Book review: Hidden in Plain View by Lydia McGrew

The eighteenth book I read in 2018 was Hidden in Plain View: Undesigned Coincidences in the Gospels and Acts by Lydia McGrew.  This book argues for the reliability of the New Testament by comparing accounts between the books.  The four gospels famously tell the same story, and many of the epistles overlap with the events of Acts; McGrew believes that, by examining the same events as recorded at different times by different authors, we can be reassured that the events in question actually happened and are not a fictional account.

I found the first section, covering the gospels, a little dry, perhaps because I am already very familiar with the story, but the second part, which covers Acts and the epistles, was full of details I hadn't noticed before, probably because, in the church, we tend to treat Acts and the various epistles separately.  When I hear a sermon on part of Jesus's life, it will almost always reference the same event as recounted in the other gospels, but a sermon from an epistle tends to treat the letter as a discrete literary whole and almost never refers back to Acts for the context in which it was written.

This is an extremely valuable resource that has added multiple notes to my Bible.