UNDESIGNED COINCIDENCES IN THE WRITINGS BOTH OF THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS, AN ARGUMENT OF THEIR VERACITY; WITH AN APPENDIX, CONTAINING UNDESIGNED COINCIDENCES BETWEEN THE GOSPELS, BY THE REV. J. J. BLUNT, B. D. MARGARET PROFESSOR OF DIVINITY, CAMBRIDGE. NEW YORK: ROBERT CARTER & BROTHERS, No. 285 BROADWAY. 1851. PREFACE. THE present Volume is a republication, with corrections and large additions, of several short Works which I printed a few years ago separately; and which, having passed through more or fewer editions, have become out of print: I have thus been furnished with an opportunity of revising and consolidating them. These works were: "The Veracity of the Books of Moses;" "The Veracity of the Historical Scriptures of the Old Testament;" and "The Veracity of the Gospels and Acts," argued from undesigned coincidences to be found in them when compared in their several parts; and in the last instance, when compared also with the Writings of Josephus. They were all of them originally the substance of Sermons delivered before the University, some in a Course of Hulsean Lectures, others on various occasions. And though two of them, the Veracity of the Books of Moses, and the Veracity of the Gospels and Acts, were divested of the form of Sermons before publication; the third, The Veracity of the Historical Scriptures of the Old Testament (which constituted the Hulsean Lectures) still retained it. I have thought that by reducing this to the same shape as the rest, and combining it with them, the whole would present a continued argument, or rather a continued series of in1* dependent arguments, for the Veracity of the Scriptures, of which the effect would be greater than that of the separate works could be, which might be read perhaps out of the natural order, and which were not altogether uniform in their plan. But as this test of veracity proved applicable, though in a less degree, for reasons I have assigned elsewhere, to the Prophetical Scriptures also, I have introduced into the present Volume in its proper place, evidence of the same kind which had been long lying by me, for the Veracity of some of those Writings; thus employing one and the same touchstone of truth, to verify successively the Books of Moses, the Historical Scriptures of the Old Testament, the Prophetical, and the Gospels and Acts, in their order. The argument, as my readers will of course be aware, is an extension of that of the Hora Pauline, and which originated, as was generally supposed, with Dr. Paley. But Dr. Turton,' the present bishop of Ely, has rendered the claims of Dr. Paley to the first conception of it doubtful, by producing a passage from the conclusion of Dr. Doddridge's Introduction to his Paraphrase and Notes on the First Epistle to the Thessalonians, to the following effect. "Whoever reads over St. Paul's Epistles with attention will discern such intrinsic characters in their genuineness, and the divine authority of the doctrines they con 1 In his "Natural Theology considered with reference to Lord Brougham's Discourse," &c. p. 23. |