Justified True Belief

(●) The philosopher with no university post who revived a Victorian argument for the Gospels and then turned it on her own side’s scholarship. + Open a recent issue of the Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism and find her article, and under the author’s name, where the other contributors print a university or a seminary, there are two words: Kalamazoo, MI. She has no department, no students, no sabbaticals and no library card that a graduate student would envy. She has a doctorate in English literature, a publication record in formal epistemology built without ever taking a philosophy course, four books on the reliability of the Gospels, and a house in southwest Michigan she can no longer travel far from. Formal epistemology is the study of evidence carried out with mathematics: not the loose question of whether a claim is well supported, but the exact question of how far a particular fact ought to move a reasonable person’s confidence, and by how much. She matters to Christian readers for two reasons that pull in different directions. The first is that she recovered an argument for the Gospels that had been out of use for a hundred years, the argument from undesigned coincidences, and put it back into the hands of ordinary believers. The second is that she has spent the years since arguing, hard and in public, with other Christian scholars who defend the Gospels differently, which has made her one of the most contested figures in English-language apologetics and, to a good many readers, one of the most bracing. One fact is worth holding before anything else, because it cuts against the caricature. The writer who has argued at the greatest length in our own time that the Gospel writers never invented a scene is not an inerrantist, and says so plainly on her own website. An inerrantist holds that the Bible contains no mistakes of any kind, not only in what it teaches but in every incidental detail of history and geography and number, so that if Scripture says a thing happened, it happened exactly so. That is a doctrine about the whole of Scripture, held by many Christians on theological grounds, and she does not think the case for the Gospels needs one to hold it up. She thinks it needs the evidence, taken whole. A word about the date in the heading. She has never made her birth year public and no reference work records it, so the year there carries a "c." for circa, the scholar’s way of saying about: an estimate rather than a fact she has confirmed. It is worked backwards from the doctorate she took at Vanderbilt in 1995 and from her first philosophy paper two years after that, which put her birth somewhere in the middle of the 1960s. Read it as the convention it is.

(●) 1995 AD: She finished a Vanderbilt doctorate in English that her own undergraduate degree had not prepared her for. + She was adopted as a baby, raised Baptist, and went to a Bible college, where she started as a music major and then, in her own cheerful phrase, chickened out and became a missions major. She still plays the piano and still holds a hymn sing at her house for Christian friends every other month, which is the sort of detail that explains more about her prose than any account of her method will. A Bible college degree is not the usual runway for graduate work in Renaissance literature. She knew it, and she read her way onto the runway. By her own account she prepared herself for graduate study by self-teaching, and the work paid off: she won a Department of Education fellowship, went to Vanderbilt University in Nashville, and took a PhD in English Literature there in 1995, working on Renaissance non-dramatic poetry and especially Edmund Spenser, the Elizabethan who wrote The Faerie Queene. That first crossing is worth holding on to, because she made it again, and then a third time. She has published in three scholarly fields over thirty years, and in two of the three she never sat a single course in the subject.

(●) 1997 AD: She began publishing in philosophy, a subject she had never taken a class in, while homeschooling three daughters. + Her husband, Timothy McGrew, took his own doctorate in philosophy at Vanderbilt in 1992 and joined the philosophy department at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo in 1995, where he later became a full professor and the department’s chairman. The family settled in southwest Michigan, and there the household ran on one income and a good deal of long division: she was a homemaker and a home schooler, and she is now, as she puts it, an emeritus one. The philosophy began beside the kitchen table and beside her husband. Their first papers came out together from 1997 onward in American Philosophical Quarterly, the Journal of Philosophical Research and Dialogue, and the subject was epistemology, the branch of philosophy that asks what makes a belief count as knowledge rather than a lucky guess. Their particular corner of it was internalism, the position that whatever makes a belief reasonable has to be something the believer can get at by thinking about it, and not some hidden fact about how his brain happens to be wired. Put it this way: on the internalist view, a man who believes something for no reason he can name does not get to call it knowledge merely because his wiring was reliable that morning. The pair of them defended that against the fashion of the day, and in 2007 Routledge published their joint statement of the case, Internalism and Epistemology: The Architecture of Reason. From the twenty-teens she was publishing alone, and in journals that do not care who your husband is: Philosophical Studies, Erkenntnis, Synthese, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Philosophy of Science. Her subject narrowed to a single question that would turn out to matter enormously later on. When two witnesses tell you the same thing, when exactly does the second one add anything?

(●) 2009 AD: With her husband she wrote one of the most detailed probabilistic cases for the resurrection in print. + William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland were assembling a large reference volume on the arguments of natural theology, and the McGrews were given the chapter on miracles. What they turned in ran to seventy pages, and it did something the philosophy of religion had almost stopped doing. Instead of arguing in general terms about whether a miracle could ever be believed, they took the specific evidence for one particular claim and counted it. The tool is Bayes’s theorem, an eighteenth-century piece of arithmetic named after the English minister Thomas Bayes, which says how much a new fact should move your confidence in a hypothesis. The engine of it is a ratio the McGrews call a Bayes factor: how likely is this fact if the claim is true, divided by how likely it is if the claim is false. If a fact is a hundred times more expected on the claim than against it, the factor is a hundred, and confidence should move accordingly. Independent facts multiply. Two more words travel with the theorem and are worth having in hand. Your prior is what you thought before the evidence came in; your posterior is what you ought to think once you have weighed it. The Bayes factor is simply the thing that carries you from the one to the other, and a very large factor can carry you a very long way from a very unpromising start. So they took the testimony of the women at the tomb, the testimony of thirteen named men who said they had seen the risen Christ and were willing to die saying it (the eleven who remained, with Matthias who replaced Judas and James the brother of Jesus), and the conversion of the persecutor Paul, and they put a conservative factor on each. The chapter is not a shortcut. Most of it is the patient business of taking the alternatives seriously one at a time: the swoon, the stolen body, the moved body, mass hallucination, the theory that the appearances were heavenly visions rather than a raised man. The counting comes at the end, and what comes out of it is a number large enough to be worth quoting (T4).

(●) 2014 AD: Her husband handed her the argument from undesigned coincidences, unused since the Victorians, and she wrote the book on it. + Timothy McGrew had been working through the eighteenth and nineteenth-century writers who answered the deists and answered David Hume on miracles, and in among them he kept meeting an argument nobody used any more. William Paley had used it in Horae Paulinae in 1790, comparing Paul’s letters with the book of Acts. John James Blunt had made a whole book of it in 1833 and a fuller one in 1847. Then it went quiet for a century and a half. She started reading about it around 2013 and 2014, and by the spring of 2015 she was convinced it needed to be put in front of a modern reader. The two of them agreed that whichever of them found the time first would write the book. She found the time first. Hidden in Plain View: Undesigned Coincidences in the Gospels and Acts came out from DeWard Publishing in March 2017, with a foreword by the New Testament scholar Craig Keener and an afterword by the cold-case detective J. Warner Wallace. It is a plain book, mostly example after example, and it did what she wanted: within a few years the argument was back in ordinary apologetics, in church talks and student groups and podcasts, in the hands of people who had never heard of Blunt (T1).

(●) 2019 AD: She argued that the Gospel writers took no licence to alter facts, and the quarrel was with fellow defenders of the Gospels. + Working through the coincidences had left her with a conviction about the men who wrote the Gospels: they were not arranging things. That put her at odds with a view that had been gaining ground among conservative New Testament scholars: that the evangelists (the old word for the four men who wrote the Gospels) worked with the compositional devices of Greco-Roman biography and felt free, within the conventions of their genre, to move an event to a different day or transfer a saying to a different speaker for the sake of the telling. In December 2019 she published The Mirror or the Mask: Liberating the Gospels from Literary Devices, and the scholars she argued with were not skeptics. They were Michael Licona, Craig Keener, who had written her own foreword less than three years before, and Craig Evans: believing men who defend the resurrection in public, and who she thought had given away something they did not need to give away. Licona answered in a series of videos. She answered the answer in a series of her own, at length. Readers who had watched the two of them appear on the same platforms found the whole thing painful, and said so. She also took the argument where such arguments are supposed to go. In April 2019 Themelios published her paper on independent attestation. In 2021 the Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism ran two long articles of hers in one volume. The first went through the classical and patristic evidence about the Gospels’ genre, patristic meaning the writings of the church fathers, the Christian teachers of the first few centuries, who are the earliest readers of the Gospels anyone can watch at work. The second separated two things scholars had been running together, and the distinction is easier than the words for it. Achronological narration is where an author does not commit himself to when, or in what order, something happened. Dyschronological narration is where he narrates it as happening at a time when it did not. A man who says he met his wife and bought a house, without saying which came first, has told you the plain truth achronologically; a man who says he bought the house in June when he bought it in December has narrated dyschronologically, and that is a different thing altogether.

(●) 2021 AD: Her book on John’s Gospel came out in March, and by the spring an illness had fixed her to one house. + The Eye of the Beholder: The Gospel of John as Historical Reportage came out in March 2021, the hardest of her books and the one she had been circling for years. John is where the literary-device question bites hardest, because John’s Jesus talks in what sounds like John’s own voice, and a long tradition of scholarship has concluded that the speeches are the evangelist’s meditation rather than the rabbi’s words (T3). In the spring of that year, by her own account, she was seriously injured by an immune reaction to the Covid vaccine, and was left with severe neuropathy, chronic pain and other lasting problems. Neuropathy is damage to the nerves themselves, and the practical effect of it is pain that never quite goes away and a body that will not hold a posture for long. She cannot travel more than a short distance from home, and anything that runs to any length she now has to give mostly reclining, shifting position as she goes. Her work did not stop; it moved. She had begun a YouTube channel in the summer of 2020, and it became the main room she teaches in, an hour at a time, with the camera at whatever angle her back allows that week. She writes about the injury the way she writes about everything, without drama and without pretending, and she is on record thanking God that she can still walk.

(●) 2023 AD: She wrote the book for ordinary readers, and lost the congregation she had worshipped in for decades. + Testimonies to the Truth: Why You Can Trust the Gospels appeared in 2023, and it is the one to hand a friend. The three books before it were arguments with scholars; this one gathers the whole case for a reader who has never heard of any of the disputes, and it is written with a warmth the technical work does not have room for. An audiobook followed in early 2026, read by her daughter Bethel. The same year took something from her. She had been raised Baptist and had spent several decades in a continuing Anglican congregation in Comstock, Michigan, near her home, one of the small traditionalist parishes that stand outside the mainline Episcopal Church, and in early 2023 that church had to close its doors. She now worships regularly at a conservative Reformed congregation nearby and sometimes at another, without membership in either, since she is not an inerrantist and is, in her own words, more Arminian in doctrine than they are. Arminian and Reformed are the names of two long-standing Christian answers to the question of how God’s choosing and a person’s own choosing fit together, the Arminian side giving more place to a person’s free response to grace. Her official membership remains Anglican, at a parish in Hastings she can rarely reach, which is a quiet sort of homelessness for someone who has spent a life arguing that the church has better evidence than it knows. Through all of it the philosophy has kept coming, which is the half of her output that surprises readers who know her only from the Gospel books: a paper in Philosophia in 2023, one in Philosophia Christi in 2025 on the problem of evil, and one in Philosophy of Science in 2026 on what a reliable witness can establish about an improbable event, which is the technical form of the question her whole New Testament career has been asking. Away from the desk she describes herself as politically and socially very conservative, and when she is asked which questions she cares most about she names abortion, marriage, and the nature of male and female. She also likes horses she does not own, and makes puns she thinks are only funny by accident.

What She Taught

(T1) The Gospels interlock in ways nobody arranged, and the best explanation is that the writers knew what happened. + Take her favourite example, because it takes two minutes and it is the whole method in miniature. - In Matthew 14:1-2, Herod hears about Jesus and says that this must be John the Baptist raised from the dead. Matthew, and only Matthew, adds that Herod said it to his servants. Stop and notice how odd that is. Herod here is Herod Antipas, and the title Matthew gives him is tetrarch, the rank Rome handed out to a man who governed a piece of a client kingdom rather than the whole of one. How would a Galilean tax collector know what a tetrarch said in private to his household staff? This is precisely the sort of detail a critic would file as invention, because there is no visible way for the author to have it. - Turn to Luke 8:2-3, in a completely different Gospel, in a completely different context, where Luke is listing the women who supported Jesus out of their own money. One of them is Joanna, and Luke mentions in passing that she was the wife of Chuza, Herod’s household manager. - Neither writer is explaining the other. Luke is not answering a question Matthew raised; he almost certainly had no idea Matthew had raised it. He simply knew who Joanna was. And the two details, dropped separately, lock together: the wife of Herod’s household manager was in the Christian community, which is exactly how the Christian community would know what Herod said to his servants. That is an undesigned coincidence: an incidental fit between two accounts that neither author designed. Her claim is not that any one of them proves anything. It is that they are frequent, that they run in every direction (sometimes Matthew explains Luke, sometimes Luke explains Matthew, sometimes Acts explains a letter of Paul), and that this is what testimony from people close to the events looks like and is not what invention looks like. A forger arranging a fit puts it where the reader will see it. Truth leaves its fits lying about untidily. She has also worked the same argument out formally, in the peer-reviewed epistemology journals, which is the part of her career each half of her audience tends to forget about. The popular book and the technical papers are the same argument in two languages, and most readers only ever meet one of them.

(Q) "An undesigned coincidence is a notable connection between two or more accounts or texts that doesn’t seem to have been planned by the person or people giving the accounts. Despite their apparent independence, the items fit together like pieces of a puzzle." + Source: Lydia McGrew, Hidden in Plain View: Undesigned Coincidences in the Gospels and Acts (DeWard Publishing, 2017), p. 12, where she defines the term before working a single example. Every phrase in it is carrying weight. Notable, because a connection too faint to see is no evidence at all. Doesn’t seem to have been planned, because a fit that looks arranged is worthless. Like pieces of a puzzle, because the parts have to actually join. What she draws from it is an inference and not a proof: of the explanations available for so many joins, the one that fits best is that the writers knew the truth about what they were describing.

(T2) An ancient writer could make an honest mistake without inventing, and the evidence gives the Gospel writers no licence to invent. + Here is the view she is arguing with, stated as strongly as its holders state it. The four Gospels look like Greco-Roman biography, a genre with known conventions. Ancient writers of that genre, Plutarch above all, are seen doing things a modern reporter would not do: compressing a fortnight into a day, transferring a saying from one occasion to another, putting two people at a scene where the source has one. Scholars call these compositional devices. If the evangelists were writing in that genre and using those devices, then several of the differences between the Gospels are not errors at all. They are craft, and the reader who worries about them is applying the wrong standard. She thinks this concedes something enormous on evidence that will not carry it, and she draws the line in a place worth understanding, because she is regularly accused of drawing it somewhere else. - She grants freely that the evangelists paraphrase rather than transcribe, that they summarize, that they leave gaps, and that they often narrate achronologically, without telling you the order of events. That is perfectly honest reporting: if you say that Jesus healed a leper and taught in a synagogue without saying which came first, you have told the truth and simply not answered a question nobody asked you. - She grants that they could make ordinary mistakes, of the sort any honest witness makes. She is not an inerrantist and does not need them to be flawless. - What she denies is deliberate fictionalizing: knowingly reporting a thing as having happened at a time or place or to a person when the author knows it did not. That is the difference between an author whose account is a mirror and an author whose account is a mask. Her case against it runs on two tracks. On the ancient side, she works through the classical and patristic evidence and finds that the alleged licence is simply not there. The historians of the period say, when they stop to say anything about it, that they are trying to tell the truth. And the church fathers who notice the differences between the Gospels, which they certainly do, sweat over harmonizing them instead of shrugging and pointing to a well-known convention, which is what a reader would do if a well-known convention existed. The one partial exception she finds is Origen, the third-century Alexandrian, and he does not appeal to a convention either. What he reaches for instead is a theory that the discrepant details carry a spiritual meaning rather than a literal one, and that rescue is itself the point: a man with a recognized genre licence in his pocket does not need to invent one. The second track is a trap she thinks the theory sets for the scholars who hold it. Independent attestation is the historian’s workhorse, the thing that does most of the heavy lifting in New Testament study: when two sources who were not copying each other report the same event, the event becomes far more likely to have happened, in the same way that two strangers describing the same car in the same intersection is worth more than one man saying it twice. But you cannot have it both ways. You cannot say that two accounts differ because the authors were freely embellishing, and then say that where they agree they are independently attesting. Embellishment eats the very independence the argument was living on.

(Q) "Scholars should take seriously the idea that the evangelists never deliberately invented or changed facts, whether or not they sometimes made errors." + Source: Lydia McGrew, "Truth, Historiography, and the Gospels’ Genre: Classical and Patristic Considerations," Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism 17 (2021), p. 117, the closing paragraph. The next sentence is the one that shows what kind of argument she thinks she is making: "We should take this possibility seriously not because of theological commitments but because of historical considerations that apply to any work." She is not asking for a Christian exemption. She is asking that the Gospels be handled by the rules that would be used on Tacitus.

(T3) John’s Gospel is a witness’s report, not a theologian’s meditation with the speeches supplied. + Read the first three Gospels, the ones scholars call the synoptics because Matthew, Mark and Luke see the events along much the same lines and can be laid side by side in three columns, and then read John, and something changes in the sound of the sentences. In Mark, Jesus speaks in short sayings and stories. In John he speaks in long, circling discourses about light and life and the Father, and they sound a great deal like the way the narrator of John talks when he is speaking in his own voice. Scholars call that Johannine idiom, and for over a century most of them have drawn the obvious conclusion: the voice is John’s, so the words are John’s. She thinks the conclusion outruns the observation, and her answer is to look at what the text does rather than at how it sounds. - An author who was composing the speeches would have no reason to stop and explain his own hero’s meaning to the reader. John does it constantly, and clumsily, in asides: he said this about the Spirit, he said this signifying by what death he would die, he was speaking about the temple of his body. Explanatory asides are what a reporter writes when he is handling words he did not choose. - The reverse case is just as telling. John repeatedly leaves allusions unexplained, dropping references that only make sense if the reader already knows something the Gospel has not said, which is what happens when a man is recounting from memory rather than constructing for an audience. - A style, in any case, is catching. Anyone who has spent three years with a teacher can hear that teacher in his own sentences. That John writes like Jesus is at least as good evidence that he listened to Jesus as that he invented him. She grants the ordinary things here too: John translates, John condenses long conversations, John selects ruthlessly and says so. What she denies is that he built the discourses. Her verdict on him after a whole book of testing is that he is a scrupulous recorder, and that where he can be checked against the other Gospels, he checks out.

(Q) "The author of the Gospel of John appears to have been an eyewitness of the events he records and to be a very scrupulous recorder." + Source: Lydia McGrew, interviewed by Daniel Isaiah Joseph, "Question and Answer with Lydia McGrew on the Gospels and Acts," Best Bible Commentaries, on the publication of Hidden in Plain View. She says it with her first book newly out and years before the book on John, and the sentence that follows explains why she went on to write it: "He reports a lot that is not in the synoptic gospels, and he is confirmed repeatedly." The Gospel itself makes the same claim in its own closing lines, that the one who wrote it is bearing witness and that his testimony is true (John 21:24).

(T4) A cumulative case is not a bundle of weak arguments; when the pieces are genuinely independent they multiply. + The tired complaint about cumulative case arguments is that ten leaky buckets hold no water. Her professional life has been spent on the reply, and it is not a slogan; it is arithmetic about when the buckets are separate buckets. Suppose a stranger describes your childhood home: the colour of the door, the crack in the front step, the neighbour’s dog. Any one detail he might have guessed. Each further one he gets right multiplies the improbability of guessing, so long as the details are genuinely separate. Now suppose the second witness heard the first witness first. Nothing multiplies; the second man is an echo. Everything therefore depends on independence, and independence is the thing she works on. - Her technical papers ask exactly when testimony is independent enough to multiply, and when it is not. One of them asks whether varied evidence is worth more than more of the same evidence, and argues that it is. Another works out how much to discount a cumulative case whose strands are quietly leaning on one another instead of standing apart. A third makes the point that is easiest to miss: what matters is not whether two witnesses agree, but whether they would still have agreed had the story been false. Two men who both say the door was green are worth little if they would have said green whatever colour the door was. - Her warning is as sharp as her argument. Multiplying dependent evidence inflates a case, and she says so about arguments she agrees with. Her whole objection to the literary-device view is of this shape: a theory of free embellishment does not merely damage reliability, it destroys the independence a scholar needs in order to say two sources attest the same thing. - The payoff is that a case can be overwhelming without any single piece of it being decisive. That is how a jury reasons about a crime nobody photographed, and she thinks it is how a reader should reason about a Sunday morning in the year 30. The worked example is the resurrection chapter she and her husband wrote for the Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology: the women, the thirteen named men who were willing to die rather than take it back, and Paul, each assigned a deliberately conservative factor and then multiplied.

(Q) "Sheer multiplication through gives a Bayes factor of 10⁴⁴, a weight of evidence that would be sufficient to overcome a prior probability (or rather improbability) of 10^-40 for R and leave us with a posterior probability in excess of 0.9999." + Source: Timothy McGrew and Lydia McGrew, "The Argument from Miracles: A Cumulative Case for the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth," in The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, ed. William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), p. 630. The chapter is joint work with her husband. R is the hypothesis that Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead, and the two numbers are worth reading slowly, because they are doing opposite jobs. Ten to the forty-fourth power is the weight of the evidence, the combined Bayes factor of the women, the men and Paul once their testimony has been multiplied together. Ten to the minus fortieth is a prior improbability, and it is deliberately brutal: it grants, for the sake of argument, that before a single witness is heard the chance of a resurrection is one in ten thousand billion billion billion billion. The two are set against each other, and on those figures the evidence wins by a factor of ten thousand, which is precisely what leaves the posterior probability, the confidence a person ought to end up with once everything has been weighed, above 0.9999. The claim is deliberately conditional, and the chapter says so at the outset: the Gospels and Acts are taken to deserve the credence any similarly attested document would get where it reports ordinary secular matters. The number is a way of showing what compounding does, not a measurement, and the rest of the chapter is spent on the ways the calculation could be attacked.

(T5) Argue from everything you have reason to believe, not from the little that a skeptic will concede in advance. + Suppose you are sitting across a table from a friend who thinks the Gospels are legends. The obvious tactic is not to quote the book he has already waved away, but to start from whatever he will grant you and build from there. That instinct is the most successful Christian argument for the resurrection of the last fifty years, the minimal facts approach, associated above all with Gary Habermas: build the case only on the handful of facts that nearly all scholars grant, believing and skeptical alike, so that the argument cannot be dismissed by dismissing the Bible. Jesus died by crucifixion; the disciples believed they saw him afterwards; Paul the persecutor converted. It is a strong move, and it has won a great many arguments. Her objection is not that the minimal facts are false. It is that leaving out evidence weakens a case, and that the omission does specific damage here. - The strategy asks a Christian to leave the Gospels on the table unopened, and then to argue about what the disciples experienced. But once the accounts are set aside, the experiences can be filled in any way an opponent likes: brief, private, visual only, the kind of thing a grieving man might have. Those are exactly the conditions under which the hallucination theories work. - Open the accounts and the experiences are the wrong shape for hallucination: meals eaten, wounds touched, conversations with several people at once over a period of weeks, and then a stop. The detail that constrains the alternatives is the detail the strategy discards. - The wider point is a rule she applies everywhere, including to herself: the case should rest on all the evidence, and if the evidence for the Gospels’ reliability is good, then leaving it out is not caution but loss. She calls the alternative the maximal data approach, and it is the practical upshot of everything else she argues (T1 through T4): the reason to spend a career contending that the Gospels are reliable reports is that a reliable report is evidence, and evidence is what an argument is made of.

(Q) "I therefore propose that, instead of arguing from Minimal Facts, we should argue from Maximal Data." + Source: Lydia McGrew, "Minimal facts vs. Maximal Data," What’s Wrong with the World, 21 February 2015, the post’s concluding sentence. Written two years before her first New Testament book, which is worth noticing: the programme came first and the books were carried out under it. Earlier in the same post she puts the reason in a line that has been quoted back at her ever since, that when it comes to arguing for miracles both God and the Devil are in the details.

(Q) "All Christians experience times of discouragement, doubt, and bitterness. It’s at those times that we have to hang on to the knowledge that Christianity is true. This evidence has helped me to be even more confident of that truth." + Source: Lydia McGrew, interviewed by Daniel Isaiah Joseph, "Question and Answer with Lydia McGrew on the Gospels and Acts," Best Bible Commentaries, answering a question about how writing Hidden in Plain View had increased her affection for Christ. She goes on to say the other thing the work did for her, which has nothing to do with argument at all: researching the coincidences around the Last Supper and around the morning by the Sea of Galilee gave her a more vivid sense of what those days were actually like. It is the reason her later books read the way they do, and it is the answer to the suspicion that a Bayesian is someone who has replaced devotion with a calculator.

How Christians Have Received Her

(†) She put a lost argument back into ordinary Christian hands, and it stayed there. + This is the plainest thing to say about her and the least disputed. In 2015 the argument from undesigned coincidences was a curiosity known to a few readers of Paley and Blunt. Within a few years of Hidden in Plain View it was in youth talks, campus groups, apologetics podcasts and popular books, and the Herod-and-Joanna example had become one of the standard things a Christian teenager gets shown. Part of why it travelled is the shape of the argument itself. It requires no Greek, no manuscript tables, no scholarly consensus to lean on, and no permission from anybody. A reader with two open Bibles can check every example, which is exactly the property she designed for, and exactly why the title means what it means: the evidence was never hidden, only unlooked at. The credit is shared and she says so first. Her husband found the argument in the older writers and gave it away in church talks for years before either of them wrote anything, and the Library of Historical Apologetics he built put the neglected eighteenth and nineteenth-century sources back within reach of anyone with an internet connection.

(†) The scholars answered her, and the argument moved into the journals rather than staying on the blogs. + The dispute over literary devices could easily have stayed where such disputes usually stay, in video replies and comment threads. A good deal of it did: Michael Licona produced a series answering The Mirror or the Mask, she produced a series answering him, and their respective readerships settled in for a long winter. But it also went where it should. Themelios, the Gospel Coalition’s peer-reviewed journal, published her paper on independent attestation in 2019. The Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism published two of her articles in 2021, and Conspectus published a third on Johannine idiom the same year. That is the ordinary machinery of scholarship working on a question that had been argued mostly by assertion, and it happened because a woman with no post in the field submitted papers and they were accepted on their merits. Robert Bowman, watching the credentials argument break out around her in 2018, made the observation the episode most needed: what the debate wanted was more argumentation and less ad hominem (the old name for going after the person instead of the position), more light and less heat. Her defenders and her critics have both quoted it since, at each other.

(†) She changed how boldly Christian apologists are willing to argue. + The maximal data argument (T5) has moved the practice of a good many working apologists, and the movement is documented rather than claimed. She noted with satisfaction that Gary Habermas, who had endorsed her first book, clarified publicly after it appeared that Christian apologists should be willing to defend the general reliability of the Gospels and not only a minimal set of facts. The change shows up in what an apologist now feels free to assert in public: not only the handful of facts a skeptic will concede in advance, but the reliability of the accounts those facts were taken from. She calls the change taking the forward position: declining to let the widest scholarly consensus set the starting line, and going where the evidence goes even when that is in a direction the guild calls conservative. Whether or not a reader ends up agreeing, the effect on the conversation is real. Arguments that had been thought too ambitious to make in public are being made in public. Then there is Testimonies to the Truth (2023), which does something none of the others try. It is written for a reader with no stake in any of the quarrels, in unhurried prose that takes a hard idea and opens it with something ordinary, and it has quietly become the book people hand to a friend who has started to wonder whether the Gospels are worth anything at all.

(†) Where her own record invites criticism: two of her four New Testament books argue with fellow defenders of the Gospels, and readers who admire both sides have found the manner painful. + Two of her four New Testament books, and a great deal of the hundreds of hours of video, are aimed not at unbelievers but at Christians: at Michael Licona, Craig Keener, Craig Evans and others who defend the resurrection for a living. That is her own choice, made deliberately and defended on her own terms, and it is the thing about her record that most needs saying honestly in both directions. - Her principle, in her own words. Challenged in 2018 about deferring to specialists, she answered that she does not consider that she needs, or that anyone else needs, to have any special humility toward someone just because he is a designated specialist, when she has examined his position and found it wanting. She added that being polemical, which is to say arguing pointedly and in public against a named position, is not inconsistent with being respectful or properly humble. The first half of that is straightforwardly right, and any reader who has ever watched an argument settled by a job title rather than by a reason should be glad somebody said it out loud. The second half is a claim about herself that only her conduct can make good, and her critics have not been persuaded by the conduct. - The cost, stated fairly. Named critics have put the complaint in print. Kurt Jaros, announcing a reply series in April 2018, called her arguments uncharitable and complained that she had attacked positions on her blog, his own among them, without first asking their holders what they meant. Readers who admire both parties describe watching the exchange as painful. A reader put off by the manner is a reader who never gets to the evidence, and the evidence is the part she cares about. - The counterweight, also stated fairly. Reviewers who disagree with her conclusions grant that she quotes her opponents at length and in context before answering them, which is not what a careless polemicist does; and the substantive question, whether ancient biographers had licence to alter facts, is not settled by anybody’s tone. She has also taken the argument into peer review, where the manner counts for nothing and the case has to stand alone. - A real feature of her position. Her account raises the stakes. On the literary-device view a demonstrated case of deliberate alteration is absorbed as a convention of the genre; on hers it would be a genuine problem, because she has staked the reading on the evangelists never having done it. She would say that is what it means to make a falsifiable historical claim, one that a clear counterexample could bring down, rather than an unfalsifiable one that no possible finding could touch, and she is entitled to say it. It is still a heavier bet than the alternative, and a reader should know that before placing it. The disagreement here is with a manner, not with a faith. She confesses the deity of Christ, the Trinity and the bodily resurrection; she has given her working life to the reliability of the Gospels; and she has done it from a house she can barely leave, in chronic pain, without an institution behind her.