‘Testimonies to the Truth: Why You Can Trust the Gospels’ by Lydia McGrew – A Review

1. INTRODUCTION 

If you have spent a moment’s time engaging with evangelical Christian apologists or their arguments, then you are no doubt aware that when it comes to the defense of Jesus’s resurrection there exist two schools of thought. On the reality of Jesus’s resurrection, these two schools agree. On the inspiration of the Bible, especially the documents that comprise the New Testament, they agree. On the nature of the Gospels as documents rooted in eyewitness testimony, they agree. Where they disagree fundamentally isn’t the data (as they perceive it to be). The disagreement is over methodology: What is the best way to defend the historicity of Jesus’s resurrection in an age of ever-increasing skepticism about the supernatural generally and the claims of Christianity particularly?

One school argues from a few generally agreed-upon facts – about the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth, the early confessions that he was witnessed alive, and the unexpected conversions of prominent unbelievers – that they find their best explanation in Jesus’s resurrection. This so-called “minimal facts” approach, spearheaded by philosopher Gary Habermas, traffics in an apologetic of “less is more.”¹ By appealing to data points with which even non-believing scholars agree and then arguing that naturalistic explanations fail to account for them, minimal facts apologists posit that the bodily resurrection of Jesus is the key to understanding what really happened Easter morning.² This method of defending the historicity of Jesus’s resurrection requires no appeal to the New Testament’s inspiration or even necessarily to the notion that the Gospels are rooted in eyewitness testimony. Rather, it depends solely on “data that are so strongly attested historically that they are granted by nearly every scholar who studies the subject, even the skeptical ones.”³

The second school takes a considerably different approach. Whereas the first school places on the bench the reliability of the Gospels, the second makes it the star of the team. Dubbed the “maximal data approach,”⁴it is most commonly associated with philosophers Timothy and Lydia McGrew.⁵ But it is Lydia McGrew with whom it has become strongly tethered due to the publication in recent years of a trio of volumes defending the historicity and reliability of the canonical Gospels: Hidden in Plain View: Undesigned Coincidences in the Gospels and Acts (2017), The Mirror or the Mask: Liberating the Gospels from Literary Devices (2019), and The Eye of the Beholder: The Gospel of John as Historical Reportage (2021). In these works, she takes as her starting point the view that the four Gospels are rooted in the testimony of eyewitnesses. She writes in Hidden in Plain View,

I suggest that the reader take seriously the hypothesis that [the Gospels] are what they appear to be prima facie and what they were traditionally taken by Christians to be – historical memoirs of real people and events, written by those in a position to know about these people and events, either direct eyewitnesses or friends and associates of eyewitnesses, who were trying to be truthful.⁶

Being based in the testimony of reliable eyewitnesses in turn increases the reliability of the Gospels’ witness to Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. “The Gospels undeniably present themselves as true accounts of the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth,” McGrew writes in The Mirror or the Mask.⁷

In addition to the aforementioned trilogy penned by McGrew, we may add a fourth work she has recently published that in many ways serves as a distilling of those volumes – Testimonies to the Truth: Why You Can Trust the Gospels (DeWard, 2023). Shorter than either The Mirror or the Mask and The Eye of the Beholder, Testimonies serves as a veritable introduction to McGrew’s defense of the reliability of the Gospels. 

2. SUMMARY

In the preface, McGrew lays out the goals of Testimonies, writing that she seeks to not only provide evidence for the historical reliability of the Gospels but also a case for Christianity that is palatable to believers and unbelievers alike. The question of the trustworthiness of the Evangelists “lies at the heart of Christianity, because Jesus himself is at the heart of Christianity” (p. ix). To assess their reliability, ch. 1 zeroes in on location data mined from the Gospels. Because “[s]pecific locations are hard on hoaxers” (p. 1), the presence of detailed geographic and topographic information is best explained by “reportage from people close up to the facts, who knew what they were talking about” (p. 16). Chapter 2 follows a similar trajectory, contending that customs and culture are also difficult for fabricators. For McGrew, that they were able to get so much right about the period is evidence that the Gospel writers “really knew what they were talking about” (p. 46). 

With ch. 3, the discussion turns to “undesigned coincidences,” the subject of our author’s 2019 volume Hidden in Plain View. The interlocking of relatively independent accounts – their unintentional corroboration of one another – is in her view indicative of the Gospels’ inherent reliability. A related line of evidence is offered in ch. 4 – unnecessary details, “in and of itself a mark of truth” (p. 84). For our author, these details make for poor fiction but affirm that the Evangelists wrote as those who depended on recollection and not as inventors. A similar case is made in ch. 5 concerning unexplained allusions. That the Evangelists at times mention, for example, events without offering elaboration is illustrative of the fact that they “were truthful reporters, close to the facts” (p. 130).

In ch. 6, our author broaches the issue of harmonization and argues that, despite the bad reputation it has received among the skeptical and scholarly communities, it is a useful historical tool. For McGrew, that the Gospel writers differ in describing the same events shouldn’t lead us to believe they contradict; instead, this “gives us reason to think that the accounts come from different witnesses who had independent access to the facts” (p. 137). Chapter 7 switches gears to focus on where the Evangelists exhibit consistency, namely in their presentation of particular characters like Peter, the sisters Mary and Martha, and the disciple Thomas. Because this “would be hard to fake” (p. 181), it is suggestive of the reliability of the accounts. The final chapter, ch. 8, looks at the related topic of the Evangelists’ consistent portrayal of Jesus. For our author, the reliability of the Gospels is of supreme importance because without it one cannot truly follow Jesus. 

3. ASSESSMENT

Before I register just some of my many disagreements with the apologetic proffered by Testimonies, let me first comment on what I find commendable about it. First, McGrew is an excellent writer. Her prose is unburdened, and her style is lucid. Consequently, the arguments she makes are relatively simple to follow, making Testimonies a useful contribution to the discussion of the reliability of the Gospels in this regard. Second, like her other volumes on the subject, Testimonies is well organized, a feature that also contributes to its usefulness. Third, for Christian readers the study questions and discussion prompts at the end of each chapter serve as ways to reinforce the material and as fodder for small groups and Sunday School. Fourth, some of the observations our author makes in the book are interesting and helpful in thinking about the Gospels. For example, in ch. 8 she presents to readers a sarcastic Jesus, noting his use of it in Luke 13:33 – “Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my way, because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem.” McGrew writes, “Jesus says wryly, with a bit of exaggeration, that a prophet can’t perish anywhere else” (p. 198). I’ve read the Gospel of Luke countless times but have never really understood this saying in that way. It is an astute observation. 

Having said all that, I find in Testimonies an apologetic methodology that is deeply problematic. For starters, McGrew engages minimally with critical scholarship, especially when lambasting it. For example, on p. 55 she writes that “sometimes a scholar’s use of the two-source hypothesis comes with extra ‘baggage’ that doesn’t at all follow” from Markan Priority. In discussing that “baggage,” McGrew offers no citation that would give a concrete example of it. Similarly, a paragraph later, in discussing the idea that Matthew and Luke embellished upon their Markan source, she writes, “Scholars will often say things like, ‘We can see here how Matthew used Mark,’ referring to such alleged inventions.” Again, she provides her readers with no scholarly text that provides a real-world example. The decision to write in this manner is no doubt part of her rhetorical strategy, pitting godless scholarship against faithful apologists. This is unfortunate if for no other reason than it gives off the impression that McGrew’s knowledge of critical scholarship is robust, masking an unwillingness to engage with it fully and out in the open where her audience can see. Indeed, this seems symptomatic of our author’s work generally as even The Mirror or the Mask and The Eye of the Beholder fail to engage with scholarship on a deep level.⁸

Another problem I find in Testimonies are the many unsubstantiated (and at times bewildering) assertions that are made. For example, after quoting John 5:39-43, our author writes, “It is quite plausible that these verses are a real prophecy of the military messianic claims of Simon bar Kokhba, who led a revolt against the Romans in about AD 132” (p. 199). McGrew, unfortunately, fails to provide readers with either further exposition in any of the following sentences or a citation that might point to a relevant commentary or to an explanation in her own words. It amounts to little more than a couple of throwaway lines in what was an otherwise fairly agreeable section of the book.⁹

But the main problem I have with Testimonies is one that renders inert the maximal data apologetic. At its core, the maximal data approach seeks to complete a puzzle called “Gospel Reliability.” To do so, maximalists pick out pieces from four existing puzzles (i.e., the canonical Gospels) and attempt to put together a new one. The difficulty is that the four puzzles from which they extract these pieces are complete in and of themselves. That is, the Evangelists have crafted their own puzzles (i.e., narratives) that result in images that are coherent on their own. In certain places, the images overlap (e.g., the Double and Triple traditions) and one can rightly infer that one dissectologist has puzzled together their version using material from a predecessor. But this activity necessarily involves making some subtle and some not-so-subtle alterations to the pieces to make them fit in the new iteration. 

Maximalists like McGrew tend to deny or downplay the ways in which the Evangelists altered their sources when they puzzled together their respective versions. As a result, they fail to appreciate the ways in which those alterations affect the resulting narratives. Additionally, in crafting their own puzzle (i.e., Gospel Reliability) maximalists are forced to do the very thing they deny to the Evangelists: the extraction of pieces from previous puzzles to create a new one, a task that requires the alteration of pieces. This methodological hypocrisy does not simply weaken the maximalist case; it effectively destroys it by implicitly arguing that in order to take seriously the version of events proffered by apologists like McGrew one cannot then take seriously the individual work of the Evangelists. To put it another way, to find reliable the Gospel according to McGrew one must find unreliable the canonical Gospels themselves. 

3.1. McGrew the Redactor

Though she is quick to find fault with redaction criticism,¹⁰ McGrew is something of a redactor herself. Redaction criticism is, in the words of David Law, “the study of how the biblical writers have handled the tradition they have inherited.”¹¹By taking their source material and weaving it into a coherent narrative, the Evangelists function as people who performed redaction, i.e., “redactors.”¹² The author of the Gospel of Luke, for example, admits to being a redactor when he writes in the prologue of previous attempts by others to write down all that transpired among the earliest Christ-followers and that he too “decided, after investigating carefully from the very first, to write an orderly account” (Luke 1:1-3). The Evangelist acknowledges his predecessors, confirms his use of sources, and from them purports to compose “an orderly account.”¹³

Like her own ancient Evangelical predecessors, McGrew also makes use of her sources to craft a narrative. In this case, her primary sources are the canonical Gospels and her work as redactor of these texts is seen most clearly in ch. 6 of Testimonies – “Unexpected Harmonies.” There our author spills copious amounts of ink in a bid to take the Easter narratives of the four Gospels and create from them a singular, coherent account. But like the Evangelists, McGrew is forced to make alterations to her sources that implicitly undermine their reliability. Three examples stand out to this reviewer. 

3.1.1 – What Did Mary Magdalene Witness?

Of the many contradictions found among the Easter narratives of the Gospels, one of the most egregious is to be found by comparing the Matthean story of the visit to Jesus’s tomb (Matthew 28:1-10) and that of the Johannine (John 20:1-18). In the former, Mary Magdalene and “the other Mary,” the pair that had served as witnesses to the location of the tomb in Matthew 27:61, are also witnesses to the descent of an angel of the Lord and his message that Jesus had been raised from the dead. Following the angel’s command to tell the disciples the good news, the women run fearfully and joyfully but are stopped on the way by none other than Jesus himself who reiterates the angelic decree. 

The Johannine account (John 20:1-10) features an entirely different story. There Mary Magdalene approaches the tomb and finds that the stone has been rolled away. This prompts her to tell the disciples what she has seen. Strikingly, there is no heavenly messenger who offers instruction, and, while she does meet Jesus (John 20:11-18), this reunion occurs only after she has already reported to the disciples the news about the stone. What does McGrew make of this incongruity? 

To her credit, our author acknowledges some measure of difficulty here. She writes, 

If we only had Matthew to go on, we would assume that this group included Mary Magdalene all the way through the passage. If one makes that assumption, then one will assume that she met Jesus on the road (Matt. 28.9). But that assumption would create a problem: John 20.1-18 gives us a detailed account of Mary Magdalene’s movements that shows that she didn’t meet Jesus on the road and that she was almost certainly alone when she first saw him. (p. 142)

With the language of “assume” and “assumption,” McGrew is attempting to cast doubt on the viability of a contextualized reading of the Matthean account. This is because her solution to the contradiction is to assert that Mary Magdalene left the group of women with whom she had gone to the tomb in order to report to the disciples, as in the Fourth Gospel, that the stone had been rolled away. How does she reach such a conclusion?

The first thing McGrew does is to invite readers to reconstruct the movements of the women on Easter morning using “a little historical imagination,” which she describes as “a reasonable tool to apply” (p. 143). As reasonable a tool it may be, historical imagination should nevertheless not be a substitute for our extant sources unless those sources lack verisimilitude. Moreover, any reconstruction of events using a combination of imagination and sources should err on the side of being faithful to the latter while depending minimally on the former. As James McGrath explains, 

Nothing exposes the implausibility of a historical reconstruction more quickly than the attempt to turn that reconstruction into a narrative. If we cannot find plausible motives for characters, or construct dialogue that doesn’t sound stilted, or fill in the gaps around the pieces of historical data in ways that make sense, this tells us something crucial about either the historicity or otherwise of the event recorded in our sources, or our own reconstruction of what happened, and sometimes both.¹⁴

As we will shortly see, McGrew’s method for “fill[ing] in the gaps” between the Matthean and Johannine narratives concerning the whereabouts of Mary Magdalene indeed tells us something about her reconstruction, namely that it undermines the project Testimonies set out to complete.

After discussing the variety of women that appear among the Evangelists,¹⁵ as well as stressing that “real life resembles a movie, not a set of still shots” and that “Mary Magdalene and the other women weren’t chained together on Easter Sunday” (p. 143), our author provides readers with a way to reconcile the accounts in Matthew and John. 

When Mary Magdalene saw that the stone was rolled away, she left the other women behind, perhaps after a hurried consultation, and ran to tell Peter and John that someone took the body. We can think of John’s “camera” as following Mary Magdalene as she goes away. Meanwhile, the other women went to the tomb, looked inside, and had the experiences described in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Those evangelists’ ‘cameras’ follow the other women. After hearing from the angels that Jesus had risen, they ran to tell the disciples, meeting Jesus on the road, as explained in Matthew. (p. 144)

The analogy to film is an intriguing one and useful for thinking about the Evangelists, though not in the way McGrew intends. 

Films, whether they are historical dramas, horror flicks, or even documentaries, exist to tell stories. At their core, they are narratives. Films about Jesus are especially interesting because of the abundant source material from which they can draw. But for those who have watched any of the scores of Jesus movies that have been produced over the last century or so, it is clear that the abundant source material becomes difficult to wrestle with and so invariably choices are made about what to do with that material to keep the narrative the film is intended to tell coherent. As Mark Goodacre explains, “Jesus films variously harmonize, epitomize, expand, omit, change, and manipulate their sources, the Gospels, in what one might call a creative interaction with them.”¹⁶ The choices that writers and directors make influence the end product, and no one wants to produce a film with no clear trajectory or one with inconsistent storytelling. 

The Evangelists were no different. Even if we grant that their authors were eyewitnesses, they nevertheless picked and chose which stories to tell about Jesus. Additionally, they chose to place those stories in a framework particular to their accounts. That is, of the various modes of communicating their message about Jesus, the Evangelists chose narratives. Thus, each Gospel, David Howell explains, “can be read as a story with its own integrity rather than as a collection of traditional units and pericopae.”¹⁷ This is because as vital as the content of the narrative assuredly is, the form is just as important. “[N]arrative is not simply an inconsequential, disposable ‘container’ of ideational or propositional content,” writes Michal Beth Dinkler. “The narrative form is crucial to its communication.”¹⁸

Were we to treat the Gospel of Matthew as a film, borrowing from McGrew’s analogy, then we should assume that the author intended to produce a narrative complete unto itself. In such a case, the story of Mary Magdalene and the other Mary begins at the cross as the pair are among a group looking on as Jesus hangs suspended between heaven and earth in Matthew 27:55-56. As the camera closes in on these women, the picture fades to black but opens again to later that evening as Joseph of Arimathea, in Matthew 27:57-61, engages with Pilate to acquire Jesus’s corpse and then buries him in a new tomb. As Joseph rolls the stone across the door and walks away, the camera pans over to show, opposite the tomb, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary sitting down, the implication being that they witnessed what has just transpired. The camera zooms in on their pensive faces before fading to black again. 

After an interlude in Matthew 27:62-66 wherein the Jewish authorities on the sabbath persuade Pilate to set a guard on Jesus’s tomb, a scene that sets up drama that follows, the camera peers in on two women, rising at dawn on Sunday, headed for the tomb. We recognize them immediately: they were two who had been among the women at the cross and were the pair who witnessed the burial of Jesus – Mary Magdalene and the other Mary. Now, with the sabbath ended, they make the trek to the tomb and encounter the unexpected. The camera shakes and the women wobble: an earthquake! The camera then jolts upwards as an angel descends from the sky, rolls back the stone that had not only covered the door to Jesus’s tomb but had been sealed by the guards, and casually sits upon it. It then reveals the faces of the guards, frozen in fear, and watches as they fall to the ground as living corpses. (Has this suddenly become a horror film?)

The scene then shifts back to the angel who speaks to, in Matthean terms, “the women.” His message is one of joy and good news. “Do not be afraid,” he says. “I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay.” The camera gazes into the tomb. Empty! “Then go quickly,” the heavenly messenger continues, “and tell his disciples, ‘He has been raised from the dead, and indeed he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him.’ This is my message for you.” The camera is now set on the women whose faces exude a strange mixture of fear and joy. They hike up their robes and run in the direction of where the disciples are. 

Just as the camera keeps pace alongside the women, it suddenly stops: they have ceased their sprint. It zooms out to reveal a new character who has appeared on the scene: Jesus himself. The camera zeroes in on his face: “Greetings!” he says, with a smile no doubt. We are then given a glimpse of the women who fall down at Jesus’s feet and bathe them with homage. As they do so, Jesus speaks and the camera reveals that the women look up at him: “Do not be afraid,” he says. “Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.” The women take off yet again while the camera fades out and back in as the next scene begins. 

What do we find when we take McGrew’s analogy for a spin? What does it tell us about the motion picture called The Gospel According to Matthew? In short, we find a film as consistent as it is coherent.¹⁹ “The author of Matthew…shows considerable skill and artistry in the narrative he has constructed,” observes Donald Hagner.²⁰ This can be seen in a variety of ways. For example, in the beginning of the Matthean Gospel we encounter an angel of the Lord who tells a beleaguered Joseph to “not be afraid” and declares that a miracle has happened with his beloved: though she is a virgin, Mary will bear a son, conceived by God’s holy pneuma, named Jesus (Matthew 1:20-23). Here, at the end of the Gospel, an angel of the Lord appears again, telling the women to “not be afraid” and declaring that a miracle has happened with theirbeloved: though he was dead, Jesus has been raised to life again. Regardless of whether these stories are rooted in eyewitness testimony, Matthew chose to not only include these particular narratives but also the place where he would tell them in his own framework. 

More pertinent for our analysis of Testimonies are the two Marys of Matthew 28. They were there when Jesus breathed his last upon a Roman cross; they were there when his body was laid in the tomb; they were there when an angel declared Jesus risen and the tomb empty; and they were there as the first witnesses of the risen Jesus himself. Throughout they function as witnesses, and it is this continuity in the Matthean narrative that is vital for understanding the story as the Evangelist tells it. To claim that his references to “the women” and his use of the pronoun “them” in vv. 5-10 do not include Mary Magdalene is to undermine what Matthew is trying to show, namely that she was among those who were there when Jesus died, and she was also among those who witnessed him alive. By changing the straightforward meaning of the text, McGrew has called into question Matthew’s abilities as a coherent and consistent narrator.

This, then, is the problem with McGrew’s reconstruction (via harmonization) of Mary Magdalene’s movements on Easter morning. Having discovered in the Johannine source a version of events that precludes the version of events in the Matthean, our author decides that the former must be in control of the latter. But why should John enjoy pride of place over Matthew? Unless there is found something historically implausible in the Matthean account, shouldn’t maximalists like McGrew trust his version of events as much as they trust John’s? 

Instead, our author seeks to bring Matthew in line with John, turning “the women” of Matthew 28:5 into “the women minus Mary Magdalene.” She writes, 

It’s not clear whether or not Matthew heard about the fact that Mary Magdalene left the group and met Jesus later alone, nor is it clear that he knew that there were four or more women present. But he doesn’t deny such a meeting between Mary and Jesus. He says that “they” met Jesus on the road. Once we realize (by reading both Luke and Mark) that there were more than two women present to begin with, Matthew’s “they” makes sense even after Mary Magdalene is no longer there. (p. 144)

This line of reasoning works only if you believe that the author of the Gospel of Matthew was a less than reliable storyteller. 

Even if Matthew can somehow be brought in line with John, there is still another hurdle for McGrew’s harmonization. In Luke 24:1-9, the Evangelist reports a scene similar to that of Matthew’s and Mark’s. A group of yet to be named women go to the tomb, find the stone rolled away, encounter angelic beings, and, per v. 9, “returning from the tomb, they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest.” Who are these women? To whom does “they” refer? Here is Luke in v. 10: “Now it was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them who told this to the apostles.” Right there at the head of the list is Mary Magdalene, and Luke depicts her as part of the group who had all these experiences on Sunday morning. 

Is Luke unreliable too? This question is not asked facetiously. The query exists because of the method McGrew has chosen to harmonize these accounts. By treating the Gospels, in the words of John Barton, “as databases of sayings and stories” rather than “coherent narratives,”²¹ maximalists like McGrew can neither see nor appreciate the narrative artistry of the Evangelists. But this has important implications for the maximal data apologetic itself, for in treating the Gospels as mines from which to extract information sans the narrative context in which that information is embedded, they register an implicit distrust of the Evangelists. In other words, the Gospel writers cannot on their own be trusted to tell the story of Jesus. And this undermines the apologetic arguing for reliability because it tacitly admits that the Gospels are unreliable. 

3.1.2 – The “Ten” or the “Eleven”?

The redactional hand of McGrew can be seen at work in her reconstruction of another scene from the Easter accounts. Here I will begin with her words:   

Shortly after the Emmaus disciples arrive, Jesus appears to ten of the eleven core disciples and the others who are with them. He shows his hands, feet, and side,²² eats some fish and honeycomb,²³ and talks with them for an unspecified period of time. (p. 154).

For readers attentive to the details given by the Evangelists, that first clause should raise a red flag. The story of the “disciples” on the road to Emmaus is unique to Luke, appearing as the second major narrative in his Easter story. In that account, when the two “disciples” realize that they have seen the risen Jesus, they then, per v. 33, “got up and returned to Jerusalem; and they found the eleven and their companions gathered together.” This stirs up discussion and while they are busy talking about it, v. 36 reports, “Jesus²⁴himself stood among them.” Stood among whom? The antecedent of “them” can only be those in v. 33: “the eleven and their companions.” That is, when Jesus in Luke appears to the disciples on Easter, he does so before all eleven of them. Whence, then, McGrew’s “ten of the eleven”? 

As was the case with the Matthean story about Mary Magdalene considered earlier, so too here McGrew’s redaction is influenced by the Johannine Gospel. In John’s version of events, Jesus indeed appears to the disciples on Easter but one of them was missing: “But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came,” John 20:24 reads. The Evangelist narrates that when told about the appearance of Jesus to the other disciples, Thomas remained skeptical. But his doubt turned to belief when, a week later, he is witness to a very alive Jesus. 

Obviously, this version of events runs contrary to what we find in the Gospel of Luke. And so, in deference to her Johannine source material, McGrew alters Luke’s “eleven” to “ten.” But this only raises again the issues created when she used this procedure with the Matthean account. Why should John be given pride of place over Luke? Why does his version of events get to control everyone else’s? This methodology of treating the Gospels as data mines erodes any confidence one might place in them. If the only way to create from the Gospels a reliable reconstruction of Easter is to alter them when they disagree, then one must question whether the Gospels are reliable in the first place. If the Evangelists cannot be trusted to tell their stories, can they be trusted at all? In this way, then, the maximal data approach is self-defeating.  

3.1.3 – Galilee or Jerusalem?

There is another issue related to the scene which again demonstrates McGrew’s willingness to alter her sources. After Jesus on the day of his resurrection reveals himself to the eleven in Luke 24:36-43, he begins instructing them, “open[ing] their minds to understand the scriptures” (v. 45) which spoke of not only his death and resurrection but also “that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem” (v. 47).  The disciples, Jesus tells them, are designated as “witnesses of these things,” and are commanded to look forward to the giving of God’s holy pneuma, his spirit: “And see, I am sending upon you what my Father promised; so stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.” What is most interesting for the purpose of this review is Jesus’s command to the eleven in v. 49: “Stay here in the city.” In the remaining narrative, this is precisely what they do and when the story resumes in the Acts of the Apostles we are given more details about their time there, including the giving of the holy pneuma. But this immediately raises a problem when we compare this version of events with what we find in the other Synoptic accounts, especially Matthew’s. 

In Matthew’s version, the women are twice told to report to the men that they will meet Jesus in Galilee: once by the angel and once by Jesus himself. “Do not be afraid,” the risen Jesus tells the women. “Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me” (Matthew 28:10). Previously in the Matthean Gospel (Matthew 26:31-32), before his arrest in Gethsemane, Jesus warned the disciples that they would soon desert him, scattering like sheep without a shepherd. But then he made a prophetic promise: “But after I am raised up, I will go ahead of you to Galilee.” Now, to the women, Jesus speaks again this message: they are to go to Galilee because it is there that they will see him. And what happens next in the narrative? Following the resolution of Matthew’s drama about the guards at the tomb (vv. 11-15), the final scene of the Gospel is one wherein the eleven disciples go to Galilee where they see Jesus. It is a fitting ending to Matthew’s story. In his commentary on the Gospel, the late R.T. France wrote that “the fact that the reunion is set in Galilee gives new hope to the reader who has followed Matthew’s careful distinction between the northern and southern provinces: Galilee is the place of light (4:15-16)…. Galilee, the place of Jesus’ first preaching (4:17), is also to be the place for a new beginning, which will spread out to ‘all the nations.’”²⁵

So, in Luke’s account we read the story of how Jesus, on Easter, told the eleven disciples to remain in Jerusalem, the place from which the message of repentance and forgiveness to the nations would emanate, and await the coming of the holy pneuma. In Matthew’s version, the eleven are ordered by both an angel and Jesus to go to Galilee where they would see him and, from which, the message would go out. This is without a doubt a contradiction. How does McGrew handle it? Simply put, she changes the story. 

To begin with, our author writes, “It’s important not to insist that a document means only what we would have thought the first time we read it, without any input from any other account” (p. 149). But as I’ve already shown, this tactic effectively undermines the reliability of the Evangelists as narrators, a project that in turn undermines McGrew’s thesis generally. Why must I interpret Matthew’s Gospel on the basis of Luke’s? Why can’t Matthew stand on his own? The harmonization for which our author advocates fundamentally “robs the texts of their individuality,” to quote Mark Goodacre.²⁶

Next, McGrew appeals to the common apologetic trope that simply because an author doesn’t say this or that doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen. In this instance, simply because Matthew doesn’t mention a meeting in Jerusalem doesn’t mean that there wasn’t one. As weak as such an argument is, it ignores the real issue: the Matthean narrative. It isn’t simply that Matthew fails to mention a meeting in Jerusalem; it’s that in the logic of the narrative itself the first meeting is in Galilee. The angel tells the disciples via the women to go to Galilee. Why? Because, they are to tell them ekei auton opsesthe, “There him you will see.” The adverb ekei is fronted in the clause to emphasize the location at which the disciples will see Jesus.²⁷ Similarly, Jesus tells the women, “Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; kakei me opsontai,” – “And there me they will see.” Again, the adverbial kakei is fronted to emphasize the place at which the disciples will be reunited with Jesus.²⁸ The text is reinforcing that it is in Galilee – not Jerusalem, not Rome, not anywhere else – that they will see the risen Jesus. 

But there is something else that McGrew has failed to appreciate. As I noted earlier, the words of the angel and of Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel are reiterations of the prophetic promise Jesus had made to the disciples long before his execution: “After I am raised up, I will go ahead of you to Galilee” (Matthew 26:32). In Matthew’s narrative, this is foreshadowing. And consistent with his narrative, Matthew features an appearance of Jesus in Galilee, fulfilling Jesus’s words. In this way, Jesus is depicted as a faithful savior and Matthew as a faithful narrator. But McGrew reduces the message of the angel and Jesus to a mere “password,” arguing that because the women weren’t present at the Passover meal to hear Jesus’s words about a future meeting in Galilee, the disciples should have immediately known that their report about the empty tomb was true. What our author has missed, however, is that that scene wherein Jesus discloses to the disciples the details of a meeting in Galilee is missing from the Gospel of Luke.²⁹ Why? Because Luke is a competent writer; in his version of the story, not only is there no meeting in Galilee, but Jesus explicitly commands the disciples to do the opposite of what the Matthean Jesus told them – they are to remain in Jerusalem. And this they do. Luke is a faithful narrator. But our author, because of her apologetic commitments, cannot abide it. 

Thus far, McGrew’s apologetic has been to either erase the distinctiveness of the Evangelists or implicitly deny their reliability. This trend continues, culminating with the way in which her chronological framework handles the Lukan Jesus’s command to the disciples to remain in Jerusalem. “Did Jesus say that on Easter Sunday?” she asks. “If he did, then that would create a contradiction with Matthew; they would have had no chance to go to Galilee if they were supposed to stay in Jerusalem the whole time” (p. 153). To solve this problem, then, she essentially inserts in between Luke 24:43 and Luke 24:44 all the intervening events her apologetic requires to maintain what little consistency it has. In other words, when in v. 44 Jesus begins to speak to the disciples and tells them to remain in Jerusalem, he is doing so well over a week after he appeared to them in vv. 36-43. 

While such an apologetic may seem plausible to McGrew, it flies in the face of the sense one gets from reading Luke as Luke, allowing him to tell his own story. As Joseph Fitzmyer noted in his commentary on Luke, vv. 36-53 of Luke 24 “are really a literary unit, for they recount but one appearance of the risen Christ.”³⁰ As a unit, one connected to the previous section via the phrase “While they were talking about this” in v. 36, it is depicted as occurring on Easter Sunday. The only reason McGrew insists otherwise is because of the contradiction that arises when Luke’s version is compared to the other Gospels.

When comparing the Gospels to eyewitness accounts, McGrew will rightfully point out that witnesses can disagree and still be correct. But what she misses is that witnesses can also disagree and be incorrect. It could very well be the case that one witness got it right while another got it wrong. It could even be the case that none of the witnesses got it right. Certain claims necessarily exclude the validity of others, and if we suppose that the canonical Gospels are rooted in eyewitness testimony then we have clear-cut examples of this: Mary Magdalene’s presence at the empty tomb wherein she sees the angel and hears the message (Matthew and Luke) versus her only seeing that the stone had been removed (John); Jesus’s appearance to the eleven disciples on Easter (Luke) versus only ten of them on Easter (John); the command given on Easter to the disciples to go to Galilee to meet Jesus (Mark and Matthew) versus the command given on Easter to the disciples to stay in Jerusalem (Luke). These are mutually exclusive stories, and the only way McGrew can get around them is to change what she finds in the Gospels. In other words, she communicates by the maximal data apologetic that the Gospels cannot be trusted.

4. CONCLUSION

The late Robert Guelich, author of the first half of the two-volume commentary on the Gospel of Mark for the Word Biblical Commentary series,³¹ published in 1981 an article with the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society entitled “The Gospels: Portraits of Jesus and His Ministry.”³² In it he says this: 

[T]he presence of four distinctive gospels demands that each be taken seriously with its own divinely inspired message. Harmonization that obliterates the distinctiveness of the four gospels in the interest of reconstructing the life and teaching of Jesus can actually distort the plain meaning of the text. To read the four gospels as an unscrambled Diatessaron misses the genius of having four distinct gospels.³³

While this middle-aged skeptic may not agree with the language of divine inspiration, Guelich’s words nevertheless remain salient. McGrew in Testimonies to the Truth treats the Gospels in such a way that not only mutes the voices of the Evangelists, but, in Guelich’s words, “obliterates the distinctiveness of the four gospels” that effectively “distort[s] the plain meaning of the text.” This has significant ramifications for the maximal data apologetic she represents. 

First, it reveals a methodological hypocrisy. While she downplays and denies the redactional work of the Evangelists and the effect their choices had on their respective narratives, McGrew has in Testimonies become a redactor herself. This is seen clearly in her harmonization of the Easter narratives where she is forced to change the details in the Gospels according to Matthew and according to Luke to accommodate a reconstruction of events she finds plausible: the Gospel according to McGrew. 

Second, this methodological hypocrisy destroys the project taken up by Testimonies. The aim of the volume was to establish the reliability of the Gospels by pointing to things like the Evangelists’ accurate knowledge of locations and customs as well as the casualness of unexplained allusions and unnecessary details. But all of these things are embedded in narratives and by her redactional choices McGrew reveals an inherent distrust of those narratives. Thus, to argue for the reliability of the Gospels, our author must argue implicitly that the Gospels are fundamentally unreliable. 

The question, then, for maximalists is this: Whose Gospel do you find reliable? The Gospel according to McGrew offered in the pages of Testimonies to the Truth or the Gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John? 

Acknowledgements

I want to thank the following people for their help with either this review specifically or with the ideas that helped to shape it: Mark Edward, Joshua Parikh, John Nelson, Matthew Hartke, and Dustin (@AlchemistNon). Each of these gentlemen are more learned that I am and I have benefited greatly from my interactions with them.

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ENDNOTES

1. For a list of the facts, see Gary R. Habermas, Risen Indeed: A Historical Investigation into the Resurrection of Jesus (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Academic, 2021), 22-23. ↩︎
2. For an example of this apologetic at work, see Gary R. Habermas and Michael R. Licona, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, 2004).  ↩︎
3. Habermas and Licona, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus, 44. For a recent reaction to the minimal facts approach, see Dale C. Allison, Jr., The Resurrection of Jesus: Apologetics, Polemics, History (London: T&T Clark, 2021), 357-359. Pointedly he writes, “We cannot open the case and check the facts” (p. 359). ↩︎
4. See, for example, Lydia McGrew, “Minimal Facts vs. Maximal Data” (2.21.15), whatswrongwiththeworld.net. According to biologist and Christian apologist Jonathan McLatchie (“The Firstfruits Feast and the Case for the Resurrection” [4.9.23], jonathanmclatchie.com) the term was coined by Lydia McGrew.  ↩︎
5. The first traces of what would become the maximal data argument were presented to the world in a chapter the McGrews penned for The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology (edited by William Lane Craig and J.P. Moreland [West Sussex: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2009]). That piece, entitled “The Argument from Miracles: A Cumulative Case for the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth” (pp. 593-662), utilizes Bayes Theorem to argue for the historicity of Jesus’s resurrection, plugging in numbers based on a series of “salient facts” (e.g., the testimony of the women, the testimony of the disciples, etc.) that require the Gospels be reliable vehicles of history. Interestingly, Lydia McGrew wrote in a blog post in 2021 (“On the minimal facts, Part 3: How did we get confused about what scholars grant?” [12.2.21] Extra Thoughts) that some readers of the Blackwell piece understood the argument to be of the Minimal Facts variety. This, she makes clear, is not what they were “self-consciously” doing. (She also tacitly admits that when writing the piece for the Blackwell volume she and her husband were not well-acquainted with pertinent New Testament scholarship.) In between the publication of their contribution to the Blackwell book and Lydia McGrew’s Hidden in Plain View: Undesigned Coincidences in the Gospels and Acts (Chillicothe, OH: DeWard Publishing Co., 2017), Timothy McGrew gave various lectures on the reliability of the Gospels, many of which can be found on YouTube. In 2012, he gave a number of such lectures at St. Michael Lutheran Church in Portage, Michigan covering the authorship of the Gospels, external corroboration for their accounts, and more. (A full playlist of lectures given by McGrew can be found at the YouTube channel Apologetics315.) ↩︎
6. McGrew, Hidden in Plain View, 15. McGrew offers a critique of the minimal facts approach on pp. 220-227 of that volume. ↩︎
7. Lydia McGrew, The Mirror or the Mask: Liberating the Gospels from Literary Devices (Tampa, FL: DeWard Publishing Co., 2019), 480. Emphasis author’s. ↩︎
8. Illustrative is her rather superficial treatment of editorial fatigue in The Mirror or the Mask (pp. 407-414). While she makes clear in the volume’s preface that her main target in the volume is evangelical scholars like Michael Licona (p. viii), that her discussion of editorial fatigue does not feature any acknowledgment of the work of Mark Goodacre is troubling. Goodacre, the scholar with whom fatigue is most closely associated, has referred to the phenomenon as “[t]he most decisive indicator of Markan Priority” (The Synoptic Problem: A Way Through the Maze [London: T&T Clark International, 2001], 76) and has done extensive work on it elsewhere. See, for example, Goodacre’s oft-cited “Fatigue in the Synoptics,” New Testament Studies 44, issue 1 (January 1998), 45-58.
    
   That McGrew chooses to attack a singular (though viable) example of fatigue from what originated as an endnote in the work of Licona (see Michael R. Licona, Why Are There Differences in the Gospels? What We Can Learn from Ancient Biography [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017] 244n.46) rather than assess a more intentional and robust presentation of fatigue by someone like Goodacre is revealing. ↩︎
9. This claim in Testimonies to the Truth about John 5:39-43 being a prophecy about Simon Bar Kokhba is not the first time it has appeared in McGrew’s writings. A substantial amount of material in ch. 8 of Testimonies appeared first in The Eye of the Beholder.On p. 396 of that volume, McGrew also makes this claim but fails to provide either clarification or citation. We can trace it back further to a blog post that appeared on the odious website What’s Wrong with the World in which McGrew wrote, “It is quite plausible that Jesus is thinking here of the probability (or, when we assume genuine prophecy, certainty), of later messianic claimants. Simon bar Kokhba would be an example.” See McGrew, “Ecce Homo: Only One Jesus” (1.3.18), whatswrongwiththeworld.net. It is interesting to note the progression from Bar Kokhba being a mere example of what Jesus spoke of in the passage to being in The Eye of the Beholder and Testimonies not simply the example par excellence but the fulfillment of his words. 
   
   Though not impossible, it is doubtful that McGrew arrived at this conclusion concerning John 5:39-43 and Bar Kokhba on her own. She has pulled it from one of the various sources to which she frequently appeals. In this particular instance, it is likely that it came from D.A. Carson’s commentary on the Gospel of John (The Gospel According to John, The Pillar New Testament Commentary [Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1991], 265).   He wrote, 
   
   Josephus reports a string of messianic pretenders in the years before AD 70 (Ant. xx. 97-99, 171-172; Bel. ii.258-265); some scholars have suggested that a particular claimant is in view, such as Bar Kochba, who led an unsuccessful revolt about AD 132, and whom no less than the great Rabbi Akiba viewed as the ‘star out of Jacob’ prophesied by Balaam (Nu. 24:17) until he and his followers were routed and killed by the Romans. But the text is less interested in identifying a particular charlatan than in contrasting all messianic pretenders with Jesus.
    
   Note that Carson does not think the passage is keen on one particular would-be messiah but is instead setting up a contrast between Jesus and all those who could be considered rivals.
    
   A similar track was taken by F.F. Bruce (The Gospel & Epistles of John [Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1983], 138) who wrote in his comments on the passage, “An astounding fulfilment of this prediction came about in AD 132, when one Simeon ben Kosebah [i.e., Simon Bar Kokhba] claimed to be the Messiah of David’s line, and led a revolt against Rome.” But Bruce is then quick to write, “It is not necessary to suppose that he is particularly in view here – there were several similar pretenders in the period between AD 30 and 70 (cf. Mark 13:6) – but he provides the best known example.” 
   
   William Hendricksen in his commentary on John (John, New Testament Commentary [Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 1953], 1:210) was less nuanced than either Carson or Bruce, writing on John 5:43, “This prophecy was fulfilled over and over again. One false Messiah was Theudas; and another, Judas of Galilee (Acts 5:36, 37). Then came Barkochba (132-135 A.D.), whom such a distinguished rabbi as Akiba called The Star of Jacob (Num. 24:17). There have been several scores of others since their days. The last one will be the antichrist himself (II Thess. 2:8-10).” 
   
   The problem with ascribing to Jesus a prophetic utterance that has multiple points of fulfillment is that it fundamentally weakens the prophetic claim. After all, couldn’t anyone make some vague prediction and later claim the power of prognostication if/when it is seemingly fulfilled? For example, recently on Twitter I saw someone “rebuke” a powerful hurricane in the name of God, demanding that its winds die down and it dissipate. When the storm does stop existing, that person will claim that it was the power of prayer that caused it to do so. But isn’t it the fate of every storm to eventually end? 
   
   This draws attention to the fact that Jesus is not in John 5:43 giving a prophecy as such. Rather, his words constitute something more proverbial, a truism that is, as Carson noted, intended to contrast Jesus’s messianic status with those of other messianic claimants. It is no accident that the Johannine Jesus says what he says. Regardless of its historicity, it is included by the Evangelist because it speaks to his historical moment in which there have been rivals to Jesus for the title of messiah. 
   
   Moreover, this passage is part of the recurring theme in the Fourth Gospel of Jesus’s rejection by the Jews. As Adele Reinhartz (“The Gospel According to John,” in The Jewish Annotated New Testament, edited by Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, second edition [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017], 172) observes, 
   
   From the outset, John portrays “the Jews” as those who reject Jesus (1.11), persecute him (5.16), seek his death (8.40), expel believers from the synagogue (9.22), plot Jesus’ death (9.49-52), and persecute his followers (16.2). Furthermore, in the Gospel’s stark rhetoric of binary opposition, the Jews are associated with each negative pole: flesh rather than spirit (6.63), darkness rather than light (8.12), death rather than life (5.24), eternal damnation rather than salvation (5.28), Satan rather than God (8.44).
   
   That the Jews would reject someone who came in the name of their god (i.e., “in my Father’s name”) and prefer someone who came in their own name fits with this theme. It lends credence to Jesus’s words and, thus, points to his messianic claim as being the only legitimate one.
   
   Consequently, more problematic than having multiple fulfillments is to pick one in particular as McGrew has done. Sans justification, McGrew’s words are little more than a bald assertion bordering on eisegesis. What gave Jesus’s words its power was precisely that he didn’t make some specific claim. By making it more concrete, McGrew has obligated herself to explain why readers should think Bar Kokhba was on Jesus’s mind. Until she provides some rationale, her comments should be cast into hermeneutical hell. 
   
   Interestingly, John 5:43 does come into play in scholarship of a bygone era where it concerns the dating of the Gospel. In his entry on John the son of Zebedee for the Encyclopedia Biblica, Paul Schmiedel (“John, Son of Zebedee,” in Encyclopedia Biblical: A Dictionary of the Bible, edited by T.K. Cheyne and J. Sutherland Black [NY: The MacMillan Company, 1901], 2:2551) quotes the passage and then writes, “This prophecy of another Messiah was fulfilled when in 132 A.D. Bar-chochba arose and incited the Jews to the great revolt which in 135 ended in the complete extinction of the Jewish state. It is very tempting to think that [John 5:43] contains an allusion to this.” Cf. Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John (I-XII), The Anchor Bible (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1966), 226. A few years later, Schmiedel brings this up again in his book The Johannine Writings(translated by Maurice A. Canney [London: Adam and Charles Black, 1908], 201). Noting Christian opposition to Bar-Kokhba’s messianic claims, he asks, “If the Fourth Evangelist had had experience of all this, may he not have thought that it would be understood and would make an impression if he put into Jesus’ mouth a prophecy of these events? In that case he would have written between 132 and 140.” It should be noted that Schmiedel thought that the Gospel of John was written around 140 independently of the passage in John 5:43 and had it not been for this, he explained, “we might not have had the boldness to appeal to this passage; but, such being the case, we seem to be really justified in doing so” (p. 201). Cf. Samuel Zinner, “John 5 and Bar Kokhba,” Journal of Higher Criticism 14, no. 2 (Summer 2019), 72-89.
   
   Relatedly, Ernst Haenchen (John 1: A Commentary on the Gospel of John Chapters 1-6, translated by Robert W. Funk, Hermeneia Commentary series [Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984], 265) mentions Simon Bar-Kokhba in his comments on John 5:43. In his commentary, he cites the work of Emanuel Hirsch and his Studien zum vierten Evangelium. According to Haenchen, Hirsch thought that this passage was an allusion to Simon Bar-Kokhba but that it wasn’t the Evangelist who wrote it but a later redactor. That is, it is an interpolation. Haenchen himself thought that v. 43 seemed somewhat disconnected from the preceding context but nevertheless noted that the verse is in all of the relevant manuscripts of John, including significant early witnesses like P⁵².  ↩︎
10. See, for example, her discussion of it as it relates to Michael Licona and Luke 24 in The Mirror or the Mask, 276-277. Licona’s view on Lukan redaction of his Markan source concerning the angelic message about Galilee is described by McGrew as blinding and “blocks the appreciation of real evidence for historicity” (p. 277).  ↩︎
11. David R. Law, The Historical-Critical Method: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: T&T Clark International, 2012), 181. On the relationship of redaction criticism and Markan Priority, see Goodacre, The Synoptic Problem, 84-92. ↩︎
12. See F. Gerald Downing, “Redaction Criticism,” in Dictionary of Biblical Criticism and Interpretation, edited by Stanley E. Porter (New York: Routledge, 2007), 310. ↩︎
13. On Luke’s sources, including the Gospel of Mark, see Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke I-IX: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, The Anchor Bible (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1981), 63-85; Michael Wolter, The Gospel According to Luke: Volume 1 (Luke 1-9:50), translated by Wayne Coppins and Christoph Heilig (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2016), 12-18. On the character of Luke’s “eyewitnesses,” see Joel B. Green, The Gospel of Luke, NICNT (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1997), 40-42. ↩︎
14. James F. McGrath, What Jesus Learned from Women (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2022), 8. In context, McGrath is referring to the writing of historical fiction, but the principle nevertheless applies to historical reconstructions generally.  ↩︎
15. McGrew places a premium on the variety of names, arguing that they are indicative of independence among the Gospels. With regards to the reference to Salome, however, it may be that Matthew’s mention of but two women – both named Mary – may be directly dependent on a version of Mark that lacked the name Salome in the Easter narrative. On the problems with Markan manuscripts and the names of the women at the tomb, see Elizabeth Schrader Polczer, “Was Salome at the Markan Tomb? Another Ending to Mark’s Gospel,” Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies Bulletin 8, no. 2 (2022), 401-420. ↩︎
16. Mark Goodacre, The Case Against Q (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2002), 122. His chapter “The Synoptic Jesus and the Celluloid Christ” is a must-read on the topic of the parallels between the Synoptic Problem and Jesus in film. ↩︎
17. David B. Howell, Matthew’s Inclusive Story: A Study in the Narrative Rhetoric of the First Gospel (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1990), 13. ↩︎
18. Michal Beth Dinkler, Literary Theory and the New Testament (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), 81. ↩︎
19. This does not entail that Matthew is absolutely consistent, only that his literary contribution is a viable story that readers could follow and from which they could derive meaning. ↩︎
20. Donald A. Hagner, Matthew 1-13, Word Biblical Commentary 33A (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1993), liii. Hagner also notes that there is some difficulty in detecting a “unifying overall structure other than a very general kind.” But this in no way compromises the idea that Matthew has written a coherent document. Indeed, as W.D. Davies and Dale C. Allison (Matthew 1-7, International Critical Commentary [London: T&T Clark, 1988], 61) note in their commentary on Matthew, the Evangelist is fond of alternating between narrative material and discourses. Moreover, they also find in Matthew five major discourses.  ↩︎
21. John Barton, The Nature of Biblical Criticism (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007), 20. ↩︎
22. That Jesus showed his pierced side to the disciples is not part of Luke’s account since, in his Gospel, Jesus’s side isn’t pierced. That detail is from the Gospel of John (19:34).  ↩︎
23. The detail of eating honeycomb is featured in the King James Version and related translations but is absent from the majority of modern translations. It is curious that McGrew includes it here since her translation of choice, the NASB, lacks it.  ↩︎
24. The Greek text reads, quite simply, autos estē en mesō autōn, “He himself stood in their midst.” The implied subject of the verb estē is obviously Jesus and the autos is added by the Evangelist to emphasize that fact.  ↩︎
25. R. T. France, The Gospel of Matthew, NICNT (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2007), 999. ↩︎
26. Goodacre, The Synoptic Problem, 168. ↩︎
27. Wesley G. Olmstead, Matthew 15-28: A Handbook on the Greek Text (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 404. ↩︎
28. Olmstead, Matthew 15-28, 406.  ↩︎
29. One might expect to find it somewhere around Luke 22:31-34. ↩︎
30. Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke X-XXIV: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, The Anchor Yale Bible 28A (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1985), 1572. ↩︎
31. Robert A. Guelich, Mark 1 – 8:26, Word Biblical Commentary 34a (Nashville, TN: Word, Inc., 1989). Guelich died before he could complete the second volume and it was subsequently written by Craig Evans. ↩︎
32. Robert A. Guelich, “The Gospels: Portraits of Jesus and His Ministry,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 24, no. 2 (June 1981), 117-125. ↩︎
33. Guelich, “The Gospels,” 121. ↩︎