Let me start with with the fun part: Joe Schmid now really loves Jesus, and Jesus has clearly changed him. That. Is. Awesome. Christians should be happy about that. Protestants poo-pooing online are super weird to me. We should be rejoicing with the angels.

I’m also glad miracles played a big role in Joe’s conversion. The argument from miracles is criminally underrated. Also, Joe is also now a MAX DATA guy on the Resurrection, which is basically a second conversion as far as I’m concerned. He’s a McGrewpie. A McPologist, if you will, at least loosely. Still, very based. And he cited some of my videos in his gigantic conversion document, which honestly means a lot to me. If my work helped him even a little, that makes all the hard work uploading my goofy content for little pay all worth it.

Now for my probably dumb, premature worries.

To be honest, I haven’t watched the 27 hours or so worth of materials Joe has uploaded about his conversion and his defense of Catholicism. I’m reacting to the parts I’ve jumped around to so far, not pretending this is a complete answer to his case. Maybe he has already answered half of this and I’m being the proverbial fool by answering a matter before he hears it. (Proverbs 18:13)

My acquaintance Matthew Adelstein raised some similarish concerns. Matt’s a generic theist, and I can’t say that I share all his worries about inerrancy, hell, or Christian sexual ethics at all. Still, I think he puts his finger on a real issue: strong evidence that something supernatural happened is not always strong evidence for the whole Roman Catholic system.

My concern is evidential standards, not “Rome bad”

Theologically, I have some issues with Rome over justification and assurance of salvation. But I’m not rabidly anti-Catholic. I was in the church for at least some of my childhood. I received my first communion there. I might even be Catholic to this day if my parents didn’t quit going to church. There’s a lot about Rome that I respect and I think we’re all bros, even if we’re “separated bros.” But that’s not my main issue here.

Obviously, I’m not coming at this as someone embarrassed by miracle claims. I’m a Pentecostal. I already think God heals people. I make videos about God healing people. Joe played clips of one of those videos. And healing is all over the Gospels and Acts. Christians are told to pray for the sick. If someone has a clearly diagnosed disease, receives prayer, suddenly recovers, and stays well, I’m very open to calling that a miracle, as long as it passes some strong evidential standards. And that’s one thing the Catholic church does pretty well. I wish my tradition was better at that. But yeah, some healing cases are about as open and shut as historical evidence gets.

They also make sense within Christianity. Jesus healed people. The apostles healed people. So if God still heals people through prayer, that fits the biblical pattern just fine. It doesn’t matter to me if they’re charismatic, Baptist, Catholic, Anglican or whatever.

The harder cases for me are the ones that are less straightforward, or the ones where several extra steps get smuggled in. A strange light is seen, therefore it was Mary. Human tissue is tested, therefore it used to be a consecrated host. A miracle happens near Catholics, therefore disputed Roman doctrines are true.

Any of those conclusions certainly could be right, I suppose. But each added step needs evidence. That’s also why I have resisted hyped-up apologetic claims about the Shroud of Turin. If it were Jesus’ burial cloth, that would clearly help Christianity and would obviously serve my apologetic interests. But wanting a claim to be true doesn’t fix gaps in its history or testing. They also make it more difficult for me to grasp since they require trusting a lot of disputed evidence that’s over most people’s heads, including my own. Bottom line: I want Christians of every stripe to use good evidence, including when it helps us.

So I am not trying to explain away every Catholic miracle. I would probably accept many of the healing cases Joe discusses, especially if they pass the Lambertini criteria. The question is what those healings prove.

A genuine healing at a Catholic shrine is evidence in Catholicism’s favor. I can’t just say “meh, it’s neutral.” It’s not. But God could heal Catholics even if Vatican I were wrong, just as Catholics presumably believe God can heal Protestants without thereby endorsing every Protestant doctrine. The jump from “God acted here” to “Christ requires every Christian to submit to Rome” at least seems to be to be much bigger than it sometimes sounds.

Rome does not start at 50/50 for me

I don’t think the prior for Rome is exactly on the floor. They have their arguments. The early church gives us an important Peter, an important Roman church, and a Roman bishop who eventually exercised real authority.

But golly, I don’t know if that evidence exactly gives us the full teaching of Vatican I, with it’s universal and immediate papal jurisdiction, together with papal infallibility under the stated conditions.

The first thousand years are pretty darn complicated. Popes make major interventions, but bishops also resist Roman judgments. Councils govern the Church. The ancient East remains thoroughly Christian and sacramental without consistently behaving as though the later Vatican I model were already settled.

Then there are later dogmas with thin early records. The Assumption has some real roots in later Christian tradition. No one should be saying Catholics invented it in 1950. But the surviving explicit evidence comes centuries after the apostles, Epiphanius is uncertain about how exactly Mary died, and the traditions differ on details. Rome eventually defined the bodily Assumption as divinely revealed while leaving open whether Mary died first. But man, this doesn’t seem to be a ‘believe it or anathema’ kind of belief that can be pressed upon Christians with such shaky historical backing.

Penance, purgatory, and indulgences bug me, too. One could say that there are early precedents for penance, prayer for the dead, and postmortem purification. No one should be saying that Catholics made every piece up out of nowhere. Still, the developed system of temporal punishment and Church-administered indulgences looks more complicated and elaborate than anything the apostles clearly laid out.

None of this is meant to be TESTIFY DESTROYS ROME, it just means Rome does not enter the miracle discussion at 50/50 for me. Miracles have some work to do, and the amount of work depends on how specifically they point to Rome rather than Christianity in general.

Lourdes is the one that moves me most

Lourdes is a different beast altogether. The recognized cures go through a super demanding medical process, which I highly respect. I’m fine with healing miracles. Heck, I have used some of these cases as evidence for Christianity. They’re public enough to investigate, the before-and-after claims have witnesses and doctor reports, and they look like the kind of thing God does in Scripture. If a person has documented case of blindness and then suddenly can see, we at least know what the claimed event is.

Lourdes also has more Catholic bite than a generic healing ministry. Bernadette said the apparition identified herself as “the Immaculate Conception,” only a few years after Rome defined the doctrine in 1854. If the healings authenticate Bernadette and her apparition, then yeah, that’s more difficult for me to square. That at least prima facie seems to raise the probability of the Immaculate Conception. I mean, I’d have a double standard if I pretended otherwise.

The remaining question is how far that confirmation travels. Does it automatically establish Vatican I, indulgences, the Assumption, and the duty of every Christian to enter Roman communion? Or could it be that there are healing miracles in lots of different denominations, and God honors some people’s faith even if their theology isn’t exactly spot on. I don’t think God will refuse to heal someone if he wants to heal them because they asked a departed saint to pray for them. Do these miracles serve as signs that validate the apparition; or signs of the compassion of Jesus in general?

Padre Pio: separate the claims

I am open to healings connected with Padre Pio. Again, God healing someone through the prayers of a deeply Catholic man wouldn’t at all shock me. Same thing goes for exorcisms.

The stigmata are a different claim, and I’m somewhat skeptical without claiming to have solved the case.

Contemporary examinations don’t all seem to describe the same thing. Some witnesses described deep, bleeding wounds. Bishop Raffaello Rossi’s 1921 examination reportedly found lesions but no clear opening or piercing of the tissue, with some marks fading. Later witnesses described holes deep enough to see light through. Padre Pio also privately requested carbolic acid. He said it was used to disinfect syringes, which is a possible innocent explanation. Not saying “welp, total fraud!” But all of this isn’t as clear cut as say….Bernadette Moreau being healed of cauda aquina.

Maybe the stigmata were genuine. Maybe some stories grew in the telling. Maybe the healing claims are much stronger than the wounds. I’m not saying he’s a fraud, I’m just saying this stuff doesn’t really move me very far.

Eucharistic miracles: the missing step is the whole claim

Eucharistic miracles could be some of the most Catholic-specific evidence on the table. If a consecrated host visibly changed into living human heart tissue under strong controls, that would be something, for sure. That would be evidence for Catholicism. But again, now I feel like I’m in Shroud of Turin territory. This is difficult stuff for me to evaluate, not to mention it has a certain “weirdness” factor.

Lanciano has a long gap between the alleged eighth-century event and the later records available to us. Modern testing might say something about the material now preserved, but it can’t by itself tell us how that material arrived there many centuries ago.

Some of the sharpest criticism here actually comes from Catholics. Catholic chemist Stacy Trasancos says the lab results are often less conclusive than popular retellings make them sound. She and Catholic immunologist Kelly Kearse have called for raw data, proper controls, DNA testing, and standard procedures. Kearse notes that bacteria can produce misleading AB blood-type results, and his control experiments found reddish fungus and bacteria growing on ordinary unconsecrated wafers kept under similar conditions. Catholic cardiologist Franco Serafini also discovered that the famous “WHO report” supposedly confirming Lanciano was mostly research on Egyptian mummies dressed up as a Lanciano investigation. Not saying the whole thing is bogus, but it shows that Catholics themselves have good reason to stop repeating the big scientific claims until the evidence is a lot cleaner. And it’s not like Catholics are the only Christian group who believe in real presence, so I’m not sure if this uniquely points to Rome.

Fatima: interesting, but still iffy

Fatima is interesting-ish. A public miracle was promised for a particular date and place, a huge crowd showed up, and many people reported something unusual. That counts for something. But I cringed when Trent Horn told PineCreek Doug that Fatima was better attested than the Resurrection. I respect and like Trent, but better attested in what sense, exactly?

The prediction didn’t specify what the crowd would see, and reports varied. Some saw the sun spin, change colors, or plunge toward the earth. Others reported something less dramatic or nothing unusual. The sun obviously did not literally move, so we’re dealing with a local, atmospheric, perceptual event, or some combination. Retinal effects from staring at the sun could explain part of the testimony, though probably not all of it.

There is some in-house Catholic caution here too. Jesuit theologian Edouard Dhanis distinguished between “Fatima I,” the original 1917 events, and “Fatima II,” the much fuller story found in Lucia’s later memoirs. He accepted that something supernatural may have happened while questioning whether all the later details could be projected back into 1917.

That seems to be a bit of a problem for the “secrets.” Lucia did not write the first two parts down until 1941, after the Russian Revolution, the rise of communism, and the beginning of World War II. The third was written in 1944 and is highly symbolic. The Vatican later connected it with the 1981 attempt on John Paul II, but Cardinal Ratzinger himself stressed that these visions are not photographs of the future. They are filtered through the seer’s own mind and use symbolic language. The Vatican’s publication of the Fatima material gives the dates, texts, and Ratzinger’s cautions.

I’m not saying Lucia was lying or crazy. Fatima is weird and interesting, but it only goes so far for me.

Zeitoun is not the Resurrection, and it ain’t Rome, either

Zeitoun might be evidence that something strange happened. Large crowds reported luminous phenomena over a church in Egypt, and the reports were contemporary. It’s….interesting.

But what did they see? The photographs are usually blurry, washed out, or poorly sourced. Witnesses reported lights and a luminous figure, but the figure gave no spoken message. A glowing outline does not come with a “Hi, I’m Mary” name tag. Anthropologist Cynthia Nelson visited repeatedly and reported mysterious flashes and an ambiguous luminous form, but nothing she could confidently identify as the Virgin Mary.

That makes the content of the testimony crucial. Seeing a weird light above a church ain’t the same kind of identification as eating with, speaking with, and touching a man you already knew after watching him be crucified. The Resurrection accounts don’t just say that people saw a mysterious form. They identify Jesus through extended, repeated encounters. “We saw something bright” and “we touched our formerly crucified rabbi” are not equal claims just because more people may have reported the first one. So when the argument is made that Zeitoun is better evidenced than the Resurrection, again, I cringe. How are we defining better here?

Zeitoun also occurred over a Coptic Orthodox church and was approved by Coptic authorities. It’s plainly not a Roman Catholic miracle in any simple sense.

Where I land for now

Miracle claims should be judged one at a time. Healings are usually pretty straightforward: someone was sick, people prayed, and now they’re well. That’s testable, biblically familiar, and honestly feels safe to me. I’m happy to accept good healing evidence, including Catholic cases.

The other claims involve more links in the chain. What caused Padre Pio’s wounds? Did the tested tissue actually begin as a host? What happened at Fatima? What exactly was the light at Zeitoun? The farther the conclusion gets from what was directly observed, the more careful we should be.

I think I understand Joe’s cumulative argument, and I’m willing to look closer. I’d be a bad evidentialist if I wasn’t. He has studied this more than I have, so I’m happy to give him the benefit of the doubt and admit I may be missing something. I’m just not convinced every step from “miracle” to “therefore Rome” holds up.

Lourdes moves the needle the most. Many of the healings are impressive. Something is up. But there still seems to be enough wiggle room between “God acted at Lourdes” and “therefore Vatican I, indulgences, and every disputed Roman doctrine are true.” It makes me maybe update toward Catholicism without getting me all the way there.

So yes, I think a Protestant can take this evidence seriously and still reasonably remain outside Rome. No constant ecclesial anxiety. No feeling like Peter and Paul are about to jump you because you haven’t crossed the Tiber yet.

I’m incredibly grateful Joe follows Jesus, and I’m glad miracles helped bring him back. I’ll keep looking, slowly but surely. For now, Lourdes makes me look twice somewhat at least, but it doesn’t make me swim.

But yeah, Lourdes at the very makes me scratch my head and say “wow.” Something is up. It just still doesn’t get me all the way there. Hopefully I can be forgiven for remaining non-Catholic. Personally, I think for now at least that a Protestant or other non-Roman Christian can look at the same evidence, update in Catholicism’s direction, and still reasonably remain outside Rome. That person doesn’t need live with constant ecclesial anxiety as if they’re about to face the wrath of Peter and Paul, as though every healing at a shrine proves that staying Protestant is rebellion against Christ.

I’m incredibly grateful Joe follows Jesus. I’m glad miracles helped bring him back. And I’m willing to keep looking, slowly but surely. But for now, Lourdes makes me look twice. It does not make me swim the Tiber.

The Qur’an fires off at Christians for saying, “The Messiah is the Son of Allah.” It follows the statement with an anathema: “May Allah condemn them!” (Qur’an 9:30). But here’s where things get awkward: Who exactly taught Christians to call the Messiah God’s Son in the first place?

The prophets did. The very prophets and Scriptures the Qur’an claims to confirm. The prophets that were inspired by Allah. Oh, right. Yeah. Those prophets.

Now, right off the bat, I’m not claiming Psalm 2 gives us the whole Nicene Creed or that Muslims have no possible reply. They do. The better question is whether those replies actually explain the evidence or merely keep Islam logically possible after the problem appears. That’s where the argument gets much stronger.

“Messiah” is a royal office, not a cool nickname

Christ isn’t Jesus’s last name. The words Messiah and Christos both mean “anointed one.” In the Old Testament, kings were anointed and installed to rule. The Messiah was the promised king from David’s line.

In 2 Samuel 7:12–16, God promises to raise up a Davidic descendant, establish his kingdom, and secure his throne. God says of David’s heir, “I will be to him a father, and he shall be to me a son.”

Obviously, the promise first concerns Solomon and the Davidic dynasty. This isn’t an issue for the argument. This passage just establishes the office. The Davidic king stands in a unique covenant relationship with God: His Father is God; the king is God’s son.

Psalm 2 is probably the most important text here. The nations rage against the Lord and against his “Anointed,” a.k.a. his Messiah. God sets this king on Zion and declares, “You are my Son; today I have begotten you.” The king is then promised the nations for his inheritance.

So what do we have here? Messiah, King, and Son appearing in the same Psalm. These aren’t three unrelated ideas that Christians later smooshed together so they could worship a mere man.

Psalm 89 repeats the same pattern. God finds David and anoints him. Then the king calls God “My Father,” and God makes him “the firstborn, the highest of the kings of the earth.” God promises to preserve his offspring and throne.

Again, this does NOT mean every Davidic king was God by nature. But it DOES mean royal sonship was built into the Davidic covenant. Even if the language is metaphorical, God picked it to describe a real covenant relationship between himself and his anointed king.

Now follow me here:

1. The Qur’an claims that Allah gave David the Zabūr, normally translated as the Psalms (Qur’an 4:163).

2. It also says the Qur’an confirms earlier revelation (Qur’an 3:3).

3. Then it calls Jesus “the Messiah” (Qur’an 3:45; 4:171).

Okay, now stop and think about this for a second: Apparently Allah revealed Psalms in which his anointed king is called his Son, later identified Jesus as the Messiah, and then condemned Christians for saying, “The Messiah is the Son of Allah.”

Yeah, that seems to be a big problem for Islam.

The best Muslim distinction

Now, a knowledgeable Muslim apologist will immediately say something like this: “The Psalms only teach royal sonship. The king is called God’s son because he represents God; he rules under God’s authority. Christians went way too far by confessing Jesus as the eternal divine Son who shares God’s nature.”

Let’s be honest: that reply has some force. In fact, Qur’an 9:31, the very next verse, accuses Christians of taking the Messiah as a lord besides Allah. The context gives Muslims a real reason to say Qur’an 9:30 attacks the Christian divine confession, not the word “son” by itself.

Fair enough. But that doesn’t solve the bigger issue.

Where does the Qur’an preserve the legitimate royal sense? Where does it say, “Jesus really is God’s royal Son, but Christians wrongly turned that office into divine Sonship”? Where does it connect Jesus with David’s covenant, throne, anointing, Zion, or promised kingdom? Cue the crickets.

Yeah… it doesn’t. Ever. Not once.

The distinction between royal and divine Sonship is a harmonization the Muslim reader has to supply. The Qur’an keeps the biblical title “Messiah,” rejects the Sonship Christians confess, and never explains that Allah had supposedly revealed a legitimate form of messianic sonship himself. Once we look beyond Qur’an 9:30, this gets a heckuva lot harder to dismiss.

The Qur’an really seems to hate the whole ‘sonship’ concept

A bunch of Qur’anic passages use walad, a word commonly translated as “child” or “offspring.” Qur’an 4:171 tells Christians that Allah is far too exalted to have a child. Qur’an 18:4–5 condemns the claim that Allah has taken a child, basically calling it a big, ugly lie. And if it wasn’t clear enough already, Qur’an 19:88–93 says the heavens almost rupture, the earth splits, and the mountains collapse because people attribute a child to the Most Merciful. Allah’s got 99 names, but a Father ain’t one.

A Muslim can argue that these passages reject biological offspring, but Christians reject that idea too. The Father didn’t have sex with Mary and physically produce Jesus. (We’re not Mormons, okay?) Historic Christian theology has never taught divine reproduction.

But here’s the thing: Qur’an 9:30 does not use walad. It uses ibn, the ordinary word for “son,” in the exact statement, “The Messiah is the Son of Allah.”

Qur’an 5:18 covers even more ground. It says Jews and Christians are going around saying, “We are the children of Allah and his beloved,” using the plural abnāʾ. The Qur’an responds with a big fat “nah, fam”: “Rather, you are human beings from among those he has created.”

Now to keep it honest, Allah’s target here is their claim to being God’s chosen people. The verse asks why God punishes them if they really are so special. So Qur’an 5:18 ain’t, all by itself, proof that the Qur’an rejects every possible metaphor involving fatherhood and sonship.

But still, notice how it answers. Jews were obviously not claiming that every Jewish person was divine or physically produced by God. Yet the Qur’an does not preserve covenantal sonship while correcting their spiritual pride. It answers sonship with creaturehood. You call yourselves God’s children? No. You’re only humans he made out of the dust.

So do you see the pattern? Across different words and contexts, this theme keeps beating the same drum. The Qur’an does not merely reject divine reproduction. It never gives us an acceptable “Son of God” category, even though royal and covenantal sonship belong to the biblical revelation it claims to confirm. That creates a serious continuity problem.

al-Masīḥ: A title that explains nothing

The weirdest part might be what the Qur’an doesn’t say. It calls Jesus al-Masīḥ repeatedly but never explains the title’s biblical office.

Here are some questions for my Muslim friends: Who anointed Jesus? What exactly was he anointed to do? Is he a king? What kingdom does he rule? How does he fulfill the covenant with David? Why is Jesus called the Messiah rather than simply another prophet or messenger?

The Qur’an gives Jesus other unique descriptions. He’s born of a virgin, performs miracles, is called a word from Allah, and is sent to Israel. The Hadith say he’ll return and judge. Fine and all, but none of that explains why he carries this particular title.

Later Muslim interpreters tried to fill the gap in different ways. Al-Tabari reports explanations connecting al-Masīḥ with being purified or wiped with blessing. Ibn Kathir connects it with Jesus touching and healing the sick. These explanations try to derive the title from the Arabic root connected with touching or wiping, but they’re not the Davidic royal meaning from which “Messiah” entered Jewish and Christian usage.

Qur’anic scholar Nicolai Sinai coldly puts the proverbial skunk on the table. He says al-Masīḥ appears to be “little more than a fossilised title” in the Qur’an. It behaves almost like another proper name for Jesus without carrying the messianic expectations attached to Christos in the New Testament (Key Terms of the Qur’an, pp. 621–22). That basically hits the nail on the head. The Qur’an keeps calling Jesus “Christ,” but leaves out the story that makes “Christ” mean anything.

Sonship ain’t the only pressure point, either, especially if you watched Sheikh Uthman ibn Farooq’s exchange with Elijah Johnson during the recent 1 vs. 10 debate on Sean Kelly’s show. Isaiah 9:6–7 gives the coming Davidic ruler titles including “Mighty God” and says his government will have no end. Jeremiah 23:5–6 calls the righteous Branch from David “The LORD is our righteousness.” Micah 5:2 speaks of a ruler from Bethlehem whose coming forth is from ancient days.

Muslims can run to Tovia Singer for alternative readings all they want. That seems pretty counterproductive when Muslims themselves call Jesus the Messiah. But none of these passages needs to carry the whole case. Taken together, they point in the same direction: Davidic king, Son of God, everlasting ruler, divine titles. This isn’t something Constantine and a few bishops pulled out of their rear ends at Nicaea.

“The earlier Scriptures were corrupted”

A Muslim can deny that Psalm 2 or Psalm 89 belongs to the unaltered Zabūr given by Allah. Qur’an 4:163 does not explicitly rubber-stamp every line of the present Psalter, and Islam has categories for concealing, twisting, and mishandling earlier revelation.

That keeps the corruption response logically available, at least according to their faith. But historically, it lacks a paper trail. Where’s the evidence?

Royal sonship appears in multiple passages across the Hebrew textual tradition and the ancient Greek translation, the Septuagint, centuries before Islam. Jews preserved these passages while rejecting the Christian claim that Jesus fulfills them. Christians did not sneak “You are my Son” into the Bible while nobody was looking.

So when was the sonship language added? Who added it? What did the original passages say? Where is the manuscript that removes “Son,” “Father,” “firstborn,” or “begotten” from this Davidic framework?

There’s no evidential answer here. “Muh Corruption!” works as an ad hoc rescue, not a historical argument. It’s awfully convenient to trust earlier Scripture whenever it sounds Islamic and call it corrupted whenever it doesn’t.

Plus, there’s our good ol’ friend, the Islamic Dilemma. The Qur’an tells Jews that they possess the Torah “in which is Allah’s judgment” (Qur’an 5:43), tells the people of the Gospel to judge by what Allah revealed in it (Qur’an 5:47), and says the People of the Book stand on nothing unless they uphold the Torah and Gospel (Qur’an 5:68). Whatever one thinks these verses finally mean, the Qur’an treats genuine revelation as still present among its Jewish and Christian audience. So where do Muslim apologists generally run next?

Does muhaymin fix the problem?

Qur’an 5:48 says the Qur’an confirms previous Scripture and is muhaymin over it. English translations use words like guardian, witness, trustee, criterion, or supreme authority. Muslims therefore argue that the Qur’an judges earlier religious claims. If the Bible conflicts with the Qur’an, the Qur’an is the umpire, calling balls and strikes.

The problem is that muhaymin doesn’t simply mean “corrector of a corrupted text.” Al-Tabari defines the root in terms of “preservation and watchfulness” and describes the Qur’an as a witness, trustee, and guardian over earlier books. To be fair, he also says it judges what came before it, so Muslims do have an early basis for treating the Qur’an as the final authority. But authority to judge is not evidence that a specific earlier text was corrupted.

Al-Tabari also records a report from Mujahid in which muhaymin refers to Muhammad as the one “entrusted with the Qur’an.” Al-Tabari rejects that reading on grammatical grounds, calling it remote from normal Arabic and “indeed, an error.” Still, the report shows that muhaymin cannot automatically mean “corrector.” Muhammad wasn’t correcting a corrupted Qur’an. He was entrusted with it.

At most, Qur’an 5:48 gives Muslims an internal reason to let the Qur’an judge earlier Scripture. It does not show that Psalm 2, Psalm 89, or 2 Samuel 7 was altered. I could put on a referee costume and claim final authority at my kid’s basketball game, but that wouldn’t prove I made the right call. As an answer to the historical evidence, “Well, Qur’an 5:48!” is circular:

The Qur’an is right about the earlier revelation because the Qur’an says it has authority over the earlier revelation.

That may convince someone who already believes the Qur’an comes from God. But that’s the very question under discussion: Does the Qur’an’s treatment of the Messiah look like divine confirmation in the first place?

Could God simply retire the old metaphor?

There’s one final, slightly more sophisticated response. Maybe royal sonship was legitimate in its original setting, but those shirk-loving Christians later used it to support Jesus’ divine Sonship. Allah finally had enough, retired the old metaphor, and replaced it with the safer language of servant and messenger. Boom, problem solved through the magic of abrogation!

That’s possible, but it concedes the discontinuity. The Qur’an does not preserve biblical sonship and distinguish its legitimate use from its abuse. It abandons language Allah supposedly revealed because that language became dangerous. And where does the Qur’an tell us this is what happened? Nowhere.

The selectivity is weird. If “Son of God” had become too loaded to preserve, why keep “Messiah”? That title came with David, kingship, covenant, and kingdom. The Muslim apologist has not shown continuity here. He has offered a possible reason for discontinuity.

Which explanation actually fits?

Alright, if you’ve made it this far, congrats. We’re left with two broad explanations.

The first is the divine clarification view. On this hypothesis, the God who gave David the Psalms later revealed the Qur’an to correct Christian misunderstanding. We might expect it to connect Jesus with David, define his royal office and anointing, preserve royal sonship while rejecting divine Sonship, or identify which messianic texts had been corrupted. You get the idea.

But the Qur’an never does any of that, all while calling itself a “clear Book” (Qur’an 26:2), a “guide” (2:2), a “light” (42:52), and “an explanation of all things” (16:89). Instead, it retains al-Masīḥ as a familiar title, gives us no Davidic framework, condemns the Christian confession that the Messiah is God’s Son, and leaves later interpreters debating what the title means. Hmm…

The second explanation is human recasting. On this view, Muhammad heard about Jesus, already known as “the Messiah” or “Christ,” and folded him into his own line of prophets. The familiar title survived almost like part of Jesus’ name, while David’s covenant disappeared and Sonship became the objectionable Christian belief to reject. That predicts the evidence pretty darn well.

Can a Muslim apologist whip up a harmonization? Sure. He can distinguish royal from divine Sonship, question the Psalms’ wording, invoke muhaymin, and say God deliberately displaced the older metaphor. Each move is possible, but bare possibilities are pretty cheap. The question is how many extra moves an explanation needs and whether those moves have independent support.

That’s why the argument is not simply, “Jesus is the Messiah, the Messiah is God, therefore Islam is false.” With respect to Elijah, that’s too quick. The abductive case is stronger: The Qur’an claims to confirm the prophets, keeps their title for Jesus, condemns language built into the Messiah’s royal office, and ignores David. It calls the result confirmation.

So the Qur’an faces a dilemma:

Either al-Masīḥ retains the meaning Allah supposedly revealed through David, or it doesn’t. If it does, the Qur’an condemns sonship language built into the office it gives Jesus without preserving the legitimate royal sense. If it doesn’t, the Qur’an has borrowed a biblical title while stripping away its content.

Neither option looks like the God of the prophets clarifying his earlier revelation. Both look a heck of a lot more like a later theology keeping the name “Christ” while losing the story that explains who the Messiah is.

If your starting point is that the Qur’an must be right no matter what, this argument probably won’t move you. But if you’re a Muslim willing to weigh the evidence instead of assuming the conclusion, this should at least make you uncomfortable.

For a very short introduction, learn about the Biblical concept of the Messiah here:

A recent video by Sheng Tsai (Mindful Living) argues that undesigned coincidences “don’t work” as evidence for the historical reliability of the New Testament. If you’re enough of a nerd to have followed this debate, his objection will sound very familiar: The Gospel writers weren’t completely independent. I know, you’re shocked.

Here’s the basic idea: Matthew and Luke probably used Mark. John may have known one or more of the Synoptics. All four Gospels came from overlapping Christian communities where stories about Jesus were already being told. Don’t you McPologists understand the Synoptic problem sinks undesigned coincidences? Yadda yadda yadda.

To be fair, Sheng’s critique is more thoughtful (and respectful) than other responses I’ve seen. (I’m looking at you, Dr. Jef Tripp!) But much of it is still the same ol’, same ol’: some kind of literary dependence is always possible no matter how you slice it, so apparently any evidence of separate knowledge can be waved away.

Here’s Sheng’s video:

What Is an Undesigned Coincidence?

If you’re new to this whole debate, an undesigned coincidence happens when two accounts fit together in an apparently undesigned way. One account raises a question or drops an odd detail. Another casually gives us the missing information, often in a completely different story, without pointing out the connection. The pieces fit together (co-incide) like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. There are dozens of undesigned coincidences across the Gospels and between Acts and Paul’s letters. Philosopher Lydia McGrew lays out many of them in her book Hidden in Plain View.

The argument isn’t that every detail went through a completely sealed-off channel. It also isn’t that one coincidence proves every single word in both accounts. The argument is probabilistic. These casual connections make more sense if the authors or their sources knew what really happened than if the accounts grew through invention and literary design.

Sheng actually admits that casual connections may “count for something.” Well, yeah and that something is the argument. Lydia McGrew isn’t claiming that truth is the only explanation anyone could possibly imagine. She’s arguing that the pattern is more likely if these accounts came from people who knew the events. Sheng seems admit that Lydia is making that point, but does he really get it?

Literary Dependence Is Not All or Nothing

Sheng treats independence in a very binary way Either two documents were totally sequestered, or neither one can give us any separate historical information.

But that doesn’t work, as Lydia has pointed out many times. An author can use another text while also knowing things that aren’t found in that text. Luke may have followed Mark’s basic account while adding details from other sources, his own research, or people he interviewed.

Imagine a historian writing a biography. He uses an earlier biography but also has letters, diaries, and interviews. His book depends on the earlier one, but not for every detail. We wouldn’t throw out everything new just because we knew he had read the first biography.

The same point applies to Luke. If Luke includes information that doesn’t come naturally from Mark, especially something that seems to contradict with Mark at first, that gives us a reason to think he had some info beyond Mark. It doesn’t mathematically prove with certainty the new detail is true. But “not proven” doesn’t mean “not evidence.”

Sheng says independence must first be shown before an undesigned coincidence can carry any weight. Ugh. This is an extremely common mistake among critics. The interlock is part of the evidence. Just how casual is it? How far apart are the details? Does either writer stop to explain the connection? Could one detail have been easily pulled from the other?

The thing is, we don’t need proof that the writers never spoke, shared information, or read each other’s work. We need to ask which explanation makes the best sense of the texts.

Possibility Is Not an Explanation

This is where Sheng’s case is pretty weak. He gives us a long list of things that might’ve happened.

John might have known Luke. John might’ve heard a similar tradition. John might’ve guessed a detail from the setting. John might’ve invented a conversation. Both writers might’ve used the same source. Years of Christian preaching might’ve produced a common version of the story. And so on. Again, this is familiar. We’ve thought about these things.

Thing is, historical arguments aren’t defeated because someone can imagine another possibility. The question is whether that possibility explains the evidence as well as the idea that the writers knew what happened.

Suppose an ancient writer correctly identifies a minor official, his unusual title, the town where he worked, and a local dispute involving him. A critic could always say, “Maybe the author copied all of that from some lost source.” Maybe, I guess, but unless we have evidence for that source, we haven’t explained anything. We’ve just moved the writer’s knowledge back one step and given it a name.

Oral tradition certainly existed. Luke tells us that accounts were already circulating and that he investigated traditions handed down by eyewitnesses (Luke 1:1–4). The problem isn’t saying that the Gospel writers used traditions. Of course they did. The problem is pulling out a mystery tradition that contains exactly the facts needed to explain each coincidence. That’s ad hoc.

At that point, “shared tradition” becomes a blank check. Whatever two accounts happen to know gets tossed into the missing source.

Lydia directly addresses the idea of a common shared source, whether written or oral, in a post on what she calls the “ur-source” theory:

Since the hypothesis of an otherwise unknown ur-source just puts an unnecessary layer between the accounts we actually do have and the facts, it is not subject to principled limits. Hence, that type of method would be a history killer.

Consider an event like the Battle of Gettysburg. Historians talk about things that happened there, like Pickett’s Charge on Cemetery Ridge, as real events. They learn about various aspects of the battle from primary sources like military dispatches, speeches, putative eyewitness accounts, etc.

Suppose we applied the “ur-source” method to the Battle of Gettysburg. Then we could say that there is some ur-account, which might or might not be true, that claims that the battle happened and that this and this and this happened during the battle, all of which details have become subsequently dispersed through other accounts, which aren’t really eyewitness accounts either but are just somehow copying bits and pieces of this entirely hypothetical ur-source.

This, of course, could be used to cast doubt on whether the Battle of Gettysburg ever happened at all!

The more reasonable hypothesis is that there was a real Battle of Gettysburg at which various specific things, like Pickett’s Charge, actually occurred, and that these have become known to us through these varied other accounts from people’s knowledge of the real events.

Otherwise we never get to talking about the real world at all. Every source we do have is taken to be based on some other source or tradition that we don’t have, and we never get back to knowing the facts. This is a reductio of the method in question.

The hypothetical source that appears just when we need it to explain away undesigned coincidences is basically an epistemological trap door.

Philip, Andrew, and Bethsaida

Like EVERY SINGLE CRITIC, Sheng focuses on the feeding of the five thousand for an example. (Sorry for all caps, just being real here. Rarely does a critic engage with any examples outside of the feeding.)

John says Jesus looked at the crowd and asked Philip, “Where are we to buy bread, so that these people may eat?” (John 6:5). John never explains why Jesus asked Philip.

Elsewhere, John casually tells us that Philip was from Bethsaida (John 1:44; 12:21). But John never says the feeding happened there. Luke supplies that detail. He says Jesus and the disciples withdrew to the area of Bethsaida before the feeding (Luke 9:10).

Now the conversation makes sense. Philip was a local, so Jesus asked him where they could buy food. Andrew, who was also from Bethsaida, immediately joins the conversation and tells Jesus about the boy with the loaves and fish (John 6:8–9).

John gives us the local disciples but not the location. Luke gives us the location but never mentions Philip or Andrew.

Sheng points out that Peter was also from Bethsaida. Yep, and so was Andrew. (That’s probably how he knew the lad with bread.) Jesus could have asked either one of them. This example doesn’t force the conclusion, and it certainly doesn’t prove every part of the feeding story by itself.

But Sheng’s alternative isn’t exactly loaded with evidence. He says John may have known the event was tied to Bethsaida and then invented the conversation with Philip. But why think that? Why would John build the connection so quietly that he never even tells us the feeding happened near Bethsaida? Why spread the pieces across John 1, John 6, John 12, and Luke 9?

The odd, scattered way the details appear is what needs an explanation. “John may have invented it” is a possibility, but possible doesn’t equal probable.

Sheng also suggests John and Luke may have used the same tradition. But look at what this tradition apparently contained: the Bethsaida location, Philip’s hometown, Jesus’ question to Philip, and Andrew’s role in finding the food. An oral tradition certainly could preserve minor names and small towns, but Sheng needs more than “well, it’s possible.” He needs a reason to think one shared tradition contained all these particular details and was then split between Luke and John in this weirdly casual way.

And if an early tradition already had that kind of personal and local detail, the historical evidence hasn’t disappeared.

What Happens When the Details Are Scattered Across Different Stories?

The mystery-source answer gets even weaker when the two halves are scattered across different scenes and/or several chapters.

Here’s an example. John says Jesus arrived in Bethany six days before Passover. He ate dinner there, and “the next day” he rode into Jerusalem (John 12:1–2, 12–13). John gives us the timestamp but doesn’t spell out the rest of the countdown.

Mark never says Jesus arrived six days before Passover. But if we make the small and natural assumption that Jesus reached Bethany the evening before Mark’s account of the colt and triumphal entry begins, the time markers scattered through Mark 11–14 land on the same timeline.

Jesus rides into Jerusalem, looks around the temple, and returns to Bethany because it is already late (Mark 11:11). That would be five days before Passover. “The following day,” Jesus curses the fig tree and clears the temple (Mark 11:12–19). That brings us to four days before Passover. “In the morning,” they pass the withered fig tree and return to Jerusalem (Mark 11:20). We are now three days out. After another day of teaching and the Olivet Discourse, Mark tells us that Passover was two days away (Mark 14:1).

John simply says Jesus arrived six days before Passover. Mark never gives that number, but his scattered time markers fit it.

So what happened? Did John sit there with Mark open, count the late evening, the following day, the next morning, the Olivet Discourse, and Mark’s final “two days before Passover,” then drop “six days” into his own account without telling anyone what he was doing?

That’s possible …. I guess. But once again, “possible” ≠ equally likely.

It gets even weirder because John and Mark look like they disagree about the anointing at Bethany. John places it before the triumphal entry, while Mark’s arrangement seems to place it two days before Passover (Mark 14:1–9). I personally tend to think Mark arranged the scene thematically, using one of his familiar sandwiches to place the anointing between the leaders’ plot and Judas’s agreement to betray Jesus.

Either way, that surface tension is exactly what we would not expect if John were carefully mining Mark to create a hidden confirmation. And saying, “Maybe John had another source he trusted,” doesn’t explain the evidence. It just invents another source whenever the texts refuse to fit the theory.

And a giant common source doesn’t help much either. It would need to contain the whole Passion Week schedule, including details later scattered across several chapters in Mark. John then gives us the total while Mark gives us the pieces. And neither one stops to does the countdown for us.

The much simpler answer is that both writers knew the timeline of Jesus’ final week. John gave us the date. Mark reported the days as they passed.

The temple saying is another example. At Jesus’ trial, Mark says witnesses accused him of saying, “I will destroy this temple that is made with hands, and in three days I will build another, not made with hands” (Mark 14:58). Mark calls their testimony false and says the witnesses couldn’t agree. But he never tells us what started this oddly specific accusation.

John gives us the missing background in a completely different scene. During the temple cleansing, Jesus says, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” (John 2:19).

Notice that Jesus does not say, “I will destroy this temple.” He tells his antagonists, “Destroy this temple,” and says he will raise it. The witnesses have twisted the original statement while keeping its weirder feature, the reference to three days. That looks like the kind of garbled accusation that can grow from something a person really said.

John gives us the original saying but never mentions its later use at the trial. Mark gives us the twisted accusation but never mentions the original saying.

Again, we can imagine a lost source that includes both events. But now this source needs to contain the early temple saying, its distortion years later at Jesus’ trial, and the link between the two. Mark and John then each take opposite sides of the story without either one explaining the connection.

At some point, this source starts looking a lot like a detailed account of what actually happened.

Shared Memory Doesn’t Make the Evidence Worthless

Sheng argues that even if Matthew and John were eyewitnesses, they spent years traveling, eating, preaching, and hanging out together. Their memories could’ve shaped one another until the group developed a shared version of the story.

Well, yeah, witnesses can influence one another. But discussing an event doesn’t erase personal memory. People can talk about something for years and still remember different small details. In fact, if constant discussion completely flattened their memories into one shared story, we might expect their accounts to sound more alike, not to contain so many odd differences and missing pieces.

More importantly, a shared memory among people who were actually there isn’t worthless. Even if some stories became part of common apostolic preaching, that’s very different from a legend made up generations later by people nowhere near the events.

Shared tradition might lower the level of independence. It doesn’t send the evidence to zero. Sheng seems to keep moving from “not completely independent” to “not independently valuable.”

Do We Need the Whole Chain of Transmission?

This is Sheng’s weirdest argument. He says that before Luke can confirm John, we need to know where Luke got his information and whether that source was independent of John, John’s community, and whatever tradition John used.

That would be nice, I guess … but ancient historians would also love security footage and sworn depositions. We work with what survived; what we actually have.

We usually don’t know exactly how an ancient writer learned each fact. Historians look at how close the source was to the event, what kind of writing it is, signs of local knowledge, outside confirmation, internal fit, and whether the details look designed. That’s why historical cases are cumulative.

Sheng is right that two documents don’t automatically give us two witnesses. Ten reporters repeating one interview don’t become ten eyewitnesses. But there is a lot of room between “ten separate eyewitnesses” and “one worthless rumor.”

Suppose Luke and John got some details from the same informed apostolic circle. That may not give us two completely separate witnesses. But it can still show that the tradition came from people close to the events, especially when the details are casual, local, spread across different passages, and hard to explain as intentional design.

Undesigned coincidences don’t give us a full family tree for every detail, rather they give us evidence that there’s a complicated reality that actually stands behind these texts. If we demanded a complete chain of transmission for every claim, huge parts of ancient history would disappear.

But What About Miracles?

Sheng spends a large part of the video arguing that getting ordinary details right doesn’t prove miracles, and seems to be reasserting warmed over David Hume. He trots out a modern virgin-birth claim, the supposed healings done by Vespasian, and a criminal who can somehow switch between male and female bodies.

Yeah, um...so?

Lydia already agrees with the basic point, as he even points that out. Undesigned coincidences don’t prove a miracle just because they confirm some smaller details. Showing that a writer knew the people, places, customs, and setting doesn’t guarantee that everything he reports is true.

But contra Sheng, it does count for something. If an account shows that its writer was well-informed, close to the events, and truthful, how could that not affect how we judge the harder claims?

The resurrection still needs to be judged using the whole case: Jesus’ death, the disciples’ claimed experiences, the empty tomb, the early preaching, Paul’s conversion, and the strength of other hypotheses. The content of the claims matters. “Touch me and see, because a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see I have,” and “Do you have anything here to eat?” are claims about a physical encounter, not some brief, confusing episode. (Luke 24:39–43; John 20:24–29; 21:9–14). That makes mistake-based explanations harder to argue. The persecution cost the witnesses were willing to endure also counts against fraud.

The Vespasian story is in a totally different setting. The alleged healings happened in Alexandria and were tied directly to the god Serapis. Suetonius even introduces them by saying that Vespasian, as a new and unexpected emperor, still lacked “prestige” and a certain divine majesty, and that these events gave it (Vespasian 7.2). The story totally worked as public proof of divine favor for a new emperor.

So we know what Vespasian was up to. That ain’t quite the same thing as a resurrection case involving multiple appearances, physical interaction, and witnesses who gained persecution rather than an empire.

Undesigned coincidences were never meant to prove miracles all by themselves. They’re a part of a broader case. Showing that one piece of evidence can’t carry the whole thing doesn’t exactly show that it weighs nothing.

“The Gospels Are Anonymous”

Sheng argues that because the Gospels are anonymous, their authors must already have been distant from the events they describe. But c’mon. I’m sorry, this isn’t some settled fact that ends the debate. They’re anonymous in the limited sense that the writers don’t open with, “Yo, I’m John.” That doesn’t mean the books first floated around with no known authors.

Every surviving manuscript with a title names Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. We don’t find copies called The Gospel According to Peter, then later renamed Matthew. Papias connects Mark and Matthew with Gospel accounts, while Irenaeus names all four. Scholars debate when the titles were added, but the fact that the names are early, widespread, and never challenged still needs an explanation. Martin Hengel and Simon Gathercole have even argued that the titles may go back to the Gospels’ first circulation (see Gathercole, “The Alleged Anonymity of the Canonical Gospels,” JTS 69 [2018]).

Justin Martyr also calls the Gospels “memoirs” written by apostles and their followers (First Apology 66–67; Dialogue 103). That fits the traditional picture: Matthew and John were apostles, while Mark and Luke worked with apostles. Justin’s student Tatian later combined the same four Gospels into the Diatessaron. So these weren’t four random books that suddenly received names near the end of the second century.

And we don’t have to settle authorship before internal evidence can count. That’s actually backward. If a book shows signs of close, witness-level knowledge, (a memoir, if you will?) that evidence can help us decide what kind of source stands behind it. The Gospels being reportage makes something like traditional authorship more likely.

What About Acts and Paul?

Near the end of the video, Sheng admits he hasn’t looked at the undesigned coincidences between Acts and Paul’s letters. He then tells his viewers that they should already see how the same problems apply.

What kind of Jedi mind trick is he trying here? This honestly made me chuckle. By all means, go for it. Dig in. I’d love to see what he comes up with. In fact, I’d happily invite Sheng to have a friendly live discussion with me about it.

Because Acts isn’t generally thought to have been written by copying Paul’s letters; even Bart Ehrman seems to agree. And Paul’s letters were written to different churches dealing with real problems. That makes their casual fit with Acts especially interesting.

For instance, let’s talk about Paul’s time in Corinth. Acts says Paul first worked with Aquila and Priscilla because they had the same trade. But when Silas and Timothy arrived from Macedonia, Paul became occupied with preaching the word (Acts 18:1–5). Acts never tells us why them showing gave him the chance to preach full-time.

Paul’s letters fill us in. He says that while he was in need at Corinth, “the brothers who came from Macedonia supplied my need” (2 Corinthians 11:9). Philippians also confirms that the Macedonian Christians supported his ministry financially (Philippians 4:15–16).

Ah, so Acts tells us Paul’s work changed when Silas and Timothy arrived from Macedonia. Paul tells us that believers from Macedonia supplied what he needed. Neither one points out the connection. The natural explanation is that the visitors brought financial help, freeing up Paul to spend less time making tents and more time preaching.

It’s pretty obvious that the Synoptic problem objection isn’t gonna bail you out here. 2 Corinthians isn’t riffing off of Acts. Acts isn’t trying to explain 2 Corinthians. They were written for different people, for different reasons, and each gives us a different side of the story. And it would be hilarious to apply a lost source theory here.

Sheng can’t dismiss the Acts-Paul evidence by admitting he hasn’t studied it, then telling his viewers they should already know how to dismiss it anyway. I see this over and over. Someone takes a run at Lydia’s book, picks a couple of examples, cooks up a few other possible explanations, usually some version of “Haven’t you heard of the Synoptic problem?” and calls it a day.

No. Sheng needs to examine the actual examples before ending his video with, “They’re probably just as weak.” Imagine if I read one chapter of Paul Draper or Graham Oppy, offered a few possible alternatives, and then said, “Welp, the rest of their arguments are probably just as bad.” Bro…

My friend Jonathan McLatchie has documented more than forty examples in Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, and Galatians alone. His more recent article, “The Fine-Grained Historicity of Acts,” goes into even more. He also shows why we know Acts wasn’t literarily dependent on Paul’s letters.

“Scholars Don’t Use It”

Sheng says undesigned coincidences aren’t a standard test in New Testament scholarship, seemingly because he assumes they’d agree with him. But dude, we don’t care that we aren’t a part of the scholarly Cool Kids Club™. New Testament scholarship has produced plenty of iffy ideas over the years.

Take the historical Jesus criteria. They were once all the rage, but now plenty of scholars admit these methods are severely limited (Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity, ed. Chris Keith and Anthony Le Donne).

These historical Jesus scholars would often take the Gospels apart story by story, then ask whether one saying or event can be pulled from the text and traced back to Jesus. But embarrassment depends on what we think the writer found embarrassing. It can move the needle in some circumstances, but we need to be careful with it. Dissimilarity can create a Jesus who looks nothing like Judaism or the movement he started. And criteria like coherence or contextual plausibility still depend heavily on prior assumptions about what “fits” first-century Judaism in the first place. These tools can sometimes help, but they’re hardly a gold standard.

And that isn’t what we’re doing anyway. We aren’t mining the Gospels passage by passage, trying to rescue a few sayings that “really go back” to Jesus by looking for undesigned coincidences in those verses. We’re looking at the documents as a whole.

Across the Gospels, Acts, and Paul’s letters, we find dozens of casual connections. One text raises a question, and another quietly answers it. Names, places, travel plans, timelines, and odd comments fit together without the writers stopping to explain the connection.

The question is what best explains that whole pattern. Making stuff up? A bunch o’ mystery sources created whenever needed? Or historical reportage from writers who were close to the facts? Historical Jesus criteria start with the assumption that the Gospels are a mixed bag and try to pull out individual pieces that might be authentic. Undesigned coincidences test that assumption by asking what best explains the documents as a whole. And dozens of casual, interlocking details look far more like reportage than a jumbled pile of fact and fiction.

Finally it’s simply not true that the idea has gone totally unused by actual scholars. Peter J. Williams devotes part of chapter 4 of Can We Trust the Gospels? to undesigned coincidences, describing them as agreements that are difficult to explain as deliberate attempts to make the stories look authentic. Luuk van de Weghe’s Living Footnotes in the Gospel of Luke uses comparable incidental connections as part of a cumulative case that Luke relied on eyewitness information. He even gives examples of undesigned coincidences from the Anne Frank narratives. Craig Keener wrote the foreword to Lydia McGrew’s Hidden in Plain View, while scholars including Craig Blomberg have also endorsed the book’s argument. So this ain’t just some internet apologist thing.

What Would Actually Undermine an Undesigned Coincidence?

Okay, so undesigned coincidences aren’t untouchable. Some examples are stronger than others, and a proposed coincidence can fail. (I do in fact think McGrew and JJ Blunt at times give weaker examples). But you need evidence, not a story you yanked out of your rear-end five seconds ago.

For starters, you could show that the apparent connection probably rests on a mistake. Take the strange phrase “second-first Sabbath” in some manuscripts of Luke 6:1. The reading is missing from several early manuscripts and is widely treated as a copying error. If an undesigned coincidence depended on that phrase being original, textual evidence would give us a real reason to reject it. (Blunt tries this one.) That’s how you weaken an argument: bring some actual evidence that the key detail probably isn’t reliable.

Or, you could find an actual common source. Show that it contained both pieces of info, that both writers could access it, and that each could easily copy a different part. Better yet, show that the connection was already obvious in that source. Then the appearance of an unplanned fit between the later accounts would largely disappear.

You could also show that one writer has a serious “boy who cried wolf” problem with this exact kind of detail. Maybe the author repeatedly invents names, places, travel plans, or bits of local color. Or show that the writer was very unlikely to have any independent access to the facts. Those would be real reasons to lower the evidential value of the pattern.

What doesn’t work is dreaming up a just-so story about how one author might have invented the detail. Adding “while copying Mark” doesn’t magically turn speculation into evidence. Even if Matthew or Luke used Mark, that doesn’t explain why a new detail appears, why it fits so well with something in another account, or why the connection is left unsaid.

The same goes for mystery sources. Not to repeat myself too much here, but you can always imagine a lost source containing exactly the material your theory needs, arranged in exactly the right way, and then partially copied by exactly the right writers. Super convenient. Neato. But unless there’s independent evidence for that source, you haven’t explained the coincidence.

So yeah, undesigned coincidences can definitely be challenged. Show us a genuine error. Show us an actual common source. Or show us a pattern of invention or a lack of access. But just describing something that could’ve happened isn’t enough. The question is still which explanation best accounts for the evidence we actually have. Sheng and all the other critics before him keep going at it the wrong way.

Undesigned coincidences simply aren’t worthless to the case for Christianity. And when we find dozens and dozens of them criss-crossing with each other, multiplying a bunch of “well, actually…it’s possible” explanations starts to look strained and ad hoc. The witness model explains the whole pattern in one fell swoop.

Muslims, here’s a challenge: Name one historically identifiable Christian teacher or community between the apostles and Muhammad whose beliefs about Jesus match what the Quran says. Give me a name, a pre-Islamic source, and evidence showing what that person or group actually believed.

Name. Source. Beliefs. Go. (Queue the crickets)

And no, you can’t simply say, “Islam teaches that Jesus had true followers.” That’s the claim we’re testing. I’m asking you to identify those followers in actual history. You don’t need to find someone who called himself a Muslim or predicted every detail of Muhammad’s religion. Just find a Christian who followed the basic message Islam says Jesus preached.

According to the Quran:

• Jesus was the Messiah, a prophet, and the virgin-born son of Mary (Quran 3:45–47; 4:171).

• He wasn’t God or God’s divine Son (Quran 4:171; 5:17; 5:72–75).

• He preached the worship of Allah alone and wasn’t crucified by his enemies (Quran 3:51; 4:157–158).

• His disciples believed this message and submitted themselves to Allah (Quran 3:52–53; 5:111).

That’s the basic profile. I’m basing this on the Quran itself.

If Islam restored the original religion of Jesus, finding someone like this shouldn’t be very hard. We have almost six hundred years between Jesus and Muhammad. We have Christian writings from across the Roman Empire, North Africa, Syria, Egypt, Persia, and beyond. We even have long catalogs describing tiny Christian sects and their weirdest beliefs.

And you can’t just handwave this challenge away. The Quran says Allah personally guaranteed that Jesus’ followers would be big-time winners.

In Quran 3:55, Allah tells Jesus:

“I will make those who follow you superior to those who disbelieve until the Day of Resurrection.”

And Quran 61:14 says:

“We supported those who believed against their enemy, and they became dominant.”

These weren’t supposed to be five guys hiding in a cave while everyone else corrupted Christianity. Allah says he supported them, made them dominant, and placed them above the unbelievers until the end of history.

So...where were they?

The Christians who actually became dominant believed Jesus was the divine Son of God who was crucified under Pontius Pilate and raised from the dead. By Muhammad’s time, millions of Christians across several empires confessed these beliefs.

This leaves Islam with a massive historical problem. Either Allah’s promise failed, the Christians who became dominant really were Jesus’ followers, or “dominant” has to be stretched until it no longer means anything we’d recognize.

And interestingly, early Muslim commentators seem to have noticed the problem. They couldn’t agree on who these victorious followers were.

Who Did Allah Make Superior?

Al-Ṭabarī, one of Islam’s most important early commentators, preserves two very different interpretations of Quran 3:55.

He first explains the followers of Jesus as those who remained upon Jesus’ true religion of Islam. In al-Ṭabarī’s words, Allah would place those who followed Jesus “in his way and his religion, namely Islam” above those who rejected his prophethood. This appears to be al-Ṭabarī’s own preferred interpretation, not merely one view he reports. You can read the Arabic commentary and reports here.

He then supplies several earlier reports supporting it. A report attributed to Qatādah identifies Jesus’ followers as:

“The people of Islam who followed him according to his natural disposition, his religion, and his way. They will continue to be victorious over those who oppose them until the Day of Resurrection.”

This is report 7149 in al-Ṭabarī’s commentary on Quran 3:55. The Arabic reads: hum ahl al-islām alladhīna ittabaʿūhu ʿalā fiṭratihi wa-millatihi wa-sunnatihi.

Reports attributed to al-Rabīʿ and Ibn Jurayj give the same basic answer. Ibn Jurayj interprets Allah’s promise as meaning that he would support those who followed Jesus “in Islam” against the unbelievers until the Day of Resurrection. These appear in reports 7150–7152. Al-Ḥasan is similarly reported as saying that the Muslims were placed above those who abandoned Islam in report 7154.

So on this interpretation, Jesus’ true followers are ultimately the Muslims. They follow the same original religion supposedly taught by Jesus, even though Muhammad appeared centuries later.

But there’s an obvious problem. Muhammad didn’t begin preaching until almost six hundred years after Jesus. Calling Muslims the true followers of Jesus might explain who wins after Muhammad, but it doesn’t tell us where these victorious followers were during the five centuries before him. Who followed Jesus’ true religion during that period, and how exactly were they “above” the unbelievers?

Al-Ṭabarī then preserves a completely different interpretation. Al-Suddī reportedly gives two possible identifications: Jesus’ followers may be “the believers,” or they may be “the Romans” (report 7153). Since the Romans of al-Suddī’s time were Christians, this second option identifies the victorious followers with the Christian Roman Empire.

Ibn Zayd makes the point even more explicitly:

“The Christians are above the Jews until the Day of Resurrection. There is no land in the East or the West where there are Christians except that they are above the Jews. In every land, the Jews are humiliated.”

The report explicitly uses al-naṣārā, “the Christians,” and appears as report 7155 in al-Ṭabarī’s commentary.

This interpretation fits history much better. Christians really did become politically and socially dominant over the Jews who rejected Jesus. Christianity spread across the Roman world, and the Roman Empire itself eventually became Christian.

Unfortunately, this creates a bigger theological problem for Islam.

The Christians who became dominant weren’t Quranic Unitarians. They worshiped Jesus. They proclaimed him as the divine Son of God. They believed he was crucified, buried, and raised from the dead. Those are precisely the people whom Allah supposedly made superior.

A Muslim could respond that Christians were only Jesus’ followers in a loose sense. They misunderstood him, but Allah still gave them victory because they were closer to the truth than the Jews who rejected him. That is basically the answer Ibn Kathīr gives in his commentary on Quran 3:55:

“Throughout this time, the Christians had the upper hand and dominated the Jews. Allah aided them against the Jews because they used to be closer to the truth than the Jews, even though both groups were and still are disbelievers.”

Ibn Kathīr then says that when Muhammad appeared, Muslims became the true followers of every prophet, including Jesus. Allah consequently placed the Muslims above the Christians by giving them control over Christian territories.

But there’s a big problem here. The promise no longer means Allah preserved and vindicated the people who accurately followed Jesus. It means Allah handed centuries of victory to a corrupted movement that committed the worst possible sin in Islam by worshiping Jesus alongside Allah.

Allah promised Jesus that his followers would be superior. History gives us Christians. Islam responds that those Christians were unbelievers who fundamentally misunderstood Jesus, but Allah made them superior anyway because they were slightly closer to the truth than the Jews.

That’s, uh...convenient, I guess. It just doesn’t make much sense.

But al-Ṭabarī preserves an even more interesting explanation in his commentary on Quran 61:14.

When “Victory” Means Getting Wiped Out

Al-Ṭabarī records a report attributed to Ibn Abbas in which Jesus’ followers divide into three groups. One says Jesus was God. Another says Jesus was the Son of God. The third says Jesus was the servant and messenger of God. The report identifies this third group as “the Muslims.”

The first two groups then join forces against the Islamic group and kill them. The report concludes:

“Islam remained effaced until Allah sent Muhammad.”

You can read the complete Arabic report in al-Ṭabarī’s commentary on Quran 61:14. The key line reads: fa-lam yazal al-islāmu ṭāmisan ḥattā baʿatha Allāhu Muḥammadan, meaning, “Islam remained effaced until Allah sent Muhammad.”

Wow. Let that sink in.

Quran 61:14 says Allah supported the believers against their enemies, “and they became dominant.” But according to the report preserved by al-Ṭabarī, the Islamic followers were defeated and killed. Islam remained effaced until Muhammad appeared almost six hundred years later.

That is a strange definition of “dominant.”

The report gets around the problem by saying Muhammad eventually vindicated the defeated group. When Muhammad denied that Jesus was God or the Son of God, the argument of Jesus’ true followers finally became victorious.

Other reports preserved in al-Ṭabarī’s commentary on Quran 61:14 make the same basic move. Reports attributed to Ibrāhīm al-Nakhaʿī say Jesus’ believers were “supported through Muhammad” and that their argument became dominant because Muhammad confirmed that Jesus was God’s servant, messenger, word, and spirit.

But that isn’t what we normally mean when we say a group defeated its enemies. The group didn’t survive, spread, or preserve Jesus’ message. Its enemies supposedly killed its members and took over the religion. Then someone else appeared centuries later and claimed the dead group had been right all along.

And just to make things worse, we don’t have historical evidence that this group ever existed.

This rather embarrassing rescue also clashes badly with Quran 3:55. Allah doesn’t merely say Jesus’ followers would be vindicated at some distant point. He says he would place them above the unbelievers “until the Day of Resurrection.” A community that loses, disappears, and remains historically invisible for centuries doesn’t look continuously superior.

Later commentators layered these answers together. In his commentary on Quran 3:55, Ibn Kathīr asserts (without evidence) that Jesus’ original followers were divided into sects. Christianity was later corrupted, particularly under Constantine. (Because Constantine is always the scapegoat!) The Christians nevertheless became dominant over the Jews because they were closer to the truth. Then, after Muhammad appeared, the Muslims became the genuine followers of Jesus and conquered Christian territories.

So the identity of “those who follow you” keeps changing. First it means Jesus’ original disciples. Then it includes corrupted Christians. Finally it means Muslims who appeared centuries later.

Instead of assigning Islamic labels to invisible communities, why don’t we look at the Christians history actually gives us?

What the Earliest Christians Believed

Our earliest Christian writings are Paul’s letters, written within about twenty to thirty years of Jesus’ death. Notice that Paul is writing to established Christian communities spread across the Roman world.

Those communities already believed Jesus had died for their sins, been buried, and risen from the dead (1 Corinthians 15:3–5). They shared a sacred meal remembering Jesus’ death (1 Corinthians 11:23–26). They called upon Jesus as Lord for salvation (Romans 10:9–13). They sang or recited material presenting Jesus as existing in God’s form, taking human form, dying, and then receiving universal worship (Philippians 2:6–11).

Paul even takes Israel’s confession that there is one God and includes Jesus within it:

“Yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things, and we for him; and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things, and we live through him” (1 Corinthians 8:6).

A Muslim will probably say, “That’s Paul! Paul corrupted Christianity.”

But saying Paul corrupted Christianity just because he disagrees with Muhammad isn’t evidence.

Paul says the death, burial, resurrection, and appearances of Jesus were traditions he had “received” and then passed on (1 Corinthians 15:3–7). His list includes Peter, James, and the Twelve. Paul personally met Peter and James only a few years after his conversion (Galatians 1:18–19). He later met Peter, James, and John again, presented his gospel to them, and says they recognized his ministry and extended “the right hand of fellowship” to him (Galatians 2:1–10).

Galatians is a big deal because Paul doesn’t pretend they agreed about everything. He openly describes confronting Peter over table fellowship with Gentile Christians. Peter stopped eating with them after men associated with James arrived, and Paul accused him of hypocrisy to his face (Galatians 2:11–14).

But what was the fight about? Whether Jewish and Gentile Christians could eat together and whether Gentiles needed to live like Jews. It wasn’t about whether Jesus had been crucified, raised from the dead, or exalted as Lord. Paul’s opponents pushed circumcision and law-keeping, not an Islamic version of Jesus.

If Peter and James were preaching that Jesus escaped crucifixion and was merely a human prophet, Galatians would be the perfect place for that conflict to explode. Instead, Paul says Peter, James, and John accepted his gospel.

Paul also didn’t create all the Christian communities to which he wrote. The Roman church existed before he ever visited it. The Corinthians already celebrated the Lord’s Supper, confessed Jesus as Lord, and believed he had been crucified and raised.

More importantly, the Corinthians weren’t isolated from Jesus’ original disciples. Some divided themselves into factions claiming, “I follow Paul,” “I follow Apollos,” or “I follow Cephas,” meaning Peter (1 Corinthians 1:12; 3:22). They knew that Peter traveled with a believing wife, as did Jesus’ brothers and the other apostles (1 Corinthians 9:5). Paul could mention these people casually because the Corinthians already knew who they were.

That creates a major problem for the Islamic corruption theory. If Peter and Jesus’ brothers taught that Jesus was merely a prophet who escaped crucifixion, why were Corinthian Christians claiming loyalty to Peter while remaining in a church built around Jesus’ crucifixion, resurrection, and lordship? Why doesn’t Paul ever have to defend those beliefs against the Peter faction?

The Corinthians fought over leadership, spiritual gifts, sexual behavior, food offered to idols, and the future resurrection of believers. Paul and Peter clashed over table fellowship. But the idea that Jesus died, rose again, and is Lord wasn’t one of their disputes.

So even our earliest Christian evidence already gives us the exact Jesus Islam says Christianity shouldn’t have.

This Isn’t Just Paul

Maybe Paul told one story while the original disciples told another. That is what the Islamic corruption theory needs. But our sources don’t give us that split.

Acts presents Peter preaching that Jesus was crucified, raised from the dead, exalted beside God, and installed as Lord and Messiah (Acts 2:22–36). Peter accuses his audience of killing “the Author of life,” whom God raised from the dead (Acts 3:15). He later declares that salvation is found in no one else because there is no other name under heaven by which people must be saved (Acts 4:10–12).

And this isn’t Paul telling us what Peter preached. Acts was written by a separate author who traveled with Paul, accompanied him to Jerusalem, stayed with Philip in Caesarea, and met James and the Jerusalem elders (Acts 21:8–19). The author was in a position to hear from the Jerusalem church directly.

How do we know he traveled with Paul? The narration suddenly shifts from “they” to “we” at several points during Paul’s journeys (Acts 16:10–17; 20:5–21:18; 27:1–28:16). The author doesn’t announce himself or explain the change. He simply begins narrating as one of the people present.

The travel account also contains the kind of details you’d expect from someone who had actually made the journey. During the voyage to Rome, the author correctly traces the ship’s route around Cyprus, along the coasts of Cilicia and Pamphylia, to Myra, Cnidus, Crete, and Malta. He knows how the prevailing winds forced the ship to struggle westward and how a violent northeaster drove it away from Crete.

Then he casually mentions that the ship found brief shelter behind a small island called Cauda (Acts 27:16). That detail is more impressive than it first appears.

Pliny the Elder knew about Cauda, which he calls Gaudos, but placed it opposite Hierapytna, roughly ninety miles too far east (Natural History 4.12.61). Ptolemy later supplied geographical coordinates but displaced the island to the northwest, too close to the western end of Crete. Luke gets its practical location right. A ship driven southwest from the southern coast of Crete by a northeaster would run under the shelter of Cauda exactly where Acts places it in the voyage.

As Colin Hemer points out, Luke’s geographical knowledge here is better than the information preserved by Pliny and Ptolemy. The detail makes sense as the memory of someone who was blown past the island, not someone dropping famous locations into the story from a reference book. Hemer discusses the comparison in “First Person Narrative in Acts 27–28,” Tyndale Bulletin 36 (1985), pp. 88–89.

Acts shows the same kind of knowledge on land. In Philippi, Luke uses the proper Roman colonial title for the local magistrates (Acts 16:20–22). In Thessalonica, he calls the city officials politarchs, a rare local title confirmed by inscriptions (Acts 17:6). On Malta, he calls Publius “the first man of the island,” another title supported by inscriptions (Acts 28:7). Hemer catalogs dozens of these local details in The Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic History.

These details give us good reason to take him seriously as someone who traveled with Paul and knew the people and places he described. When Luke reached Jerusalem, he stayed with Philip, one of the earliest members of the Jerusalem church, and then went with Paul to meet James and the elders (Acts 21:8–19). In the prologue to his Gospel, he says he investigated the events carefully using traditions handed down by “eyewitnesses and servants of the word” (Luke 1:1–4). Acts shows that he had exactly the kind of access his prologue claims.

This same traveling companion tells us James and the Jerusalem elders received Paul as a brother and praised God for his ministry (Acts 21:17–20). They discussed Jewish Christians and the law, but nobody pulled Paul aside and said, “Hey, you’ve accidentally built the entire religion around something that never happened.” Everything we see in Acts is basically in line with what we find in Paul’s letters.

Of course, a Muslim can reject Acts because it was written by a Christian. But throwing out an early, informed source because it doesn’t match a book written six centuries later isn’t the best way to do history.

Christianity Outside the New Testament

The evidence doesn’t suddenly change once we leave the New Testament.

Near the end of the first century, 1 Clement speaks of Jesus’ blood, says God raised him from the dead, and says the apostles preached after seeing his resurrection (1 Clement 7; 24; 42; 49).

In the early second century, Ignatius of Antioch calls Jesus “our God” and says he was born of Mary (Ephesians 18). He also says Jesus was “truly nailed” to the cross, “truly suffered,” and was truly raised from the dead (Smyrnaeans 1–2). Ignatius wasn’t being vague. He was directly fighting people who claimed Jesus only appeared to suffer.

Polycarp says Jesus died for our sins and that God raised him from the dead. He adds that everything in heaven and earth is subject to Jesus and “every spirit serves” him (Philippians 1–2). Polycarp also praises Paul and tells the Philippians to study his letters (Philippians 3).

The Didache tells Christians to baptize “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” (Didache 7). So no, that language wasn’t cooked up at Nicaea. Christians were already using it centuries earlier.

Justin Martyr says Christians worship Jesus, calls him the eternal Word of God, and says he became human and was crucified under Pontius Pilate (First Apology 13; 46; 63). Irenaeus defends Jesus’ birth as a man, crucifixion, resurrection, and the public teaching passed down from the apostles (Against Heresies 3.3.1; 3.18.2–3).

By the early third century, Tertullian clearly spoke of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit while still saying there is one God. He says Jesus was both God and man, was born of the Virgin, suffered, died, was buried, rose again, went up to heaven, and sent the Holy Spirit (Against Praxeas 2).

This evidence comes from Rome, Syria, Asia Minor, Gaul, and North Africa. These writers didn’t have a giant Telegram group where they could download the approved Christian script. Yet wherever we look, we find the same basic Jesus: divine, crucified, risen, and worshiped.

Were the Ebionites the Real Christians?

A popular move among Muslim apologists is to appeal to the Ebionites because they seem to check several important boxes. They were Jewish Christians. They practiced circumcision and kept the law of Moses. They rejected Paul as an apostate. Some apparently viewed Jesus as a normal human being specially chosen by God.

That sounds a lot closer to Islam than the Council of Nicaea. The problem is that the Ebionites didn’t leave us a neat statement of faith. Most of what we know comes from Christian writers arguing against them, including Irenaeus, Origen, Eusebius, Epiphanius, and Jerome. These authors may not always be describing the same group. “Ebionite” may have become a broader label for several kinds of Jewish Christianity.

That uncertainty doesn’t help the Muslim case, though. It means you can’t gather random beliefs from different reports, keep the Islamic-looking ones, throw away the inconvenient ones, and then build your perfect proto-Muslim church.

Let’s look at what the sources actually say.

Irenaeus says the Ebionites regarded Jesus as the natural son of Joseph and Mary (Against Heresies 3.21.1; 5.1.3). Eusebius similarly says some considered Jesus a plain and ordinary man (Ecclesiastical History 3.27.2). This blatantly contradicts the Quran’s teaching that Jesus was born of a virgin.

Origen knew there was some variation. He distinguishes Ebionites who accepted the virgin birth from those who denied it (Contra Celsum 5.61). So perhaps a Muslim could appeal to the virgin-birth Ebionites. So far, so good. But things get messy pretty quickly.

Epiphanius quotes their Gospel as adding a declaration at Jesus’ baptism:

“This day have I begotten you” (Panarion 30.13.7–8).

That sounds like adoptionism. Jesus becomes God’s Son at his baptism. Oops. That’s a pretty big problem.

Epiphanius also attributes a much more exalted view to some Ebionites:

“Christ is one of the archangels, and was created before all things” (Panarion 30.16.4).

Elsewhere, he reports the belief that Christ was created in heaven and later came and clothed himself with the man Jesus (Panarion 30.3.4–6). Even if Epiphanius has combined different Ebionite ideas, none of this looks like Muhammad’s Jesus. It gives us a preexistent heavenly Christ associated with or embodied in a human being. Yikes.

There’s another huge problem. Epiphanius says they accepted Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Aaron, and Joshua, but rejected or even mocked David, Solomon, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, Elijah, and Elisha (Panarion 30.18.4–5). Uh-oh. The Quran very clearly honors many of those men as genuine prophets.

The identification of the Ebionites just doesn’t work. Plus, they weren’t dominant. The Ebionites were a small, marginal movement known mainly through the Christians who condemned them. Even if you could create an Islamic Ebionite theology out of these scattered reports, they still wouldn’t fulfill Allah’s promise to make Jesus’ followers superior.

The Other Candidates Don’t Work Either

Muslims sometimes point to other pre-Islamic groups, but matching Islam on one belief isn’t enough. The whole profile matters.

• Arians: They denied that the Son was equal and coeternal with the Father, but still believed he existed before the universe, participated in creation, became human, was crucified, rose again, and should receive Christian worship.

• Gnostics: Their beliefs varied, but many distinguished the highest God from the inferior or evil creator of the physical world. They often viewed the material world as a prison and Christ as a heavenly revealer who brought secret knowledge.

• Docetists: Some denied that Christ truly suffered, but only because they believed he merely appeared human or was a heavenly being untouched by physical pain. Some Gnostic texts even have someone else crucified while Jesus laughs. That resembles Islamic substitution theories at one point, but their Jesus is nothing like the Quran’s human prophet.

• Nazarenes: They appear to have been Torah-observant Jewish Christians who accepted Jesus as Messiah and likely affirmed the virgin birth. But there’s no solid evidence that they denied his crucifixion or unique Sonship. They were Jewish Christians, not proto-Muslims.

• The ḥunafāʾ: Later Islamic sources describe them as pre-Islamic Arabs seeking Abraham’s religion. But they weren’t a Christian community preserving Jesus’ teaching, and we don’t have contemporary writings from them establishing their beliefs. They can’t fulfill the promise about Jesus’ followers in Quran 3:55.

None of those similarities makes a group Islamic. We still need the name, the pre-Islamic source, and the complete set of beliefs.

“This Is Just an Argument From Silence”

The obvious response is that history loses things. Maybe the true Christians were a small, persecuted group whose writings were destroyed. You can’t prove nobody believed something simply because their books didn’t survive.

And actually, that’s fair as far as it goes. Absence of evidence isn’t always evidence of absence. But sometimes it is.

Suppose police receive a credible tip that a warehouse is being used to store drugs. They bring in several trained detection dogs and sweep the whole building. The dogs search the offices, loading bays, storage rooms, vehicles, and every crate they can reach. Not one of them alerts.

Does that logically prove there were never drugs anywhere in the warehouse? No. Maybe the drugs were moved. Maybe they were sealed inside something the dogs couldn’t smell. Lots of things are possible.

But the dogs’ silence is still evidence. These dogs are trained to detect drugs. They had access to the places where the drugs should have been. If a large stash had been sitting there, we’d expect at least one dog to alert. Their failure to do so makes the original claim less likely.

The early Christian heresiologists were the detection dogs of the ancient Church. Their job was to find rival versions of Christianity, describe what they taught, and then attack them.

They certainly wanted heresies suppressed. But they had no interest in pretending those heresies never existed. The whole point of their books was to show Christians how many false teachers were out there. They named names, quoted rival writings, traced lines of influence, and sometimes preserved beliefs that would otherwise be completely lost.

Irenaeus describes the Ebionites, Cerinthians, Marcionites, Valentinians, Basilideans, Carpocratians, Cainites, Encratites, and numerous Gnostic teachers. Hippolytus expands the list. Epiphanius’ Panarion catalogs eighty different heresies and religious movements, including obscure groups like the Collyridians, Archontics, Pepuzians, Borborites, and Valesians. Later writers discuss Arians, Eunomians, Apollinarians, Nestorians, Monophysites, Manichaeans, Montanists, adoptionists, and competing Jewish-Christian sects.

These writers barked at everything.

And the beliefs they discussed overlap almost perfectly with the questions Islam raises. They cared about whether Jesus was divine, whether he was genuinely human, whether he was born of a virgin, whether he truly suffered, whether someone else died in his place, whether Paul was a legitimate apostle, and whether Christians should keep the law of Moses.

A Christian community claiming apostolic authority while teaching that Jesus was merely a prophet, wasn’t God’s Son, and escaped crucifixion would’ve set off every alarm they had.

But it didn’t.

Timothy McGrew explains that an argument from silence becomes stronger when three conditions are met. First, the relevant fact probably would’ve come to the authors’ attention. Second, they probably would’ve recorded it if they knew about it. Third, some evidence of that record probably would’ve survived (“The Argument from Silence,” Acta Analytica 29 (2014): 215–228).

This case does pretty well on all three.

The heresiologists actively searched for rival views about Jesus. They recorded groups much smaller than the worldwide movement Islam seems to require. Their catalogs survived, along with quotations and summaries of works that are now lost. Yet nobody gives us a clear community teaching the Quranic package.

And we can test the detection-dog illustration because we know what happened when an Islam-like movement finally appeared.

John of Damascus lived under early Muslim rule in the late seventh and early eighth centuries. Once Islam was historically visible, he noticed it, described it, and attacked it. In On Heresies, he devoted an entire section to what he called “the heresy of the Ishmaelites.” He discusses Muhammad, the Quran, Islam’s denial that Jesus is the Son of God, and its claim that Jesus wasn’t crucified. You can read the relevant section in John’s Fount of Knowledge.

In other words, the detection dog barked.

When an identifiable movement finally appeared teaching that Jesus was a prophet rather than God’s Son and that he hadn’t been crucified, a Christian heresiologist recorded it. But John was writing after Muhammad. Before Islam appeared, the earlier heresiologists cataloged almost every strange Christian belief imaginable without finding the supposedly original Islamic followers of Jesus.

So no, this ain’t a cheap argument from silence. Besides, there isn’t silence as I already wrote above. We already know plenty about what the early apostles preached.

Islam’s Historical Trilemma

The evidence fits historic Christianity far better than Islam’s reconstruction. From our earliest sources, Jesus’ followers proclaim his crucifixion, resurrection, and lordship. The Quranic community is nowhere to be found.

That leaves Islam with three options. Either Allah’s promise failed and Jesus’ true followers disappeared, the dominant Christians really were the followers Allah vindicated, or “dominant” means they were defeated, killed, and erased for centuries while still somehow winning.

So the challenge remains: Name one Christian teacher or community between the apostles and Muhammad whose documented beliefs match the Quran’s Jesus. Give us the name, the pre-Islamic source, and the beliefs.

Islam rejects every historically visible Christian tradition and then claims to restore a message it can’t document. The followers who actually became uppermost preached that Jesus Christ is Lord, that he was crucified for our sins, and that God raised him from the dead.

Name. Source. Beliefs.

I’ll wait.

Acts gets tons of tiny historical details right. For instance, Luke keeps using the exact local titles for officials.

At Philippi, he first calls the officials archontes, a general word for rulers, and then uses their proper Roman colonial title, strategoi (Acts 16:19, 22). In Thessalonica, they are politarchs (Acts 17:6). In Athens, a member of the ruling council is an Areopagite (Acts 17:34). Gallio is correctly called the proconsul of Achaia at Corinth, which places Paul there around AD 51–52 (Acts 18:12). In Ephesus, Luke gets three more local terms right: grammateus for the city clerk, neōkoros for Ephesus as temple keeper, and agoraioi for the court sessions held under the proconsuls (Acts 19:35, 38). Luke calls Publius “the first man of the island” (ho protos ho nēsos) after Paul’s shipwreck (Acts 28:7). Inscriptions from Malta confirm that “First Man” was the title used for the island’s top official.

That’s just one category. Colin Hemer lists 84 verifiable details in Acts 13–28 involving overland routes, cities, landmarks, political boundaries, sea routes, local religious practices, customs, local religious beliefs, languages, dialects, and even slang.

Canadian New Testament scholar and YouTuber C. J. Cornthwaite grants this. In a recent video collaboration with Bart Ehrman, C.J.’s answer is that Luke did a huge amount of homework. Maybe he used maps, travel documents, eyewitness reports, and literary sources. Maybe he traveled through parts of the Mediterranean himself and later used that knowledge to spin a convincing yarn. Accurate details don’t prove that Luke traveled with Paul or met other apostles.

Leaning on the scholar John Kloppenberg, Cornthwaite says the real test is Palestine. That’s where Luke goofs up plenty of times and shows his hand. (Supposedly.)

Then Cornthwaite goes full Steve Mason. Luke supposedly mined Josephus for Judean history and occasionally twisted what he read. He reversed Theudas and Judas, mashed the Egyptian prophet together with the Sicarii, and lifted background information about rulers like Felix and Agrippa. So that’s the theory in a nutshell. Watch the video for the full argument.

The problem is that most of these supposed “mistakes” are, well...there’s no nice way to say it. They’re shockingly bad. Let’s take a look.

Luke Did Not Understand the Climb From Jericho to Jerusalem

Cornthwaite says Luke does not seem to know there is a “huge climb” between Jericho and Jerusalem. Um, what?

• In the Good Samaritan parable, Luke says: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho” (Luke 10:30).

• Then, after Jesus passes through Jericho, Luke says: “He went on ahead, going up to Jerusalem” (Luke 19:28).

Cornthwaite never gives a verse where Luke gets the climb wrong. He just says Luke doesn’t know about something Luke directly correctly states twice. This is C.J.’s worst mistake in the video.

Luke Wrongly Calls Bethsaida a Polis

Cornthwaite says Bethsaida was only a village, so Luke calling it a polis shows that he did not understand the area. This isn’t a mistake at all.

Josephus says Philip raised Bethsaida from a village to the status of a city around this period (Antiquities 18.28). Whether that happened shortly before or after the feeding isn’t for certain. Either way, Luke wrote later and used the status by which Bethsaida was then known. That’s no more a geographical mistake than calling Paul’s birthplace “Tarsus in Turkey.” It uses the familiar later description to identify the same place.

Bethsaida Cannot Be Both a City and a “Deserted Place”

Cornthwaite asks how Luke can link the feeding to Bethsaida while calling the spot “deserted.” If Bethsaida was a city, why look elsewhere for food? This seems to assume Luke is a dummy who can’t keep his own story straight.

Maybe the feeding didn’t happen downtown? Luke connects the event with Bethsaida (Luke 9:10), then says the actual spot was deserted, with villages and countryside nearby (Luke 9:12). That fits fine. If I say I went camping in Denver, nobody thinks I pitched my tent downtown. Denver names the general area. “Deserted place” tells you where I camped. Mark uses place names the same way when he mentions “the villages of Caesarea Philippi” (Mark 8:27).

There were five thousand men there (Luke 9:14). Matthew says five thousand plus women and children. (Matthew 14:21) So Bethsaida naturally wouldn’t have thousands of meals ready for an unexpected crowd, so sending them into nearby villages makes sense.

John casually adds that Jesus asks Philip where to buy bread (John 6:5), but never says why. But Philip is hardly a main character in John, he speaks only a few times. Wouldn’t a fiction writer use a more well-known disciple, like Peter? Or maybe Judas, since he had the money bag? Elsewhere, John tells us Philip was from Bethsaida (John 1:44; 12:21). But interestingly, Luke is the only evangelist that gives the place where the feeding happened. Put together, the picture makes sense: John gives the local guy, which makes sense of the question. The two sources interlock in an undesigned way that points to truth.

Luke Mistakes Samaria for a City

Cornthwaite points to Acts 8:5, where Philip goes to “the city of Samaria,” and says Luke confused the region with a city. Some manuscripts read “a city of Samaria.” But even if we take the harder reading, this objection fails badly.

Samaria was both a region and a city. Josephus says Herod rebuilt the city of Samaria, filled it with settlers, and renamed it Sebaste (Antiquities 15.292–298). He also calls it “Samaria, which he named Sebaste” (Antiquities 15.246). The new name didn’t automatically erase the old one, just like the name “Sea of Tiberias” co-existed with “Sea of Galilee” and “Lake of Gennesaret” (John 6:1; Luke 5:1). Saying “Samaria” no more shows confusion than saying “New York” means you can’t tell the city from the state.

Worse for C.J., Acts clearly knows the difference:

• Jesus distinguishes “Judea and Samaria” in Acts 1:8.

• The believers scatter through “the regions of Judea and Samaria” in Acts 8:1.

• Simon practices magic “in the city” in Acts 8:9.

• Peter and John preach in “many villages of the Samaritans” in Acts 8:25.

• The church has peace throughout “Judea and Galilee and Samaria” in Acts 9:31.

Luke knows Samaria is a region with cities and villages. Cornthwaite has failed to carefully read Acts, and has ignored Josephus.

Luke Calls Nazareth a Polis

Cornthwaite says Luke calls Nazareth a polis even though it was a tiny village. He then guesses at Luke’s motive: Luke wanted Jesus to sound less like a backwater hick.

But Luke openly shows Jesus’ poor background. Mary speaks of her “humble estate” (Luke 1:48). Jesus is laid in a feeding trough because there is no room for him (Luke 2:7). His parents bring the sacrifice allowed for poor families (Luke 2:24; Leviticus 12:8). Luke isn’t trying to hide Jesus’ humble origins. If anything, he makes it into a big deal. And Matthew also calls Nazareth a polis (Matthew 2:23), so this isn’t exclusively a Luke thing.

But all this motive reading is off the mark, anyway. Josephus calls Lydda a kōmē, or village, while saying it was “not less than a polis in size” (Antiquities 20.130). Elsewhere, he simply calls Lydda a polis (Jewish War 2.515).

Josephus grew up in Jerusalem and commanded troops in Galilee (Life 1–15; Jewish War 2.568). Yet he could call the same place a village in one book and a polis in another. These terms were a lot more flexible than C.J. thinks. If Josephus can use polis this way without being clueless about Palestine, so can Luke.

Luke’s Journey to Jerusalem Is Geographically Confused

Luke says Jesus “set his face” toward Jerusalem (Luke 9:51). Yet much later, Jesus is traveling “between Samaria and Galilee” (Luke 17:11). Since Samaria sits south of Galilee, why is Jesus still near their border instead of farther south?

But Luke never says Jesus took a straight route through Samaria. The Greek phrase in Luke 17:11 has been translated “between Samaria and Galilee,” “along the border,” or “through Samaria and Galilee.” Jesus could travel east along the border, head toward the Jordan, go south through Perea, and then turn west toward Jerusalem.

Luke 13 gives us a strong clue that this may be what happened. While Jesus is traveling toward Jerusalem (Luke 13:22), some Pharisees warn him that Herod Antipas wants to kill him (Luke 13:31). But Luke only tells us that Antipas ruled Galilee (Luke 3:1; 23:5–12). If Jesus had left Galilee, why was Antipas still a threat?

Josephus gives us the missing detail. Antipas ruled both Galilee and Perea, the land east of the Jordan (Antiquities 17.318–320). The other Gospels place Jesus in that same area late in his ministry. Matthew and Mark say he traveled “beyond the Jordan” (Matthew 19:1; Mark 10:1). John also places him across the Jordan shortly before his final trip to Jerusalem (John 10:40–11:18).

The pieces fit:

• Luke gives us the threat from Antipas.

• Matthew, Mark, and John place Jesus east of the Jordan.

• Josephus tells us that Antipas ruled that land.

Luke never names Perea or explains why Antipas still had power there. He just reports the event. That’s a weird way to fake local realism from Josephus, but it makes perfect sense if Luke preserved a real part of Jesus’ travels.

There’s also a good reason not to cut straight through Samaria. A Samaritan village had already refused to welcome Jesus because he was going to Jerusalem (Luke 9:51–56). Josephus tells us that under Cumanus, Samaritans killed a Galilean pilgrim traveling to Jerusalem, sparking a larger fight (Jewish War 2.232–246; Antiquities 20.118–136). So we find out that this was in fact a dangerous route, and tensions were high between Samaritans and travelers from Galilee to Jerusalem. Moreover, to travel east along the border would keep Jesus and his disciples near fresh water.

Most importantly, Luke 9–18 isn’t some kind of day-by-day travel log. Luke keeps reminding us that Jesus is heading toward Jerusalem (Luke 9:51; 13:22; 17:11; 18:31), but he chunks sayings and events without giving each stop or date. He might not know what story or teaching happened when and where, but that’s achronological narration—meaning narrating without meaning to indicate an order of time. This isn’t a reason to assume Luke is ignorant about the regional inland geography.

Luke Supposedly Gets the Distance to Emmaus Wrong

This is is the only argument C.J. has that rises to the level of a real objection. Luke says Emmaus was sixty stadia from Jerusalem, roughly six to eight miles (Luke 24:13). Cornthwaite identifies it with Emmaus-Nicopolis, about nineteen miles away, and concludes that Luke knew the place but botched the distance.

But the problem is there wasn’t just one Emmaus. Extra-biblical sources mention at least three:

1. An Emmaus near Tiberias in Galilee (Antiquities 18.36; Jewish War 4.11).

2. An Emmaus in the hill country of Judah (Jewish War 7.217).

3. An Emmaus in the Shephelah lowlands, mentioned by Josephus and 1 Maccabees 3–4.

The Galilean site is obviously too far away. Nicopolis is the traditional identification because Eusebius connects Luke’s Emmaus with the place later called Nicopolis (Onomasticon 88). But Nicopolis lies around 160 stadia from Jerusalem, not sixty. Some manuscripts of Luke do read 160, including Codex Sinaiticus, but the better-attested reading in Papyrus 75 and Codex Vaticanus is sixty.

The 160 stadia reading is problematic for other reasons. The disciples reach Emmaus near evening, recognize Jesus during the meal, and then immediately return to Jerusalem (Luke 24:28–35). When they arrive, the apostles are still gathered and food from the evening meal is apparently still available (Luke 24:33, 41–43). If Emmaus were Nicopolis, they traveled roughly nineteen miles back to Jerusalem, uphill and after dark, and still arrived while everyone was gathered around the dinner table. That doesn’t work.

However, Josephus mentions another Emmaus only thirty stadia from Jerusalem in the hill country of Judah (Jewish War 7.217), commonly associated with modern day Mozah. This is probably a better fit although it does have its own problems. Luke’s sixty stadia could reflect the complete journey out and back, although that would be an unusual way to state the distance. Still, Mozah fits the terrain and makes the evening return much easier.

At worst, Luke may have made a good-faith measurement error, but this doesn’t do the work Cornthwaite needs for his argument to succeed. I don’t think he can confidently say “it must be Nicopolis and ONLY Nicopolis, therefore Luke is clueless about the region.”

Did Luke Get His Judean History From Josephus?

Cornthwaite, drinking the Steve Mason Kool-Aid, argues that Acts copies Josephus. Acts 21:38 is one passage that allegedly contains a fingerprint of Luke’s dependence. Josephus discusses the Sicarii and then, a few paragraphs later, the Egyptian prophet (Jewish War 2.254–263). Acts calls the Egyptian’s followers Sicarii. Therefore, Luke supposedly remembered two neighboring sections of Josephus and accidentally mashed them together.

But this is a mess. It only works by treating agreement and disagreement as evidence for the same theory. It’s an unfalsifiable theory.

Acts says the Egyptian led about 4,000 Sicarii into the wilderness (Acts 21:38). Josephus describes him as a prophetic figure who gathered 30,000 followers, led them from the wilderness to the Mount of Olives, and promised that Jerusalem’s walls would collapse so they could seize the city (Jewish War 2.261–263; Antiquities 20.169–172).

So Luke changes the size of the movement, the identity of its members, and the most memorable feature of Josephus’ account? I mean, I guess that’s possible. But why think a thing like that?

Mason admits these differences but blames Luke’s poor memory. Apparently Luke remembered that Josephus discussed the Sicarii near the Egyptian but forgot almost everything Josephus actually said about the Egyptian.

As Ben Witherington asks, does poor memory really explain the change from 30,000 to 4,000? Did Luke just pick a number at random because Josephus’ number slipped his mind? (The Acts of the Apostles: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary, pp. 237–238).

There’s a simpler explanation: The Egyptian led a real public movement during Felix’s administration. Acts and Josephus preserve independent reports about it, and those reports disagreed over his numbers and followers. Luke did not need Josephus to know about a revolt remembered by Roman officials in Judea.

Cornthwaite, borrowing Mason, has a stronger example in Theudas. In Acts 5:36–37, Gamaliel mentions Theudas and then Judas the Galilean. Josephus discusses Theudas and then, a few paragraphs later, mentions the sons of Judas and reminds readers of Judas’ earlier revolt (Antiquities 20.97–102). Mason argues that Luke remembered Josephus’ paragraph order, confused Judas with his sons, and forgot that Judas had lived decades before Josephus’ Theudas. That’s some rather interesting selective memory.

Luke supposedly remembers the order of two neighboring paragraphs but forgets their actual substance. As F. F. Bruce puts it, “only a very superficial and cursory glance at Josephus could give a reader the impression that Judas himself came after Theudas” (quoted in Witherington, Acts, p. 238).

Luke also drops Josephus’ most memorable detail. Josephus says Theudas presented himself as a prophet and promised to divide the Jordan river (a la Joshua) so his followers could cross (Antiquities 20.97–99). That would have made Theudas a perfect false-prophet-like-Moses foil for Luke’s portrayal of Jesus. But Luke says nothing about it.

Apparently Luke remembered where Josephus put the paragraph but forgot the chronology, Fadus, the Jordan miracle, the cavalry attack, and Theudas’ beheading.

There are other, better options:

• Josephus may have misdated his Theudas. Josephus rearranges episodes and creates chronological problems elsewhere, so we can’t simply treat him as the measuring stick and declare Luke wrong whenever they differ.

• Then there is the possibility of two men named Theudas. As Witherington points out, the name appears repeatedly in Greek inscriptions (CIG 2684, 3563, 3920, 5698). And Josephus himself records four rebel leaders named Simon within roughly forty years and three named Judas within about ten years.

Josephus also doesn’t describe every rebel who ever gathered a following. The period was full of obscure rebels, prophets, and wannabe Messianic figures (Antiquities 17.269–285; 20.167–172). An earlier Theudas not mentioned by Josephus isn’t some desperate apologist save of Acts.

C.J. and Mason really should remember the lesson of Lysanias. Luke places “Lysanias, tetrarch of Abilene” during Tiberius’ reign (Luke 3:1). Josephus knew a Lysanias who ruled the same region but was executed decades before Jesus was born (Antiquities 15.92). Critics decided Luke had grabbed the right name and dropped it into the wrong century.

Then the Abila inscription was discovered. It names “Lysanias the tetrarch” and was dedicated for the welfare of the “Augusti,” commonly understood as Tiberius and his mother Livia. So a later Lysanias connected with Abilene fit exactly.

That is why “Josephus only mentions one Theudas” doesn’t prove much. People reused names, especially within the same families and regions.

Acts also drops historical figures into the story, gets their surrounding details right, and never explains the background that makes the scene hit so hard. Josephus supplies that background. Acts does not look like an author showing off notes he mined from Josephus. It looks like an author telling a story whose participants already belong to that world.

Take Ananias. In Acts 23:1–3, the high priest Ananias orders Paul struck on the mouth before Paul finishes his opening statement. Paul fires back: “God is going to strike you, you whitewashed wall!” (Acts 23:3)

Luke gives no biography of Ananias. He never tells us why this act fits the man, but Josephus does. Ananias acted more like a mafia boss than a high priest. He hoarded money, bought political influence with gifts, and employed violent goons. Those hired thugs raided threshing floors, stole the tithes belonging to ordinary priests, and beat up anyone who resisted. Josephus tells us that it became so bad that some of the priests starved (Antiquities 20.205–207). That’s the guy who orders Paul punched in the face.

But there’s more. Why is it that Paul didn’t realize who the high priest was? Wouldn’t a guy like Paul, a self-proclaimed Pharisee of Pharisees, recognize the high priest?

Ananias was the son of Nebedinus (Antiquities 20.5.3), who occupied the office of high priest when Quadratus (Felix’s predecessor) was president of Syria. Josephus reports that he was sent bound to Rome by Quadratus in order to give an account of his crimes to Claudius Caesar (Antiquities 20.6.2). Agrippa got involved and pleaded their case, and they were dismissed and went back to Jerusalem.

While it’s not clear whether he got his old job back as high priest or not, some scholars argue that Ananias didn’t. Josephus seems to indicate as much. He was succeeded by Jonathan, as is shown by the fact that Josephus refers to one called Jonathan occupying the office of high priest during the government of Felix. This would imply that Ananias’ high priesthood was interrupted (Antiquities 20.8.5). Jonathan himself was murdered in the temple by Felix’s own conspiracy (Antiquities 20.8.5).

Following Jonathan’s death, no one held the job of high priest until Ismael, the son of Fabi, was given the job by King Agrippa (Antiquities 20.8.8). The events in Acts 23 took place right at this time. Ananias was in Jerusalem and the office of the high priesthood was unoccupied. It looks like Ananias acted on his own and kept showing up to work even though he was fired. This makes sense of Paul’s words in Acts 23:5: “I did not know, brothers, that he was the high priest.” Paul was probably being salty, because he knew wasn’t really the high priest. This fits Paul’s use of sarcasm we see throughout his letters. (1 Cor 4.8-10, 14:36, 2 Cor 11:19-21, 12:13, Gal 5:12)

But Luke doesn’t even take the time to explain the historical backstory in his account of this event. The sources interlock in a way that points to the truth of the story we find in Acts. If Luke were mining Josephus for dramatic material, Josephus gave him bribery, hired thugs, stolen tithes, beaten priests, and starvation, and the fact that Ananias was acting as the high priest. Luke simply puts Ananias into the story, lets him act exactly like Josephus’ Ananias, and moves on.

Next up, there is Felix and Drusilla. Acts says Felix arrived with “Drusilla, his wife, who was Jewish” (Acts 24:24). Paul speaks to them about “righteousness and self-control and the coming judgment,” and Felix becomes frightened (Acts 24:25). Luke never explains who Drusilla was or why those topics might make this couple feel so awkward.

Josephus spills the tea. Drusilla was the daughter of Agrippa I and had been married to Azizus, king of Emesa. Felix saw her, lusted after her, and sent a Jewish magician named Simon to smooth-talk her into ditching Azizus and marrying him. Josephus says she was persuaded “to transgress the laws of her forefathers” (Antiquities 19.354; 20.139–144).

Paul is preaching righteousness and self-control to an evil governor sitting beside the woman he persuaded to leave her husband. Then he gets to God’s judgment, and Felix suddenly gets nervous. But again, Luke never explains the scandal.

So, Mason’s theory now needs two completely different Lukes. When the accounts differ in big ways, Luke is forgetful and sloppy. When the accounts fit, Luke has to be a super sneaky editor. This isn’t even a remotely consistent picture of the author.

What Would it be Like if Acts is Fiction?

Cornthwaite’s list of Luke’s supposed errors is full of errors of its own. And the claim that Luke copied Josephus doesn’t come close to explaining the evidence.

The alternative requires a super inconsistent hoaxer. He researches obscure titles, ports, routes, political jurisdictions, and local customs without Google or Wikipedia, then makes up journeys for Paul, switches naturally into “we” narration (Acts 16:10–17; 20:5–21:18; 27:1–28:16), and peppers the details through the story without stopping to draw attention to them. Then the author sent this carefully prepared hoax to someone who probably hadn’t traveled to these places himself and probably didn’t know these details himself and therefore couldn’t be impressed by their accuracy.

But on Cornthwaite’s late-first, early-second-century dating scheme, this same literary genius somehow researched obscure local details yet failed to smooth out the tensions that he and Ehrman see between Acts and Paul’s letters, which had been circulating well before Josephus wrote the Antiquities.

C.J. briefly claims, for example, that Acts and Galatians contradict each other about the Jerusalem Council. I don’t think they do, but surely a late author carefully constructing historical fiction from written sources would have made the accounts fit more smoothly.

It’s a lot easier to take Acts at face value. Luke traveled with Paul, traveled with him to Jerusalem, stayed with Philip in Caesarea, and met James and the Jerusalem elders (Acts 21:8–18). That gave him direct access to disciples, eyewitnesses, and members of Jesus’ family, exactly the kind of people he says he consulted in his prologue (Luke 1:1–4).

Cornthwaite’s view gives us a great researcher, a bad copier, and a hoaxer whose best tricks his first reader might never notice. The companion view just fits the facts better.