Is There Evidence For Undesigned Coincidences Supporting Biblical Truth?

When considering evidence for the trustworthiness of Scripture, most Christians immediately imagine an archaeological discovery or the intersection of some passage in the Gospels with something written by a Roman or Jewish historian. Such external evidences work in an obvious way, providing points of reference outside of Scripture that confirm what is in Scripture itself.

Another kind of evidence, known as the evidence of undesigned coincidences, works in a different way. It uses a comparison of one passage of Scripture with another to raise the credibility of both. This kind of evidence was widely discussed in the nineteenth century but was neglected for most of the twentieth. Today it has once again risen to the forefront of apologetics.

Any time a purely internal argument for the Bible is made, people must take care not to reason in a circle. Undesigned coincidences are not passages in two of the Gospels that tell the same story in the same words. That kind of parallel language doesn’t by itself confirm the truth of what either writer says. Rather, the kind of passages up for discussion provide cases in which two or more passages interlock. Often one of them raises some natural question in the reader’s mind that another answers—and the more indirect the answer, the more confident readers can be that the answer was not included intentionally by the second author; it was not designed to remove surprise or puzzlement.

Consider that fiction and forgeries never work this way. No one picks up The Fellowship of the Ring in order to answer questions raised by reading Moby Dick. No one expects any connection between those two works. They are not anchored in the same independent reality. But when two works (especially two books penned by different authors) interlock like that, the coincidence suggests the authors were well-informed and wrote truthfully. And when multiple interconnections crisscross a set of narratives, they form a strong cumulative case.

The best way to understand this kind of evidence involves looking at examples. Matthew 14 tells the story of the death of John the Baptist, but in the setup for that story in vv. 1-2, Herod Antipas expresses his perplexity to his own servants. Here a natural question could be raised: How could Matthew know what Herod said to his servants, presumably in the privacy of his own palace? Matthew is just a former tax collector who is now a traveling preacher. Turning to Luke 8:3 (which is not part of a story about the death of John the Baptist), a plausible answer to this question rises: Jesus’s followers had family among the highest ranks of Herod’s servants. Luke explains something puzzling about Matthew.

Another example begins at Luke 9:36. Why do Peter, James, and John tell no one about Jesus’s transfiguration until after his resurrection? Here Mark 9:9 supplies a detail that Luke left out: Jesus commanded them not to tell anyone about it at that time. Luke records their obedience but not the command; Mark records the command but not their obedience. Neither narrative copies from the other. Mark explains Luke.

The setup for the feeding of the five thousand in Mark 6:31 leads into a third example. Why are many people coming and going? They aren’t there to see Jesus (or else the very idea of trying to get out of the crowd would make no sense). John 6:4 reveals a detail about the setting for the same event that Mark omits. The Passover was near. For that annual feast, hundreds of thousands of Jews traveled to Jerusalem from all parts of the Roman Empire. No wonder it was crowded on any route that led to Jerusalem! John explains Mark.

In John 18 Pilate asks Jesus whether he is the King of the Jews (v. 33). In looking back through John 18, a reader cannot see why Pilate should have asked this question at all; it is not one of the charges against Jesus that John records earlier in the chapter. But a glance at Luke 23:1-3, which is a different account of the same episode, reveals that Luke does record that accusation. And this undesigned coincidence goes both directions. In Luke 23:1-4, Pilate is satisfied with Jesus’s curt response to the question of whether he is a King—a charge that a Roman governor would have to take most seriously—and declares that he finds no fault in him. This is an extremely puzzling response: “You say so” might mean, “Yes,” or it might mean “Well, so you say,” but it hardly means “No, not me!” But John 18 reveals a longer version of the exchange and highlights that Jesus told Pilate that his “kingdom is not of this world” (v. 36). That answer explains Pilate’s response. Jesus did not pose a threat to Caesar’s authority. He was not that sort of king.

Many more undesigned coincidences exist, both among the Gospels and between other parts of Scripture. William Paley’s Horae Paulinae (first published in 1790) covers the interconnections between the book of Acts and Paul’s letters, and John James Blunt’s Undesigned Coincidences (part of which was published first in 1828 under a different title) goes through scores of examples in both the Old and the New Testament. Both volumes are available online. In more recent literature, J. Warner Wallace, a cold-case homicide detective, has emphasized the significance of the argument from undesigned coincidences among the Gospels in his book Cold-Case Christianity (2013).