Are the Gospels and Acts reliable and based on eyewitness testimony? In her book, Hidden in Plain View: Undesigned Coincidences in the Gospels and Acts (DeWard, 2017), Lydia McGrew argues that they are. Specifically, she argues that the Gospels and Acts are “historical memoirs of real people and events, written by those in a position to know about these people and events, either direct eyewitnesses or friends and associates of eyewitnesses, who were trying to be truthful”. 1
This conclusion is at odds with the consensus view of New Testament scholars, which is that the Gospels and Acts were written by people who were not and did not know eyewitnesses, and who based their accounts on oral and literary traditions that had been circulating for decades. These traditions changed as they were told and retold, which accounts for the similarities and the differences in the stories. The circulating traditions also explain why the Gospels and Acts contain nuggets of reliable historical information about Jesus and his followers, but why they also contain unhistorical details that are the product of literary artistry, imagination, and theological embellishments.
McGrew argues that this consensus view is wrong because within the Gospels and Acts there are “undesigned coincidences”. McGrew’s definition of an undesigned coincidence is the following:
An undesigned coincidence is a notable connection between two or more accounts or texts that doesn’t seem to have been planned by the person or people giving the accounts. Despite their apparent independence, the items fit together like pieces of a puzzle.
The undesigned coincidences connect in such subtle and casual ways that they can be easily missed—they are “hidden in plain view”. McGrew’s argument is that “the occurrence of multiple undesigned coincidences” in the Gospels and Acts is evidence that these documents “are historically reliable and that they come from people close to the facts who were attempting to tell truthfully what they knew”. These undesigned coincidences establish that the Gospels and Acts were not “written at many removes from the events that they chronicle”, that they are not “so full of contradictions that we cannot trust them”, that they are not “full of legendary accretions”, and that they do not “contain statements that are contrary to fact but that were included as literary or theological embellishments or alterations”.
On this blog I’ll explain how McGrew’s argument from undesigned coincidences fails. I’ll be going through all of McGrew’s examples of undesigned coincidences, and for each one I’ll explain why it does not constitute evidence for reliability and eyewitness testimony, and how it can be explained by oral and literary traditions. In addition, several of the examples of coincidences touch upon the evidence that the Gospels and Acts are unreliable and are not based on direct eyewitness testimony. In these cases, I’ll show why the undesigned coincidence fails to challenge this evidence.
- I’m using the Kindle version of McGrew’s book, Hidden in Plain View: Undesigned Coincidences in the Gospels and Acts (DeWard, 2017), making page number useless. All the quotes on this page come from the book’s “General Introduction”, section “Organization and Argument of this Book”. ↩