What’s Wrong with the World

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What’s Wrong with the World is dedicated to the defense of what remains of Christendom, the civilization made by the men of the Cross of Christ. Athwart two hostile Powers we stand: the Jihad and Liberalism...read more

The Mirror or the Mask is available for pre-order

I'm pleased to announce that The Mirror or the Mask: Liberating the Gospels From Literary Devices is available for pre-order earlier than expected. Copies will ship after the physical launch date of December 10.

The book has blurbs by eminent British New Testament scholar Peter J. Williams, eminent American New Testament scholar Craig Blomberg, international legal, biblical, and apologetics scholar John Warwick Montgomery, Old Testament scholar Jack Collins, and well-known Christian philosopher J. P. Moreland. More blurbs are forthcoming in the book from biblical scholars, scientists, philosophers, and apologists.

Here is the description on the order page:

In recent years a number of evangelical scholars have claimed that the Gospel authors felt free to present events in one way even though they knew that the reality was different. Analytic philosopher Lydia McGrew brings her training in the evaluation of evidence to bear, investigates these theories about the evangelists’ literary standards in detail, and finds them wanting. At the same time she provides a nuanced, positive view of the Gospels that she dubs the reportage model. Clearing away misconceptions of this model, McGrew amasses objective evidence that the evangelists are honest, careful reporters who tell it like it is. Meticulous, well-informed, and accessible, The Mirror or the Mask is an important addition to the libraries of laymen, pastors, apologists, and scholars who want to know whether the Gospels are reliable.

Pre-order your copy, and please share the link.

Comments (20)

I like books that lay out the points and argumentation clearly rather than those that are written (seemingly) to convince other scholars that the author has the "right" views/attitudes and deserves to be in the cool scholars' club.

You may or may not be a person of note in conservative Biblical scholarship, but I'd imagine your argumentation carries the day. Looking forward to seeing what you write, especially if it sticks a pin in the literary conjectural balloon of purportedly conservative scholars.

I have more patience and sympathy for those who simply say that they think scripture is bunk, not true, didn't happen, etc, than those who advance theories that facts were deliberately changed to make theological points, or that the meaning of a text is something that is contrary to what the prima facie sense given by the text is.

I'm really looking forward to this.

As Joe said, I get tired of so-called exegesis that attempts to "save" Scripture only to ultimately undermine all of Christianity and the Bible to boot. If the Apostles didn't think that the events of the Gospels actually happened, (a) why didn't they say so; and (b) then something else convinced them that Jesus was God, and that something else is EVEN MORE the right thing to have reported than any made-up events or sayings. And this is obviously true - so much so that all of the Gospel writers would have realized it. The notion that they needed to "adjust" or "rearrange" the events or sayings to fit a "better" story is effectively saying that the Apostles themselves had inadequate basis to believe in Jesus.

The notion that they needed to "adjust" or "rearrange" the events or sayings to fit a "better" story is effectively saying that the Apostles themselves had inadequate basis to believe in Jesus.

That is especially important when it comes to miracles and to the resurrection. If the disciples believed that the resurrection was physical, but if the actual resurrection accounts are embellished in their physical details, that does seem to suggest that they believed *unjustifiedly* that Jesus was physically alive. Otherwise there would have been no need to embellish. No doubt skeptics think that's *exactly* what went wrong--they believed irrationally and hence the only accounts that could sound convincing were embellished accounts. But it's more than a bit concerning when conservative Christians do not recognize this implication when they blithely state that we cannot be confident historically that the accounts that we have are accurate accounts of the witnesses' claims. And yet, they believe, we can have high justified confidence in the physical resurrection of Jesus. There's some kind of major epistemic disconnect going on there.

Congratulations on your latest publication Lydia! I look forward to reading it.

In recent years a number of evangelical scholars have claimed that the Gospel authors felt free to present events in one way even though they knew that the reality was different.

I hope you don’t mind my asking, but what do you think is motivating evangelical scholars to read the Gospels in this way? I doubt it’s a simple matter of trying to gain respectability among “liberal” scholars; there has to be a more charitable interpretation than that. As you pointed out on this blog, these tendencies are even present in the work of Craig Keener, who also wrote a big book in defense of miracles! I suppose it’s possible for Licona to be motivated by a desire to redefine Inerrancy among evangelicals to mean something contrary to what Geisler intended as revenge for what happened between them earlier. But at best that might only account for Licona and not Keener, Evans, etc.

The most charitable interpretation I can imagine, is that evangelical scholars are trying to maintain a nominal commitment to Inerrancy for reasons of employment, but want to depart from the substance of how that doctrine was understood by the CSBI framers. The model you seem to represent is that we don’t need Inerrancy to preserve a robust commitment to biblical reliability in scholarship.

Andrew, I think you'll appreciate a recent interview with Cogent Christianity where I address that question. I'll cut and paste here just part of what I say there and then ask you to give them some clicks to read the rest:

There are a lot of strands going into their theorizing. One strand is just that they have gotten used to being far too literary, to the point that they have lost touch with living reality. An example here is Craig Keener’s claim that John exaggerates how far Jesus carried his own cross in order to make Jesus look like he’s in control of his own death. If you think about the reality of the situation, this is bizarre. Here is a bloodied, beaten prisoner being forced to carry the crossbeam of his cross over a distance, being driven by the soldiers. This certainly does not convey the idea of his being in control of his own death! There is no reason at all to think of this as some heavy, thematic thing. John just didn’t happen to mention Simon of Cyrene, probably because the Synoptics had already mentioned him and because John was so struck by what it was like for Jesus to carry his own cross for the distance that he did carry it, until he could not carry it anymore. I could give many more examples of this kind. The scholars have gotten so used to doing far-fetched literary criticism on the Gospels (of a kind that I’m familiar with from my graduate studies in English literature) that they don’t realize how truly implausible their theories are. They confuse what strikes them as deep and cool with what is reasonable to attribute to the author.

There certainly is peer pressure from more skeptical scholars. William Lane Craig tells of a time when his dissertation director sneered at him for harmonizing the resurrection accounts. Bart Ehrman definitely bullies people when he debates them. But I think it’s important to realize that a lot of evangelical scholars have internalized an anti-harmonization bias to the point that they put implicit or explicit pressure on fellow Christians, too. In a correspondence I had with an evangelical NT scholar, I said that I thought two accounts were about two different events. As I recall, it was two places in different Gospels where it says that the people in Jesus’ home town of Nazareth rejected him. And he responded pretty condescendingly, “How often are you going to do that?” He meant to ask how often I am going to say that there were two different events. The obvious response from my side was, “As many times as the evidence warrants it. Why do you ask? Is there a bag limit on reasonable historical harmonizations?” In general he was pretty dismissive of harmonization. I couldn’t help thinking about what it would be like to be subjected to that rhetoric if I were this person’s student.

For more, see the whole interview here. (That question and the rest of the answer is partway down.)

https://cogentchristianity.com/2019/10/30/the-mirror-or-the-mask-an-interview-with-lydia-mcgrew/

You would enjoy a guy by the name of James Begon on Twitter who I gather is some type of biblical scholar. He plays literary genius all the time. Case in point, he recently waded into to the apparent contradiction between Matthew and Luke concerning Judas' death. It was recently a point of contention in the Peter Williams and Bart Erhman conversation. He doesn't disregard the harmonisation by Williams, but specifically wants to answer *why* there are differences as opposed to why *how* they can be reconciled. He's literary mad. Anyway, part of his theory was that Luke wants to compare the blood that Jesus sweats in the garden with the blood that spills from Judas. Whereas Matthew looks back and uses Ahithophel from the OT as an archetype.

You know I always used to be somewhat bemused when some NT scholars would seem to treat biblical scholarship as though It was different from history. Not anymore. I swear it's a literary source before it's a historical source for many of them.

The scholars have gotten so used to doing far-fetched literary criticism on the Gospels (of a kind that I’m familiar with from my graduate studies in English literature) that they don’t realize how truly implausible their theories are. They confuse what strikes them as deep and cool with what is reasonable to attribute to the author.

I have seen that: there is an actual premium on being able to piece together a wild-n-woolly-headed idea, and string one element with another with another, regardless of how truly outrageous the theory is. In some ways, you even get more points for making it more outrageous, as long as you can string sufficiently many elements along to make it pretend-plausible. You know that chreia theory that says that they were taught in school to make up stories and put words in famous people's mouths, that they said meant historians were taught that they were allowed to make up stories in their histories? Looks like the biblical "scholars "who believe this crap are projecting their own training in school onto the ancient scholarly education: they (the modern "scholars") were too stupid to realize that when their professors gave them extra points for making up utterly outrageous theories, that didn't make the theories actually worth anything; being outrageous certainly did not make them epistemically better - rather quite the opposite.

Thank you for pointing me to that interview, Lydia. And I freely acknowledge that these tendencies among certain evangelical scholars can at least partially be explained in terms of an academic loss of perspective, and other cultural forces that discourage harmonization. But I also noticed that you made the following point elsewhere in the interview:

The idea is that if there isn’t a harmonization they think is plausible, and if they are speaking to an audience that isn’t likely to want to say there is an error, then they try to get such an audience to think that they have to accept their literary device view as the only remaining option. You get a kind of blitzkrieg: “What about this?” “What about that?” “What about this other Bible difficulty?”

I could be wrong, but I think this is the main pitch for accepting interpretations that stress the usage of a literary device for those not subject to the social forces of academic culture. Once someone accepts that Inerrancy is probably wrong, then they can either (1) reject the doctrine or (2) redefine it in some way (e.g., inerrancy is true relative to genre considerations that allow for authors to be factually incorrect). So in a sense, Lydia, your model for having a robust defense of biblical reliability going forward means taking (1) over (2), particularly given the epistemic consequences to the Gospels if these literary devices are accepted. You do not accept the theological argument for Inerrancy as a corollary of Inspiration, nor do you think that Inerrancy is likely to be true. (Please correct me if I’m mistaken on these points!)

Since I doubt many people find literary readings of the Gospels to be all that compelling given their speculative nature, I can’t help but conclude that the real motivation for taking them seriously is something more like the above. It follows that undermining the appeal of a Licona is not a simple matter of deconstructing his case for all these literary devices (as you’ve done so brilliantly on this blog) but also showing how a robust commitment to biblical reliability can be held without Inerrancy, which is what Licona allows us to nominally maintain.

Andrew, there is another option, though, and it's been the option that traditional inerrantists have taken since time out of mind:

They can just say that they don't know and that there is probably some factual harmonization that depends on facts we don't have.

That is what traditional inerrantists had *always* done with recalcitrant apparent discrepancies, right up until these literary theories got popular.

They were willing to live with not knowing.

That seems to me consistent. And it involves recognizing that you don't gain *anything* by radical redefinition. Nothing.

I will probably get blamed for using this analogy, but I'm gonna use it anyway. :-)

Suppose that a man ceases to be attracted to his wife and is attracted to another woman. Is it any gain for fidelity for him to take up an affair with the other woman but to tell his wife, "She does not mean anything to me emotionally, so I'm still being faithful to you; this isn't an affair"?

It's transparently obvious that it isn't a gain for marital fidelity. One has just redefined "fidelity." This man is no more faithful than a man who says, "Sorry, honey, I'm just not attracted to you anymore, so I'm going to have an affair."

Norman Geisler understood this. Phil Fernandes understands this. Richard Howe understands this. Thomas Roach understands this. There are plenty of old-fashioned inerrantists who still understand this.

And so they know that option 2, where the redefinition in question is the one offered by Licona and co., is *totally pointless* as far as they are concerned. *That* wasn't anywhere *close* to what they originally meant by "inerrancy," so why would they *bother* redefining it in that way? Just to keep using a certain set of pixels, a certain set of sounds?

That, quite frankly, is why these guys and I can respect each other. Because we're not playing around with pointless redefinitions.

I do think, too, that even those not directly subject to the stresses and forces of academic culture are indirectly influenced by them. Take the sheer question of the *number* of allegedly intractable contradictions in the Bible and the *size* of them.

Suppose you're a layman in the pews and you are listening to Licona or some other scholar who implies (whether or not he comes out and says it) that there are a lot of these.

That's when it starts seeming psychologically burdensome, too hard, to take the traditional harmonization approach and just say, "There's probably something we don't know." This hypothetical person in the audience is getting the impression that he'd have to do that *so many times* and that this would be terribly ad hoc and ridiculous. But that arises from the scholar's anti-harmonistic bias.

Another way that academic culture influences such people is by the ridicule that Licona heaps upon harmonizations in his *popular* lectures. He gets the audience to laugh at silly things and makes it look like *that* is harmonization. You should see it some time. When he talked about the one about what Jairus said about his daughter, guess what his example was of harmonization? That maybe Jairus's daughter died twice because Jesus' ability to raise people from the dead was a little off that day. Cute, huh? He got an audience laugh for that.

This is illegitimate, but one sees it repeatedly. On social media if you mention harmonization, you'll be told that you must think Peter denied Jesus six times. I had one guy recently on social media imply that my position would lead one to think the rooster crowed twelve times. (I'm not sure how he came up with that one.)

William Lane Craig nowadays scarcely (if ever) uses the term "harmonization" in his podcasts and other presentations without the word "strained" or "artificial" in front of it. He applies this phrase to the idea that Jesus cleansed the Temple twice, as if it's just too ridiculous.

Laymen notice this. They don't have to be in the academy to be influenced by this. If WLC is telling you in a popular-level podcast with great confidence that it's a horribly strained harmonization to think that Jesus cleansed the Temple twice, who are you, mere layman, to say he's wrong?

So I think there's a lot of trickle-down academic bias going on here.

Socially, Andrew, I think you are right though in your analysis of the appeal that this has to many who identify themselves as inerrantists. I'm just pointing out that the academic bias fits into that, directly or indirectly.

And here there is just an enormous, overwhelming irony: Licona has said that he is an historian and cannot bring in his theological presuppositions about inspiration, that he has accepted these conclusions because of academic integrity as a matter of neutral argument. He said this in a blog post written at a time when, I suspect (though I cannot prove), he had not yet learned that I am not an inerrantist. It was the kind of statement that he had used in his wrangles with Norman Geisler, and of course it went down very well in that context, since Geisler self-professedly *was* using his theological category of inerrancy as part of his evaluation of Licona's views.

Keener has said something similar. He's said that there are some things he can affirm using the "normal" (whatever that means) historical means of argument and other things he can affirm using only a "different epistemology" as a Christian.

So in both of these cases the implication is that their "side" (for want of a better word) is moved *entirely* by non-theological, objective, historical considerations.

Yet in practice, exactly the opposite has proven to be the case. Many times (confirming your theory) I've been told that someone feels like he has to accept Mike's view "because I'm an inerrantist"!! Is this not a shouting irony? Mike insists that his view has nothing whatsoever to do with theological presuppositions, yet his followers again and again accept it because they view it as a way of holding onto their theological self-identification. Perhaps if he wants to enjoin people not to be driven by theological rather than historical considerations, he should speak to his own followers. Certainly not to me!

The old-style inerrantists rightly recognize this as the very definition of a Pyrrhic victory. I have a chapter in The Mirror or the Mask that argues the same. How could an inerrancy position possibly *support* the theory that the evangelists deliberately, invisibly altered history? Not argumentatively. It can't. It "supports" it only by way of the historical accident that some of those who hold that view have chosen to *label* it as compatible with "inerrancy" and that others have decided to acquiesce socially in such a radical redefinition of the word. By that means one can make just about anything "support" just about anything else!

In contrast, I'm the one asking people to look at this historically and to ask whether these theories are *historically* well supported, and I'm arguing that they aren't.

The reason that I first focused on the scholarly trends was because I was asked about why evangelical *scholars* read the Gospels in these ways. How exactly that filters down through various other layers--scholar/apologists whose primary credentials are in other fields, lay apologists, pastors, laymen--is a little more complicated.

Thank you for that generous multi-faceted response Lydia! You are a real gem in the body of Christ.

I understand that in one sense you’re latest work is narrowly concerned with how we exegetically handle the Gospels and understand them to be reliable. However, I am curious as to how your perspective relates to larger issues of Inspiration and Inerrancy that continue to fester among evangelicals, which are not confined to the Gospels (and whether they can be fully harmonized) but leach out into other parts of the Bible.

To give an example, my sense is that the scientific evidence is broadly inconsistent with a flood that nearly wiped out humanity apart from Noah and his family a few thousand years ago; even if that event is understood to be local to the Mesopotamian basin, there is good reason to think that humanity was not so regionally confined at that time. Does it really make sense to continue affirming the historicity of Genesis 6–9 and confess ignorance as to how Scripture and Nature can be reconciled? As you know, William Lane Craig is going down the path of saying that Noah’s flood is true as “mytho-history” but not history-history, which seems like a desperate attempt to save Inerrancy by appealing to literary considerations. Moreover, it doesn’t seem like the sort of move you would endorse, Lydia, but at the same time I don’t see you endorsing Ken Ham’s Ark Encounter as the answer to that question either.

I'm inclined to affirm the historicity of a "local" (but extremely widespread) flood that wiped out the majority of humanity but not aboriginal populations in far distant locations. I'm quite unsatisfied with WLC's "mytho-history" approach. I suppose that, if we take the flood story historically even to this extent, then, yes, there would be animals on board and so forth. (I'm OEC, not YEC, though.) In that sense it would bear some resemblance to the "Ark Encounter," though somewhat looser. E.g. There would have been animals that survived outside of the large flood zone, and some animal species would have gone extinct much earlier in the old history of the earth. In other words, the flood is not (in my current view) doing the enormous amount of heavy lifting that the YECs need it to do in "flood geology" and so forth to create the entire fossil record and appearance of the age of the earth.

I don't claim to have investigated the scientific plausibility of a large local flood in detail, though Steve Hays of Triablogue recently had an interesting exchange with a non-Christian (I believe) geologist that debunked some of the alleged scientific objections to it.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, probably my most controversial view is my enormous hesitation to agree that God actually ordered the slaughter of infants in the Canaanite populations. Paul Copan's theories simply are not an answer to my concerns here, if for no other reason than that he is interested only in the narrow question of God's ordering full genocide, not God's ordering the slaughter of infants per se. (Many people don't know that.) This would be a fairly large error or at least apparent error in several Old Testament passages where the narrator does seem to affirm that God ordered these actions. My late blog colleague Zippy (memory eternal) took the view that these passages could still be regarded as consistent with inerrancy if we held that they recorded accurately what Moses and Samuel ordered and what the people believed and did rather than what God personally ordered. I'm dubious about that, though. Zippy was as absolutist as I am on the inherent evil of killing babies.

I'm not trying to start an argument about that in this thread, merely mentioning it again since you brought up other parts of the Bible and how the issue of inerrancy might interact with other parts of the Bible. I also don't claim to have investigated nearly as widely the alleged smaller contradictions in the OT as in the Gospels. Life is short. I also note that many OT books are anonymous, such as the various kingly chronicles, and quite a bit of time probably passed between the events and the writing of the books, and we can't get as much of a "handle" on the personality of the authors and the care they took with history as we can for the evangelists. There *are* undesigned coincidences in the OT, but they are spread out more over larger amounts of the books and longer time periods.

Andrew, there is another option, though, and it's been the option that traditional inerrantists have taken since time out of mind:

They can just say that they don't know and that there is probably some factual harmonization that depends on facts we don't have.

That is what traditional inerrantists had *always* done with recalcitrant apparent discrepancies, right up until these literary theories got popular.

They were willing to live with not knowing.

That seems to me consistent. And it involves recognizing that you don't gain *anything* by radical redefinition. Nothing.

This is gold. As Bania in Seinfeld would say: "That's gold, Jerry! gold!"

I've learned to live in the Xty world while not having killer answers for every possible objection, what-if, what-about, and so on. I should have good answers for a large amount of objections (and I do), but I confess to being stumped about a few things, which don't make me worry too much because there is an evidential line of credit provided by my answers to all sorts of other things, and the things that stump me are not central/foundational issues. This principle is the same sort of principle I use in real life.

Atheists, materialists, reductionists, and any other "-ist" or follower of an "-ism" runs into the same problem of not having answers for everything. I especially note here the handwavy just-so Darwinist stories for explaining how various features of life exist today. Not arguing it here, but I would contend that non-Christian worldviews have insuperable difficulties compared with Xty. Also, I can't escape the conclusion that if atheism or reductionism is true, then it doesn't objectively matter if it is true.

Also, the main stock objections to Xty: the problem of evil, alleged discrepancies in scripture, Darwinism, etc, really don't get much traction with me. Were I to argue against Xty, I'd actually argue more generally against the coherency of God as described (a fully actualized being with no potentiality whatsoever, absolutely simple, etc) than anything else. But while divine simplicity confuses me to death in light of the Trinity, the other attributes of God don't puzzle me that much.

(And then there are various objections to Xty proffered by its opponents that strike me more as things that are consistent with Xty, such as when atheists use the size of the known universe or the potential for rational/moral life somewhere else. These have zero argumentative force as arguments against Xty as far as I'm concerned, and in fact strike me as completely consistent with it. Or as another example, the claims that religious belief may be explained by our neural "wiring"; here I'd consider this completely consistent with a Creator making morally accountable creatures. And so on. But I'm getting waaay off-topic now.)

So getting back to scripture, and the gospels in particular, I'm totally fine with just letting a difficulty stand and thinking there is a good chance that there is some missing fact that when conjoined with the two apparently conflicting facts fixes things. Maybe not. Maybe one of the gospels is in fact wrong on a detail. If so, does that cause me to discard everything else in the gospels? I don't do this in real life; why would I do it for the gospels? I think Lydia's positions, besides being correct, have the virtue of epistemic humility as well!

Will this book be available on Kindle or an electronic format? That would be most convenient for me, but either way I plan on reading it. It should be really good!

So getting back to scripture, and the gospels in particular, I'm totally fine with just letting a difficulty stand and thinking there is a good chance that there is some missing fact that when conjoined with the two apparently conflicting facts fixes things. Maybe not.

Actually, it occurs to me that we should press the argument a step farther. Scientism-types are confident that our resorting to God as an explanation of certain things is nothing more than wishful thinking, and that science "will eventually" solve all such riddles. When you ask for why they are confident science will solve the questions, they point to "the enormous success science has had in solving so many difficulties so far", and (effectively) they just extrapolate from there. (I suppose there is some nuance involved in that extrapolation, but be that as it may, it is still nothing essentially better than that).

But we can use exactly the same tactic on the difficulties in the Gospels. In fact, in this we are aided by all the awwwful, idiotic, silly "objections" posed by the Bart Erhmans (and worse snake-oil practitioners than him): since SO MANY of them have perfectly good solution, we are in a similar position as the scientists are when they point out how many problems science has solved. We have hundreds of solutions for supposed problems. So we assert (by similar extrapolation) "and we are confident that there are, likewise, factual solutions to the remaining problems, even if we cannot see them right now." The fact that we have encountered and then solved one "problem" after another should grant us a line of credit (as Joe says) that allows us to be taken seriously when we say "the fact that we have not yet solved Z problem is not evidence that it cannot be solved."

As far as faith goes: nobody - and I mean NOBODY - ever came to the faith precisely on account of each and every detail of Christianity AND the Bible were established to their (well-reasoned) satisfaction on the basis of independent evidence. (And if that was their pathway, it wouldn't be "faith", it would be another sort of affirmation). We should not be in the position that our faith is gravely endangered by noticing a difficulty that we don't have the solution for. On the other hand, we should not expect that a reasonable opponent questioning Christianity will be convinced precisely when we encounter and solve N problems, or N+1, or N+2... for each person the tipping point will be different. Our job (in that kind of situation) is to present an account that reasonably attests to the truth, and let God's grace work its inner miracle. But for an opponent with bad will, who is intent not on the truth so much as on defeating you no matter what, prayer and sacrifice will be more valuable than argument. (Though, sometimes we should argue anyway, for the sake of those others who hear, who are more open.)

Will this book be available on Kindle or an electronic format? That would be most convenient for me, but either way I plan on reading it. It should be really good!

I went to the pre-order site (on Amazon) and it did not have a Kindle format available (yet). You can do as I did and scroll down just a bit and on the right-hand side will be a link to "Tell the Publisher 'I'd like to read this book on Kindle.'" The more requests they get, perhaps the more quickly it will happen. ??

On the Kindle question, my publisher currently doesn't have concrete plans for a Kindle version, but we hope to have one eventually. My contract for the book covers both paper and Kindle. With Hidden in Plain View, I believe it was about a year between paper and Kindle. I have a hope that when eventually TMOM is in Kindle we will be able to get it done in such a way that the page numbers correspond to the paper page numbers. I've seen a couple of books now that have that, and it's a tremendous convenience for others who want to cite it, because the citations are the same for both Kindle and paper. But that part might not be possible.

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