They are also not consistent with the “…idea that the Gospels contain statements that are contrary to fact but that were included as literary or theological embellishments or alterations.”
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@Faizal_Ali I see what you are saying now and did not the first couple of times through. You are saying that if there are truly undesigned consequences in myths, then this means that undesigned consequences may not be legitimate evidence for a certain narrative to have been true. I grant you that there’s more legitimacy to your point than I understood originally. I’m sorry about that.
With that said, I do wonder, as Dale has also, if you are using the term in the same way that we are and that these undesigned consequences truly exist in the narratives that you mentioned.
I don’t see how undesigned consequences could truly occur in narrative that is not true. It does not make sense. They are an effect of multiple persons actually having personal knowledge of the same topic and describing it differently. The result is that their individual honesty actually unveils truths that were otherwise not directly presented.
If they exist in Norse myths, for instance, I would imagine that they exist in narrative that describes events (parts of the story) that truly occurred.
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I think Faizal has a good point, that if the method that McGrew used to argue that the Gospels are authentic can also be used to argue that a forged or clearly legendary text is also authentic, then it is not a very good method. Sort of like calibration of a metal detector. So as you’ve read the book, my question is, does she do this kind of calibration? Does she apply it to say, modern news articles which are clearly authentic, as well as texts other than the Bible?
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I agree, and backed off my earlier misunderstanding above, as well. If I understand your point, the answer is yes. What she does is to explore each of the points in order to explore the possibility that each of the examples were purposeful and not “accidental.”
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Both her and her husband, who are both trained in analytical epistemology state that “undesigned coincidences” are unique only to multiple attestation of factual events. They do not occur in fictional or contrived accounts. Now if that isn’t true, then I would like to see the actual examples of it.
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Undesigned coincidences can only occur when there are multiple accounts of the same historical event. Which is not the case in Norse mythology for two reasons: (a) that as far as I know they are preserved in individual manuscripts, or in deliberate poetic retellings of “the old, old story,” in which details are deliberately embellished and (b) they are mythic in genre, and don’t even pretend to give local detail.
So citing Homer is completely irrelevant - even if the Odyssey and the Iliad contained coincidences in the few events that overlap, that would be expected in the same author.
So they are not specific to negatively debunking fraudulent invention, but positively to detecting a factual setting for a story in multiple tellings.
In the grass at the feeding of the 5000 example, none of the writers is that interested in describing the scene, but (a) the event and (b) in John’s case, the association with Passover. That in Judea the grass is only green around Passover is not something any author would be likely to consider consciously, but the mention of its greenness would be quite natural in an eyewitness account, and its timing would be well-known to anyone who was there.
The most natural reading is that John and Luke have access to different accounts of an actual event. A possible alternative is that there was an earlier “master account” in which much more detail both of the event (grass) AND its theological significance (Passover) existed, but even if such a lost source ever existed (and were unaccountably lost), it would still make the gospels independent attestations of an early authority, and not mythological developments.
What is vanishingly unlikely is collusion in a master-plan to make the accounts look independent by such coincidences. Indeed, that would be against the very nature of mythology, which is about some kind of eternal truth, not historical events.
Now, it would be possible that the gathering of a large crowd by Jesus did, as per the coincidences, occur at the implied time and place, and was recalled by eyewitnesses, but that no miracle happened. But then one has to grapple with four accounts whose sole unifying features are the number of men, and the miraculous feeding. There was no other reason for remembering the event at all. Even John’s passove reference hinges around Jesus as the one who feeds.
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So one should be able to apply it to contemporary news articles of the same event right? They should also yield a positive, like the Gospels. If legendary myths are not the right type of example of a “non-factual” article, perhaps one could generate one through an accelerated game of “telephone” (which simulates “legend development”) or similar means. I’m just saying that there is a potential for a good empirical test here. Not that it would necessarily definitively validate or falsify the method in a single experiment, only that it would be an interesting test.
OK. But that would still mean you can differentiate the factual vs. non-factual settings. If you apply the method to a series of contemporary news articles it should yield many undesigned coincidences, just like McGrew claims it does for the Gospels. Whereas if you apply it to a non-factual one, then it would just yield less undesigned coincidences.
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So the Gospels are not fictional or contrived. Since I am in agreement with the majority of scholars that this is not the case, I fail to see how this pertains to this discussion.
Nonetheless, on what empirical data did rely to draw this conclusion?
That is what most scholars believe the Gospels to be, broadly speaking, and I accept that majority opinion. Are you admitting that such “undesigned coincidences” exist in these retellings of the myths?
i.e. These retellings are based on original stories that have been elaborated over time and of which we have no direct accounts. However, we can get a good idea of much of the content of the original storie by piecing together the details of the retellings. There may be a detail in version A of a particular story that is unclear to us, but version B provides us with further details to figure it out.
Which is the strawman I am talking about. Most people who do not believe the Gospels to be completely or largely historically accurate do not also think they were contrived in this manner.
SImple explanation: It is a legend that had been subsumed as part of the oral and written tradition by the time the Gospels were written.
Exactly. Have the McGrews done such tests? If not, why is anyone taking them seriously?
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At a simplistic level, this is obviously true. Truthful (unprimed) witnesses in court will describe events differently, including apparent contradictions of minor details poorly remembered. But one might judge their truthfulness by minor details that do correspond. For example, the crime hinges on whether the window was open or shut on a winter night. Witness A says he noticed it was open: witness B doesn’t even mention the window, but says he put put his sweater on because he was cold, or that he lit the oil-lamp because it had blown out.
However, testimony in which witnesses not only agree on details, but on which elements they remember, has always been suspect - I was told once that rabbinic courts rejected identical testimony for that reason.
In a similar way, stories that have a “traditional” form tend to be told in the same way, even if the teller feels there’s leeway for invention: telling a joke, for example, the story-line will be fixed, but our embellishments of detail will tend to be different.
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See my reply to Daniel: stories elaborated over time also become formulaic (witness the way that nowadays nearly everyone will retell the pericopes of the gospel the same way, even from memory, because they have 2000 years of retelling behind them. Few Sunday School teachers will start the Good Samaritan, “One Tuesday afternoon in April…” Gratuitous details will be pared away, and so “undesigned coincidences” will tend to be lost.
On the other hand, let’s take your idea of an original account that, dispersed in time and space, gradually evolves a mythical miracle account. The original account (I think you are saying) has green grass and Passover, but no miraculous feeding.
The problem in that case is that you have to explain how the separate traditions all converged on the common miraculous occurrence that is the reason for the account in all four gospels. In biology common features usually mean divergence from a common ancestor.
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I’m curious about undesigned non-coincidences. For example, what do people here think of the flight into Egypt and the massacre of the innocents? Are they an account of true events, or are they something Matthew (or whoever) just made up?
Would you? Take a look at Hidden in Plain View , or just search up some of the undesigned coincidences that the McGrew’s point out in the Gospels, and let us know where something comparable can be found in Greek and Norse myths.
Edit: posted this before seeing that this assertion was already called into question. Sorry for the redundancy! 
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Sorry, I’m not sure I represented things correctly in my statement. As @jongarvey pointed out:
I must confess it is a very nuanced approach that I’m not well versed in. I do recall, though, that it may have some of it’s basis in what typically happens in criminal investigations. If I remember correctly, when there are multiple eyewitnesses it is not uncommon for one testimony to add additional information that helps makes sense of some puzzling aspect of some or all of the other testimonies. This seems to be typical of multiple attestation and one indication for investigators of the reliability of the testimony. So I believe it’s treated as positive evidence for reliability.
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Aren’t the commonalities here evidence of an actual war in the past that both works of literature were mythologizing?
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No, that is not what I am saying. Rather, the version of the story that the authors of the Gospel were familiar with had all the elements that are, collectively, present in the versions they wrote.
The common ancestor here is a story that is a combination of historical fact, myth, and legendary elaboration.
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I doubt the Judgement of Paris was the real cause of the war. I doubt any historians believe this, either.
If you understood what an undesigned coincidence was (and their numbers), you wouldn’t be saying that.
What am I not understanding, in your estimation?
Their attestation to fact.