Testimonies to the Truth - by Lydia McGrew

 I recently had the opportunity to read and endorse Lydia McGrew's excellent new book defending the reliability of the Gospels: Testimonies to the Truth - Why you can trust the Gospels. 

I thoroughly enjoyed it, and this is what I had to say about it:

Guillaume Bignon’s Blurb for Lydia McGrew’s Testimonies to the Truth

The gospels claim to be the testimony of people who were in a position to know what Jesus said and did, including his dying on a cross and rising from the dead. If they are reliable historical sources, their reader may come to know (not just believe) those most important truths about Jesus. In her wonderful new little book, Testimonies to the Truth, Lydia McGrew gives us a thoroughly convincing defense of that big “if”. She very effectively describes what reliable witness accounts look like and shows that the gospels fit those patterns time and time again. Lydia makes good on her ministry slogan that claims to “make common sense rigorous”. Her careful thinking is indeed connecting the gospel accounts to our modern-day, reasonable intuitions of how truthful witnesses sound like in the real world, and reading her making those powerful connections had me mumble “oh…, that makes so much sense!” at just about every chapter.

Years ago, when I read the gospels as an adult atheist, they challenged my unbelief partly because they struck me as having the ring of truth, even though I couldn’t explain immediately what I saw that made them so truthful. But Lydia can and does explain it all: external confirmations, unexplained allusions, undesigned coincidences, unnecessary details, unified personalities, her excellent book carefully breaks down those intuitive markers of truth we find in the gospels, and thereby not only provides solid justification for Christian belief, but also trains the lay person to become the Apologist. What a gift.

--Guillaume Bignon

Philosopher, apologist, and author of “Confessions of a French Atheist”.