'Undesigned Coincidences' in the Gospels

The eighteenth-century cleric William Paley is best known today for his argument from design, with its memorable watchmaker analogy. Yet the clergyman was once equally well known for his argument from undesign;¹ or his argument from ‘undesigned coincidences.’ In Horae Paulinae (1790), Paley argued that the epistles of Paul and the Acts of the Apostles dovetail in a casual, uncontrived fashion; the way a forger would be hard-pressed to create. He thought these connections show that both texts are describing something which actually happened, but from slightly different angles. The argument was taken up by theologian J. J. Blunt,² who applied Paley’s insights to the Gospels, arguing that the Gospels also interlock in ways that point to their truth.

The argument fell on deaf ears during the Twentieth Century.³ In the past few years, however, some apologists have begun to resuscitate Paley and Blunt’s arguments. Timothy McGrew has delivered a number of lectures introducing undesigned coincidences, and his wife Lydia McGrew has written a book (Hidden in Plain View, 2017), revising Paley’s original contribution, and supplementing it with new material. McGrew’s book was endorsed by a fleet of familiar names in Christian apologetics, including Craig A. Evans, William Lane Craig, and Craig Keener. It has also been defended by Peter J. Williams in his little apologetic, Can we Trust the Gospels?⁴

A ‘real life’ example may help, from Lydia McGrew.⁵ Suppose you’re hearing independently from two friends about their coffee catch-up. Have they made up the story or are they telling the truth? Suppose one friend said it was unusually cramped in the cafe. And the other mentioned that their friend spilt their coffee. These details have not been built into either account to verify the other, but when put together, they dovetail well. If it had, indeed, been unusually cramped, then we have an explanation for why one spilt coffee over himself. To be sure, this account may just be a coincidence. But the more subtle connections there are, the more likely it is historical.

I agree that ‘undesigned coincidences’ are a hallmark of authentic testimony. But in this post, I will argue that much which passes for ‘undesigned coincidences’ in the gospels eludes that descriptor. That is, closer examination of the gospels reveal that ‘undesigned coincidences’ are easily explained by redactional interests, compositional practices, or points of context which have been traditionally highlighted by gospel scholars. Here, they are not a hallmark of eyewitness testimony or reportage.

One might expect that these sort of explanations would be treated in the recent presentation on the argument, since much has happened in the last two centuries of gospels scholarship which is worth exploring. Unfortunately, McGrew deliberately “[sets] aside the apparatus of critical scholarship” in presenting her argument.⁶ Rather than testing her case against competing scholarly hypotheses for the origins of the same data - hypotheses which are posited to explain features of the Gospels which go well beyond any alleged ‘undesigned coincidence’ - she instead engages primarily her own imagined, alternative scenarios for how an undesigned coincidence might have arisen. This neglect is to the detriment of the argument.

How then might one explain undesigned coincidences? Some coincidences fade when one considers how the evangelists compiled their sources and shaped their narratives - their ‘redactional’ interests. Take the timing of the feeding of the five thousand in Mark and John. John tells us this was around Passover (6:4), which is apparently corroborated by Mark’s note that ‘many were coming and going’ (6:31). But the crowd’s following Jesus is a Markan trope (found in 3:7–9) and Passover is not an uncommon setting to John. Unlike the Synoptic Gospels, which features only one Passover event, John has three, around which most of his narrative revolves. It is therefore unsurprising that John’s feeding account is placed around Passover.⁷ 

McGrew notes that Mark’s ‘green grass’ (6.39) also corroborates a Passover setting, since Passover falls in Nisan (March/April) after months of rainfall. Yet the time-span for ‘green grass’ is not so narrow as she implies. Mary Ann Beavis comments: “[for] members of the audience familiar with the Palestinian climate, the reference to greenery situates the incident in the rainy season, October to early May [emphasis added].”⁸ Most rain fell through November to February.⁹ It is unclear, then, that Mark’s account specifically indicates a Passover setting.

Let us assume, however, that the grass was sufficiently green around Passover to warrant mention. Even then, the ‘green grass’ fits well with the author’s thematic purpose: to present Jesus as the Messiah. Though easily missed by modern readers, the feeding pericope is saturated with messianic imagery obvious to early Jewish audiences. From the mention that Jesus had compassion on the crowds like sheep without a shepherd (6:34; cf. Num. 27:17), to his provision of bread in a wilderness setting (Exod. 16:1-4; 2 Bar. 29:-38) and his organisation of the crowds into rows of hundreds and fifties (6:40; cf. Exod. 18:25-26; Deut. 1:13-15; 1QRule of the Community 2:18-23), we find the imagery of Jesus as a Moses-like figure (Deut. 18:15-18).

Within this framework, Mark’s ‘green grass’ need not be seen as a flash of memory, but as a detail which nourishes his overall picture of Jesus as a Moses or Davidic Messiah. As Graham Twelftree notes, “[at] first sight this may be seem to an incidental detail reflecting an eyewitness account, but it could have been inserted as a reminder than in the messianic age the desert will be fertile (cf. Is 35:1), or it may reflect the shepherd’s role of leading his sheep to lie down in green pastures.”¹⁰

Another much-loved coincidence in the feeding narrative concerns its location.⁵ In John’s account, uniquely, Philip is asked by Jesus where to find bread, Luke alone mentions the miracle took place in Bethsaida (9:10) and John tells us in a completely separate place that Philip was from Bethsaida (1:44). Piecing these together, Jesus seems to be asking the local boy, Philip,  where to find bread. 

Yet there are several  difficulties. Luke’s depiction in Bethsaida is discrepant with Mark’s earlier account, in which the disciples cross over the sea (of Galilee) ‘to Bethsaida’ (6:45) after the feeding. There have been many attempts to reconcile this with Mark, but none are satisfying.¹¹ So how did this discrepancy arise? Mark Goodacre finds a plausible explanation in  ‘editorial fatigue.’¹² This occurs when a writer - in this case, Luke - is dependent upon another (Mark), but failed to sustain their editorial activity. In this case, Luke’s hand is betrayed when he resets the feeding in ‘a city’ but has Jesus describe the surroundings as ‘a desolate place’ (9:12).¹³

Why, then, might John imagine Philip as having talked to Jesus, if he was not preserving eyewitness memory? If John knew a tradition that Philip was from Bethsaida, and was following Luke’s account over Mark’s (as he sometimes does), John may have imagined Jesus as naturally turning to the local boy. Or Philip may have been chosen more or less at random. While Philip may seem an odd choice to us, his character is more prominent role in John than in the Synoptics, and he is a significant figure in Christian apocrypha. Thus, John would not be the only author who decided to fill in Philip’s role among Christian writers.¹⁴

Other ‘undesigned coincidences’ fall away once the processes of oral tradition are considered. Take, for instance, the lists of the Twelve in the gospels. McGrew finds an ‘undesigned coincidence’ between Matthew’s list, which groups the names in twos (10:2–4), and Jesus’ sending out of the disciples in twos in Mark (6:7). Yet this grouping in ‘twos’ may be better explained by the processes of oral tradition. If the lists had to remembered, grouping the list into couplets may have functioned as a mnemonic device as the list was passed on, with certain pairs naturally lending themselves to each other (e.g. Simon & Andrew; James & John). Whatever the case, a hypothesis which seems lacking in plausibility is that which says the coincidence is due to a direct retrieval of information from eyewitnesses, close up the facts. If this is to be maintained, it becomes difficult to see why so basic a point as the names on the lists differ, or even why a list of names should feature in such an artificial manner at all.

For those who are more familiar with undesigned coincidences than Gospels scholarship, an appeal to oral tradition may feel like a deflection; a way to get around the supposedly unwelcome conclusion of the argument. Yet the machinations of oral tradition and social memory are able to explain great swathes of the Gospel material, not only the select places in which undesigned coincidences are found.¹⁵ In appealing to oral tradition, then, one appeals to a body of research which is well understood in relation to the Gospels in the particular and the whole; one is not attempting only to explain a specific datum: alleged undesigned coincidences.

Some coincidences can be explained with reference to the use of literary imitation — that is, the creative rewriting of some well-known text; in the case of the gospels, the Jewish scriptures. To return to the feeding of the five thousand, Williams notes that John’s interlocking timing at Passover is further subtly supported by the mention of ‘barley loaves’ (6:9). In this case, however, the whole scene should be viewed as a literary imitation of the scene of Elisha feeding one hundred men miraculously with twenty loaves, in 2 Kings 4:42–44 - a prominent explanation commanding wide scholarly approval.¹⁶ There, in the Greek translation of the Hebrew text, we find the exact term used in John: ἄρτους κριθίνους (artous krithinous) — barley loaves. This dependence upon the Jewish scriptures may also helps to explain why John sets this event at Passover, for the Elisha story is set around Passover too.

The notion that an author might shape or even compose a narrative based on another one may seem unusual to modern readers who are more accustomed to reading the Gospels as historical biography. Yet such reshaping and invention of tradition is found throughout Roman and Jewish antiquity. As Nathanael Vette has demonstrated in detail, such a ‘compositional’ (rather than exegetical) use of Jewish Scriptures can be found in a host of other Second-Temple Jewish texts, such as the Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum, Genesis Apocryphon, Judith and 1 Maccabees.¹⁷ This would explain many of the features we have seen in the episode of the feeding of the five thousand, a story whose historical veracity many have questioned on quite separate grounds.¹⁸

Other undesigned coincidences disappear when the assumed knowledge of an audience is brought into view. Consider the so-called ‘bread of life’ discourse in John 6, where Jesus uses the enigmatic language of ‘eating the flesh’ and ‘drinking the blood’ of the Son of Man (6.53). McGrew supposes that this is explained in an uncontrived way by the institution of the eucharist which appears in the Matthew and Luke (but not in John). But how is this coincidence ‘undesigned’? According to the canons of ancient biography, in which invention of speech is not unusual, the fourth evangelist may simply have composed the discourse using the language of the last supper. This explanation is supported by the fact that a debate about whether ‘the Jews’ will eat and drink communion smacks of a later concern which has been retrojected back into the ministry of Jesus. This may not be the way that modern authors would write a gospel. But the evangelists were not modern historians.

McGrew is aware of this objection, but responds, “Why did John not include the institution of Communion in his own Gospel? Why does he leave the odd and difficult bread of life discourse dangling, using eucharistic-sounding language but without making any connection to the very passage from which he borrowed the language?”¹⁹ Yet the answer to these questions should be plain. John’s Christian audience is already aware of the language; they are already aware that what Jesus is speaking about is the ubiquitous ritual of the eucharist. It is for this very reason that John does not need to include the institution of the eucharist in his gospel; he has already treated it in his own fashion in John 6. There is no coincidence here to be found.

Some phenomena in the gospels are interpreted by McGrew as ‘undesigned coincidences,’ but they only fit by expanding the definition so wide as to negate its significance. For instance, McGrew spends nine pages in the book exploring the absence of Joseph (pp. 99–107). The argument runs that if any of the writers were fabricating material, they may well have included Joseph — but they do not. This is a subtle corroboration of their gospels. But hardly anyone is claiming that the gospels are unhinged from history. Not even the form-critics, who remain a common object of conservative critiques, were claiming such a thing. The normal explanation for why Joseph appears in none of the texts is compelling: he was not around in the ministry of Jesus, and the oral traditions and source material which came down to the evangelists reflect this fact.

In the last two ‘undesigned coincidences,’ we see how undesigned coincidences often rely upon arguments from silence: the fact that John doesn’t explain the eucharist; and that the gospels don’t mention Joseph, is taken as evidence of interlocking, eyewitness testimony.²⁰ Yet, while some silences are more deafening than others, we should be cautious about this kind of argument when a silence is easily explicable. As we have seen in the two cases surveyed above, both silences are effortlessly explained by the common models of the gospels’ composition: the idea that the gospels were composed using a mixture of oral tradition, written sources and literary creativity.²¹

Other ‘undesigned coincidences’ mentioned by McGrew are so tangential as not to concern the same event. McGrew ponders why the water jars are empty in John’s account of the wedding in Cana (2:6–7), and finds an answer in Mark’s explanation of Jewish ritual practices (7:3). The answer that they had already been used before the feast emerges. But this isn’t an undesigned coincidence; it is a point of well-known context. Whether John 2 is historical, partly historical, or not historical at all - as Andrew Lincoln’s analysis suggests²² - someone aiming at verisimilitude could have plausibly composed such an account. These, I think, are the sorts of undesigned coincidences one can find scattered all over fiction. One will only find in them proof of eyewitness testimony if that is what one has already established in one’s own mind.

Coming into land, some more remarks on eyewitness testimony are perhaps due. First, even if the gospels possessed a number of undesigned coincidences, it would not support the conclusion that the gospels were sourced more or less directly by eyewitnesses. Almost no one but the most ardent sceptic doubts that material in the gospels goes back to eyewitnesses (even if there is a dispute about how much). That we should find different reports which interlock in ways which support their testimony is natural, even on the modern canons of scholarship which McGrew is seeking to abrogate. In other words, even if we have plenty of undesigned coincidences, much more work would still need to be done to confirm the conclusion that the gospels were sourced, directly or indirectly, by living eyewitness.

Second, it seems to me that McGrew’s testing of the gospels for ‘undesigned coincidences’ assumes a similar stance to testing eyewitnesses in a court-case scenario. To perform this testing, she needs almost no other tools but classic detective questioning: if this, why that? But the history of terse, ancient texts, will often not co-operate with such an analysis. We have four anonymous authors, working with different source material, with their own redactional interests and compositional techniques, who are writing to different audiences, sometimes decades apart. It is really unsurprising that the complex process of ‘writing a gospel’ should give rise to apparently undesigned coincidences? This was one reason why John Henry Newman was cautious about Paley’s courtroom apologetic.²³ The evidence is slim. The unknowns are great. And history will not often bend to the courtroom’s demands.²⁴

Much more can be said about other undesigned coincidences which I cannot address here. I do not therefore expect that readers will have found this an entirely satisfying or comprehensive engagement of the topic. Unlike some critics, I have no intention in making such a critique. My aim has rather been to show that undesigned coincidences provide little help in establishing the historicity of the gospels. One of the reasons why Williams’, and to a greater extent, McGrew’s presentation of undesigned coincidences will seem compelling to some is because they are interested in the text as an apologetic. McGrew has not, in her apologetic, attempted to engage the more difficult work which historians and exegetes do in theirs. This is no attempt to denigrate apologetics, nor Hidden in Plain View. It is simply to say that a short work, of the variety she have produced, does not do justice to alternative explanations. It is these explanations which often cause the appearance of ‘undesign’ to disappear.

1. This is a slightly revised version of a post on Medium in 2019. My gratitude is due to Josh Parikh, redactor par excellence, for helping me rework the piece.

2. J.J. Blunt, Undesigned Coincidences in the Writings of the Old & New Testament, An Argument of Their Veracity (London: John Murray, 1869).

3. A few conservative scholars, such as B.B. Warfield and F.F. Bruce, were aware of it, but by the second half of the twentieth century, it seems to have been almost entirely forgotten. One exception is Colin J. Hemer, who appeals to undesigned coincidences in his work, The Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic History. WUNT 49 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1989). More recently, when James Dunn employs a similar argument, he shows no awareness of undesigned coincidences. See James G.D Dunn, Jesus Remembered, Christianity in the Making Vol. 1 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), 635.

4. Peter J. Williams, Can We Trust the Gospels? (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2018), np.

5. See Lydia McGrew, Hidden in Plain View: Undesigned Coincidences in the Gospels and Acts (Ohio: Deward, 2017), np.

6. McGrew, Plain View, 15.

7. See Steven A. Hunt, Rewriting the Feeding of the Five Thousand: John 6.1-15 as a Test Case for Johannine Dependence on the Synoptic Gospels, SBL 125 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011), 245-246.

8. Mary Ann Beavis,  Mark (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2011), 106. This was brought to my attention through Ben’s excellent review, “Mark 6:39’s “Green Grass” and Lydia McGrew’s Undesigned Coincidences,” The Amateur Exegete (Blog). 20th July 2023. Accessed 10th January, 2023. https://amateurexegete.com/2023/07/20/mark-639s-green-grass-and-lydia-mcgrews-undesigned-coincidences/.

9. Frank S. Frick, “Palestine, Climate of,” in The Anchor Bible Dictionary, ed. David Noel Freedman (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 5:122. Again, see TAE, “Green Grass” above.

10. Jesus The Miracle Worker: A Historical and Theological Study (Downers Grove, Illinois: IVP, 1999), 319.

11. See Mike Licona, “‘Was Mark Confused Pertaining to the Location of the Feeding fo the 5,000” 22nd August, 2016 [accessed 3rd Jan] www.risenjesus.com/mark-confused-pertaining-location-feeding-5000.

12. Mark Goodacre, “Fatigue in the Synoptics,” NTS 44 (1998): 45-58.

13. Ibid., 51.

14. Bart D. Ehrman makes this point in his debate with Timothy McGrew on the Unbelieveable? radio show on 25th July 2012 . See www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gm=nx8yNK30. 

15. See James G.D. Dunn, The Oral Gospel Tradition (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2013); Eric Eve, Behind the Gospels: Understanding the Oral Tradition (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014).

16. See, for example, Adam Winn, Mark and the Elijah-Elisha Narrative: Considering the Practice of Greco-Roman Imitation in the Search for Markan Source Material (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2010).

17. See Nathanael Vette, Writing with Scripture: Scripturalized Narrative in the Gospel of Mark (London: Bloomsbury, 2022), 32-109.

18. For a detailed discussion, see Graham H. Twelftree (ed.), The Nature Miracles: Problems, Perspectives (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2017).

19. McGrew, Plain View, 45.

20. I am grateful to Josh Parikh for highlighting to me how often undesigned coincidences depend upon arguments from silence.

21. In search for explanatory elegance, one might suppose that the hypothesis that the evangelists were eyewitnesses, or sourced directly by eyewitnesses, is simpler than a composite model in which the the Gospels are a product of oral/literary traditions. Yet one need not only look for elegance. The idea that the Gospels were composed through a process of oral tradition, mimesis and literary tradition is well-established to explain the Gospels in their minutiae and as narrative. On this process, see the masterful works of Eric Eve, Behind the Gospels; idem. Writing the Gospels: Composition and Memory (London: SPCK, 2016).

22. See Andrew T. Lincoln, “‘We Know That His testimony Is True’: Johannine Truth Claims and Historicity” in John, Jesus and History, vol. 1: Critical Appraisals of Critical Views, eds. Paul N. Anderson, Felix Just, S.J., Tom Thatcher. SBLSS (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 179-197 (191-195).

23. See John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of A Grammar of Assent (London: Burns, Oates, & Co., 1874).

24. In history - especially ancient history - ‘modesty becomes us.’ I am not claiming that any one of my explanations is the only plausible explanation for any coincidence. Rather, I show here that the appearance of undesigned coincidence is well accounted for on traditional models of the Gospels, which - unlike undesigned coincidences and the theories they are deemed to support - withstand scrutiny in mainstream biblical scholarship.