Thursday, November 01, 2018

Welcome to readers from Christian Women Apologists

It was drawn to my attention yesterday that my name made it into a recent list of Christian Women Apologists whose blogs people might not know about. Thanks to Carrie Anderson for the shout-out.

Welcome to any new readers! Though I also notice that the shout-out was actually in May, but I only learned about it yesterday. So a belated welcome!

As you'll probably notice, this personal blog has been quite neglected lately. The reasons for that are several-fold. (Is "several-fold" a word?) First, I'm working on writing a book (two books, actually) in New Testament studies. And home schooling and so forth. (Though I now have only one student being home schooled; the others have grown up!) So what I've done is that I've transferred much of the functionality of this personal blog to my Facebook page. You can follow my public content on Facebook without being a Facebook "friend" by clicking "follow" here. I do update public content with some regularity there, though it's brief. It mostly concerns New Testament and a few other topics right now. Please do follow me if interested in these topics.

The one thing that has been a bit neglected in all of this is public posting on more personal things. That content (such as I post) usually ends up set to "friends only" on Facebook, so my whimsy and humor and Christian reflections aren't getting as much of an audience.

Carrie Anderson also mentioned What's Wrong With the World. That is a group blog, but as it happens the majority of the content that gets posted there is by me. Again, I'm blogging there much less frequently now because of the book work, though a fair bit of the content that will eventually go into the books is available under my New Testament tag in an informal style.

There are large archives of my work at What's Wrong With the World, or W4 as it is sometimes called. Feel free to browse under my author tab, here. When I do blog these days, I tend to put it there, because cross-posting is time consuming. (Did you know there is no way to transport links by cutting and pasting a blog post? Links always get stripped, and then one has to put them back in!)

You may be wondering why the big concentration on New Testament. Well, one way of looking at it is this: We evidential apologists focus on Jesus' resurrection. Our original sources for Jesus' resurrection, the ones that actually describe Jesus' post-resurrection meetings with his friends, are the Gospels (and one scene in Acts). So we have a major stake in knowing whether these are good sources and whether such incidents were made up. Unlike some apologists, I strongly dissent from the view that "you don't need the Gospels" to argue for Jesus' resurrection, that you can "do it all from Paul." (That is not a straw man. I have actually heard a noted apologist say exactly that in a podcast, in so many words.)

My current concentration is defending the Gospels from those who say that they are full of embellishments and historical alterations, particularly evangelical scholars who are promoting these views.

I am excited to make my content available and am working hard at putting it into blog form. Meanwhile, have fun looking at what is already out there. My personal web page acts as a portal to some of this information.

Oh, and consider buying a copy of my book that is already out there--Hidden in Plain View: Undesigned Coincidences in the Gospels and Acts (2017). This book revives a long-neglected argument for the historical reliability of the Gospels and Acts.

6 comments:

scarlett clay said...

The amount of information on this site is incredible. Thank you for sharing your work and creating this amazing resource!

David Madison said...

I think those who put the emphasis on Paul are still implicitly relying on the Gospel accounts. Presumably, the appearances which Paul mentions must be like those recounted in the Gospels. If the appearances had just been ghostly ephemera, no one could have been convinced of the Resurrection. Luke says that the disciples initially thought they had seen a ghost but were then given concrete proof (24:37-39).

Of course, atheists try to dismiss that as a later apologetic legend. But there is an obvious problem with that argument. One has to assume that some time between AD 30 and the writing of Luke's Gospel, people had figured out that ghost sightings are not evidence of physical resurrections and then rewritten history to make it look as if this had been understood all along. This is especially problematic given the compelling evidence that Luke was Paul's companion.

Avraham said...

I saw you paper http://lydiamcgrew.com/Problemoftheexternalworldrevised.pdf but for some reason I have not been able to download PDF in order to study it in detail. But I wanted just to ask if you know that Dr Michael Huemer wrote a paper along the same lines saying just like you that the Bayesians do not cross the threshold of credibility?

Lisa Resnick said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Unknown said...

Hi, Lydia! I just saw this post over here, as well. So no worries about the "belatedness".

In our online apologetics study community, our ladies will be getting introduced to your content through our study on the reliability of the Gospels using Peter Williams' "Can We Trust the Gospels?". I'm super excited about that.

I recently found a previously unknown (to me, anyway) apologetics blog and added it to my list. Perhaps you'd like to check her out as well.

Thanks for doing what you do and be blessed in Christ!

Lydia McGrew said...

Thanks, Carrie. You don't include the link to the new blog, so feel free to post that.

Peter Williams's book is great. I've recently been enjoying it. If any of your ladies in the study don't have Hidden in Plain View itself (my book on undesigned coincidences), be sure to encourage them to get a copy. Also available in Kindle.

https://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Plain-View-Undesigned-Coincidences-ebook/dp/B073GDF3VZ/ref=sr_1_2?crid=12HH772TFP759&keywords=hidden+in+plain+view&qid=1553519629&s=books&sprefix=hidden+in+plain+view%2Caps%2C157&sr=1-2