those two come together well. And Peter Williams has a chart of rainfall in his book, Can We Trust the Gospels? Now, I want to be careful.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

Lydia McGrew: I'm not saying there were only two weeks when the grass was green. Okay, I'm not saying it's like super-duper narrow. Okay, but there definitely were times when the grass would not have been green, especially when the sun got too hot later in the summer and there wasn’t much rain. But the Passover ah falls right after all of these rains of winter and then when there would be time for some greening up to start happening so that fits together well there're there is this a guy scholar named John Nelson who wrote arguing against undesigned coincidences and he said oh the green grass Mark put that in there to allude to Psalm  he makes me to lie down in green pastures

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

Lydia McGrew: So, then he takes that to be an argument against the undesigned coincidence. What do you notice about that? He hasn't explained the coincidence at all.

Kathleen Noller: Yeah.

Lydia McGrew: All he's done is claimed, and I think it's a very far-fetched theory to explain why Mark includes it, okay? But he doesn't explain why that fits together with the time of year in John. So, you get a lot of that ah sort of fake refutations of undesigned coincidences where they're not really reckoning with the coincidence itself at all.

Kathleen Noller: Yes, that makes sense. And I think it's good to note as well as you did before that, like you said, these are these are supportive and in line with all the other evidence that we have those points all together in a certain direction. It's not like we're resting our case entirely on a set of undesigned coincidences. We have a lot of internal and external evidence. And I'd also like to talk about more global similarities and sort of take a step back and look at the big picture between John and the other gospels.

Lydia McGrew: Thank you.

Kathleen Noller: So how we can look at you know the teachings of Jesus, the person, character of Jesus. Presumably, we would think that he would be similarly represented amongst the four gospels. Is he or do we see marked differences between how he's represented in the Gospel of John versus the synoptics?

Lydia McGrew: Well, this is another of those scholarly myths for sure that I’m trying to I'm trying to puncture, which is that there's this a Yohannan Jesus, you know, John's Jesus, right?

Kathleen Noller: Yeah, it's

Lydia McGrew: And then there's a synoptic Jesus and that these are not the same. So, i spend a lot of space in the eye of the beholder arguing that there's only one Jesus and that if anything, the similarities are remarkable. I'm just going to give a couple examples, just kind of click through them. So, in the way Jesus speaks, which is, I love this because it's seen as a weakness of John, but it's a strength. You find similarities. ah He says, of course, in ah Matthew, come unto me, all you that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Right? And in John, he says, if anyone comes to me, I will not cast him out or he that comes to me will never hunger. He that believes in me will never thirst. So, and they're in totally different contexts, you know? So, what we see here is that he likes to talk about coming to him. That was the concept that he had. or drinking the cup, you know, in, ah again, in the Gethsemane, in the Garden of Gethsemane, Father, please let this cup pass from me. And then, in John, he sees the Judas and the guards coming, right? And he says, and then and then ah Peter cuts off the ear of one of the guards. And Jesus says, no. And he says, shall I not drink the cup that the father has given me? Now, I don't see that as a contradiction.

Kathleen Noller: Yeah.

Lydia McGrew: I was just reading ah a liberal scholar named Jörg Frey recently who sees that as some kind of problem. I'm like, no, it fits together perfectly. He's thinking of the cup and begging the father to let the cup pass. And then when he sees the guards coming, he's like, okay, it's the answer. The Father said no. And so, then he says, “No, this is the cup that the father has given me. I must drink it. So that almost counts as an undesigned coincidence. one suffering. Jesus suffers. And we find him, of course, you know suffering in the synoptics, both mentally and physically. But we also find him, am thirsty, oh only recorded in the Gospel of John. We find him suffering internally. He says, now is my soul troubled, just like in the synoptics. you know He says, couldn't you watch with me one hour? you know that he's He wants his friends to be with him on that night, and then they fall asleep. And that it's a that's the person. C.S. Lewis said, if he wanted to, God could have been incarnating in a man with nerves of steel, but it wouldn't have been as helpful for us.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

Lydia McGrew: And instead, he was incarnate as a man who could fear crucifixion and death and all that. And I just see that so strongly across the four Gospels. And then just one more, he likes to use object lessons. And there are many more, but that’s all I'm going to say today. In the synoptics, he brings a child. and places him among them, right? And says, you must become like a little child to enter the kingdom of heaven. In the gospel of John, when we know from Luke, they've been quarreling. John doesn't mention that. Jesus gets up and he takes off his outer garment, and he puts a towel around his waist. You could almost picture them all like watching him. you know What's he going to do? And he washes their feet. And then he sits down and says, “This is, A lesson to you, right? That you should wash one another's feet. So that's an object lesson, just like placing the child very deliberately among them. It's the exact, it's the same Jesus repeatedly. and I just love that.

Kathleen Noller: Yeah, thank you for those examples. And this leads me into sort of asking a little bit more about the writing style of John. and so, we might say, you know, Jesus sounds similar, but then we have quotes from folks like Michael Lacona saying he sounds very much like how John sounds in John, the way Jesus sounds in the Gospel of John. So where are the lines between John having his unique writing style, perhaps paraphrasing in his own way, making stylistic differences versus introducing an ahistorical element. And how does that, yeah, where's the line between sort of a stylistic difference and something that we need to be concerned about?

Lydia McGrew: Yeah, it's a good question. And I want to say right now, it is true that the style of Jesus speaking sounds like the style of ah John in John. I am inclined to think that that's because John learned to talk like Jesus, not so much because he made Jesus talk like John.

Kathleen Noller: Thank you.

Lydia McGrew: You know, these were young men at the time. And Jesus was a huge influence on their life. And if you've ever known somebody who had a teacher and that teacher made a big impact on him when he was young, and then maybe he goes on to become a teacher, he'll talk like his mentor. I mean, that happens. They pick up especially you know themes and favorite words and favorite terms and that kind of thing. But I think we also need to get a sense of perspective here because the ways in which it's true that ah John's style and the way Jesus speaks in John sounds a little bit different from the synoptics are so trivial. So, I'm going to give just a couple of examples.

Kathleen Noller: Yeah. Okay.

Lydia McGrew: There's something called Ascending. where you leave out a connective. You could have a connective, but you leave it out. So, in the speech of Winston Churchill, we shall fight them on the beaches, we shall fight them in the streets, we shall never surrender, etc. right He doesn't say and. He doesn't, you know, he's just, its boom, boom, boom, right? That's a syndeton, and it can be very effective. So... so the narrator in John says the law came through Moses, but great. Oh, he doesn't say but. See, I almost put it.

Kathleen Noller: of

Lydia McGrew: almost put it again. Law came by Moses, but there isn't.

Kathleen Noller: It's so natural to me, yes.

Lydia McGrew: Grace and truth came by Jesus Christ. That's a syndeton. And Jesus says, let not your heart be troubled. Believe in God. Believe also in me. A syndeton. In Jesus' words. That is not... something that's going to change the meaning. Right? I mean, that’s purely stylistic.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

Lydia McGrew: So whether we view that as John coming to think and talk more like Jesus, which I think should be a ah viable proposal on the table, or John ah giving Jesus words in a way that's somewhat more like his own style, that doesn't change and wouldn't normally be expected to change the recognizability of it on that occasion. So, if you'd been there at the Last Supper, I think you would have been able to recognize when he says, let’s not let your heart be troubled. You know, even if he said, if you believe in God, you should also believe in me. You know a few more words in there, right? And it's not a syndeton, you subordinating clause or whatever. You could still recognize it as both the context and the content.

Kathleen Noller: Thank you.

Lydia McGrew: So, I think that recognizability is good. Another example quick of the of the stylistic ways in which Jesus and John sound similar, something called the adversative kai. So, kai means and. So, an example here from the preface, so that's the narrator. The world was made by him, and the world knew him not. He came into his own, and his own received him not. So, use and in both places. But the meaning is but.

Kathleen Noller: Yeah.

Lydia McGrew: Right? He came into his but his own received him not. It's a contrast. Okay, but he uses he loves he just loves that word and, chi, in Greek. So, he just uses it. He came into his own, and his own received him not. Jesus does something a bit like this in the scene with Nicodemus, he said, we speak of what we know, we testify of what we have seen, and you receive not our witness. Well, it means, but right? It's a contrastive use, but it's just chi.

Kathleen Noller: Yes. is it

Lydia McGrew: Well, I mean, how trivial is that? and so I really, and that would not prevent that recognizability if you had been there, even if Jesus said, but, on that occasion with Nicodemus. and I sort of want to be proactive here. D.A. Carson, you know conservative commentator, has a passage where he's talking about exactly these kinds of things, these trivial grammatical things.

Kathleen Noller: Thank you.

Lydia McGrew: And he says at the end of it, John has rewritten the whole. And what he means is that John the Baptist kind of sounds like John too, also. Okay. So, some of these same stylistic things are found in John the Baptist or in Nathaniel or whatever. So that it's, it's all in John's style. Okay. But he's talking about these stylistic things. And unfortunately, something Dr. Lacona has been doing recently that I very much disagree with, he is telling people that if they disagree with him, Dr. Lacona, on things like John making up by thirst or changing the day of the temple cleansing or whatever, they're also disagreeing with D.A. Carson. And it's like, why? And he says, well, D.A. Carson says John has rewritten the whole. You're going to call D.A. Carson a liberal? Well, it's out of context. It's out of context because Carson is not talking about these kinds of changes that

Kathleen Noller: yes

Lydia McGrew: would not normally be called paraphrase at all. He's talking about these trivial ah stylistic things. So, i wanted to I wanted to sort of preempt that so that your viewers ah can be aware of them.

Kathleen Noller: Okay, yes, that's very helpful. So, would you say most of the stylistic differences are these small grammatical changes that are insignificant to the overall message? Is that the majority or is that all?

Lydia McGrew: Either they're grammatical or they're other stylistic things, like Jesus, as reported in John, repeats himself more at one time. So, he's a little more, what should I say, loquacious. And if anything, I think that's more realistic. Okay, I think it's far more likely that to make it easier to remember what Jesus said, the synoptics would more likely reflect cutting out some of those repetitions, right? I mean, people don't need to remember that Jesus said, abide in me as many times as he says, abide in me, you know, and when he's talking about himself, the true vine, I'm the vine, you are the branches.

Kathleen Noller: you

Lydia McGrew: You don't need to remember that as him repeating himself that often. and So that the sort of terseness of Jesus in, say, the Sermon on the Mount is I think better explained by boiling down than by John boiling up, as we might say, and adding ah repetitions that Jesus didn't really use.

Kathleen Noller: Okay.

Lydia McGrew: So, I would say they're all stylistic in one way or another. They're not all as specific as some of those other sorts of specialized things I mentioned. But none of them affect not only the message, but none of them argue against the context. That's the other thing. None of those differences give us reason to think that John is shifting something from one context to another context.

Kathleen Noller: That's a very important note. The final question that I have for you is, what about some of the accusations against the gospel John that don't result from known discrepancies, such as the invention of the phrase, it is finished, which I have heard preached multiple times, and I could not imagine deleting from my sort of bank of biblical phrases here. How do we handle those?

Lydia McGrew: Yeah, call those utterly unforced errors. That's my phrase for those because they don't arise even from a perceived discrepancy. Right? There's no discrepancy between Jesus saying it is finished and Jesus saying, Father, into your hands I commit my spirit. Each of them takes only a second to say. He easily could have said both even right around the same time. You know, he could have said, Father, and into your hands I commit my spirit. And then he drops down and says, it is finished. And the beloved disciples standing so close, maybe you heard something that was softer than someone couldn't have heard if they were further away. at all It all fits together think many, many, many of these unforced errors and even claims of contradiction are artificially created, again, from that very bad argument from silence. Another example of this would be the two-temple cleansing. I've heard the argument; no gospel narrates two temple cleansings. So what? Okay, there are healings of the lame that are narrated in one gospel, and then a different healing of the lame is narrated in a different gospel, but that doesn't mean that one of them was moved or something. Jesus healed lame people on more than one occasion. So that's this weird, weird argument from silence that we would need to have a gospel that narrates both temple cleansings, and otherwise we must argue that

Kathleen Noller: Okay.

Lydia McGrew: or we must accept that one of the authors changed the time. And when I say moved here, I mean, changed it, tried to make it look like it happened when it didn't really happen. And usually, it's John who's accused of that. Some people have accused Mark of doing that. I think that's, they're both wrong. It's a protest. You know, as I often say, I've stood outside the same abortion clinic at different times of year, carrying a sign that said the very same thing, you know, I think i think it said, I love them both, audit or something like that, you know, right out the same gates, and one time November, and one time it's February, you could no doubt have ways of narrating that, that would make them sound similar, but they both happened. The cleansing of the temple was a protest, and they went right back to doing the things Jesus was protesting. So, three years later, he's

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

Lydia McGrew: annoyed by that again and he comes in and protested again in a similar way. I see no argument against that. So, to me, even though that's said to be a contradiction, I would call it an unforced error arising from a kind of allergy that scholars have to generally similar things happening. And they seem to see it as being an

Kathleen Noller: yes

Lydia McGrew: you know, oh, you know, that's too similar. Well, not really. I mean, if you read the two narratives, they could be two different occasions. It's not like he's having verbatim the same dialogue with people or that kind of thing that it would just be so weird and uncanny that this exact same thing would happen twice.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

Lydia McGrew: That's not true. So why introduce that as a problem? I think scholars, a lot of times, have their own problems. They make problems where there isn't a problem. I'll bring up one more thing about that language issue, because it's one of my favorites.

Kathleen Noller: Yes.

Lydia McGrew: So, a theory, theologically, is that the author of John, he believed he was inspired by the Holy Spirit. So therefore, therefore, it goes, he thought it was okay for him to put words in Jesus' mouth, because after all, he thought he was inspired by the Holy Spirit. So if he kind of made Jesus his sack puppet and made him say things he didn't really say, Hey, it's okay because this is the Holy Spirit.

Kathleen Noller: Oh God, yeah.

Lydia McGrew: but It's all God. Exactly. Exactly. That's the theory. But instead, what we find in John is that he's, and this is a point of D.A. Carson. I think I may have even gotten it from D.A. Carson, that he distinguishes his voice from the voice of Jesus several times. So that example I gave you about Destroy the Temple, and in three days I will raise it up, is an example of that. Because at that point, the author pauses and qualified the narrator, he says, but he was speaking of the temple of his body. And therefore, after his resurrection, his disciples remembered. Now think about this. If he thought it was okay for him to make Jesus say something, why not make Jesus explain that? He could even have a little scene like we have sometimes in the synoptics, and I think those are historical, but where later the disciples say to him, what did you mean to destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up? And Jesus said unto them, I am speaking of the temple of my body for, you know, I will be crucified and raised. And Jesus did predict his resurrection, of course. But why not make up a little scene like that? I mean, that that would be less radical than some of the things that John's accused of doing, even.

Kathleen Noller: Thank you.

Lydia McGrew: But he doesn't. Instead, he tells you what Jesus historically said, and then he pauses the tape and he tells you what it meant in his own voice. He does those multiple times. It's really striking. These are called asides in John. and Okay, that he'll pause and he'll make, you know, make this little aside. So, for example, when Jesus says, whoever comes to me, out of his innermost being will come streams of living water. That's in John, which also is an external allusion to Feast of Tabernacles, which John does not explain, but it's great because they poured living water over the altar. Then he pauses and he says he was speaking of the Holy Spirit that was not yet given. He doesn't have Jesus tell somebody ah that he's speaking, and Jesus does speak of the Holy Spirit in John, but not there, not explicitly. The narrator pauses it and tells you it meant the Holy Spirit. I consider that these asides in John are all by themselves an incredibly strong argument against the common scholarly view of John that he felt that it was okay to put words in Jesus' mouth. And I just love that argument.

Kathleen Noller: Yes, that's an excellent argument. And I found it very convincing as well. Thank you so much, Dr. McGrew, for all your wisdom, for sharing it with us. This has been just a very edifying and fun conversation. and I think this will be really helpful for not only non-believers who I know are struggling with some of these questions, but also hopefully some, I do know as well, some folks in seminary who've been struggling with sort of the difference that you mentioned between, you know, how to handle the academic perspective on the gospel of John that they're reading with what they're preaching and their own faith and all of that. So, I think this will be very helpful for a wide variety of listeners, and I'm so thankful to you for joining us today.

Lydia McGrew: Thank you, Kathleen. It was a lot of fun.

Kathleen Noller: Yes, so let me quote end with a quote from C.S. Lewis, which is related to what we've talked about today. c s Lewis says, quote, I've been reading poems, romances, vision, literature, legends, and myths all my life. I know what they are like. I know that not one of them is like this. Of this text, there are only two possible views. Either this is reportage close to the facts or else some unknown writer without known predecessors or successors suddenly anticipated the whole technique of modern novel novelistic, realistic narrative. So, this is getting at sort of the... accusation of gospel of John being myth or wisdom literature. And I think CS Lewis puts it quite well. Thank you so much. And we'll look forward to you joining us for the next episode.

Thank you for listening to the questioning belief podcast.