Did Irenaeus, or a mid-second-century compiler, invent the authorship of John to help oppose Gnosticism? Nope. Turns out, the debate with the Gnostics was over the interpretation of John, not its authorship.

Everybody who's interested in the authorship of John would like to know what the early church father Papias said about the subject. But alas! We have no unquestionable statement from Papias about who wrote John. Though probably he did say something explicit, this is another illustration of the way that the chances and changes of this mortal life leave us missing a lot of things written in the ancient world. They just don't survive to our time.Here I survey the meager evidence on the question, "What did Papias say about the authorship of the 4th Gospel?" I give one ancient piece of evidence that is pretty direct--that it, it claims to be telling us what Papias actually said. But its reliability is genuinely questionable. And I give two indirect arguments, one (reasonable, but IMO not very strong) from Charles Hill and one (so weak as to be valueless) from Richard Bauckham.

A blessed Christmas to all my listeners and viewers. Here we pause in discussing authorship for a Christmas reflection: The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us. John's Gospel emphasizes truth because literal truth is, in John's view, inherently bound up with the Incarnation of God. The true anachronism is not holding John to this literal, historical standard. The real anachronism is condescendingly imposing upon John a postmodern, fuzzy concept of truth.For more on the historicity of Christmas, see this playlist:https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLe1tMOs8ARn3za22QzE28xKqhTq5KvCB2

Here I talk about the earliest evidence we have about the authorship of John. as it happens, the author isn't named as "John" in this evidence, but it is still very valuable. It's very important to remember that "the earliest evidence that has come down to us" isn't "the earliest evidence that ever existed." Many ancient writings have simply been lost. See here for a discussion of Bart Ehrman's misuse of the term "anonymous." https://lydiaswebpage.blogspot.com/2015/07/on-bart-ehrman-and-authorship-of-gospels.htmlIf you want to hear me read my favorite Richard Bauckham quotation, which I allude to in the video, you can get that here:https://youtu.be/Ineqa_QL9aw?si=8ufEXQtIH4zDdq40&t=1091The Eye of the Beholder is available on Amazon:https://www.amazon.com/Eye-Beholder-Gospel-Historical-Reportage/dp/1947929151Or Logos users can get it here:https://www.logos.com/product/416637/the-eye-of-the-beholder-the-gospel-of-john-as-historical-reportage

Today begins a series on the authorship of the Fourth Gospel. In this introduction I explore what one might mean by authorship and what assumptions you shouldn't make when hearing that someone affirms traditional authorship. And just how important is authorship, anyway?Get more content on the Gospel of John in _The Eye of the Beholder: The Gospel of John as Historical Reportage_:https://www.amazon.com/Eye-Beholder-Gospel-Historical-Reportage/dp/1947929151The blog post on independence and the resurrection, which I mention at the beginning, is here:https://lydiaswebpage.blogspot.com/2025/12/the-resurrection-independence-and.htmlThumbnail: _Saint John and the Eagle_ by Vladamir Borovikovsky

Recently Dr. William Lane Craig has claimed that what we "should be talking about" is how great it is that Dale Allison acknowledges "the appearance to the twelve" and Allison's arguments for it. Craig earnestly urges that we should accentuate the positive when it comes to Allison, emphasizing how very impressive it is that a person who thinks the Gospels have many legendary embellishment nonetheless acknowledges some of the central "facts" that Craig himself uses to argue for Jesus' bodily resurrection.https://content.blubrry.com/reasonable_faith/RF_PODCAST_Dale_Alliosn_on_Resurrection_2025.mp3?fbclid=IwY2xjawNnXMNleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFIdVphNUpRMHBXc3Nyd0J4AR6D--9gESoLXZeZ7Z4bfOIXHycoKgFFeUjw950BET6_-XgD-by2FuQadrftiA_aem_9VaaLpGJj1s-fHA0mNoXzAIn this video I take up Dr. Craig's suggestion that we be talking about Allison's arguments, but I take it in a very different direction from what Craig suggests. I argue that what Allison acknowledges as "the appearance to the twelve" is by his own conception so completely different from what Craig uses as a central fact that, if Allison were right, it would actually be evidence *against* Jesus' bodily resurrection, not for it. I also point out that his arguments show this same problem, to the point that it is just wrong to imply that he is admitting something against his own bias or that his acknowledgement points to the actual strength of the case. In fact, Craig's attempt to insist that we should all, like him, be deeply excited about Allison's acknowledgement points to the weaknesses of his own broadly minimalist approach (not just of a more specific "minimal facts" approach, which he disclaims).I have said more about my disagreements with Craig's "accentuate the positive" advice in this blog post: https://lydiaswebpage.blogspot.com/2025/10/on-maximalism-and-dale-allison-david.htmlThumbnail, Jesus Visits the Disciples in Locked Room Without Thomas © Drawn to the Word/Paul Oman Fine Art. All Rights Reserved.www.paulomanfineart.comUsed with permission

Dale Allison admits that there are apparition accounts in which not everybody present can see the apparition. (Ya think?) But despite his insinuation that this has some connection with the "recurrent notice of doubt" in the Gospel accounts, this is actually a strong *dissimilarity* with the Gospel accounts, in which it is strongly implied that everybody present can see and interact with Jesus. And in Acts 1 we're told definitely that the earliest body of believers knew who had and hadn't seen Jesus after his resurrection and that they were thereby able to pick out Matthias and Joseph Barsabbas as candidates to replace Judas Iscariot and testify boldly to the resurrection.Thumbnail: Banquo's ghost at the feast as portrayed by the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Joy Strotz.

How do bereavement apparitions (assuming that they occur) typically end? *Not* with something like the ascension scene as described in Acts 1. Here again I'm investigating whether the bereavement apparition literature, even taken on its own terms, provides a good fit for what is *claimed* in the canonical Gospels and Acts. Dale Allison frequently implies or even states that there are significant parallels between these, but we see again and again that it isn't true. In this video I even describe a truly jaw-dropping eisegesis from Allison of Matthew 28:18.Thumbnail _The Ascension_, John Singleton Copley, public domain

Dale Allison asserts that reports of tangible apparitions create "real ambiguity" concerning the evidential force of the Gospel stories about Jesus being tangible and eating. Is this true?I argue that it isn't. Even aside from the quite uncritical approach that Allison takes to modern apparition reports, the reports as he recounts them are evidentially far less clear than the Gospel stories. While some (apparently only one-person) reports do tell of polymodal experiences, including touch, many others recount vision without hearing, hearing without vision, mere sense of presence, appearing only briefly and then disappearing while doing nothing else, etc. Nor do they correspond to the reports of *group* appearances of Jesus that are strongly polymodal, tangible, and interactive. All of this makes a major difference to probabilities.But as usual, Allison takes the unfalsifiable approach of dismissing details of the Gospel stories as not really being part of the original evidence at all in direct proportion to the extent to which they falsify an apparition theory!

In his book on the resurrection, Dale Allison claims that, in the canonical Gospels, the post-Easter Jesus does not approach but just appears suddenly at once. He also claims that he cannot be followed. But there are specific counterexamples to both claims. If you're going to claim that there are significant parallels between your favored non-bodily explanation and the canonical Gospels, you need to be more careful to remember what's in the canonical Gospels!Image courtesy of freebibleimages.org

I'm continuing to go through telling admissions that Dale Allison makes (without realizing that they are telling admissions) about the apparition literature. These show that there is no significant similarity to what we find in the Gospel accounts, even though Allison suggests that there is. Yes, he also thinks the Gospel accounts are embellished...at just the points where they don't resemble apparitions!Thumbnail: Banquo's ghost at the feast as portrayed by the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Joy Strotz.

Dale Allison says that bereavement apparitions (sometimes called grief hallucinations) provide useful and enlightening "parallels" to the content of the Gospel stories when they describe Jesus' appearances to the disciples. Grief hallucinations are often a skeptical go-to theory to account for the beginning of Christianity. Allison himself uses these alleged parallels to support his own version of an objective vision theory--Jesus really appeared to the disciples, but in a non-bodily form.Even if we don't delve deeply into Allison's rather uncritical survey of literature on apparitions, based on his own admissions, are there really significant parallels?In this series I will show that Allison makes very telling admissions that show that such apparitions (even if they are objectively real) do not constitute a good parallel for the data in the Gospel accounts. Of course, neither Allison nor more skeptical scholars think that the disciples actually experienced what is found in the Gospels. But that is where the bait and switch comes in: Allison sometimes explicitly claims and often strongly implies that the apparition literature provides useful parallels for *what we actually find in the Gospel stories*. Then, when it becomes clear that it doesn't really fit at all well, he switches to dismissing the parts of those stories that don't fit his theory as being made up later.Today we'll see this dynamic at work concerning Allison's telling admission (which he doesn't recognize as a telling admission) that apparitions often speak *only briefly*.

A skeptic recently sent me a link to this article about an ancient novel, the Aithiopika (or Aaethiopica) of Heliodoros.https://www.jstor.org/stable/25010772?read-now=1&seq=22#page_scan_tab_contents(If you are interested in the article, you can log into Jstor using your Google account and read it for free.)Here is a copy of the novel in translation (along with some other works). Find "THE ADVENTURES OF THEAGENES AND CHARICLEA" to read it. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/55406/55406-h/55406-h.htm#HELIODORUSDoes the "realism" of this novel serve as a counterexample to claims I have made about the Gospels and Acts, the non-existence of what I have called "hyper-realistic" novels at the time of the Gospels, and the reportage genre? In a word, no. Watch to learn more! (And if I say so myself, for such a dusty subject, the summaries and readings I include later in the video of parts of the Athiopika are rather amusing!)

In this final (for now) video on the question of what skeptical and moderate scholars grant about the resurrection appearances, I argue that the majority of skeptical scholars probably do not even grant a group vision-like appearance experience with some degree of intersubjective content. I discuss how I think Dr. Habermas got, and gave, the impression that at least a lot of skeptical scholars do grant at least that much.Here is the livestream that I cite repeatedly in the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YSY_hcIB14&t=349sI had intended to read a quotation from E. P. Sanders in the video but forgot to put it in my notes. There are a number of such quotations in which Sanders expresses complete agnosticism about who was present and what the disciples saw. I have more in my notes. Here is just one:"If we are also unable, as I am, to think that early Christianity was deliberately based on fraud, we must be content with the simplest, vaguest sort of conclusion: something happened to the followers of Jesus, but we do not know what it was.”When someone emphasizes strongly that he's pushing for only the "simplest, vaguest sort of conclusion" that "something happened to the followers of Jesus, but we do not know what it was," I think we should believe him. Sanders also says, "We are unable to find a 'bedrock' description or a fundamental list of appearances.” "But Did It Happen?" _The Spectator_, April 6, 1996, pp. 12ffhttps://archive.spectator.co.uk/page/6th-april-1996/12It looks like only a very small number of scholars one could with any plausibility designate as "skeptical" grant even some kind of group experience. I also implied but want to stress even more: For Ludemann, Goulder, and Vermes, it is difficult to assess what degree of intersubjectivity they actually agree to and whether this meets Licona's definition of a group appearance experience. Those I've designated as "moderates," most or all of whom consider themselves actually to *believe* in some kind of supernatural or paranormal resurrection of Jesus (which is why they shouldn't be called "skeptics") but who make heavy use of critical methodology on the Gospels (which is why I call them "moderates" rather than just "Christians" or "conservatives") do accept some kind of group appearance, but not the kind in the Gospels.What effect would these facts about scholarship have on our ability to make a good argument for Jesus' resurrection *if* we think of what is granted in this way as a representation of what can be argued for "as historians"? Thumbnail, Jesus Visits the Disciples in Locked Room Without Thomas © Drawn to the Word/Paul Oman Fine Art. All Rights Reserved.www.paulomanfineart.comUsed with permission

Do the vast majority, or virtually all, scholars across the critical spectrum grant appearances of Jesus to his disciples *that seeemed to them like what is told in the Gospels*? Emphatically not. When skeptical and even moderate scholars grant some kind of group appearance or other, they absolutely do not grant that it seemed to them like Jesus was eating with them as a group, having long conversations, and so forth. Not even that *phenomenology* of the experiences. (Yes, of course, if they're skeptics they don't agree that that really happened, but this denial goes farther than that.)Yet in a popular article in 2018, Dr. Habermas very strongly implied that virtually all scholars agree that the disciples had experiences as if Jesus was "having conversations with friends just like any of us might do" and that this was what convinced them that Jesus was risen.https://stream.org/surprising-scholarly-agreement-facts-support-jesus-resurrection/No wonder people get confused about how far the minimal facts argument can take us.Next time I'll talk about who does and doesn't grant even a vision-like or non-physical-like type of group experience, and spoiler--that doesn't seem to include a majority of skeptical scholars, either.

Dr. Habermas has astonishingly now claimed that he never gave any definition of "the vast majority of scholars" and that, except for the empty tomb (which he emphasizes is not a minimal fact anyway) he never made any head count of how many scholars affirm a proposition. Here is a blog post I did on this issue recently, with links.https://lydiaswebpage.blogspot.com/2025/08/habermas-now-says-that-he-never-made.htmlIn this video I discuss this same topic, what we can say with confidence, and what may be the explanation. It's clearly false that Dr. Habermas never made such claims. He definitely did. That can be documented. But perhaps he did not, in fact, make rigorous head counts. It's especially noteworthy that Volume 3 of his magnum opus, which is supposedly all about scholarly views, explicitly says that it does not document head counts. What, then, might have led to his implications, over decades, that he did so?Those using the minimal facts argument for the resurrection need to face this issue, which affects the argument even taken on its own terms.

In this final video in the series I discuss the use of fudge factors. These are ad hoc changes in a hypothesis of unstated symbolism that occur while the theorist still states that the resemblance between the numbers, events, passages, etc., is just too much for coincidence and hence favors some sort of intentional but unstated symbolism by the author.I discuss two places where people have overtly used such fudge factors.At the end I make a comparison to the claim that the two Temple cleansings in John and the Synoptics are just *too similar* to each other to be two different events, even though they are just generally similar. Enjoy!Thumbnail image fudge licensed under creative commons, copied from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fudge#/media/File:Vegan_Chocolate_Fudge.jpg

We're talking about the "Gilbert and Sullivan" problem for dreaming up far-fetched symbolic meanings for narrated Gospel details. "If everybody's somebody, then no one's anybody." This week we see the "it's too easy" objection by considering this: If you can use "the sevenfold gift of the spirit plus the ten commandments, and then take the triangular number of that" as an unstated symbolic meaning of the 153 fish in John 21, you could dream up something just as "good" (that is, just as far-fetched and silly) if the number were something else.This is another way to see that using our creativity to come up with unstated symbolic meanings is a bad method.

What do I mean by saying that it's too easy to come up with theories of unstated symbolism in the details of the Gospels? And why does the fact that it's too easy create a problem for those theories?A song from an operetta by Gilbert and Sullivan says, "If everybody's somebody, then no one's anybody." If you're willing to go far enough to come up with an unstated symbolism theory for the details of the Gospels (such as the view that John is symbolizing some particular theological idea by dyschronologically moving the Temple cleansing), then there is virtually no limit to the additional theories you can come up with. The choice among them is arbitrary. And that's a Gilbert and Sullivan problem.Thumbnail by Studio Ellis & Walery:[1] Alfred Ellis (1854-1930)[2] & Walery (Stanislas Julian, Count Ostrorog, either senior (1830 - 1890) or junior (1863 - 1935).)[3] - Scanned from the 1914 edition of François Cellier & Cunningham Bridgeman's Gilbert and Sullivan and Their Operas., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3987877

I return here to a topic that I think is important, though I'm taking an unpopular position: I think that there is probabilistic tension between the occurrence of *unstated* symbolic or allusive meanings in the details of the Gospels' narratives. This does not mean that it is *strictly impossible* that a detail could be both historical and intended by the author to have an unstated symbolic meaning. I just think it's unlikely. I think there is a pretty good reason why skeptics (and for that matter some Christians) try to use claims that the author put something in as an allusion to the Old Testament (e.g., the claim that Matthew put in the slaughter of the baby boys in Bethlehem to allude to the infancy of Moses) as an argument against the historicity of that incident or detail. And I think we should hesitate before dismissing such claims merely by saying, "That doesn't necessarily mean it's not historical." No, it doesn't *necessarily* mean that, but there is some tension nonetheless.In this video I explore this tension in terms of genre. If the Gospels' genre is, as I think we have ample evidence that it is, memoir reportage coming from people very close to the facts, whose primary purpose was testimonial, then this is some evidence against unstated symbolic meanings or unstated Old Testament allusions in the events and details of the narratives. In fact, the Gospel authors aren't subtle, because they aren't worrying about making a work of Art with a capital A. If they want to tell you that something fulfills prophecy, they don't hesitate just to come right out and tell you that, so you don't miss it.Here I use some references to works of fiction, including Chaim Potok's excellent novel _The Chosen_, to make these points. Enjoy!