The Argument from Undesigned Coincidences is a naive Christian apologetic invented in the 19th century but revived recently by apologist Lydia McGrew, which ignores all historical knowledge of the redaction history of the Gospels to argue that, instead of the authors using each other as sources, they wrote completely independently of each other, such that the alignments in their text signal reliable witnessing. In particular, the argument zeroes in on alignments whereby both authors purport to know something that they don’t share in their accounts, yet that signal they are “aware” of what is related in those other accounts.

A prototypical example is how Mark says the grass was green at the Feeding of the Five Thousand and John doesn’t mention that but instead says it was the Passover, which occurs in Spring, a detail Mark omitted. Yet the details corroborate each other. This is of course weak tea (and there are many problems here, such as that Mark definitely does not locate the event at Passover or in the same place). But you can see how, if you could find an ideal case of this sort of thing, you would have evidence that Mark and John each knew a thing that could only have come from witnesses. That is, if you’ve ruled out the more obvious explanation, that John is simply redacting Mark—or Mark and John are each picking different details out of a common source that’s just as fictional.

I wrote up my own critique of this in There Are No Undesigned Coincidences: The Bible’s Authors Are Simply Changing Up Their Sources. And there I cite several other online critiques. But I now there mention a new book just released by Michael Alter, The Hypothesis of Undesigned Coincidences: A Critical Review, that is an exemplary model of how to really drill down on arguments like this. His book is a bit clunky but well organized and built out of extensive research and consultation with expert sources. I definitely recommend it. Not only as a rigorous takedown of Lydia McGrew’s argument (making this now your first-stop-shop on Undesigned Coincides), but also as a model to follow in constructing a takedown of any other apologetical argument.

Some Basics

Alter starts by challenging McGrew’s unexplained (and undefended) rejection of biblical criticism, a.k.a. all modern scholarship on the Bible, by explaining what “biblical criticism” actually refers to, quoting actual experts on the point. He explains in turn why this is fatal to her entire project. She needs anything she dubs a coincidence to be both undesigned (i.e. unintentional) and actual (i.e. something otherwise unexpected). But biblical criticism establishes her every example to be neither. Redactional changes in stories over time are intentional, and not unexpected, even in their particulars. The Bayesian idea underlying her argument is that certain matching elements between two Gospels are unlikely unless both accounts are coming from real witnesses (even if different witnesses), which is a valid description of evidence, but not a sound description of the evidence. In other words, no examples she proposes meet this condition, despite all her handwaving.

So McGrew’s argument could work, it’s just that it doesn’t—because no instance in any Gospel meets the requirements. For a good Bayesian analysis of why such arguments can in principle work, without claiming any such argument works for the Bible, see Aviezer Tucker’s study, “The Generation of Knowledge from Multiple Testimonies,” in Social Epistemology (2015). And for an example of why it doesn’t work for the Bible, see my previous critique of Daniel Bonevac’s Bayesian Argument for Miracles.

Alter points out how it is a mainstream fact of the field that many of the things McGrew points to actually are lifted from relevant Old Testament verses (and other pre-Christain Judaica), eliminating any likelihood of it coming from witnesses or being included for that reason. For example (as I pointed out last time), Mark 6:39 adapts material from Psalm 23, and not to make a witness account florid, but to give a literary and theological spin on the shared themes between those two tales: the Lord providing food and wisdom in the verdant wilds beside quiet waters, ensuring salvation (“The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing”). Indeed, “In Mark 6:34, Jesus takes pity on the crowd of people following him because they are ‘like sheep without a shepherd’,” echoing Psalm 23:1, which “declares, ‘The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures'” (Alter, p. 13).

Once we see Mark is doing this, it no longer becomes a given that he is doing it for the reasons McGrew avers. The coincidence here is designed—Mark deliberately uses concepts from Psalm 23 to characterize a scene he wants to portray; the authors of John then chose to do this differently, by characterizing the same scene (which they adapted from Mark, so they well know what they are changing) in terms of a Passover-Eucharist theme instead of Psalm 23. The coincidences (of verdancy and theological relevance) and differences (the alternative ways of characterizing the same things in a story) are intentional, not accidental. And so we have no evidence left here that any witness was involved (and there are even more reasons to doubt that, as I covered last time).

Alter also addresses McGgrew’s attempts to answer arguments like this. For example, he quotes Christian scholars critiquing eisegesis generally, exactly the thing McGrew is doing, and then directly criticizing her argument on sound exegetical grounds. So the poor lamb of her argument is getting slaughtered from all sides. Alter’s study is also useful beyond just this one application. For example, he provides a detailed analysis of the concept of “coincidence” and of various kind of “arguments from coincidence” and what it takes to render them sound. Which has many applications (as Christian apologists attempt “arguments from coincidence” all the time). Similarly, when discussing the Argument to Undesigned Coincidences in the “feeding of the five thousand,” Alter provides a useful and complete synopsis of all four Gospels’ narratives of this event, and outlines how the story is thus built out of Psalms, Kings, and Exodus material (as well as others), with verses and tables. All of which is useful beyond this one application. (Alter also includes a detailed case against the miracle itself, which is useful for those arguing with Christians at that basic a level.) 

There are also things Alter catches that even I had not noticed before. For example, Alter quotes scholars pointing out that the Elisha food miracle that the Jesus narrative emulates occurs after the “death” of Elijah, while Mark places the Jesus narrative immediately after relating the death of John the Baptist, whom we well know Mark characterized as the Elijah to his Jesus (because prophetically a new Elijah would precede the messiah). The message is clear: Elijah preceded the messiah, and now the messiah is demonstrating his messianic succession (which is why Jesus’s miracle is vastly more impressive than Elisha’s). Another example is that Mark actually contradicts John by placing the feeding not near Bethsaida but entirely across the Sea of Galilee from it (Mark 6:45); and it is not John who reverses this to have it near Bethsaida in the first place, but Luke (9:10). John therefore got the idea of placing it there from Luke, just like John gets many other ideas. He thus did not get it from some independent eyewitness. (Alter’s discussion of the “green grass” episode also inspired me to rewrite the passage he quotes from me.)

There are also several sections where Alter surveys the history of Christian apologetics over the last few hundred years, quoting Christian historians themselves explaining how fads and fashions changed over time, and why, and how this impacted which apologetical arguments would take the forefront and which the backburner in any given period. This material is also broadly useful in the service of counter-apologetics.

Some Specifics

Alter’s extensive critique offers well more than my article. For example, he quotes Christian scholar Vincent Torley pointing out that McGrew’s own reasoning operates against her own agenda, since “Among the forty-seven alleged undesigned coincidences listed in her book,” only one “bears any relation to the resurrection,” and that one is easily proved nonexistent (since none of the features she claims to be unintentionally coincidental between the miraculous catch tales of Luke 5 and John 21, are). So it would appear that by her own argument there were no eyewitness testimonies to the resurrection of Jesus. The Gospels had to make those up (as one might have predicted from reading the original ending of Mark). Even at best she can only get there to be witnesses to some events of his life. Of course, those all fall apart, too. But the point remains that even if she were entirely correct, that very fact would logically compel her to accept an admission about the Gospels that undermines her entire apologetic agenda. She might prefer to shelve the idea for all the damage it will do to her cause.

Alter also brings in memory studies to show that eyewitness memories are routinely distorted over time, the contrary of what McGrew wishes to conclude from her alleged undesigned coincidences. That witnesses remember one or two things correctly actually does not support the conclusion that they remembered the rest correctly. So even on the rudimentary assumption that anything related by the Gospels derived in any way from witnesses is not particularly helpful for what McGrew wants to argue. This is already where most mainstream scholars are: believing some witness testimony is in there, but admitting it is heavily distorted and mythologized in transmission and even in witness memory. Of course, I find no good evidence for that assumption (the Gospels appear to have had no oral lore to operate from relating to any historical Jesus). But even granting the assumption doesn’t get you where McGrew wants. And it is points like this (and I’m just giving some examples) that make Alter’s book a valuable treatise in counter-apologetics.

Another example is the “washing of feet” between John 13 and Luke 22: Luke has Jesus resolve a dispute among apostles over who is greater by saying even Jesus is like one who serves—and the apostles must likewise serve, since “the greatest among you should be like the youngest, and the one who rules like the one who serves.” John drops the argument and just has Jesus act like a servant, washing the apostles feet, and teach the same lesson thereby (because “now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet,” because “no servant is greater than his master, nor is a messenger greater than the one who sent him”).

McGrew sees the one as explaining the other: Luke provides a detail unknown to John that explains what John reports, entailing the whole story must go back to someone who was there, and they each are just getting different points of view as to what happened. This of course is all in McGrew’s mind. There is no indication Luke had any idea of Jesus washing feet; and there is no indication the story in John was meant to convey Jesus reacting to an argument. John simply didn’t like that detail—that’s why he dropped it. He instead invents a new way to teach the same lesson, with a different story than Luke’s. John repeatedly riffs on Luke this way, often to reverse or change a point Luke made, which is how we know John knows Luke (they are not writing independently).

That means John omits the argument on purpose—and invented the idea of Jesus washing feet instead. John wants to keep the teaching, that Jesus is the Servant, which appeals to the common Suffering Servant theology, and that Apostles must not seek glory or hierarchy but serve each other and the gospel—thus preserving the concept of the gospel as “the least being first,” as well as the Philippians 2 doctrine that Jesus defeated Death by humbling himself as a slave. So John reifies Luke’s saying into an action, to depict it in narrative. 

John often does this. The parable of Lazarus in Luke becomes in John a reified tale of an actual Lazarus (in that case, to reverse the very point Luke was trying to make: see my discussion in Why You Should Not Believe the Apostle John Wrote the Last Gospel). The miraculous catch in Luke (which has Jesus teach a lesson about fishing for men, highlighting the risks of failure) becomes transformed in John into an even more miraculous catch of fish (which highlights through narrative symbolism that the mission will not fail at all). And so on. So we are not looking at independent sources explaining each other. We are looking at one source redacting another, to change what the first one said, omitting things they didn’t like, and retelling things they did like in their own creative ways. Which means Luke’s account caused John’s, and John’s intentions caused the transformation of Luke’s story. These coincidences are designed.

The Example of Philip

Which brings us to another example Alter devotes considerable attention to: why John decides to claim that the apostle Philip (and, incidentally, Peter and his brother Andrew) hail from Bethsaida—given that he got Luke’s idea of relocating the “feeding of the five thousand” to Bethsaida (whereas Mark has it across the lake from there). McGrew claims this is an undesigned coincidence, “because” Philip hailed from Bethsaida, and Luke places the event at Bethsaida, so John is placing the feeding of the five thousand near Bethsaida because Philip is the one in John to discuss provisioning options there (along with, notably, Andrew).

Of course, this is already a circular argument. This isn’t undesigned. John is the one who told us Philip (and Andrew) hailed from Bethsaida (no other author had ever heard of this); and that is how he signals that he is following Luke in placing the event there by the very act of having Philip and Andrew present as experts on the location. John is the one inventing all this. None of it exists in any of his sources (Mark and Matthew do not place the event at Bethsaida; and neither they nor Luke hail any apostles from there, least of all Philip or Andrew). So there is no “coincidence” to explain. John is simply agreeing with Luke’s relocation of the event, and signaling that in his own creative way.

The question remains why the authors of John chose Philip specifically to be their Bethsaidan. One notable feature of John is that he litters his Gospel with spotlights on Philip, making him a recurring narrative character, when he never was before (Philip gets no stories or lines in any of the Synoptics). Thus we already see assigning Philip a role is a trend in John, and thus not unexpected in the feeding story. Another notable feature of Philip is that he was often confused with another Philip in Acts, where that one gets one extended tale, emphasizing his miraculous powers. And he was possibly chosen for that role there because of a pun: Philip means “lover of horses,” and that Philip narrative has him summoned to and riding on a chariot.

Luke means this to be someone other than the Apostle, and Luke locates his home at Caesarea (the port city in Samaria, befitting the fact that Acts has this Philip conduct a mission there), not Bethsaida (Mark likewise locates Peter and Andrew’s home in Capernaum, not Bethsaida). So John has changed even where he may have thought Philip (and was told Peter and Andrew) came from to suit his own narrative agenda. After that, every story John spins about Philip is original. Philip sees Jesus practice clairvoyance, summon God’s voice from heaven, conjure food for thousands, and then rebuke him for still not believing he is God’s vessel on Earth. John clearly chose one apostle to produce this narrative arc, showing how despite repeated proofs, his disciples’ belief could still be wanting (a theme found in other Gospels: see Can You Rebel Against Rome with Only Two Swords?).

John may have chosen Philip at random. Or he may have been inspired by seeing (what he mistook) as Philip’s elevation to narrative status in Acts, and thus decided it made sense to give that apostle more backstory (a common trend in mythmaking over time), since he needed some apostle to choose for the role, and simply picked what he thought was then the most narratively famous option. But the idea might also have come to John’s authors (as Alter documents) because Bethsaida was under the rule of Herod Philip the Tetrarch, and that Philip also had famously built it up from a village into a city and had even later died and been buried there. Alter is not persuaded, but the congruence of names could easily inspire John to play on it. Indeed, one might wonder if it was assumed or imagined that Philip the Apostle acquired that specific Greek name from the famous Herod in question (even then they’d know that would be the most likely explanation, by far, of any Palestinian follower of Jesus having that name).

Either way, support for the political narrative is provided by Alter: Mark has the feeding occur immediately after news that Herod Antipas had killed John the Baptist over a dispute concerning his brother—that very same Philip the Tetrach; Matthew then takes Mark to mean that “when Jesus heard what had happened, he withdrew” to the remote place for that feeding miracle. Thus the story was evolving over time into the idea that Jesus fled the public eye until things with Herod Antipas cooled down (a motive that made narrative sense, as in the Gospels Jesus is made out to be a known associate or even successor of John the Baptist, and we had just been told Herod thought Jesus might be John the Baptist resurrected). Luke thus evolves the story further by inventing the idea not just that Jesus fled to a remote place, but indeed a place just a tick outside the jurisdiction of Herod, but still along the coast of the Sea of Galilee (where Luke was following Matthew and Mark in continuing to place this event), which left Luke no other logical place to situate this event than Bethsaida, even though this contradicts Mark’s original account (where they go to Bethsaida after the feeding miracle). John thus inherits this version of events, which then logically evokes the suitability of having Philip the Apostle be the one to play the role of the disciples, and advising on affairs around Bethsaida.

Alter prefers that Luke (and then John) settled on Bethsaida for what I would call an additional reason: its name happens to mean House of Procuring Meat—hence “house of hunting” or “house of fishing,” in either case: procuring meat, and in the wild. This is so apposite to the themes of the tale that it surely would have been attractive to a literary auteur like Luke. Not only would this fit the connection to fish in the story and the “fishers of men” theme of the Synoptics, and the procuring of food in the wild (where the difficulty requiring a miracle becomes the number of people and not what the usual means of provisioning in the wild would be), but it also fits the theme from Hebrews that meat is for the initiated, milk for the beginner (a trope already seen in the Dead Sea Scrolls: On the Historicity of Jesus, pp. 111, 237).

The symbolism of relocating the event at Bethsaida was thus apt in so many ways that it should not surprise us. John simply liked this feature from Luke and thus ran with it and even built on it—by having Philip now the key disciple in the scene, completing the transformative arc of the story by even bringing that cogent name into it. We can’t infer more because our edition of John has been so repeatedly redacted that we no longer have its original arrangement (its content is out of order, and has had things added and removed: On the Historicity of Jesus, pp. 487–93). For example, our edition does have Jesus mention the Baptist in the previous chapter, but not his killing by Herod; but we have no way of knowing what the original edition included (indeed, the original edition might even have explicitly said this occurred in Bethsaida, rather than just having a disciple previously set-up as from there get spotlighted in the story).

Any author of the time would nevertheless know that Bethsaida was in Philip’s Tetrarchy. So once John borrowed Bethsaida as the location from Luke, adding the name of Philip remained apposite.

Some Caveats

The negatives are few. Alter’s book’s structure and style can feel overly mechanical at times. And there are a few typos, but I didn’t find any you couldn’t figure out. For examples: in the Preface by Evan Fales, the number 108 appears, but is supposed to be formatted as 10 to the 8th power; later, the word “disciplines” once appears where “disciples” is meant; and in a quote of Lewis Carol, there are inconsistencies in punctuation that don’t impair the sense. Things like that. And not too many. Likewise, though I did not thoroughly check, the only actual errors I caught are also not overly significant. 

For example, at one point (on p. 89) Alter discusses Michael Licona’s linguistic analysis of the Greek word pros in Mark 6:45 and gets minor things wrong, but not in any way that matters to the point being made, which is that Mark is most definitely describing Bethsaida as their post-feeding cross-lake destination, and not just a reference point for their direction of travel (as some apologists attempt to claim). For those who want to know the deets on that: the word pros is a preposition, and as such does not (as Alter puts it) “appear in the accusative,” but with a following word in the accusative, nor does it “appear as an infinitive” but with an infinitive, in the same manner, and that following word being an infinitive is needless to mention, because nominal infinitives are assigned case by their definite article. Moreover, the text of Mark has Bethsaida in the accusative case (with a terminal nu), so one need not argue that it is; and pros plus the accusative always means direction of motion (“toward”). Licona’s (correct) point is that it means destination when paired with an eis clause of motion, as it is in Mark 6:45. Moreover, pros plus the dative would mean “near to,” not “going to,” but that is why Bethsaida is not in the dative in Mark, which Mark would have specified with a definite article (after dropping the terminal nu). I don’t know whether these mistakes are in Licona or Alter’s paraphrase, but I assume the latter. In any event, they change nothing, as Alter’s point is that Licona’s point is correct, and it is.

Another example is when Alter cites expert Robert Gundry for the conclusion that Golgotha is on the wrong side of the Jerusalem temple for a guard there to see its veil. Gundry is quoted saying it’s not plausible “tradition has misplaced Golgotha,” but in fact it is. There is no actual historical basis for the “traditional” site. That was an invention of Constantinian propaganda. That they didn’t work out that their chosen location contradicted first century geography is because that geography didn’t exist in the 4th century for them to notice (the Jewish temple had been razed centuries ago, and an entirely new pagan city stood atop it). Sites like this were then chosen more for the convenience of the pilgrimage industry at the time than from any actual archaeological knowledge. It is still worth pointing this out (the “traditional” site is impossible on Gospel descriptions), but it would be better to make clear that the contradiction is not within the Gospels, but between the Gospels and modern Christian belief.

For two other examples of similar confusions: Alter says “proponents note that Luke did not report [the] feeding [of] the five thousand occurring in Bethsaida,” but Luke very explicitly does say that. I cannot account for Alter’s sentence here, especially as a few lines later he references “Luke’s placing of the feeding story in Bethsaida” as a fact. So which is it? More confusingly, Alter says John 5 says the healing at the Pool of Siloam occurs in Bethsaida—and then the group crosses the sea for the feeding, implying a contradiction. But that is incorrect. John says that that healing takes place in Jerusalem, and that the pool in Jerusalem was called Bethsaida (or some similar word; the manuscripts disagree—and again, confusingly, Alter seems to know this when later he calls it “the pool of Bethesda in Jerusalem”). The contradiction here is that Jerusalem is nowhere even near the Sea of Galilee, so when John then says they “crossed to the far shore of the Sea of Galilee” for the feeding miracle, John’s geography becomes impossible. One might say John was ignorant of the geography and mistook Jerusalem as a sea port in Galilee. But given abundant evidence of this Gospel’s reordering and editing, it’s more likely the material about Jerusalem is out of place, or the feeding of the five thousand is out of place, or something was cut in between the Jerusalem scene and the feeding scene.

No one can be an expert at everything, and Alter relies on (and cites) expert observers for his points, or else relies on points that are logically self-evincing, and so any errors you might encounter won’t likely matter, but you may need to check the expert sources Alter cited if you need to rely on anything like the hyper-specifics of their wording, for example (like you would in an esoteric case of how Greek prepositions work), or even the experts’ own arguments (like Gundry overstating our certainty in locating Golgotha).

The only other defect I would note is that though Lydia McGrew catalogs dozens of purported “undesigned coincidences,” Alter only addresses a few, which are the strongest examples. But one can apply the same principles to all the others, so arguing by exemplary cases is not a bad approach. It’s just that some readers may have wanted a complete catalogue of responses to consult. This is not a major defect, though. Alter points his readers to other treatments that cover some of the weaker examples (including mine).

Conclusion

Overall, this is a valuable book well worth adding to any counter-apologetics collection. Much like Loftus’s Outsider Test for Faith or Murray’s Atheist’s Primer or Schoenig’s Where Christianity Errs—or, indeed, Pearce’s The Resurrection: A Critical Examination—which are must-haves, Alter’s book has specific utility in understanding biblical literary studies and why it undermines Christian apologetics despite specific attempts, like Lydia McGrew’s, to make that problem go away. It not only eliminates that particular argument, but in doing so arms you with a number of tools of use in combating all manner of biblical apologetics.