Christian Doscher reviews Dr. Lydia McGrew's "Eye of the Beholder"

This is my review of Lydia McGrew, The Eye of the Beholder: The Gospel of John as Historical Reportage (DeWard Publishing, 2021)

I will update this review periodically as I go through the book.

May 17, 2021:  Part One

Before we get started, apparently as of May 17, 2021, there are either no non-Christian critiques of Lydia's book online just yet, or they are are buried further down in google search results than I care to dive.

Amazon.com finally figured out that they needed to zig instead of zag to get to my address. Thus arrived the strongest defense of Gospel of John's historical reliability ever known to man. Or so I discerned from the numerous accolades.  So far I've only gotten to page 62, so this must be read into my May 17 comments if I accuse Lydia of not mentioning something.  

I would ask Lydia to make publicly available all pre-publication correspondence she had with the scholars who are now cited as "praising" her Beholder book, as well as with the scholars who offered critique of her arguments before publication.  Most people who weren't born yesterday are acutely aware that the final polished public form of a review usually isn't the same as its original form, especially when its friends who are promoting friends in spite of possible and likely disagreements.  I'd really like to know what Mike Licona, Craig Evans and Craig Keener, the scholars she critiques the most, had to say before the book went to press.  I have a hunch that the pre-publication correspondence probably gives a different picture than the impression given by the published "praise".

I've accused Lydia previously that her wordy-gossipy "apologetics" constitutes the word-wrangling that Paul prohibited in 2nd Timothy 2:14, and her specializing in "epistemology" of all disciplines makes her especially prone to that specific type of sin.  See here.  I've also challenged her, should she disagree that she commits word wrangling, to give a few examples of fictional dialogue in which the characters ARE engaging in word-wrangling so we can compare these to her writings to decide if she ever steps over the line. Id.  So far, no replies.  Apparently, I can be reasonable to view Lydia as committing the sins of being too wordy (Proverbs 10:19) and engaging in word-wrangling (2nd Tim. 2:14).  The point of this criticism is to choke the point of her book:  Lydia wants people including unbelievers to take the gospel of John at face value and to therefore put faith in Jesus and walk in the light of Christ thereafter.  But if it be true that Lydia's doing all this in the past did not enable her to overcome the sins of gossip and word-wrangling, the skeptic can be reasonable to be suspicious that "accepting Jesus" and "walking in the light of Christ" have no spirituality to them and therefore, the NT's theology is false even if its historical assertions all prove true.

Lydia comprehensively documents her sources, raising the question of why she isn't as comfortable making undocumented assertions as the author of John's gospel apparently was.   Surely John knew that some investigators would wonder why he and Cerinthus disagreed, and if John's personal presence during ministry can substitute for the documentation, why can't Lydia's personal presence during ministry (or book tour) substitute for her documentation?  Are modern unbelievers who always document their sources in scholarly tomes doing better than what the Holy Spirit wanted John to do in the 1st century?  If the Holy Spirit approved of undocumented dogma in the 1st century, why does Lydia apparently think He no longer does?  Do today's Christians fail to manifest divine inspiration as defined in the NT because God wanted the age of miracles to fade out, or because there is no god and thus no chance that modern Christians could manifest divine inspiration in the first place?

Lydia makes clear in the very title of her book that John’s gospel is historical “reportage”, which means she can’t even state the title of her book without creating scholarly disagreement within Christianity. Inerrantist scholar Borchert explicitly denies that John’s purpose was reportage: 

 “Given this dilemma, then, readers of John need to consider that the problem may be one of perspective and false expectation. Why should John have to write his Gospel as a modern newspaper reporter? His purpose was not to report but to proclaim and persuade (20:30–31).” 

Borchert, G. L. (2001, c1996). Vol. 25A: John 1-11 (electronic ed.). Logos Library System; 

The New American Commentary (Page 161). Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers.  

That is significant, since you'd figure an inerrantist would insist that John had "reported" history reliably. But if even "inerrantist" scholars (thus those who are naturally most disposed to insist John never played fast and lose with the facts) nevertheless hesitate before equating John's reporting of facts with a modern newspaper's style of reporting of facts, then the skeptic can be reasonable to say we probably aren't getting "what really happened" out of John because he is trying to do something more than merely be truthful about history.

The accolades often say things that push Lydia back down to the ignorance-level she thinks Licona, Evans and Keener work at.  For example, Randy Leedy says McGrew's demurral from rigorous inerrancy is "regrettable", which means he would characterize Lydia's reasons for denying inerrancy the way Lydia characterizes Licona's composition-device theory:  unsupportable and driven by some combination of bias and ignorance.

Lydia at page 100 starts her most in-depth discussion of external evidence for John's authorship, but her treatment of each source is sufficiently shallow as to justify the skeptic who says Lydia here wasn't intending  to refute skeptical arguments against such sources.  That's important for though Lydia may affirm she wasn't intending to refute skeptics, you get that idea from some of her publisher DeWard:

Why is the Gospel of John different from Matthew, Mark, and Luke? Many scholars have suggested that John felt more free than the other evangelists to massage the facts in the service of his theological goals and to put embellishments into the mouth of Jesus. Analytic philosopher Lydia McGrew refutes these claims, arguing in detail that John never invents material and that he is robustly reliable and honestly historical.

That certainly sounds like much of what she says in the book will also attack the skeptical position, which of course says John massaged facts and embellished truth.  Back to the problems in her handling of the patristic evidence, she cites Irenaeus, but says nothing about his well-known credibility problems such as his belief that Jesus didn't die until he was an old man, an interpretation of Irenaeus held by most patristic and Christian scholars.  In personal correspondence I even managed to convince Dr. Monte Shanks ("Papias and the New Testament")  that he needed to admit that Irenaeus meant that Jesus died as an elderly man after about 10 years or more of public ministry.  Against other conservatives that trifled otherwise, apologist Dr. James White also admitted the hard truth here.

Lydia at 102 cites the Muratorian Canon and says we don't have to accept the "flowery" part of its testimony that John consulted with the other apostles about his gospel, but she makes no argument that this part of the Canon's story is unworthy of credit.  It is death to a Christian scholar to come up with a reason to justify doubting something an early church father said about gospel authorship, as that can be exploited by a skeptic.  We are not required to only attack author credibility due to their specific statements, there is such a thing as an attack on an author's general credibility.

Lydia discusses Papias, but doesn't tell the  reader that the guy who apparently helps us know that John authored a gospel, also told us John taught that grapes would talk to people in the last days.  Search for "grapes" in my Rebuttal to Jonathan McLatchie's defense of traditional apostolic authorship of Mark's gospel, here.

At page 89 Lydia asks “why doubt John?”, which in context was probably directed to Christian scholars, not skeptics, since it is Christian scholars that she primarily or even exclusively deals with up to that point. But anyway, the answer of the skeptic is 

a)  We doubt John because he credibly admits to a strongly impeaching detail:  Jesus' own brothers did not find him compelling enough to believe in (John 7:5).  Lydia will trifle that the brothers were disappointed that Jesus wasn't a military messiah, but which do you suppose would impress itself on the brothers' minds more:  Jesus failed to do what a military messiah was commonly expected to do?  or Jesus raised the dead and healed thousands of people?  We are thus reasonable to find John 7:5 truthful, and therefore infer that Jesus' brothers, more likely by reason of the honor/shame collectivist culture to attend his magic shows than a complete stranger might, and these brothers decided that Jesus was unable to perform genuinely supernatural miracles.  That is, John in 7:5 gave us sufficient reason to doubt the parts of his gospel that attribute miracles to the pre-crucifixion Jesus.  just like there's nothing inconsistent about the prosecutor who uses one single admission from a suspect to overthrow the suspects entire alibi.

b) We doubt John because the Synoptic authors had an agenda to prove that Jesus was the true Messiah and Son of God. They would have welcomed and thus actually used reliable evidence supporting their agenda. It is simply too difficult to believe that if Jesus uttered the high-Christological sayings now confined to the Gospel of John, the Synoptic authors, with their intent to establish controversial claims about Jesus as true, would have “chosen to exclude” such powerful supporting material. That would be like the author of a book entitled Sex Scandals of the Clinton Presidency “choosing to exclude” any mention of Monica Lewinsky.  Lydia will say John didn't wish to state known teachings which thus didn't need to be repeated, but on the contrary, Mark's writing at the request of the Roman church, and any literary dependence theory for the Synnoptics indicates that repeating things already known was exactly their intention and can thus be a motive reasonably attributed to John.  Worse, Lydia thinks John in the gospel is "repeating" mostly everything he ever taught in the prior 50 years, since the alternative (that John changed his story or didn't reveal certain teaching until later) might render reasonable a degree of skepticism toward the written form of his testimony.

c) It is much more likely that the reason John’s Jesus sounds so different from the Synoptic Jesus is because the historical Jesus never said most of the things John credits to him (and reasonableness is not dictated by whether or not the theory in question makes life difficult for fundamentalist Christian apologists), rather, John is just putting in Jesus’ mouth words Jesus never actually spoke. This is all the more likely if we can trust Irenaeus’ comment that John’s motive in writing was to ruin the ministry of a competing sect headed by Cerinthus, a Gnostic. In that case, John would recognize that putting his theology on Jesus lips would make that theology more authoritative, than if John had simply limited that theology to his own comments about what Jesus said.  In short, having Jesus say it makes it more authoritative than if John is the only person saying it.

d) If John's purpose in writing was to refute Cerinthus, then John apparently didn't view the Synoptic gospels as "profitable for doctrine, reproof, correction..."  (2nd Tim. 3:16).  John's desire to refute Cerinthus sounds like a good explanation for why the anti-gnostic ideas in the Synoptics are stated much more explicitly in John.  And embellishment is far likelier to occur in a context where personal testimony or alleged personal testimony is intended to be used to refute "heretics".

Part Two:

First, the first 6 pages of her book are nothing but accolades, and the back page contains nothing but repetitions of some of these.  So Lydia, whom the NT prohibits from saying she can promote the gospel without the Holy Spirit's help, apparently thought that statements of support from other sinners should be the first thing the prospective buyers notice.  That's a neat marketing trick, but is not consistent with the NT authors, who never introduce themselves to the world starting with a few pages of accolades from other people.  Even in Lydia's world, one can justify departing from the one model of apostolic method that has the surest guarantees of divine inspiration.

Second, the conservative Christian scholars Lydia apparently seeks to correct, need to be notified that Lydia McGrew adopts a spiritless Christianity:  From posts to her blog in 2017:

If you are aware that spiritually alive people cannot resolve these matters, then must you not conclude that spiritually dead people are only going to fare worse if they dare enter the fray (i.e., isn't it irrational to classify spiritually dead people as 'unreasonable' for their refusal to investigate biblical matters)?
Posted by barry | November 14, 2017 4:31 PM

Being spiritually alive has zilch to do with it. I'm an epistemologist and a professional philosopher. I'm all about the arguments. I don't think the Holy Spirit is zapping either me or Mike Licona, especially not in our understanding of Plutarch, for heaven's sake. It would be absurd to suppose that I'm calling any other Christian's relationship with Jesus or eternal destiny into account by disagreeing on these matters. We have to do the hard work of following the arguments and making up our own minds, which is an attitude one would think a skeptic would welcome. I've laid out arguments (in this post, concerning Plutarch, in case you didn't notice). If you're actually interested in the subject I'm discussing, rather than in spamming my comments threads with other topics, I suggest that you read and study the arguments and see who you think has the better of the argument. But I honestly doubt that you have much interest in the differences of opinion between myself and Licona on these points, as your many comments virtually admitting as much and attempted topic shifts have shown. I suggest you stop it. We do have a banning mechanism.
Posted by Lydia | November 14, 2017 5:15 PM

See bottom of this page.

That Lydia meant something worse than "I'm not a Pentecostal" is clear from her affirmation that being spiritually alive has "zilch" to do with a person's ability to understand biblical things.  That interpretation is supported by the immediate context, wherein Lydia clearly thinks "I'm all about the arguments" and "I'm an epistemologist" have greater relevance to her ability to discern biblical truth, than does the "zapping" of the Holy Spirit.  Lydia cannot find any support in the NT for depending this strongly on purely naturalistic means to discern biblical truth, and she won't be reconciling that modern sense of objectivity with Paul's warning that to use persuasive words causes the faith of the hearers to rest on human wisdom:

 3 I was with you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling,

 4 and my message and my preaching were not in persuasive words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power,

 5 so that your faith would not rest on the wisdom of men, but on the power of God. (1 Cor. 2:3-5 NAU)

Second, Lydia might mention "skeptic" here or there, but a) the book is 99% an attack on the ways in which Christian scholarly moderates and conservatives like Licona, Evans and Keener argue for conclusions that disagree with the fundamentalist take on John's historical reliability.  The point is that because atheist bible critics like myself often attack John's reliability using arguments that differ markedly from those employed by the likes of the above-named three scholars, Lydia's rebuttals to them cannot perform double duty and refute atheist attacks on John at the same time.  I'm not saying this means Lydia failed at her job, I'm saying that it appears she did not intend to defend John historical reliability against attacks from scholarly skeptics, only from Christian scholars who because of their faith are prevented from going to the skeptical destination that their attacks on John point to.

Third, that Lydia's book does nothing to injure the atheist bible skeptic's case against John's reliability may be seen in how I myself attack John. In the works currently is a 700+ page book exclusively devoted to defending the thesis that one can be reasonable to say John is lying to the reader about what happened in actual history.  You'll notice that Lydia's book addresses none of these, which is why I just want to clarify that her attacks on the Christian scholarly moderates/conservatives cannot perform double duty as attacks on skeptical arguments.  Being summaries, yes, I'm presenting them mostly without supporting argument:

a) the doctrine of hell is a false alarm, and if Christianity were true, the atheist's fate will be the same one she already accepts as inevitable: extinction of consciousness, no conscious eternal suffering. Rejecting Christianity is about as dangerous as rejecting Caesar salad.  Since the fate will be same regardless of whether somebody embraces or rejects Christianity, prudence and common sense say that she avoid doing something that would increase the chances she'll commit a greater sin. Even if she is already in trouble with God as an atheist, she is not in as much trouble as those who knew the truth but perverted it (John 9:41, Gal. 1:8, Hebrews 10:26 ff).  Thus, becoming completely apathetic toward Christianity appears to achieve the morally good goal of limiting the degree to which the atheist offends god.

b) Lydia doesn't accuse her opponents (Licona, Evans, Keener) of lacking salvation, or living in sin, or not praying enough, or harboring unconfessed sin, etc, etc. But if Lydia is willing to admit that these three men are equally saved and walking in Christ to the degree she believes true of herself, then she is implicitly but necessarily implying that even if an unbeliever converts and becomes a conserative bible believing Trinitarian, there is no reasonable guarantee that 'god' will prevent them from adopting the errors she thinks are so important to root out of the church.   If God won't guarantee sincere Christians against committing the errors Lydia finds too troubling to stay quiet about, isn't it reasonable to say this is where the smart unbeliever should draw the line?

c) Lydia doesn't know what gospel subject God wants specifically myself to start investigating, if any. So she forfeits the right to balk if I answer that question for myself in a way she doesn't find acceptable. In Beholder, Chapter IV, p. 93, Lydia admits that there is an “enormous amount” of scholarship on the question of John’s authorship.  An unbeliever would be most reasonable to infer that apostle John's authorship of the gospel now bearing his name is a fatally convoluted issue that can never be resolved to any reasonable degree of certainty.  At that point, the unbeliever can ask whether Lydia would like to be prosecuted for a crime on the basis of anonymous testimony.  If not, then she is agreeing with the unbeliever that the anonymous testimony called "John's gospel" is unfit to be taken seriously, still less as a reason to make a radical commitment to an invisible person who wants a personal relationship, but who relates to us in decidedly impersonal ways only, so that even the most holy among us often aren't sure of what he is doing or what exactly he wants.

d) If the new Christian can be reasonable to accept Jesus at a time when they are almost totally ignorant of skeptical attacks on Christianity, doesn't consistency require Lydia to allow that it can also possibly be reasonable for an unbeliever to reject Jesus at a time when they are almost totally ignorant of apologetics defenses of Christianity?   Under what circumstances would Lydia say such rejection can be reasonable?

e) Lydia doesn't know how biased an author must be, before the reader can be justified to start out suspicious that some of what they read might be embellishments to support the cause. So since she never answers that question, she forfeits the right to balk if I answer it for myself. I say that if we can trust Irenaeus' statements that John's singular purpose in writing a gospel was to refute another 1st century Christian named "Cerinthus" (a Gnostic), then John's desire to prove Jesus was a real physical person and that Jesus' father was the OT god, and that Jesus and the Christ were the same individual, was much more intense than something produced by a Christian unaware of the competing Gnostic sects.  Lydia will say bias doesn't prove unreliability, but just exactly how much bias the author must have before the reader can be intellectually justified to withhold the benefit of the doubt and demand independent corroboration, is a very subjective judgment call for which Lydia's book gives no criteria for whatsoever, and John's apparent "put Cerinthus out of business" motive makes me suspicious that John was willing to make Jesus talk far more explicitly than he really did, because that makes it more likely that the doctrines established thereby will make sure Cerinthus' view would become impossible to claim apostolic support for. (Perhaps my argument here is specious since there was never any benefit of doubt that anybody was ever required to grant in the first place).

f) There is no rule of historiography, hermeneutics or common sense that says there is the least bit of intellectual or moral obligation upon anybody to pay the least bit of attention to any testimony that is 2,000 years old. Josh McDowell was lying through his teeth about "Aristotle's Dictum", as Aristotle never required people to give the benefit of the doubt to the document.  Lydia will say that such benefit of doubt is reasonably granted in the case of testimony that shows the reader is in trouble with God. But I've already reviewed the matter and decided that biblical "hell" is a false alarm, and annihilationism is the more likely biblical truth.

g) There's plenty of evidence to show that the NT authors intended to write for their own contemporaries. In other words, when we 21st century people neglect the NT, we are neglecting something that was never intended for modern readers in the first place. So the burden is on Christians to show that that either the NT author or "god" intended a readership extending to the 21st century.  That's not an unreasonable request, as 2,000 years of nothing but proliferation of heretical groups and church splits with no clear indication that anybody had the actual truth, raises a legitimate concern that what got started in the 1st century was a false religion, which, like Roman Catholicism, ended up getting lucky enough in history to attract a self-perpetuating popularity.  

h) How would Lydia answer the skeptic who uses Calvinism to justify ignoring Christianity? For example, a skeptic investigated the bible for one year and decided that if Christianity is true, Calvinism would be the form of it that most accurately relates what Jesus and Paul taught. So the skeptic reasons to herself 

"the bible teaches that I cannot accept the gospel message anyway, and it teaches that I am not capable of contrary choice and thus can do nothing other than what God infallibly predestined me to do, therefore, if I completely ignore Christianity, that must have been what God infallibly predestined me to do.  I can no more be faulted for rejecting the gospel than for needing oxygen.  Calvinism without eternal conscious torment is probably the biblical truth"

 Lydia would probably advise that Calvinism is false (but she wouldn't do so too loudly though, because she dedicates her book to the late Steve Hays, a Calvinist blogger who taught that we fulfill God's will perfectly when we sin, which would logically mean the pedophile is doing exactly what God wanted him to do when raping a child, see here), but does Lydia know how long God wants the skeptic to study Christianity's Calvinist/Arminian schism before God will expect the skeptic to start drawing ultimate conclusions about which soteriology is more biblical? No. Then she forfeits the right to label our present skeptic unreasonable for finding Calvinism to be biblical.  

i) In my upcoming book which devotes more than 700 pages exclusively to attacking the Gospel of John's authorship and credibility, answering the arguments of Leon Morris, Craig Blomberg and other Johannine scholars, about 57 arguments start out like this "Even assuming that apostle John is the author of the gospel now bearing his name..." This is the particularly devastating "even if" type of argument that defies most attempts to refute it. Nothing Lydia wrote touches these. 

j) John 7:5 and Mark 3:21 powerfully support the skeptical contention that Jesus was incapable of doing genuinely supernatural miracles, and thus support the further contention that yes, two biblical authors, like any two people who try too hard to promote a false religious leader, yapped so much that they ended up giving their audiences reasons to think the other stories about Jesus doing miracles are just embellishments.

k) Lydia's obvious purpose involves more than refuting Christian scholars, she wants liberal Christians and unbelievers to make a radical commitment to Jesus as Lord.  So wouldn't it be reasonable to demand that we not radically commit to Jesus until the evidence that he is alive and well is radically authenticated?  Sure.  But that goal can never be achieved.  Authentication requires evidence that the alleged person who said it really is the person who said it.  I'm sorry but the typical apologist remark  "Irenaeus said John authored it...can you prove him wrong?" does not constitute "radical" authentication.  Using external evidence to establish authorship is nothing "radical", especially given the credibility problems in the early church fathers.  Only fools would  radically commit to an invisible non-responsive Jesus they derive from a gospel that has all of the authorship and interpretation problems of John's gospel.

Fourth, Lydia makes the same mistake that most other apologists make: if she can show that the checkable references in John (usually statements that archaeology has something to say about, e.g., Solomon's portico) turn out to be true, then this indicates the author was being honest and thus intending to give the reader "historical reportage". What Lydia doesn't seem to notice is that honest authors are not the only people in the world with a desire to tell the truth, dishonest authors desire to tell the truth too. To use an example to show how absurd Lydia's leap in logic is, consider:  You are a juror in a murder trial:  the suspect testifies that at the time of the murder, he was asleep at his friend's house 10 miles across town.  That friend got on the stand and corroborated that alibi.  How would Lydia know whether he was telling the truth?  According to Lydia, the fact that he correctly mentioned the name of the city, the names of people they drank beer with before falling asleep, and what movie cable was playing when the party started, indicates the witness is being honest.

This is absurd!  Do you see the problem?  If a person is a good liar, what ELSE would they do if they wished to deceive you, except surround that lie with nuggets of historical truth so that you would do what Lydia does, and conclude that the story "rings true"?  I'm not saying I start out assuming everybody is a liar.  I'm saying that because a witness's concern to tell the truth can imply their dishonesty just as strongly as their honesty, we have to come up with a way to decide what the accurate details imply:  an honest witness or a witness trying to make a lie sound plausible?  Nothing I've read so far in Beholder helps the reader to figure out when the presence of historically true details means honest author, and when it means dishonest author trying to make a falsehood sound convincing.  Short of interviewing the person face to face, or being blessed to have several disarmingly objective detailed biographies about them, you more than likely won't be able to answer this question with any reasonable degree of certainty. Especially if it is an ancient author, in which case the details about his actual known credibility are mostly lost to time or are likely embellished by devoted followers naturally inclined to make a good man sound better than he actually was.

Fifth, Skeptics might also wish to email a note of thanks to Lydia for the publication of  Beholder because therein she makes numerous comments to the effect that Christian scholars, including even some "conservative" and "evangelical" scholars, have adopted views that are so plainly mistaken that it is a wonder they would ever commit such errors in the first place.  For example, at 104 Lydia is astounded that NT scholars so often derive from Papias the very opposite meaning that he intended.  Why should that be good news to skeptics? Easy, it just proves that the numerous biblical promises of Holy Spirit guidance to those who get saved and walk in the light of Christ, are absolutely false.  There is nothing out there to protect Licona from his errors, at all, except Licona's academic ability to decipher the New Testament.  There is no god to nudge Licona at the moment Licona starts to adopt faulty conclusions.  Unless he gets smarter on his own, or accepts correction from another scholar, there is no "god" who can substitute for them.  This is perfectly consistent with Lydia McGrew's eyebrow raising admission that being spiritually alive has "zilch" to do with correctly understanding spiritual matters.

Congrats...you made it to the end of part two.  Part 3 will be posted soon.   For now, there is online a better and fuller version of Eye of the Beholder, see here. 

Update May 26:

Having read the rest of Eye of the Beholder, I don't see anything particularly compelling and thus have no motive to trifle about why I think she got further details wrong.  As an atheist, I care more about whether she has attacked something asserted by atheist bible critics, and less about whether she can corner a conservative Christian scholar for inconsistently taking a liberal position about some biblical matter.  However, I did post a review to Amazon.com.  here it is:

Lydia's Eye of the Beholder ("EOTB") constantly criticizes conservative Christian scholars Evans, Licona and Keener, among others.  Lydia wisely refrains from saying that such scholars lacked salvation, walked away from the light of Christ, denied Trinitarianism, did not regularly study the bible, did not regularly pray to God or did not regularly fellowship with other true believers.

So Lydia does an excellent job of proving that there is nothing about becoming authentically born-again, consistently walking in the light of Christ, being Trinitarian, regularly studying the bible, regularly praying to God and regularly fellowshipping with other true believers, which offers the least bit of spiritual protection against blunders of common sense which Lydia apparently finds unacceptably hurtful to the body of Christ.

That sort of justifies the skeptical contention that there really IS nothing the least bit "spiritual" about becoming authentically born-again, consistently walking in the light of Christ, being Trinitarian, regularly studying the bible, regularly praying to God or regularly fellowshipping with other true believers.  And as Lydia has made clear in her blogs, she thinks being spiritually alive has "zilch" to do with correctly understanding the bible.  She flippantly refers to the inspiration of the Holy Spirit as His "zapping" a person.  She admits in such context that because she is an epistemologist, she is "all about the arguments".

So you'll excuse me if I deem Lydia to have provided atheists with unwitting justification to deny any spirituality whatsoever to conservative Trinitarian Christianity.

It is difficult to tell whether Lydia intended this work to refute "skeptics" since she concentrates so much on conservative Christian scholars, but regardless, I review this book more extensively at my blog.  https://turchisrong.blogspot.com/2021/05/christian-doscher-reviews-dr-lydia.html

For now, I have about 50 separate arguments which begin "even assuming apostle John is the author of the canonical gospel now bearing his name...", and thus I have 50 ways to show that skepticism toward John's resurrection narratives would be justified even if we were to grant historical reliability to John's gospel.  Those arguments are dangerous to Lydia's book because they moot the significance of John's historical "reportage".

Whether or not Lydia intended EOTB to refute skeptical attacks on John's reliability, all through the book she commits the same oversight that typical apologists commit: she assumes that if some historical statement in John can be corroborated as 'true', this implies only "honest author".   

But in fact we know from stark reality that the presence of truthful details in a story can imply a good liar just as easily as it can imply an honest author:  the only way to give a lie any hope of successfully deceiving others is to make it sound realistic, which means surrounding it with details that are historically true.  Yet nowhere does Lydia express or imply why the reader should think truthful factual reportage implies an honest author any more than it implies a liar trying to make his story sound convincing.  If John was telling the truth about Solomon's portico, for example, why would this imply an honest author more than a lying author using nuggets of historical truth to make his incorrect assertions sound truthful?

Irenaeus, if we can trust him,  tells us John's purpose in writing was to refute Cerinthus, and while authorial bias doesn't necessarily mean dishonesty, authorial bias cannot simply be hand-waved as if it constituted zero problem.  Indeed, it was zeal to refute opponents that for most Christian scholars explains why Irenaeus cites to John for proof that Jesus had a 10-year ministry and died in his 50's.

A final nitpick: Lydia constantly presumes, but never proves, that there is any rule of historiography, hermeneutics or common sense that requires us to start out granting a benefit of doubt to testimony until we can prove it false.  Josh McDowell was lying through his teeth about "Aristotle's Dictum".  How much likely false testimony in the world would we have to trust as true simply because we couldn't prove it false?  UFO abductions?  Bigfoot?  The wife's shocking testimony against her ex-husband during a child-custody court hearing?  

Does Lydia's god of "truth" want people to be duped?   If not, then it sounds like that god would never approve of a rule of thumb requiring that we trust testimony to be true until it can be proven false.  

Otherwise, such a rule of thumb would require that we trust in stories of UFO abductions, poltergeists and basically all testimony to miracles, thus sparking the ire of authentically born again Christian cessationists everywhere.  

Lydia's comprehensive documentation does a good job of proving that John and apostle Paul were little more than dogmatic fools, since they expected people to accept their claims as true without documentation, while Lydia appears to recognize that claims without documentation create a weak case in any culture.

I highly recommend this book to atheists.  They could not have dreamed up a better justification to characterize the matters of becoming authentically born-again, consistently walking in the light of Christ, being Trinitarian, regularly studying the bible, regularly praying to God and regularly fellowshipping with other true believers (things which Evans, Licona and Keener regularly and consistently do) as lacking anything spiritual whatsoever.  I conclude from Lydia's book that the god she wants people to believe in, leaves those people solely to their own smarts, or lack thereof, to figure out what's what.   That ain't biblical, ma'am.

------------------------------------ 

Amazon.com contacted me to say they were refusing to post my review.  So I'm glad I cross-posted it here.

Update June 2, 2021:  Today I tried to post to one of Lydia's blogs a message about the existence of my reviews of Eye of the Beholder.  The message didn't post but was held up pending approval.  So here are screenshots proving I attempted to notify her of my reviews of her book:

Update June 11, 2021:

I posted rebuttal comments to the video of her interview about the Beholder-book, here.

Here is a screenshot just in case that reply is deleted:

here's the text:

Barry Jones

14 minutes ago (edited)

an atheist reviews Lydia McGrew's "Eye of the Beholder".

https://turchisrong.blogspot.com/2021/05/christian-doscher-reviews-dr-lydia.html

Atheists and bible skeptics should applaud Lydia's effort.  She does not link the errors of Licona, Evans, Keener or Craig to their lacking of salvation, or their failing to walk in the light of Christ.  So apparently, the reader must beware that, even should somebody "get saved', confess the Trinity, be a Protestant, trust the bible to be historically reliable, and walk in the light of Christ, and bear all the spiritual fruit borne by Licona, Evans, Keener and Craig, God STILL does not offer such Christians the least bit of guarantee that they won't start misleading the church in a way that motivates Lydia McGrew to sound the alarm bell.

Thank you, Mrs. McGrew, for demonstrating that the promises of spiritual guidance the NT gives to those who are saved and walk in the light of Christ, are empty.  Thank you for proving that at the end of the day, authentically born again Christians who walk in the light of Christ get no help from God to avoid error.  How smart you are regarding the bible and scholarship is, according to Lydia McGrew, the only defenses any Christian has to help them avoid error.  If you misunderstand the bible or scholarship, God will not protect you from falling into error.

I commented at another YouTube video promoting "Beholder", here

The full text of this is:

Barry Jones0 seconds ago

An atheist reviews Lydia McGrew's  recently published "Eye of the Beholder" (DeWard, 2021):

Lydia argues that many conservative Protestant Trinitarian Evangelical bible scholars, among whom she in her book represents with the writings of Licona, Evans, Keener and W.L. Craig, are misleading the church by arguing that the gospel of John employs a degree of fiction.

Nowhere in this book does Lydia express or imply that these scholars aren't saved, aren't walking in the light of Christ, don't study the bible enough, harbor unconfessed sin, etc, etc.  She simply provides reasons to disagree with their arguments.

So assuming Lydia's entire thesis is correct, she would be forced to conclude that she has made a strong argument justifying skepticism toward the conservative Protestant Trinitarian Evangelical version of Christianity that she and her cited scholars personally follow.  After all, according to Lydia, even if I became genuinely born again, faithfully attended a conservative Protestant Trinitarian church, graduated from conservative Trinitarian bible college and seminary with a legitimate ph.d in a field directly implicating the New Testament, and was careful to turn away from sin and walk in the light of Christ the whole time, not even THIS extreme level of dedication to the "right" version of orthodoxy would offer the slightest guarantee or assurance that God would protect me from espousing and teaching errors, which according to Lydia, are so harmful as to justify efforts to uproot the from the church.

No, this doesn't prove Christianity is false.  It proves the reasonableness of skeptics who assert that the many NT assurances that the Holy Spirit will protect those who truly walk in Christ, are false.  If Lydia is correct, then your level of bible-smarts is the only thing in existence that has significant potential to keep you free from an errant view of the gospels.  

It doesn't matter if Lydia trifles that it isn't her business to figure out God's mysterious ways, the logic within  "Beholder" is going to render skepticism toward Christianity reasonable, regardless.

https://turchisrong.blogspot.com/2021/05/christian-doscher-reviews-dr-lydia.html

Update July 21, 2021:

Lydia McGrew posted the following comments to Triablogue in reply to an article by Engwer:

Sunday, June 20, 2021

Modern Scholars Who Accept The Traditional Gospel Authorship Attributions

Here are some recent comments by Mike Licona on Markan authorship. On Luke's authorship of Acts (and its implications for the authorship of the third gospel), see Craig Keener's comments here. Even though modern scholarship is so overly skeptical of Christianity, there's still such widespread acceptance of some of the gospels' authorship attributions. We should be more concerned about the evidence than we are about the views of modern scholars, and the evidence supports the traditional attributions of all four gospels. It's noteworthy, though, that skeptics often overestimate how much the traditional views are rejected by modern scholarship.

Lydia McGrew6/30/2021 3:12 PM
☍ That's useful to know in response to some extreme positions like that of Ehrman & co. who will blithely say "we have no idea who wrote this." At the risk of sounding obsessed, I do think this should be pointed out: Dr. Licona does often defend traditional authorship of the Gospels. However, there is a caveat here in that he also strongly suggests that the Gospel authors had what he calls "secretaries," but which would really amount to very active co-authors, who added fact-changing Greco-Roman "compositional devices" to their works. This does to a large extent take away the *point* of traditional authorship, which is to secure closeness to the facts and to raise the probability of literal, factual accuracy. When you bring in a wholly anonymous, and for that matter wholly hypothetical, Greek-trained co-author who is saying, "Hey, let's move the date of this" or "let's expand this discourse" or "let's add this detail to make it seem vivid to the audience, even though we have no factual support for it," then it's rather Pyrrhic to assert that in some sense Mark or Luke or Matthew or John was "the author." It's unclear whether he believes that the traditional authors agreed to these changes to their documents, memories, and information. I think probably he would say that they did, though perhaps not on a case-by-case basis. Nor has he ever worked out his amanuensis theory in detail. It is, however, now his "go-to" response whenever anyone asks him about the improbability that the traditional authors would have been trained in the Greco-Roman devices he alleges, even if we waive the question of whether such devices existed (which I have argued they did not). What is particularly odd is that Mark would have been more or less Peter's amanuensis on the traditional authorship view, so we're multiplying influences here if we also envisage Mark as having a rhetorically trained co-author. In general, I'm afraid that Licona does not consider himself bound to spell out such theories in detail or to consider their plausibility or implausibility or why we hshould believe them. But he seems now much taken with it as an answer to the question about how traditional authorship intersects with his literary device views.

Link here.

Once again, my negative criticism of McGrew appears justified:  The more she criticizes Christian scholars who have been authentically born again and have completed many years of college-level training in biblical issues, who also consistently walk in the light of Christ, and accept the foundational doctrines of Jesus' deity, bodily resurrection and the sufficiency of his atonement for sin, the more Lydia creates reasonable justification for the skeptic to fear that, even if the skeptic becomes authentically born again born again and has completed many years of college-level training in biblical issues, and consistently walks in the light of Christ, and accepts the foundational doctrines of Jesus' deity, bodily resurrection and the sufficiency of his atonement for sin, STILL, God offers such Christian no guarantees that he or she will refrain from misleading the Christian people in a way that Lydia thinks justifies sounding the alarm bell.

Once again, skeptics should thank Dr. Lydia McGrew for creating a very reasonable skeptical argument that the NT's promises of Holy Spirit-assisted learning are absolutely hollow.  You are either smart enough to figure out the truth and so you do, or you aren't and therefore you don't.  

Under Lydia's reasoning, "god" counts for precisely nothing in the context of the Christian's concern for "truth".  How smart you are naturalistically is the single solitary protection you have against the possibile sin of misleading the Christian church.

No, I don't expect Lydia to attempt any rebuttal to this, since doing that would logically require that she pretend that she believes the Holy Spirit assists today's Christian believers in their bible studies.  That would not be consistent with Lydia's history of pretending that your naturalistic smarts are your only hope for avoiding heresy or error.

This is probably insulting to Lydia, by her own fault, since she sometimes declares that she is a "charistmatic", meaning she's one of those Christians who is more likely than others to emphasize how the Holy Spirit guides Christians today (!?). 

But let's put the question to Lydia anyway:  If you you aren't going to deny Licona's authentically born again status, and you aren't going to accuse him of being too dumb to recognize his errors, and you will charitably believe him when he confesses his acceptance of Jesus' full deity, bodily resurrection and sufficient atonement for sin, then us skeptics would like you to answer a question:  Why hasn't the Holy Spirit convinced Licona of the errors of his way?

I'll start you off with a few choices, but you can answer however you like:

1 - the Holy Spirit never tried to convince Licona of the errors of his way.  the Holy Spirit likes things just the way they are;

2 - the Holy Spirit tried to convince Licona of the errors of his way, but Licona's freewill is what prevents him from recognizing the leading of the Holy Spirit.

3 -  the Holy Spirit never tried to convince Licona of the errors of his way; because there is no Holy Spirit to guide anybody in the first place;

4 - The Holy Spirit has never convinced Licona of the error of his way, because the Holy Spirit doesn't think Licona is wrong, the Holy Spirit thinks YOU are wrong;

5 - ?

God has the ability to MAKE people acknowledge truth whenever he wants.  Ezra 1:1, Acts 16:14.

What is god doing to Licona's spirit while Licona is in the process of teaching the things Lydia says are error?

Is God "trying" to talk to Licona, but Licona simply doesn't have the "ears to hear"?

Is God screaming as loud as he can, but Licona is just spiritually deaf?  If so, why doesn't God try speaking AUDIBLY to Licona?  Might that actually achieve some of the changes Lydia would like to see?

Does God do nothing to correct Licona because God has a "greater good" in mind which requires Licona to wallow around in error for a while before seeing the light?  If so, then how can Licona be faulted or criticized?  There is no greater moral or intellectual justification for a human being's action, than the truthful declaration "God wanted me to do this".  It would be utterly irrational to say "It doesn't matter if God wanted you to teach error to the church, you should disobey God's will if that's what God willed you to do".

Lydia is naturally gossipy like most women, and she talks way too much shit about her opponents, to pretend that she can duck her responsibility to name the cause of Licona's ignorance with some excuse like "it's not my business to explain why other people can't or won't see the truth" or "it's not my business to know what is within the portions of God's will that He chooses not to reveal".

Lydia MADE it her business to explain why her opponents refuse to see things her way, and if she tries to duck that responsibility, she will forfeit the right to balk if other people come along and suggest explanations for Licona's errors, which Lydia doesn't personally accept, such as "maybe Licona isn't truly saved", or "maybe Licona has secret unconfessed sins", or "maybe Licona is a servant of the devil", etc, etc.

Maybe the reason Licona isn't correcting his errors is because Lydia hasn't explained to Licona the reason that Licona finds her criticisms unconvincing?  If Lydia is going to talk as much shit as she is known for, does she place herself under any degree of intellectual or moral obligation to reveal to the reason why the person she criticizes isn't able to see the light?

I think the obvious answer is "yes", since the alternative is to pretend that Lydia can be rational to simply point out Licona's errors and care nothing about why he doesn't correct himself.  

I also accuse Lydia of being a hypocrite.  She has some really fancy excuses for refusing to debate, but then again whenever she is in the mood to debate, then suddenly, she becomes willing to use up some of her time debating a critic.  At the end of the day, Lydia's allegedly academic and scholarly excuses for refusal to debate her critics are lies:  whether she debates a critic depends upon exactly nothing but two considerations:

1 - her mood at the time, and 

2 - how fearful she is that her critic might actually be right.

I will continue updating this blog as I notice Lydia responds to the issues she chose to place at issue by publicly publishing her "Beholder" book, yes, including issues that she may not have wished to raise, but issues that her book raises whether she likes it or not.  Such as issues of why the Holy Spirit hasn't convinced Licona of the error of his way.