One of the benefits of having both Paul’s letters and a history of Paul’s activities from another hand is that we are able to compare points of contact across the two genres. Their overlap is all the more valuable since they appear to have been written largely or wholly independently of one another, with very little verbal similarity at any point. What should we expect from … [Read more...]
Undesigned Coincidences: Part 2
Talking about undesigned coincidences in the abstract can take us only so far. There is nothing like seeing a few of them for oneself to make the idea clear. We will start with an example from William Paley’s Horae Paulinae, the first work to explore this sort of argument in detail. Paley’s object is to show the numerous correspondences between the Pauline epistles and the … [Read more...]
Undesigned Coincidences: Part 1
Nearly everyone has a concept of what it means for historical claims to be confirmed by a new discovery. Tablets unearthed at Kültepe in the late 19th century reveal that there was, as the Old Testament had said, a vast Hittite empire in the time of Abraham. An Arabic manuscript turns out to contain the Diatessaron of Tatian, settling once and for all the question of whether … [Read more...]