Skip to contentWillowOne's PositionsTagsWhat’s newMediaStatisticsSearch
WillowOne's Positions

Argument from Undesigned Coincidences

Form

An argument from William Paley (Horae Paulinae, 1790) and J. J. Blunt (1847), revived by Lydia McGrew (Hidden in Plain View, 2017):

  1. The gospels and Acts contain incidental details in one account that are explained only by details in another, where neither author seems to have the other in view. In John 6:5 Jesus asks Philip where to buy bread; Luke 9:10 locates the feeding near Bethsaida; John 1:44 says Philip came from Bethsaida. In Mark 14:65 the guards strike Jesus and say "Prophesy!", which makes sense only when Luke 22:64 adds that he was blindfolded. Matthew 14:1–2 has Herod's opinion of Jesus discussed among the disciples, which is explained by Luke 8:3's note that the wife of Herod's steward was among Jesus's followers.
  2. Such interlocking is the signature of independent, truthful reports of real events; fabricated or legendary accounts do not dovetail by accident.
  3. Therefore the gospels are grounded in eyewitness memory and are historically reliable.

My Positions

  1. The accounts are not independent. Matthew and Luke used Mark, and much of the time copy him verbatim; John shows knowledge of the synoptic tradition and probably of Mark. When Luke adds a blindfold to Mark's "Prophesy!", that is a later author smoothing a rough edge in his source, which is the opposite of two witnesses coinciding. The coincidences presuppose independence, and the synoptic problem is the two-hundred-year-old demonstration that there is none.
  2. With enough text and a motivated reader, coincidences are guaranteed. Four long narratives of overlapping events contain thousands of details. Any pair of them will yield dozens of places where one happens to make sense of another, by chance and by shared tradition, and a reader who is looking will find them. The argument gives no base rate, no count of the misses (the places where the accounts fail to interlock or flatly contradict, which are far more numerous, above all in the resurrection narratives), and no control (Texas Sharpshooter, Cherry-picking). Run the method on the Book of Mormon, the apocryphal gospels, or any shared-universe fiction and it finds coincidences there too.
  3. Coherence is a feature of competent composition. Authors writing within a shared body of stories produce accounts that dovetail because they are drawing on the same pool, and later copyists and editors actively harmonised the texts. That is why the gospels agree where they agree, and it is why Tatian could weave them into one narrative in the second century.
  4. The method had its day and was dropped. Nineteenth-century scholarship abandoned undesigned coincidences as source criticism showed the gospels' literary dependence. Its revival is confined to apologetics, and it is not used by historians on any other body of ancient texts.
  5. Even if a shared historical core is granted, it does not contain miracles. That Philip came from Bethsaida may be true. That five thousand were fed from five loaves does not follow from the accuracy of the geography (Historical Reliability of the New Testament).

Sources

  • Paley, W., Horae Paulinae (1790)
  • Blunt, J. J., Undesigned Coincidences in the Writings Both of the Old and New Testament (1847)
  • McGrew, L., Hidden in Plain View: Undesigned Coincidences in the Gospels and Acts (2017)
  • Goodacre, M., The Synoptic Problem: A Way Through the Maze (2001); The Case Against Q (2002)
  • Allison, D., Constructing Jesus (2010)

Also see