This doesn’t matter, of course, as it looks like he did a good job and produced a valuable book.

For one thing, so many elements of it hinge on explaining silence. (I love the hypocrisy of Christians saying that you can’t deduce anything from silence then using silence when it suits them). Almost by definition, you can’t be totally sure why an author chose not to include something. Maybe one of the two Gospel authors hearing from an eyewitness later realized that a particular element had to be wrong but the other one didn’t, and all we’re seeing is the failure of one author to practice proper skepticism. Maybe both authors had access to essentially the same information but each chose to emphasize different details, which lends no additional credence to the underlying oral lore they would supposedly have worked from, and also doesn’t mean that they “didn’t know” about a particular detail. So many of the details that are supposedly missing are so minor that the lack of their inclusion is hardly surprising.

It’s also, yet again, an incredible failure of the reading to basically argue that these important story elements being missing is actually an argument in favor of the reliability of your text. When you have vastly different descriptions that just happen to line up in key ways, one has to essentially assert that the authors are childish buffoons who missed things as important as the city where one of the most important events of their subject’s life took place or what the last word of their subjects were.

I’ll give them credit for cleverness in the vein of “Never admit you have a problem”. God shouldn’t be allowing the holy book to be so incoherent about really basic details. So instead of playing defense, why not play offense and pretend somehow that this record being so clearly haphazard is good for you rather than bad?

Also, doesn’t this argument implicitly concede that the authors of the Gospels couldn’t be the original evangelists? Because they wouldn’t get those details wrong. Later more casual eyewitnesses might, but that would hinge on the Gospel writers relying on second-hand information.

Yes. It’s under peer review now. Just awaiting their reports or revision lists. Which are due soon.

Paul had no companion named Luke (much less the author).

And bilingualism was as common then as sliced bread today. No one would think it miraculous.

Lol. Spellcheck verified that so I missed it. Thanks! Fixed.

The Argument from Undesigned Coincides