Doctor Logic and Tim and Lydia McGrew on the independence of the Gospels

This is a comparison of a comment by Doctor Logic about the independence of the New Testament authors, and a prescient response by Tim and Lydia McGrew from the Blackwell essay quoted in the previous post.

DL: There are several Christian claims that I see repeated here at DI that drive me bananas. First, there's the claim that there were independent witnesses to the Resurrection. There weren't. You have essentially one account because the authors were part of the same cabal. The collaborated at every stage.



T & L McGrew: Though some scholars have challenged these accounts as later additions,
there are serious reasons to take them to be authentic reports of what the
women said. First, the prima facie tensions in the narratives of the
discovery of the tomb and the first appearances of Christ tell strongly
against collusion, copying, and embellishment. One evangelist gives
an account of one angel at the tomb, another of two; one has the
women setting out “early, while it was yet dark,” another sets the scene
“when the sun was risen.” The lists of the women who are named in the
various gospels overlap only partially. Some puzzling details are never
worked out for the reader. If Mary Magdalene ran back to tell Peter
and John, how did they fail to meet the other women as they returned?
What did Jesus mean when he said “Touch me not” to Mary Magdalene?
These are the sorts of loose ends and incongruities one would expect
 from independent eyewitness accounts of the same event, where
 substantial unity – agreement on the main facts – is accompanied
 by circumstantial variety.