Years ago Christian apologist Lydia McGrew resurrected a long dead argument in Biblical studies, called the Argument from Undesigned Coincidences, particularly in her book Hidden in Plain View: Undesigned Coincidences in the Gospels and Acts.

The gist is that we can find places in the Gospels where one author seems to “know” things in another Gospel that that Gospel only alludes to, and this proves there was a real story both authors are writing down. Because this means they are, or are relying on, “separate witnesses” remembering “different details.” An “undesigned coincidence” is therefore a “connection” between accounts “that doesn’t seem to have been planned by the person or people giving the accounts.” For example, John has Jesus suddenly wash the disciples’ feet, while his source, Luke, doesn’t mention that but mentions an argument among the disciples that could explain the washing incident, so you can make the scene “make more sense” if you combine the accounts. So Luke and John must have been there! The Gospels are therefore direct eyewitness accounts.

This was an old preacher’s argument from over a hundred years ago (e.g. Undesigned Coincidences in the Writings Both of the Old and New Testament by the Reverend J.J. Blunt, published in 1853, building on an argument from William Paley from the previous century). Which never caught on because objective scholars had already started concluding the Gospel authors know things about other Gospels because they read them, and they changed some of those things because they wanted to. This doesn’t even get us to a source much less a witness. John invented the washing incident to comment on Luke. In fact, to “fix” Luke into a better story with better messaging. John didn’t like Luke’s story. So he replaced it with a different one. As John did a lot (see Chapter 10.7 in On the Historicity of Jesus). John’s new story doesn’t even require knowing anything about Luke’s. And Luke clearly knew nothing about John’s story either. It hadn’t been invented yet.

Which is the mainstream view: Matthew redacted Mark (and maybe another lost Gospel called Q, although almost certainly not really), Luke-Acts redacted Mark and Matthew (or Q, though again, probably not really), and John used all three as sources (the conclusion of most leading experts on that Gospel today: On the Historicity of Jesus, pp. 487-88). So they all knew what was in each other’s works and were deliberately making changes or deletions, whenever they did so. There’s no need of any far-fetched theory that they were bad writers using a lost source that they each reproduced inaccurately (much less that they were themselves eyewitnesses who forgot things).

But even such a theory as that only gets you to a source. Not that source being true. The source they are all redacting differently could simply be an Ur-Gospel just as late and fictional as its many subsequent redactions. Rather than “an actual event” witnesses remembered differently, it could simply be “a master story” authors are copying from differently. And really, the evidence actually supports even less than that. It looks far more likely different authors were simply redacting their sources as they pleased, and we have all those sources: they are the Gospels themselves. Just as mainstream Christian Biblical scholar L. Michael White illustrates in Scripting Jesus: The Gospels in Rewrite (2010).

Thus Blunt’s argument was really quite illogical. So, too, McGrew’s resurrection of it. Which is why mainstream scholars ignore her.

Obvious Points

The reason scholars pretty much just roll their eyes at this and don’t even bother responding to it (three years now, and no academic reviews of it exist) is already clear enough in its Amazon customer reviews. Even readers “firmly convinced [of] the historical accuracy of the Gospels” conclude that “many undesigned ‘coincidences’ in the book require heavy lifting to accomplish what McGrew attempts to achieve; and she either ignores or gives short shrift to alternative explanations which are equally viable,” in fact I’d say more so, and thus she “fails” to make any convincing argument. That pretty much sums it up.

Reader Chris Sandoval gives examples of the point. First he notes the Ur-Gospel alternative: “an evangelist may have intentionally omitted minor details knowing that his Christian audience already knew the story well enough to fill in the gap,” because they heard it repeated so often. No eyewitness source is needed for this. Just oral lore that could be as fabricated or exaggerated and embellished as any other tale, by decades of creative storytellers. McGrew literally has no argument to offer against this alternative explanation of every single example in her book.

And that’s not even the most likely explanation of the examples McGrew collects. So her explanation is worse than an already bad explanation. Poor start. There are other explanations McGrew never rules out. I’ll mention a few before getting to the best explanations we already have for these things (well beyond the brief exchange between lay critic Ed Babinski and Lydia’s defender, her husband Tim McGrew).

For example, that same explanation doesn’t even require an Ur-Gospel or oral lore. A later Gospel author could simply assume (reasonably or erroneously) that his audience is familiar with the Gospel he is redacting, and thus be building on knowledge he assumes they already have—or that he forgets they don’t, because he has it: in the Gospel he’s redacting. We see this in the “Long Ending of Mark,” whose author assumes the reader has read all four Gospels and thus knows the full story behind every reference to them in it (see my discussion in Chapter 26 of Hitler Homer Bible Christ).

As even a Christian apologist, John Nelson, puts it on his own blog:

I must make it clear from the outset that I do believe in ‘undesigned coincidences.’ … Yet I also admit that much which passes for ‘undesigned coincidences’ in the Gospels eludes that descriptor. That is, a closer examination of the Gospels reveal that ‘undesigned coincidences’ are often easily explained by the kinds of redactional interests, compositional practices, or points of context which have been traditionally highlighted by gospel scholars. One might expect that these sort of explanations would be treated in the recent work on the argument—after all, much has happened in the last two centuries of Gospel scholarship which is worth exploring. And it is always useful to test the reasons for why any coincidence may appear so. But unfortunately, McGrew’s work involves “setting aside the apparatus of critical scholarship” (p. 15). Why McGrew does not wish to test her hypothesis against critical scholarship is unclear. Is she not aware of it? Or does she not think it is worth her attention? Either way, I hope to show that its neglect is to the detriment of the argument.

And indeed he goes on to do just that. His article is well worth reading in supplementation of mine. As is Kamil Gregor’s collected critiques on video (assembled by Pine Creek) and Bart Ehrman’s take down of the idea in his debate of it with Tim McGrew. But apart from what I’ve already mentioned, following are some other “alternative explanations” McGrew never really addresses, concluding with what I consider to be the most likely in almost every case: later authors are simply changing what earlier authors wrote.

Scribal Error

And yet, another obvious cause of one text omitting what McGrew would call a “detail” but the rest of us would call “a few words” is simply: scribal error. We actually have ample evidence of accidental scribal omissions in the textual transmission of the Gospels (as well as deliberate ones), which McGrew simply ignores as a competing explanation for which we actually have evidence. The frequency of omissions in scribal transmission of the Gospels is discussed by fellow Christian apologist Edward Andrews. Many examples are catalogued by Bart Ehrman in The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture and by Taylor Barnes in his dissertation Scribal Habits in Selected New Testament Manuscripts, Including Those with Surviving Exmplars (University of Birmingham 2017).

For example, in Mark’s account of the prophecy game played on Jesus, the soldiers spit on Jesus and cover his eyes and just say “Prophesy!” when they strike Jesus; but in Matthew’s account, the covering isn’t mentioned, instead they specifically “spit in his face,” and more fully say “Prophesy to us, Christ! Who struck you!” Those sentences begin identically. The loss of the rest of the sentence in Mark is exactly the kind of accidental omission we have many examples of in the manuscripts of the Bible. So we can’t be confident Mark actually omitted it himself. And indeed, the full line in Matthew exists in many manuscripts of Mark. Some also read identically to Matthew even in having the guards spit “in his face,” and a few even omit the face covering. So this whole thing could simply be a textual corruption, and the two texts originally identical. We have evidence for all of this in the parallel passage in Luke 22:64, which is similarly corrupted with various omissions across the manuscripts, but all to some extent combine the text of Mark and Matthew. Which means either Mark and Matthew originally contained the same text or there was no Q source and Luke chose to combine Mark’s text with Matthew’s. But even that would be consistent with Matthew and Mark originally saying the same things here, leaving nothing left to explain.

Just such omissions, in fact, are among the most common errors noticed in the manuscripts, as noted by Peter Head in “The Habits of New Testament Copyists: Singular Readings in the Early Fragmentary Papyri of John,” Biblica 85.3 (2004): 399-408; Peter Head and M. Warren in “Re-inking the Pen: Evidence from P. Oxy. 657 (P13) Concerning Unintentional Scribal Errors,” New Testament Studies 43 (1997): 466-73; and C. C. Tarelli in “Omissions, Additions, and Conflations in the Chester Beatty Papyrus,” Journal of Theological Studies 40 (1939): 382–387. Redaction also produced omissions; e.g. we know John was edited out of order and likely is missing material (On the Historicity of Jesus, pp. 491-92). So in many cases one has to rule these possibilities out first. McGrew never does.

Of course, that Matthew deliberately changed Mark’s “spit on him” to “spit in his face” might instead indicate what really is going on here: Matthew doesn’t like Mark’s story precisely because it’s too colloquial (it assumes familiarity with a common children’s game of the time, possibly then even called Prophesy: Alan Dundes, Holy Writ as Oral Lit, pp. 112-13), so Matthew replaces the sack over “his face” with spitting in “his face” (identical words in both texts), thus efficiently collapsing two acts into one, signifying to blind him with spit, and then fills out the sentence, so everyone will get the point, even those who never played the Prophesy game as a child. This may even indicate the game was common among Gentiles, Mark’s audience, but not Jews, Matthew’s audience.

You’ll start to notice that these kinds of explanations—redaction history and creative authorial intent, which take into account the ancient context and the author’s obvious intentions and jibe with all the other evidence of fictionalization in the Gospels—look like the most credible in nearly every case. None are ruled out by any evidence in McGrew. They are rarely even mentioned. Like a fundamentalist, she simply ignores obvious, mainstream explanations of the same evidence.

Fabricated Data

Yet another cause of things McGrew lists as evidence is simply: there is nothing to explain. Some of McGrew’s “examples” are simply fabricated. For instance, she tries to argue that when Mark’s account of the “feeding of five thousand” speaks of the people “coming and going” he “must” mean this was the Preparation for the Passover, and they were “coming and going” because of that, so when John relates the same incident (in fact he is redacting Mark’s account) and adds in passing that “Passover was at hand,” this proves Mark and John must have been there—and Mark merely forgot to mention the Passover was near.

Never mind that Mark places this event on the lakeshore and John places it on a mountain—a discrepancy impossible for eyewitnesses. This is fiction, not witness testimony. More to the point, there is no reason whatever to believe Mark imagined this event occurred anywhere near the Passover—in fact his narrative makes that impossible. “This is a remote place,” he has the Disciples say, “and it’s already very late,” so they recommend to Jesus that he “send the people away so that they can go to the surrounding countryside and villages and buy themselves something to eat.” But they could not do that if the Passover was at hand: buying and selling would be illegal at sundown. And it could only be described as a “remote” place if it would take quite a long time to walk anywhere even to buy anything (Mark says Jesus and gang had to use a boat even to get there!).

So Mark is clearly not talking about an event that occurred on the eve of a Holy Day. John simply made that up. And he did that to extend the same metaphor Mark was already developing between these miracles and his desire to presage the Eucharist. Likewise because John wanted to expand Mark’s one year narrative (which could not have imagined a Passover in the middle of Jesus’s ministry) into a three year narrative, a goal John achieves specifically by inventing four Passovers for Jesus to attend (John 2:13, 6:4, 11:55, 19:14). This is simply his second invented chronological marker. There is no evidence even suggesting otherwise. So McGrew simply has no data here. She is making things up that aren’t even in Mark’s Gospel. Fabricated data, to reach a fabricated conclusion.

Another “non example” is McGrew’s claim that Luke and John each assume things about the trial hearing for Jesus that are spelled out in the other. Here she completely ignores the demonstrable redaction history of the text. Mark has the Jewish elite hand Jesus over to Pilate and immediately Pilate asks “Are you the king of the Jews?” Mark doesn’t explain why Pilate thinks to ask that. It’s simply assumed that the reader would find it obvious that’s what Jesus was being charged with—his whole story has been building up to this, from the triumphal entry representing him as a claimant to the throne, to the Jewish elite charging him for claiming to be the Anointed One, which meant, king. This happens immediately before Jesus is handed over to Pilate. So why would anyone be confused?

Matthew agreed. When he copies and fixes up Mark’s story (in many respects verbatim, not the behavior of an eyewitness giving his own independent account), he didn’t think it necessary to add any further explanation either. But he does at least clean up Mark’s inclusion of the fact that Jesus was being accused of “many things” into the chief priests and elders merely “accusing him,” as if of only the one thing, making what Mark assumes obvious a little more explicit. It wasn’t until Luke redacted this story (again highly verbatim, so again not an eyewitness) that dissatisfaction apparently moved Luke to make fully explicit that the Jews were accusing Jesus of being “the Anointed One, i.e. King.” Luke is simply cleaning up what he perceived to be an unprofessional brevity in his source’s presentation of the tale. He is adding an explanatory causal sequence, to make his version look more like histories of the same era, as was Luke’s stated purpose. John would later expand on Luke even further, trying to explain a lot of things the original fiction made no sense of—like why the Jews didn’t just stone Jesus, and why Pilate would regard Jesus’s reply indicative of innocence, unrealistic moves that typified myth rather than history—because John is the first author to insist you’d better believe all of this stuff actually happened.

There are no “undesigned coincidences” here. All we see is a simple myth told by one author, that gets embellished by the next author redacting him, and embellished again by the next author redacting them, and embellished yet again by the next author redacting them. What we are looking at here is a telephone game, wherein more and more each subsequent author tries to make the story sound more plausible or realistic, and less like fable (a trend widely documented as typical of legendary development: On the Historicity of Jesus, pp. 480-81). And yet each is copying whole lines and words from the previous author they are redacting. This is evidence of fiction, not eyewitness testimony. McGrew has no evidence at all to argue the contrary.

Likewise, when McGrew tries to claim it’s an “undesigned coincidence” that Mark pauses to explain to his Gentile readers that Jews ceremonially wash before eating and John puts six pots of such water at a wedding. There is literally no connection between these passages whatsoever. Mark is not talking about a wedding, he’s not even describing a scene but explaining a custom that Jesus is merely talking about; and though John borrows from Mark the explanation of why some of those pots are at a wedding, he never has Jesus discuss the point Mark does, or anything whatever about the purpose of the pots. John merely plops these in as props in a completely different story to convey a completely unrelated point: how the water-to-wine miracle from these pots foreshadows the water-and-blood that will pour from Jesus when his hour has come. John alone invented both things (though notably, later scribes attempted inserting the latter into other Gospels: harmonizing alterations to the text also being commonplace in the manuscripts, further illustrating why we can’t trust any manuscripts to exactly reproduce what the original authors wrote).

This is the case even when one could “imagine” a connection: because you are the one imagining it, not the original author. With zero evidence the original author had any idea of it (and even evidence against that), you can’t just “fabricate” the idea that they did, and then use that made-up fact as “evidence” of an undesigned coincidence. That would be a completely illogical literary analysis. Yet, absurdly, that’s often what McGrew does. For example, she once said what inspired her to write her book was the amazing coincidence between John placing the feeding of the five thousand on the eve of Passover and Mark saying during his account of that that the grass was green. She is amazed by this. As if one can only find green grass next to a lake on one day of the year!

There is no evidence whatsoever here that Mark imagined the grass was green because it was Passover; and as we already saw, quite a lot of evidence against his doing so. In actual fact you could probably find green grass by the Sea of Galilee all year round back then; certainly for a great many months out of any given year; and Mark wasn’t from there so he wouldn’t know when or where grass wouldn’t be green anyway (and worse, the word he chose overlaps with pale and yellow). Mark probably contrived the detail for its symbolism (such as echoing the shepherd Psalm or the same trope found across the whole Bible, or simply to evoke a pleasant scene), not because he was there or anyone told him what color the grass was. Instead, McGrew just “invents” a fact (her own reason why Mark said there was green grass), then uses that as “evidence” of an amazing “coincidence.” And this inspired her whole book. This borders on batshit crazy.

Finally in this same category we can count genuine coincidences, that signal nothing. Timothy McGrew, for example, leads his debate with Bart Ehrman with the example of how Matthew records secret court conversations with Herod Antipas (in fact, Mark did that; Matthew just copies that and tweaks it up by making the conversation specifically between Herod and “his boys,” meaning slave attendants), while Luke separately reports a woman named Joanna attended Jesus and the Disciples, adding the peculiar detail that she was the “wife of Chuza, Herod’s business agent” (a position that could be in close contact with Herod’s slave household…although not necessarily: state leaders had scores of procurators attending to all manner of separate business). McGrew says this is an unplanned coincidence: Luke didn’t know he was revealing Matthew’s (actually Mark’s) source for the story about that conversation with Herod! There could at least be a coincidence here: the two passages are unconnected, yet one can imagine a connection between them. But neither Luke nor Matthew knows of any such connection: neither one says they had any information (much less this information) from this Joanna. So the connection still has to be invented in Tim McGrew’s mind. It doesn’t exist in any of the evidence.

If we stopped there we would only have a wash: sure, it’s possible that’s what Luke is doing, inadvertently naming a source he and others tapped for information about Herod’s court, or that oral legend claimed originated there; but there is no evidence this is actually the case. We have no evidence Joanna was ever a source for anything, or was ever even claimed to be in oral lore. Neither Matthew nor Luke present her that way. So they don’t seem to know she was a source at all. So we don’t get any evidence here of what McGrew wants. The only evidence comes entirely from his own imagination. Which is not evidence. It’s just speculation.

But we might not even have to stop there. Tim McGrew thinks there is no way this can be a designed coincidence; although I’m not so sure. How coincidental is it that a woman with the exact same name as John the Baptist (Joanna merely being the feminine of John), whom Luke’s sources (Mark and Matthew) repeatedly connected to both Jesus and Herod, who is then connected with both Jesus and Herod, and moreover, through a seer or prophet (the meaning of Chuza), who is in turn connected to Herod’s court—just as in Matthew’s nativity, which Luke didn’t like and chose to completely rewrite (just as he did Matthew’s account of Judas’s suicide). Is this authorial creativity at work? Luke “keeping” or “inspired by” some of the clever ideas in Matthew’s nativity that Luke had abandoned narratively, and just as Luke did in his nativity, cross-linking it with John, all to construct a new character never heard of before in any prior source? That’s not so farfetched considering all the evidence of creative story construction we have across all four Gospels (see Chapter 10 of On the Historicity of Jesus). Still, I’d say we have no more evidence of this than McGrew’s contrary fancies—or vice versa—so again it’s a wash. But a wash is a wash: we end up with no evidence either way.

The same points follow in all that remains: in some proposed cases of “undesigned coincidence” we have better evidence for a different explanation than McGrew proposes, and McGrew never addresses that evidence; and in all other cases we have no more evidence for McGrew’s proposal than alternatives and it’s therefore a wash, a non-conclusion. And in those cases, prior probabilities prevail, and those always point toward alternatives as the more usual and thus the more likely, rather than what McGrew wants to be the case.

Redaction Is Usually the Better Hypothesis

Case in point. The McGrews are amazed that the early Gospels (Mark, Matthew, and Luke) don’t really explain why Pilate declares Jesus innocent, and lo and behold, John comes along and explains it by presenting a whole conversation between Pilate and Jesus no one had ever heard of before. McGrew calls this an undesigned coincidence. But there are two problems with this.

First, not merely is no such conversation known to any prior author, but all previous authors outright tell us no such conversation occurred: they all say Jesus agreed with Pilate calling him king (rather than correcting Pilate on the point) and said nothing else (Mark 15:2-5; Matthew 27:11-14; Luke 23:1-25), which John deliberately, completely reverses—which John does a lot to the stories he is rewriting (I give several examples in Chapter 10.7 of On the Historicity of Jesus). Known and established redaction tendencies of the authors thus explain what is happening here.

Second, we know no such thing ever happened. Because there is no possible way Pilate ever did this. That Pilate, the man who actually did execute Jesus for claiming to be a king (and thus, clearly, didn’t find Jesus innocent—if any of this happened at all we can be sure it was that), is being “whitewashed” in these fictional narratives as not responsible, and the guilt is shifted onto the Jews, through a completely implausible story about Barabbas and a non-existent and impossible custom of the ruthless Pontius Pilate releasing any insurgent the rabble demanded on a Holiday. (That this is nonsense top to bottom, and obvious fiction, scholars have demonstrated repeatedly under peer review; I cite and summarize the literature in OHJ, index, “Barabbas”)

This is fiction. If any of this happened, Pilate convicted Jesus of the crime of insurgency. The Gospels then invented the false claim that Pilate didn’t do this, that in some implausible way he acquitted Jesus but executed him anyway because the Jewish elite cowed him (cowed Pontius Pilate!) into it. That’s the least plausible account of the data. Only the extraordinarily gullible, or profoundly deluded, would think the Gospel narratives are at all faithful here to what Pilate actually did and said. These authors want Pilate to have said this (or else their sources did, if they are recording any oral lore at all), in order to get the Romans off the hook, and shift blame onto the Jewish elite. And they invent various stories to accomplish this, riffing on and building on each other over time. So there is no sense in trying to explain “why” Pilate said this—because he didn’t. Nothing about this story is plausible. So that Pilate acquitting Jesus on no evidence is also implausible is just more of the same, not some oddity that begs explanation.

It’s only half a century later that John, finally, is uncomfortable with how implausible this all is, doesn’t like how much this reads like a fable, and so he fabricates a whole conversation, exactly contrary to all previous accounts, indeed refuting all previous accounts, in order to make the scene make more sense to him. That’s not the behavior of an eyewitness. That’s a redactor fixing a story he inherited to suit his liking. An eyewitness would outright say those other accounts were incorrect, and explain how he knows better than they do what he is reporting. A redactor, by contrast, just rewrites the story.

And this is why all mainstream scholars simply don’t even bother addressing the McGrew hypothesis. It’s just obvious nonsense, ignoring the entire history of the field of Jesus studies across the last fifty years, and all the progress it’s made in understanding how to analyze ancient literary practices and redaction histories. Thus in mainstream textbooks in the field, you get commentary like this (here in respect to John’s linking the feeding of the five thousand to Passover, a notion never conceived of by its originator, Mark):

John’s linking the feeding of the five thousand to the Passover combines with Jesus’ comments about eating his flesh and drinking his blood to make the bread with which he feeds the crowd symbolic of his sacrificial death as the true Passover lamb. The locale on a mountain reinforces the symbolism by recalling Moses on Mount Sinai. As God incarnate, Jesus takes the initiative and exhibits his omniscience. The specification of barley bread recalls attention to the Passover symbolism, for Passover coincides with the barley harvest. Robert Gundry, A Survey of the New Testament, p. 272

You can see all the Passover elements John has added to Mark’s version, including relocating the event to a mountain to solidify the Moses parallel, all track together as additions he is making, not as details Mark forgot. No such details were ever attached to this story until John attached them. John is fabricating. His goal is symbolically portraying a message through an allegorically constructed narrative, not a critical investigation of what really happened. John doesn’t care at all what really happened. At most he only cares what you believe really happened—in particular, that you believe his version is the true one, all others be damned. But John is completely disinterested in whether the one you need to believe true is true. He just constructs what it must be, and insists you believe it—just as Plato advised all religious mythographers do in his treatise on The Republic.

Leading Examples

Of course, Lydia McGrew’s book is the prime locus for finding examples she deems most compelling. But you can find short lists of “top examples” online. Frank Turek has assembled one, for instance (to which Josh McDowell adds an example). And an even longer list was published online long before McGrew published her book. But in this last section I’ll just briefly address McGrew’s, those remaining that I haven’t already.

I won’t bother, however, with what the McGrews call “external” coincidences, which are merely authors knowing things about their own history (like who ruled where and when, what titles they held, and what they were like). Authors knew those things about their history the same way we know those things about ours: they read books and inscriptions, listened to lectures and speeches, and absorbed longstanding cultural knowledge from their parents and peers. The only “coincidences” that have any chance of being “undesigned” are what the McGrews call “internal” coincidences, meaning from Gospel to Gospel, not from Gospel to pop history.

I also won’t bother with the second half of McGrew’s book that expresses irrational amazement at correspondences between the book of Acts and Paul’s Epistles. Obviously the author of Acts used those Epistles as a source text, and when it contradicts them it does so deliberately. The author of Acts is writing revisionist history; every change they make has obvious explanations in that author’s needs and intentions. This is so mainstream a conclusion now I see no need to beat that horse dead. Richard Pervo’s Commentary on Acts already covers all this, with bibliographies to the scholarship; and some examples are summarized in his short monograph The Mystery of Acts. So I’ll stick here with the Gospels. And in each case, the alternative I propose is either better evidenced in particular or more frequently attested as a cause in general, than what the McGrews propose.

The temple not made by hands: Mark 14:55-59 and 15:27-30 repeatedly depicts the Jews accusing Jesus of claiming to destroy the temple; John 2:18-22 “explains” that when Jesus said that, he was talking metaphorically about his body. This is obviously just John explaining his source, Mark. There is no undesigned coincidence here.

Mark simply efficiently communicated that the Jews misunderstood the Christian teaching, here placed in the mouth of Jesus (though in reality it never came from him), that human bodies are the temples of God. “I will destroy this temple made with human hands,” we’re told Jesus said, “and in three days will build another, not made with hands.” This is an obvious reference to Paul’s metaphor for resurrection in 2 Corinthians 5 (our resurrection bodies being those “not built by human hands”), and to Christians (and their bodies) as the new temple of God (2 Corinthians 6:16, 1 Corinthians 6:19)—an example of many, many instances across Mark’s Gospel where he reifies into a story about Jesus some teaching of Paul (see Mark’s Use of Paul’s Epistles), whose real meaning would be told to his readers in secret (Mark 4:11-13). John, writing as much as half a century later, is so far removed from this context he needed to make explicit what had previously been obvious to Mark and his audience. No further explanation is required.

John’s expansion of Philip as a character: The Gospel of John picks the Disciple Philip to expand into a bunch of stories (in John 1, John 6, John 12, and John 14), using him to perform story functions where previous authors didn’t. Before this no stories existed about the man (other than maybe one tale set long after the ministry of Jesus in Acts 8, which might not even be about the apostle Philip at all). Yet we’re supposed to be “surprised” that John alone imagined Jesus asking Philip before the feeding of the five thousand near Bethsaida where they could buy food for the crowds, and John alone chooses to place Philip’s home town at Bethsaida (what a coincidence!), when both Mark and Luke—John’s known sources!—had already placed this event near Bethsaida.

This is not an undesigned coincidence. John simply invented all this. His sources said the event took place near Bethsaida; John liked making up stories about Philip; so John made up the idea that Philip lived in Bethsaida so he could make up a story about Jesus asking him about local produce there. McGrew thinks it’s significant that John forgot to mention in John 6 that the scene was near Bethsaida, even though his sources all did. Of course his readers would already be familiar with the fact that they did, as John is writing decades after this story had already been circulating in multiple Gospels, the very Gospels he is using to construct his story from. It might not have even occurred to him as something he need mention. But we also know John has been edited out of order and is missing passages, and that this even happened precisely here: John 5 has Jesus in Jerusalem (in fact, curiously, at the pool of Bethsaida) and then immediately John 6:1 has Jesus inexplicably all the way in northern Galilee boating across the lake! So the original text may well have placed this scene near Bethsaida.

Be that as it may, embellishing stories like this is a common trend in fiction and myth, particularly in the Judeo-Christian tradition: to create more and more stories about minor characters over time. An unnamed character will decades later get a name (as pointed out by Bruce Metzger in “Names for the Nameless”), and someone who merely gets named, will decades later have tales told about them, and sometimes, decades later still, entire books written. All made up. In the Jewish tradition we see this throughout the apocrypha, e.g. in the Biblical Antiquities. In the Christian tradition we see scattered examples of this happening to Mother Mary, Mary Magdalene, Judas, Thomas, Andrew, John, Barabbas, Nicodemus, Dismas, Gestas, Simon Magus, Elymas, Thecla, Longinus, and Melchior, Caspar, and Balthazar. See my brief discussion in “Memory vs. Legend.” So that John decided it made sense to insert Philip into the feeding of the five thousand, and thus to invent his residence near where his sources placed that event, requires no further explanation. He is simply riffing on his sources to create new stories. They inspired him to link Philip with Bethsaida and give him an upsize role at a scene they put there. There is nothing undesigned about that.

Matthew moves things around: In Matthew 8:14­-16 Jesus cures Peter’s mother-in-law of a fever (among several other people of other ailments), then only at evening are some of the demon-possessed brought to him to be healed. McGrew claims this is only explained in Mark 1:21, where we are told this was the Sabbath, which we know ends at evening, so that explains why they had to wait. Of course this already makes zero sense. Why would the demon possessed have to wait, but not all the other people Jesus healed that day? Mark has Jesus heal a demon possessed person in that very same passage he says it was the Sabbath! So clearly Matthew cannot be thinking that only occurred after the Sabbath. Moreover, it is Mark, Matthew’s source, who places more exorcisms at evening that day. Matthew is simply copying Mark. He just left out the synagogue stuff (moving it to other chapters). This is not an undesigned coincidence. It’s not even a coincidence. This is just authorial license, moving things around from the source he is copying.

The Disciples keep a secret for a bit: In Luke 9:28-36 after the transfiguration we’re told, “The disciples kept this to themselves and did not tell anyone at that time what they had seen.” But in Luke’s source, Mark 9:9-10, we’re told “Jesus gave them orders not to tell anyone what they had seen until the Son of Man had risen from the dead.” Why does Luke leave out the reason the disciples kept this to themselves? Because he wanted to. Luke dials back Mark’s repeated theme of the “messianic secret.” When Jesus orders someone to keep quiet in Mark, Luke sometimes scrubs that detail from his account. That’s simply what Luke does as an author. He wanted to soften that. And so he does the same here. That’s why Luke changes it into the disciples deciding on their own to keep the secret. But otherwise he conveys the same information he gets from Mark: they kept quiet until later (“at that time” picks up “until the Son of Man has risen”). There is no coincidence here to explain. This fits Luke’s already-documented redactional tendencies.

What was John the Baptist talking about: The Gospel of John alone (1:15 and 1:30) has John the Baptist claim Jesus existed “before” him. McGrew irrationally thinks he means “was born six months before” him as depicted in Luke, when obviously he means, existed since the dawn of time, as the Gospel of John had just informed us (1:1-7), indeed even reminds us in the preceding verse! (1:14) But even if you want to completely ignore the context of this statement, the very context laboriously constructed for us to pay attention to by the author of this Gospel, and still “think” John is talking about some legend that Jesus was merely born before the Baptist, we already know why John would say that: his source, Luke, said that. And thus John’s audience would already be familiar with that legend Luke invented. John could even just as easily forget the possibility they weren’t—just as the authors of the Long Ending of Mark and the Testimonium Flavianum didn’t even consider the possibility their readers weren’t familiar with the canonized Gospels. Either way, there is no undesigned coincidence here.

How does John the Baptist know stuff: Likewise when John deletes the baptism scene because he abhors its adoptionism: McGrew thinks this makes no sense of how John knows Jesus is the Son of God; as if the entirety of scripture wasn’t full of prophets who knew such things because the Holy Spirit informed them. John has no need of theatre to depict John the Baptist as the well-known prophet he was. He is simply compressing his source’s narrative and making it more magnificent. In Mark, John never learns Jesus is the Son of God; in Matthew and Luke, he asks Jesus later on but we’re never told if the answer persuaded him; the next step of embellishment: John prophetically knows from the get go! This is Johannine redaction tendency, not an undesigned coincidence.

Moving metaphors around: The same thing happens with the Eucharist: contrary to McGrew’s naive amazement, John does not need to depict its Passover inauguration as his sources did; by then all Christians were already fully familiar with that tradition. So that he relocates it in history to unify it with the feeding narrative is simply his authorial license; not evidence of some undesigned coincidence. And the same thing happens again with the cup metaphor: John’s sources have Jesus talk about drinking the cup of his fate in his Gethsemane prayer; John simply moves the metaphor to his rebuke of Peter for resorting to violence at his arrest. He does so entirely in accord with his redactional tendency to remove all evidence of a wussy Jesus doubting and worrying and begging to be dismissed from his mission, and replacing it with the bad-ass tough-man Jesus he depicts throughout; this is one more example of that trend.

Not liking changes to the story: It’s the same when John chooses to exclude Luke’s unique “correction” to Mark’s story of the servant’s earlobe being severed by having Jesus heal it (weirdly, to no one’s amazement). It’s clear that John simply preferred Mark’s version. No further explanation required. That John alone has Jesus explain his mission is peaceful is no coincidence at this point; all the Gospels communicate that point about Jesus, each in their own way. John is simply doing it his way, expanding on Jesus’s denial of leading a rebellion, by having Jesus explain what he means by that. Previous Christians didn’t need it explained in the text; it was explained to them in person. Similarly, when Matthew tries to add women and children to the count of the “five thousand” miraculously fed, no other author liked the idea of doing that, so they didn’t. There is no “coincidence” to explain, much less with a weirdly elaborate theory Lydia McGrew concocts involving women and childcare procedures.

Seeing things that aren’t there: Similarly, when a subsequent author of the Gospel of John added a second ending to the original one, and invented a strange dialogue between Jesus and Peter restoring Peter’s status as supreme disciple, nowhere in that dialogue does Jesus indicate any remaining disfavor toward Peter. So McGrew’s claim that we need other Gospels to explain why Jesus is being “mean” to Peter here is a fabricated coincidence. Jesus is not being mean to Peter here. Period. And that Peter needed redeeming and knew it, John himself already records. So no other Gospel is needed to interpret what John is signaling by this new mythical narrative. In the same way, that Mark already imagines Jesus separating the Disciples into pairs, already explains why Matthew listed them as pairs and why Luke, who almost certainly employed Matthew as a source, and John who clearly employed Luke as a source, kept that up. No further explanation is required.

Missing the point entirely: In like fashion, Mark never imagined Joseph of Arimathea was a “disciple” of Jesus; to the contrary, Mark’s point is precisely to construct the irony that a disciple is not the one who dutifully attends to Jesus’s burial (Mark employs numerous ironies of this kind, as I have often written about). So we don’t need to look to John’s embellishment of the Arimathean’s mythology by making that detail up just to explain why Mark imagines Joseph having to muster the courage to ask Pilate for Jesus’s body. Mark already provides us with his imagined reasons: it was too soon for Jesus to be dead (causing quite a fluster for Pilate), and the Sabbath was fast approaching (leaving little time for a burial). No undesigned coincidence here.

Not paying attention to what an author has done: Likewise when Matthew has Jesus say great deeds were done in Bethsaida, McGrew says Matthew must be anticipating Luke’s subsequent placing of the feeding of five thousand near Bethsaida. But Matthew never says that. So obviously that’s not what he was thinking. Matthew tells us what he was thinking: “Then Jesus began to denounce the towns in which most of his miracles had been performed, because they did not repent.” Asked and answered. No further explanation required. Contrary to McGrew, it wasn’t Luke who set the feeding of the five thousand near Bethsaida; it was Matthew’s source: Mark, who in fact put two miracles there. But Matthew chose to place his condemnation story (which he probably invented) before the feeding, and to relocate the healing of the blind somewhere else entirely, thus he had to lead the condemnation story with a generic reference to “most of his miracles.” That’s called a designed coincidence.

Not knowing how legends develop: Similarly, McGrew is amazed at how later Gospels embellish the story of how Joseph of Arimathea had a tomb handy to place Jesus in. But that’s simply how legends get embellished over time. There are no coincidences here. Likewise, she is amazed the only Gospels who mention another Joseph as the father of Jesus are the only two Gospels who have nativity narratives requiring the mention of his father. Of course she won’t accept the obvious reason this is the case: Luke is rewriting Matthew’s narrative. And Matthew made this name up—no doubt to conform to Rabbinical lore that the messiah’s father would be named Joseph, and not just any messiah, but specifically the messiah who would die and be resurrected to signal the end times (On the Historicity of Jesus, pp. 73-75). The same goes for why John adds things like the name of the servant Peter mutilates (remember how it’s typical in legendary development for names to get added to minor characters?).

And so on. How does John know the day before the triumphal entry was six days before the Passover? Because he is using Mark as a source and pays close attention to how many days Mark signals as passing in this interval (Historicity, pp. 423-24). This is the exact opposite of an “undesigned” coincidence. Is Mark’s Rufus based on Paul’s Rufus? Of course not. Paul does not link his Rufus to either Cyrene or an Alexander or a Simon. Without that, coincidences of a single name are inevitable and thus require no explanation. Rufus was a common name. And McGrew strains to argue that John’s miraculous catch story is not simply a redaction of Luke’s, but ignores everything we know about how redaction operates, despite our having hundreds of examples across ancient literature to learn by. Obviously John is simply rewriting Luke (Historicity, pp. 488, 505), just as Luke’s nativity is rewriting Matthew’s, each exactly as he pleases (Historicity, pp. 472-73).

And so it goes. When you go through them all, there simply are no “undesigned coincidences” to explain. It’s a made up category, based on ignoring everything we know about how legends develop and how Biblical authors composed and redacted.

Conclusion

The Argument from Undesigned Coincidences is basically tinfoil hat. It lacks any scholarly basis, is completely devoid of methodology, and is mostly delusional. Many of the claimed coincidences don’t even exist. Some are obviously just coincidences (some may even be copying errors). And most are even more obviously just authors embellishing or rewriting stories to suit their liking, using no other source than the previous Gospel we know they were copying from.

Methodologically, the McGrews utterly fail to take into account alternative explanations—of which we’ve seen there are many. Even when they mention any (which is rare), they apply no logically coherent or even intelligible method by which to rule them out. That they do this while also failing to accommodate already established prior probabilities, accepted across the entirety of mainstream biblical scholarship today—such as that all the textual evidence firmly proves these authors are using each other as their sources, indeed very often verbatim, are obviously making a great deal up on purpose, and are not themselves eyewitnesses or dictating from any eyewitness, and whose text has not even been transmitted reliably—entails a double failure of basic empirical reasoning. Typical of Christian apologists.