Can the New Testament documents be trusted? Do the Gospels accurately report what Jesus said and did? In this presentation, I investigate the historical data bearing on the dating of the New Testament documents, and ask whether there is good reason to think the four canonical gospels are written by the individuals with whom they are traditionally associated, and whether they … [Read more...]
Undesigned Coincidences in Scripture
[This post is a work in progress as part of the CAA Catechism.] [Add the title only in the title field, not in the body of the post.] Summary in 400 words or less: The argument from undesigned coincidences (UC) counters the skeptic’s notion that “the Bible is only the claim” and offers no evidence within Itself for Its own truthfulness. Far from the fallacious argument of ad … [Read more...]
Undesigned Coincidences: Part 6
Because Paul’s travels brought him into contact with many people, and some of them repeatedly, it is particularly instructive to compare the notices of some of those people in the book of Acts with the references and allusions to them in Paul’s own letters. Of those people, few are more interesting than Timothy. In 1 Corinthians 4:17, Paul explains that he has sent Timothy, … [Read more...]
Undesigned Coincidences: Part 5
A life as rich in travel and relationships as Paul’s was, documented both by his letters and by the history of the book of Acts, affords many opportunities for undesigned coincidences to emerge—so many, in fact, that it is worth pausing to see some of the evidence that Acts was not written by someone who had Paul’s letters before him. Leafing through 2 Corinthians, we notice … [Read more...]
Undesigned Coincidences: Part 4
There are certain parts of Paul’s letters that we typically pass over in silence. The long lists of greetings, in particular, are flyover territory for expository preachers. “Greet Asyncritus, Phlegon, Hermes, Patrobas, Hermas, ...” The congregation is probably snoring already. And yet such passages can, on occasion, furnish us with beautiful examples of coincidence without … [Read more...]
The Feeding of the Five Thousand: Did It Really Happen?
It’s a story which we have all grown up with. We are all familiar with the famous story of Jesus miraculously feeding the five thousand from five loaves and two fish, with no fewer than twelve basketfuls of leftovers. The story is recounted by all four gospel writers: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. But just how historical is this story? In this article, I attempt to highlight … [Read more...]
Undesigned Coincidences: Part 3
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...]
Jesus' Birth: How undesigned coincidences give evidence for the truth of the Gospel accounts
There are many charges raised against the historicity of the birth narratives of Jesus Christ. These run the gamut from objections based upon alleged contradictions to inconsistencies in the genealogies to incredulity over the possibility of a virgin birth. Rather than make a case to rebut each of these objections in turn, here I will focus upon using undesigned coincidences to … [Read more...]