Author: J.J.Blunt, hard back. 390 pages. This book was first published in 1847, this is nineteenth edition published by The Christadelphian (CMPA) in 1983.

The author shows how hundreds of Bible passages illustrate coincidences which were undesigned by the writers, which involve the agreement of widely separated authors to the facts which they relate, and which point to the truth of recorded miracles and of prophecies. For the Christadelphian reader there are points, especially in chapters concerning the new Testament, where the background of the writer's thinking will be questioned, but his wholesome Scriptural approach and his delight in its details will continue to stimulate those who seek to behold "wondrous things out of the law" (Psalm 119:18).

The books deals with 133 "coincidences" and includes:

A 4 page index of subjects

A 5 page index of scriptures quoted

Book Review 

Undesigned Scriptural Coincidences is an excellent help to strengthen one’s faith that the scriptures are undeniably the word of God.  JJ Blunt was not a Christadelphian, so many Christadelphians may be unfamiliar with his arguments and thus find them particularly compelling.

The book is based on the premise that if an event really occurred, then truth will appear throughout the account of the event, including in apparently insignificant peripheral details.  A human author trying to pass their work off as divine would naturally ensure the key events would harmonise, but this would be much harder to achieve in the very fine peripheral details (such as what time of year a particular crop turned out to be ripe, or the prevailing political conditions in a neighbouring kingdom), especially when such details can only be discovered after a considerable amount of digging around in other parts of scripture. To still discover such truth in these obscure peripheral details adds considerable weight to the claim of truth of the whole record.

Undesigned Scriptural Coincidences is a series of these little ‘by the way’ details proven correct by other ‘by the way’ details elsewhere in scripture, and the sheer volume of examples in the book (there are more than sixty) makes it a very difficult argument to ignore.  JJ Blunt frequently summarises his arguments by questioning whether a forger would really have thought to record such minute details, or if they did, would they then bury them so deep as to run the very real risk of them never even being discovered?  The only logical answer is that the harmony discovered is because all these different events really did occur as stated, and from this inescapable conclusion the very intertwined nature of the scriptures means we are bound to accept the veracity of the whole Bible.

As to the title, we might question how anything written by God could be considered ‘undesigned’.  No doubt in God’s plan these details were not undesigned at all; but the title reflects the purpose of proving the Bible to NOT be a merely human work - that the harmonies discovered are so insignificant to the main story that the most ardent sceptic could not argue they had been ‘designed’ into the record by a human author trying to claim his work was divine.

One brief example will demonstrate the point:

• Joshua 3v14-17 - Jordan overflowed its banks at the time of ‘harvest’.
• Joshua 4v17 - the children of Israel exited the Jordan a few days later on the 10^th day of the 1^st month (i.e. 4 days before Passover).  From history books we know the harvest in ch 3 must have been the barley harvest which occurred around Passover, versus the wheat harvest which was not until Pentecost.
• Exodus 9v31 – 40 years earlier, in the 7^th plague of hail (only a couple of weeks before Passover), the flax and the barley were both destroyed, but the wheat and the rye were not yet grown up. Therefore, flax and barley must ripen at the same time - so if Israel crossed Jordan in the barley harvest, they must also have crossed in the flax harvest.
• Joshua 2v6 – only a week or two earlier, Rahab had hidden the two spies on her roof under stalks of flax laid in order upon her roof – flax which had no doubt just been harvested and left there to dry!

What would it matter under what the spies were hidden so long as it did the job of hiding them. The record could have stated they were hidden under blankets and we would think nothing of it.  But it just happens to record that she used flax, thus opening the record to disproof if it could be shown flax would not be harvested then. Yet by then piecing together three other quotes (which make no effort to draw attention to themselves), we can see it was exactly the time of the flax harvest when this happened, which provides the perfect explanation of why flax just happened to be on Rahab’s roof available to conceal the spies.

To discover compelling evidence of truth in places we’ve never seen it before is very encouraging to one’s faith, so this book deserves a place in every Christadelphian’s bookshelf. 

Greg Pullman

Western Australia