How Undesigned Coincidences Fail to Be Evidence
Before we go through McGrew’s examples of undesigned coincidences, I want to outline the major deficiencies in the argument from undesigned coincidences.
Reliability
Undesigned coincidences are supposed to be evidence for the reliability of the reports they are found in. And they allegedly are in two ways. 1 One is that coinciding details make collusion unlikely. The details connect too subtly, and most readers won’t even notice the coincidence. As McGrew says, “such a subtle connection is not very useful to a forger or fictionalizer who wants his story to be taken as true”. 2
I don’t completely agree with this, but since I never appeal to collusion to explain any of McGrew’s examples, we can move on.
The second and more important way that coinciding details are supposedly evidence for reliability is that they support or explain each other. For example, Mark’s mentioning of green grass in a story and John’s claim that the Passover was near in his version of the same story lend support to each other, because both details indicate it was springtime. 3
But this kind of coinciding relationship between the details cannot be used as evidence for reliability, because details can coincide this way whether they are reliable or not. Coinciding details don’t need to come from eyewitness reports of historical events; they can also come from storytellers pulling from oral and literary traditions. This will become clearer when we discuss McGrew’s examples.
Eyewitness Testimony
Undesigned coincidences are also supposed to be evidence that the Gospels and Acts are based on direct eyewitness testimony. I do think that the Gospels and Acts contain some reliable information, and that this information ultimately goes back to eyewitnesses—but indirectly. McGrew, however, is using undesigned coincidences to make a stronger claim: that these texts were written by “either direct eyewitnesses or friends and associates of eyewitnesses”.
But how, exactly, is an undesigned coincidence evidence that the accounts come directly from eyewitnesses?
According to McGrew, the reason an undesigned coincidence is evidence for eyewitness testimony is simple: Undesigned coincidences show up in eyewitness accounts but they don’t show up in non-eyewitness accounts. She writes:
Casual comments, allusions, and omissions that fit together [i.e., undesigned coincidences] are not what one would find in different fictional or fictionalized works written by different people. They are also not to be expected among different legendary stories that grew up gradually long after the events. They are the sort of thing that one gets in real witness testimony from people close-up to real events. (Original emphasis)
To support her claim that undesigned coincidences are a feature of eyewitness testimony, McGrew appeals to the expertise of a former cold-case homicide detective named J. Warner Wallace. 4
Wallace, in his book Cold-Case Christianity, attests that “true, reliable eyewitness accounts are never completely parallel and identical. Instead, they are different pieces of the same puzzle, unintentionally supporting and complementing each other to provide all the details related to what really happened.” 5
What Wallace is describing sounds like undesigned coincidences. And as a former homicide detective, Wallace can be considered an authority on eyewitness testimony. So, we have some evidence that eyewitness testimonies can contain undesigned coincidences.
But what we still need is evidence that undesigned coincidences either do not or rarely occur in oral and literary traditions. Without that evidence, we have no reason to think the presence of undesigned coincidences is evidence for eyewitness testimony rather than oral and literary traditions.
This is where McGrew’s argument fails, and fails hard. McGrew provides no data to support her claim that undesigned coincidences are evidence for eyewitness testimony. Instead she deploys an argument that is, quite frankly, terrible.
Although the argument is different depending on the specific coincidence, it can be distilled down to the following form: At least one of the details in a coincidence is problematic. It’s ambiguous, puzzling, or unexplained, or it raises a question that the rest of the source doesn’t answer. Because it’s problematic, no one would’ve invented it and included it in their account without providing more context or explanation. Storytellers would’ve realized that including such a problematic detail would’ve made their accounts suspicious. But eyewitnesses, or authors who interviewed an eyewitness, would’ve included it because they knew that it was true. They wouldn’t have worried or even realized that the detail was problematic. They were simply presenting the details as they remembered them.
This argument is dependent upon very naive assumptions. First, it assumes that storytellers are perfect, and that they will include all necessary details and not leave any unexplained details in their accounts. Obviously this assumption is false. And second, it assumes eyewitnesses, or authors who interviewed eyewitnesses, are so focused on telling the truth they aren’t concerned about ensuring their accounts make sense. This assumption is also obviously false.
What’s even more problematic for McGrew’s argument is that every time she explains why an eyewitness might include a problematic detail, the very same reasons can explain why a storyteller might include it. In general, these reasons reduce down to the author’s not realizing the detail was problematic, or the author’s privileging other details. Again, this point will become clearer when we look at McGrew’s examples.
Conclusion
Undesigned coincidences in the Gospels and Acts are supposed to be evidence that these sources are reliable and based on eyewitness testimony. But they’re not, and in this post I’ve sketched out the reasons why: Details can coincide without being true, and both storytellers and eyewitnesses can include problematic details in their accounts. And since undesigned coincidences are not evidence for reliable eyewitness testimony, McGrew’s argument from undesigned coincidences fails.
Now we’ll go through McGrew’s examples of undesigned coincidences, and we’ll see exactly why they fail to be evidence that the Gospels and Acts “are historically reliable and that they come from people close to the facts”.
- I’m getting the two ways from McGrew’s discussion of a hypothetical undesigned coincidence in the “General Introduction” of her book, Hidden in Plain View: Undesigned Coincidences in the Gospels and Acts (DeWard, 2017). The example involves three friends and their meeting at a cafe. However, the example is unanalogous to the situation we have with the Gospels and Acts. The Gospels and Acts are anonymous, making it possible that they are based on oral and literary traditions. But in McGrew’s hypothetical example, the reader is supposed to pretend to be friends with Alan and Betty, making the options either that Alan and Betty are eyewitnesses to a meeting with Carl in the cafe, or that they are crafty colluders lying to the reader about a meeting with Carl in the cafe. There’s no possibility that the accounts of the cafe meeting are based on oral and written stories, which is the alternative hypothesis I support. ↩
- I’m using the Kindle version of Hidden in Plain View, making page number useless. All the quotes in this post come from the book’s “General Introduction”, section “Organization and Argument of this Book”. ↩
- For a full discussion of this coincidence, find the post on Coincidence 11: The Green Grass. ↩
- Wallace also happens to be a Christian apologist. In fact, Wallace wrote the afterword to Hidden in Plain View. ↩
- J. Warner Wallace, Cold-Case Christianity: A Homicide Detective Investigates the Claims of the Gospels (Colorado Springs, CO: David Cook, 2013), p. 183. Cited in McGrew, Hidden in Plain View, “General Introduction”, section “Organization and Argument of this Book”. ↩