This book was recommended by Ross Douthat in his recent book, and an excellent recommendation it was!
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I’ll begin with an overview of the book, starting with the author’s definition of the eponymous “undesigned coincidence” (12):
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 author gives a couple of examples in her interview with Sean McDowell here [link: https://seanmcdowell.org/blog/unique-evidence-for-the-new-testament-interview-with-lydia-mcgrew-about-unintended-coincidences-1 ] (another good example involves the different ways that the Gospels treat Joseph of Arimathea,78-79):
In John 13 we’re told that Jesus got up after eating the Last Supper and washed the disciples’ feet. It just sort of happens out of the blue. Reading only John, you might think that Jesus thought of this idea for no special reason, and it does raise the question, “Why did he do that just then?” If you go over to Luke 22, though, there is an explanation: It says that the disciples had been bickering at that very meal about who would be greatest in the kingdom. So the foot-washing in John is explained. Jesus was giving them an example of humility and service when they had just been competing and fighting. Luke never mentions the foot-washing, and John never mentions the argument. Those same two passages have a coincidence in the other direction. In Luke, Jesus scolds the disciples for bickering and says, of himself, that though he is their master, “I am among you as the one who serves.” This is a slightly weird expression in Luke, because he hasn’t done anything especially servant-like. But if you read about the foot-washing in John, you see that he has just dressed himself like a servant and washed their feet. He has literally been among them as one who serves. So the two passages fit together extremely tightly because of what each one contains and each one leaves out. Luke explains John, and John explains Luke.
The point is that this sort of coinciding between two narratives reinforces the credibility of both — and there are a lot of them in the New Testament narratives. The author emphasizes that this approach is not novel in Christian apologetics: To the contrary, it was once popular — she cites in particular the English clergyman and apologist William Paley (1743-1805) — but has fallen into disuse. The author states, “Paley’s dictum should be inscribed upon the office doorposts of every New Testament scholar: ‘The usual character of human testimony is substantial truth under circumstantial variety'”(19).
The book is divided into two parts: “Part One — Hidden in Plain View in the Gospels” and “Part Two — Hidden in Plain View in Acts and the Pauline Epistles” (see also 96). The author concludes (220):
I have argued for many specific points in this book, and in conclusion I want to take a step back and look at the big picture once again. The argument from undesigned coincidences in the Gospels and Acts supports a thesis that will seem to many, even to some evangelical scholars, a radical one. The thesis is that the Gospels and Acts are very, very reliable.
A brief (three page) afterword is provided by J. Warner Wallace, who is identified at its end as “Cold Case Detective; Adjunct Professor of Apologetics, Biola University; Author of Cold-Case Christianity, God’s Crime Scene and Forensic Faith.” His point is that the testimony in the Gospels is very similar to (truthful) eyewitness testimony that he heard in his years as a police detective.
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I’ll turn now to some major takeaways from the book.
First, in the introduction (28, emphasis in original), the author lists several features that make this device useful, and I noted in particular the last in her list:
[T]he argument from undesigned coincidences is bad news for the proposal that the Gospels developed, adding more nonfactual elements over time. In fact, the number of unique undesigned coincidences does not follow a developmental pattern at all. Which Gospel has the largest number of unique undesigned coincidences? John, which all are agreed is the latest of all! The order of the Gospels according to number of unique undesigned coincidences is 1) John, 2) Luke, 3) Mark, 4) Matthew. This does not fit any pattern that treats Mark, the shortest Gospel, as the most factual or that treats later Gospels as literary or redactive alterations of Mark.
Second, in the chapter on John, I noted this paragraph (46-47):
Here it should be noted that the argument from undesigned coincidences often gives us evidence that the Gospel writers saw themselves first and foremost as witnesses to the deeds and words of Jesus Christ, not primarily as authors of literary and/or theologically sculpted works. Those two roles are not necessarily in conflict, so long as the author of the literary or theological work is always scrupulous about his role as a witness — for example, as long as he does not ever “make” things happen in a way contrary to the way that, to the best of his knowledge, they. actually happened. But it is particularly noticeable that the Gospel authors often seem to write with a lack of affectation that we find in a person whose primary purpose is getting important information out there, getting down what happened, making it available, rather than in one whose primary purpose is to fit together what he writes in a polished manner. The author of the Gospel of John is certainly theological, perhaps more so than any of the other Gospel writers. But again and again we find him including items in his Gospel without their full explanations, apparently just because he wanted his readers to know that they happened. That sort of approach on John’s part is a perfectly good explanation of the presence of the John 6 discourse and the absence of the account for the institution of the Lord’s Supper in John. The fact that we find John apparently doing this type of thing repeatedly argues for the priorities of the witness rather than the priorities of the theological or literary craftsman, and it fits well with statements within the Gospel itself, most notably John 19.35: “He who saw it has borne witness — his testimony is true, and he knows that he is telling the truth — that you may also believe.”
There’s also this (106): “There are several areas in which, if the Gospel writers were not held back by considerations of truthfulness and the presence or absence of reliable information about real events, they would have been sorely tempted to event.”
The conclusion of Part I (128-29, emphasis in original) says:
The argument of Part I includes places where the Synoptic Gospels, though earlier, explain John, where John explains the Synoptics, and where the Synoptics explain each other. This final chapter has included a [variety of other undesigned coincidences] …. The reader need not give the same evaluation I do to every one of the arguments in Part I or of the sub-arguments that support them in order to see that the cumulative case from undesigned coincidences for the reliability of the Gospels is forceful and resilient.
The big picture is this: This is what truth looks like. This is what memoirs from witnesses look like. This is what it looks like when people who are trying to be truthful and who possess reliable memories of things that really happened have those memories put down in writing. This is evidence for the Gospels hidden in plain view.
The introduction to Part 2 includes a very powerful statement of the importance of Acts to Christian apologetics (see especially 134-35). And, at the end of Part 2, she writes (218), “[T]he undesigned coincidences concerning Paul, his travels, his companions, and his imprisonment support the conclusion that what Acts records about the first public teaching of the apostles, the founding of the Christian movement, and the earliest persecution of the apostles is historically trustworthy.” (My thoughts: The Gospels alone are evangelistically sufficient. But let us suppose that one found the rest of the New Testament: Should that not also suffice to show that Jesus of Nazareth was surely divine? Certainly Acts and the various New Testament letters show that a belief in that divinity was held by many obviously rational and intelligent men, was held so strongly that much dangerous travel and hard work was undertaken — and those people were willing to die for that belief. What’s more, the belief was based on eyewitness accounts of Jesus’ supernatural resurrection, and the history and letters that were written were apparently written both honestly and carefully. There is a “cumulative” force to all this, to use a word McGrew likes.)
Relatedly, the author notes, “The 19th-century historian George Rawlinson has pointed out the extreme complexity of the period of history to which the Gospels and Acts belong and the remarkable fact that the New Testament ‘falls into no error in treating of the period'” (14, footnote omitted; the beginning of this paragraph is also good). See also 235 n.13, discussing how the “entire exchange between Pilate and the religious leaders is one of many incidental historical confirmations of the historicity of the Gospels, showing in passing in the story the complex relationship of Jewish and Roman authority in Palestine at this time.”
Finally, I love the author’s paragraphs regarding how “[t]he argument from undesigned coincidences tells us something about what the authors of these documents were like” (discussing in particular John and Luke (225-26); see also 182-83 (Paul) and 13 (consistency of Jesus’ character, in addition to Paul’s).
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Here are some other odds and ends I noted:
- Interestingly, the chapter summaries are tables (see, e.g., 62).
- The author notes (30) that she thinks “the hypothesis that [the] Gospels were written by their traditionally ascribed authors is a good explanation for the data found in them, including the undesigned coincidences” (but note that she does not assume this to be true).
- She has a funny paragraph at the bottom of page 109, concluding that Jesus’ joking question to Philip before feeding the multitudes (John 6:5) was, in essence, “Philip, you’re from around here. Where can we get bread for all these people?”
- The author notes that only one of her undesigned coincidences hinges on a knowledge of Greek (212); the rest is discernible by any careful and open-minded reader.
- She worries that the “minimal facts argument” (220-22; in her notes at 262-63 she has some criticism of Michael Licona) and the “criteriological approach” (222-23), while true so far as they go, may be interpreted as conceding too much to critics regarding the New Testament’s historicity. That point is also made in the book’s modest, understated conclusion (227).
- She stresses that one need not assert inerrancy in order to argue that a text is highly reliable (226-27; she takes no position on inerrancy in this book, but elsewhere in a video she claims not to believe in it).
- Although Catholic, she does not accept the ever-virginity of Mary (245 n.20). She also thinks that the long ending of Mark, while quite ancient, is by a different author than the rest of that Gospel (247 n.4).
- Her notes are more detailed and discursive than, say, Douthat’s were. She praises and cites Colin J. Hemer (see, e.g., 246-47 n.2); indeed, she dedicates the book to him, as well as her husband (Timothy McGrew, for whom she acknowledges a professional debt — not just a marital one) and William Paley (as noted above, an 18-19th century English clergyman and theologian whose work in this field she is bringing back to Christians’ attention).
- Her notes frequently mention works by William Lane Craig, Gary Habermas, and Michael Licona.
- The blurb from Professor Paul Rhodes Eddy intriguingly notes the differences that might obtain from considering texts from an “orally dominant context” versus a “highly literate, post-Gutenberg world” — not sure what exactly he means by that, though.
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In conclusion I’ll note simply that there are lots of reasons to believe that the historical narratives in the New Testament are true, and this book brilliantly marshals one sort of evidence. I must also cite C.S. Lewis’s observation that, as someone who studied and taught ancient god myths as part of his day job, he knew what they read like — and that is not what the Gospels read like. Of course, it is possible that the truth is told about nonsupernatural matters but not about supernatural matters, but if a narrator has been shown to be generally honest it makes his lying less likely (see also 28-29). (One weak caveat: The fact that Paul was a likely source not only for his letters but also for Luke’s narratives in his gospel and Acts may lessen the asserted undesigned-ness of the coincidences, but only a bit.)
A final note: The beauty of the language in a particular translation — foremost among which is of course the King James Version — can actually undercut the argument that the facts related in the New Testament are, well, just the facts, ma’am (note that the author uses the English Standard Version; see 234 n.1). Throughout the book, the New Testament texts are shown to be and treated not as literature or even just good storytelling, but journalism (not lines, but points, as a law professor friend of mine once described the guarantees of the Bill of Rights). Of course, a sentence can be powerful even if it is simple; the author notes (238 n.11) that a classicist a made a “vivid note about John’s visual memory” in John 13:30, “And it was night.”