Lydia McGrew (author of books such as Hidden in Plain View: Undesigned Coincidences in the Gospels and Acts, The Eye of the Beholder: The Gospel of John as Historical Reportage, and The Mirror or the Mask: Liberating the Gospels from Literary Devices) has recently written a public post critiquing everyone's favourite hack Protestant apologist:
I will be leaving soon for Texas. Yesterday, at the first day of the ETS conference,at which Tim and I were not present, there was a panel at which Rob Bowman gave a paper allegedly responding to our concerns about the MFA. Rob has now confirmed that he did state that our 2009 paper on the resurrection did not rely upon the details of the Gospel resurrection accounts. This is seriously false. That paper absolutely did rely on those details. See the quotation below. Moreover, we have already explicitly stated that a statement elsewhere in that paper was incorrect to the effect that most scholars would grant that the disciples testified as given in the Gospels. At that time *we were misled* by Habermas's own statements of what his research had shown. We took them to mean that the majority of scholars actually grant something they do not grant! This is part of why I have hammered home over and over again since then the problem of the ambiguity of the appearances claim in the minimal facts account--because it confuses people. It appears that Bowman did not understand this. Again, we have since that time understood that Habermas's research is ambiguously represented and that the majority of scholars do not grant that the disciples testified as in the Gospels. *We have therefore abandoned all reference to the majority of scholarship*.
But our argument *did* crucially rely upon the details of the accounts in a way that it *did not* crucially rely upon scholarly consensus, and Bowman was seriously incorrect to state that it did not rely on those details. And our argument continues to rely on those details, for this is necessary to arguing for the *rationality* of the disciples, a point I have emphasized again and again in talking about the MFA since then. Here is that quote, from that article:
"Second, to explain the facts the hallucination theory would have to be invoked for more than a dozen people simultaneously (Luke 24:36-43). The plausibility of a collective hallucination is, for obvious reasons, inversely related to the amount of detail it involves. Given the level of polymodal interactive detail reported in cases like the one in Luke 24, the probability of coincidence is vanishing. A third factor exacerbates this problem: the hallucinations would have to be not only parallel but also integrated. According to the gospels, the risen Jesus
interacted with his disciples in numerous ways including eating food they gave him (Luke 24:41-43) and cooking fish for them (John 21:1-14). In such contexts, the disciples were interacting not
only with Jesus but with one another, physically and verbally. The suggestion that their parallel polymodal hallucinations were seamlessly integrated is simply a non-starter, an event so
improbable in natural terms that it would itself very nearly demand a supernatural explanation. Finally, these detailed, parallel, integrated hallucinations must be invoked repeatedly across a
period of more than a month during which the disciples were persuaded that they repeatedly interacted with their Lord and master here on earth."
As a friend said, "Sometimes the best way to deal with Bowman is to just let him keep talking. #HackApologist." There is no real wiggle room for simple misreading or disagreement about a fine point; this is deliberate misrepresentation. Hopefully more of his fellow Evangelical Protestants will realise that he is full of crap and produces low IQ material.
