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Making sense of intriguing correlations between the Gospels (Part 2)
My previous blogpost spotlighted Lydia McGrew’s treatise, Hidden in Plain View (DeWard Publishing; 2017). In it, she explores a variety of “undesigned coincidences” appearing in the Gospels and Acts to affirm the reliability of the Gospels. I used McGrew’s foundational premise to consider an episode recounted in the three Synoptic Gospels, in which Jesus and His disciples experienced a violent windstorm while in a fishing boat on the Sea of Galilee. In the current blogpost, I want to lift up for consideration a second episode involving Jesus, His disciples, and the Sea of Galilee. The intent is to showcase another example of how seemingly unrelated details in various Gospel accounts…
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Making sense of intriguing correlations between the Gospels
Within New Testament studies, extreme versions of historical criticism approach the question of the Gospels’ historicity and reliability with a hermeneutic of suspicion. In its most cynical expression, advocates question everything in the Gospels and affirm virtually nothing. Adherents of the preceding view contend that the final form of the Gospels has little, if any, connection to real people and actual historical events. Instead, all that is left are faint memories or kernels of truth about the way Christians eulogized, or wanted to commemorate, Jesus of Nazareth. Some proponents even allege that the Gospels are an amalgam of later additions, revisions, and redactions spanning the following centuries, until the dominant…