Feeding the Five Thousand: Fact or Fiction?

A Story Filled with Undesigned Coincidences?

A few years ago, I saw an argument doing the rounds online. It was a defence of the Gospels’ historicity, using a phenomenon called undesigned coincidences.

For those unfamiliar, an ‘undesigned coincidence’ (UC) occurs when details in two (or more) accounts dovetail in a subtle yet meaningful manner which points to their truth. It is ‘undesigned’ because these are not the kinds of coincidences a forger would invent; it is a ‘coincidence’ in pointing to an underlying historical reality.

Consider a real-life example, from a book on the subject.¹ Suppose you hear independently from two friends about their coffee catch-up. One friend said that it was unusually cramped in the cafe. The other said they spilt coffee over themselves. These details have clearly not been built into either account to verify the other, but when they are put together they dovetail well, like pieces of a jigsaw. If it had really been unusually cramped, then we can explain why the coffee was spilled.

Applied to the Gospels, the argument is this: that when we read the canonical Gospels, we find subtle ways in which they dovetail, which points to the underlying historicity of their narratives. The argument from undesigned coincidences is often used by apologists and scholars who wish to defend the Gospels’ historicity.

So what are we to make of this contention? Are there undesigned coincidences in the Gospels? Let us take a look at a premier example to get a flavour for the argument.

The Feeding of the Five Thousand

In making an argument from undesigned coincidences, the feeding of the five thousand is an obvious place to turn. As a miracle which is narrated in all four Gospels, we might expect to find a number of subtle ways in which the texts interlock.

Consider the following observations:

• Mark inexplicably says that ‘many were coming and going’, while John says that it was ‘about the time of Passover’, explaining why it was so busy.

• Mark mentions that there was ‘green grass’ which makes sense if John is correct and the event occurred in March or April, at the time of Passover.

• John says that Jesus turned to Philip to ask where to find bread, and elsewhere notes that Philip was from Bethsaida, while Luke only sets the story in Bethsaida. Jesus therefore seems to have turned to the local boy to find bread.

• Matthew tells us that ‘five thousand men, aside from women and children’, while John is the only one to tell us that only the men sat down when they were grouped in fifties and hundreds. This explains how it the figure five thousand was reached.

This is the most impressive example of an undesigned coincidence I have come across. It has even impressed friends of mine who are often highly critical of apologetic attempts to uphold the historicity of the Gospels.

Yet upon reflection, I am not convinced that these alleged undesigned coincidences do point to independent, underlying witnesses of the same event. Let us take each of them in turn, and set the texts within their wider critical context.