The Case of the Four Gospels, Part II: Undesigned Coincidences

How the gospels accidentally fit together

This week, Jordan Peterson released an extended conversation with young atheist Alex O’Connor on Christianity, skepticism, and what it means to “believe Christianity is true.” Alex came with the goal of forcing Peterson to sharpen and clarify his answers to various nagging questions Peterson’s fielded from Christians over the years (typically deflecting them, with various degrees of patience). Personally, I think it’s been clear for a while roughly where Peterson sits here, but Alex did a very good job blowing away any lingering fog. Blowing away fog has become a specialty for Alex as his profile rises, a skill I appreciate very much even if I don’t find his own conclusions compelling. He's similar to the New Atheists, but subtler and better able to grasp opposing views, which makes him a more genial conversation partner in the age of “dialogue versus debate.”

It’s a long and leisurely chat, with some tangents and sagging in the middle (I might have nodded off during an interminable tangent on the Gnostic Creation Myth), but I think the first and last thirds were especially helpful. Essentially, what emerges is that Peterson is—and always has been—utterly convinced that it’s impossible to “extract the historical Jesus” from the text of the gospels, where “the historical and the mythological” are inextricably intertwined. Christians irritate him by asking whether Jesus “really” rose from the dead, because he believes the question reveals an impoverished “modernist Enlightenment” metaphysic, which he even provocatively calls “non-Christian.” The entire attempt to drill down on physical, historical particulars is, in his mind, analogous to putting one’s nose up to an essay and analyzing the loops and swoops of the handwriting, in lieu of analyzing what they mean. The same goes for questions about the Old Testament, like “Did the Exodus really happen? Did the Jews really walk through the Egyptian desert?” “Well,” Peterson likes to say, “They’re still walking through it.” Who cares if you would have recorded them making their trek if you took a Panasonic camera back in time? That’s not the interesting question.

Very nice, Alex says, but if Peterson wants to interact with true believers in good faith, then he should recognize when they’re just asking a “rather banal” historical question and give a simple yes, no, or most likely I don’t know reply. Oh, but they “don’t get to do that,” Peterson answers, because these things aren’t “banal.” In one sense, this is true, but in another sense, this seems to miss Alex’s point, much like the way he sort of missed Sam Harris's point when they had their more aggressive dialogues six years ago. And as for all the stuff about how being fussy over historical particulars is a “modernist” invention, that's…well, I'll be polite and just say it's completely wrong. Whenever I hear a scholar talk solemnly about not imposing a “modernist Enlightenment view” on the Bible, the odds are good that he's not taking his own advice, sort of like how people who complain about “deism” tend to be incorrigible deists. Let ancient people speak for themselves.

There’s an especially funny moment where Jordan and Alex are discussing the historicity of Cain and Abel, which moves into a discussion of the Columbine high school shooting (a case study going all the way back to Peterson’s first book). The shooting was an event that took place at one particular moment in time, but you could also see it as an event with timeless significance—as Peterson puts it, “the continuation, a sort of a punctuation, in the long paragraph of the cosmic drama that is our human existence.” Once again, Alex doesn’t disagree. But suppose that Peterson had been an eyewitness of the crime, and suppose there had been a manhunt for the killer, and the police had approached him for a statement. “Dr. Peterson,” we imagine them asking, “what happened?” And if at this point Dr. Peterson says, “Well, I think what happened was the continuation, a sort of a punctuation, in the long paragraph of the cosmic drama…” Alex proposes that the police are not going to be thrilled.

Speaking for himself, Alex repeats here what he’s said elsewhere—that he does think these questions matter very much, and unlike the New Atheists, he even wishes that something like the Christian answer was true. He simply doesn’t think it is. And unlike Ayaan Hirsi Ali, he can’t make the mental move that allows him to “choose to believe,” even after reading all the right books, making all the right friends, and doing all the things one is supposed to do while waiting for a conversion experience to happen. So here he sits, perfectly understanding the stakes, but as unbelieving as ever. I've already written a bit on Alex's comments about divine hiddenness, so I won't dwell on that here, because as you'll see, this isn't really about Alex.

This past Easter, I teased a series where I would assemble some of the reasons I think the gospel texts are still, in fact, best explained by the hypothesis that Christianity is actually true. Then, of course, I failed to follow up after my first entry, where I bluntly surveyed the state of traditional Christian apologetics and gave a less than positive report. I think now is a good time to circle back. This post will mark the beginning of my attempt to pick up where I left off. I hope it’s of interest for Christian and skeptical readers alike. This is where the free preview ends and the paid part begins, because I want to give paying supporters their money’s worth. But if you’d like to read on, please consider supporting my work! This is how I pay the bills, and it wouldn’t be possible without you.

If you’re just now catching up, my first piece suggested that the problems with Christian apologetics aren’t on the fringes, but systemic, affecting even the work of big conservative “marquee names” like William Lane Craig. The deficiencies of Craig’s approach were, I think, subtly exposed in the cross-examination portion of an old debate he had with Christopher Hitchens. As Hitchens pressed Craig on whether he affirmed various tenets of Christianity—the resurrection, the Virgin Birth—Craig made a distinction between the things he believes “as a Christian” and the things he believes he can “prove historically.” When it comes to the Virgin Birth, Craig will only say he believes it “as a Christian.” But the resurrection, “that I think we have good evidence” for.

This no doubt left Hitchens a little bemused, and understandably so. Although Craig might have won the debate on polish, the substance of the approach he articulates here is fundamentally flawed. It picks through the gospels incident by incident (or, in fancy Bible scholar terms, “pericope by pericope”), assuming that the Christian will be able to keep his favorite cherries without worrying too much about the rest. The problem is that in the end, what actually happens is that he will go home with an empty bucket.

In Peterson and O’Connor’s discussion, there’s a moment where Alex mentions “Churchillisms,” sayings attributed to Churchill that Churchill never said. There are lots of these, just as there are lots of “C. S. Lewisisms.” Even so, he suggests you could start to form some idea of who Churchill was by piecing together these fake quotes. Similarly, even if we take the various “sayings” ascribed to Jesus in the canonical and non-canonical gospels with a pinch of salt, there’s enough material in there for “signal” to emerge through “noise.”

That may be good enough for Alex and Jordan, but it would hardly satisfy the Christian. And herein lies the technical problem with the minimalist apologist’s cherry-picking approach—I stress, not a theological problem (I’m not committed to biblical inerrancy, and none of my arguments will proceed from that assumption), but a technical one: How, exactly, does one separate “signal” from “noise”? Apologists have tried to insist that you can carve out a little protected space around something like Jesus’ resurrection with a few “minimal facts,” while essentially abandoning the project of trying to show that the gospel accounts are holistically reliable. To quote Gary Habermas, another much-named evangelical apologist, he believes he can grant all of “Bart Ehrman’s facts” about the gospels for the sake of the argument—that is, granting that the gospels could be completely unreliable, but insisting it doesn’t matter, because we’ve already plucked the really important cherries.

As the meme says, that’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.

But it’s one thing to tear down, and another thing to build. With this little series, I don’t just want to kvetch about how everyone else is doing this wrong. I want to build something.

A modest qualifier: This is not my own original work. As I’ve mentioned before, this topic has been an ongoing extensive research focus for both my parents, particularly my mother, who’s made several major contributions to the literature. The specific argument I’ll introduce here is developed at length in her accessible book Hidden in Plain View, which I recommend if you want to explore at more length. She not only covers the gospels, but also various interlockings between the Book of Acts and the letters of Paul. Mom would, in turn, tell you that she herself is standing on the shoulders of giants like the 19th-century scholar J. J. Blunt. Blunt collected Old as well as New Testament examples of these interlockings into several large volumes. Like other Christian thinkers of his generation, Blunt has faded in collective memory through an unfortunate process of what one might call “science envy” (apologies to Freud), in which humanities scholars flatter themselves that their field has Progressed by leaps and bounds through a series of Discoveries which have simply left everyone more enlightened than their forebears. Astronomers Discover new planets, biblical scholars Discover new redactive techniques, archly informing you that William Paley did very nicely for himself “with what he had,” but of course everyone is far beyond Paley now, because you know. Discoveries.

I (we) think that’s all rot, to borrow a nice, outdated British phrase. Our hopeful project is the revival of things forgotten that should be remembered.

On which note, onward. Let me start by defining the phrase in my title: What is an “undesigned coincidence”? Very simply, it’s an incidental interlocking between sources that points to truth. I’ll give an everyday example, then an example drawn from contemporary history, then a few examples from the gospels.

Suppose two people witness a bank robbery where the robber runs away. Adam, outside the store, tells the police he saw the robber trip and fall, but he doesn’t give a reason why. Meanwhile, inside the store, Betty independently says she noticed the robber’s shoelaces were untied, but she doesn’t mention his tripping. As you can see, these details interlock, but artlessly, in a way that doesn’t feel designed. Each witness has his or her own distinct perspective. They aren’t telling identical stories. Their testimony has the ring of truth.

Now here’s an example from history (specifically the intersection of war history and film history, two of my great loves): The great British actor Dirk Bogarde was a young officer in World War II. In his later years, he would tell the gripping story of what he witnessed during the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. But his own biographer, John Coldstream, questioned the veracity of this account based on various weak arguments, including discrepancies across several of Bogarde’s retellings, hasty assumptions about his likely access to the camp on the day, and a bad argument from silence that Bogarde would have written about it in a letter home to his sister. (All common bad habits of biblical scholarship, incidentally.)

However, Coldstream became convinced when he listened to some oral history provided to a museum by an Austrian man named Andrey Kodin. Notice, the overall context was not focused on Bogarde. But along the way, Kodin provided a remarkable interlocking account of the day Bogarde made his visit. After seeing Bogarde in a movie ten years after the war, Kodin suddenly realized he’d seen the young officer at the camp decades prior, when Kodin was there acting as a liaison between soldiers and prisoners. He said he didn’t have any interaction with Bogarde at all, only saw him briefly at a distance. But that brief sighting left an impression, as Kodin watched Bogarde take in the wretched scene with wide, sad eyes before one of Bogarde’s mates said something like, “Come on, haven’t you seen enough?” and they all drove away in a jeep. The moment stuck with Kodin, understandably, since Bogarde was a very striking young man. At the movies, he leapt up and said “That’s him! That’s the officer I saw…!” His wife, unconvinced, told him he must be dreaming. But several more decades later, Kodin read a newspaper article by Bogarde describing the day. He triumphantly called his wife, vindicated.

Notice, though, that Kodin says he had first made the connection in an independent context, long before Bogarde even began telling his story in public. Further, Bogarde’s version of the story included many more details than Kodin’s. In fact, you could even tilt your head and read Kodin’s testimony in a way that might seem to slightly clash with Bogarde’s account, although with a little thought they can be harmonized. There’s even one outright simple discrepancy in that Kodin clearly remembers the date—April 20, Hitler’s birthday—but this isn’t either of Bogarde’s own tentative suggested dates from shaky memory. Nevertheless, all of Coldstream’s doubts melted away on the strength of this artlessly interlocking testimony—this undesigned coincidence. Read Coldstream’s whole reassessment here, and watch Bogarde’s testimony here:

I give that example as one of many that could be pulled from contemporary history. Paying attention to this sort of organic interlocking isn’t unique to biblical analysis, and it isn’t an “apologist’s crutch.” It’s simply one tool with which to analyze independent sources for the same events.

With that, let’s look at a few biblical examples, focused on the gospels, though as mentioned you can find examples all over the biblical corpus. I should emphasize that this is a cumulative case, meaning it’s built out of many jigsaw puzzle pieces fitting together. One example might be odd, but dismissible. But as the examples add up, the cumulative effect is difficult to ignore, and a consistent picture begins to emerge. I only intend to give a flavor of the argument here. Again, I recommend Hidden in Plain View to those wanting more.

1. Herod’s servants

In Matthew’s gospel, chapter 14, we read an account of a conversation in the chamber of Herod the tetrarch, who’s uneasy about Jesus’ growing popularity. Herod has recently had John the Baptist executed, and he wonders superstitiously “to his servants” if John the Baptist has perhaps come back to life. The question naturally arises: How does Matthew know what Herod was saying to his servants? One could stick in “Well God just revealed it to Matthew” as a placeholder hypothesis, but since this feels ad hoc, it would be more pleasing to find a natural explanation for what feels like a bit of a loose end. When we turn to Chapter 8 in Luke’s gospel, generally taken to be written later than Matthew, we find the mystery unexpectedly solved in a completely different context, a list naming female supporters of Jesus’ ministry. Among them is the name of “Joanna, wife of Chuza, Herod’s household steward.” Matthew doesn’t contain this information. It’s just casually dropped here in Luke, and apparently without design, it explains the loose end in Matthew.

2. Are you a king?

In Luke’s account of Jesus’ pre-crucifixion trial, Pilate interrogates Jesus on the mob’s charge that he’s made a claim to be king of the Jews—the moment when the mob has begun to get Pilate’s attention in earnest. Jesus’ answer, σὺ λέγεις, more or less translates as “You said it.” Hardly a denial. Whereupon Pilate turns around and says he finds no basis for a charge. This is a puzzler. But turning to John 18:36, which doesn’t include the Jews’ accusation, we find the well-known line where Jesus says his kingdom is not of this world. In this case, the interlocking goes both ways. Pilate’s questioning seems to come from nowhere in John, and his reaction seems to come from nowhere in Luke.

3. Philip who?

This one involves not two, but three puzzle pieces. Pay close attention! We’ll begin with an exercise for the reader: Suppose you were going to make up a miracle story about Jesus, and you were given the prompt that it was supposed to involve money and food. And at some point in the story, Jesus turns to ask one of the disciples a money-related question. Who should he ask? You might guess that Jesus would ask Peter, because you know, Peter’s an important guy. Or maybe Jesus would ask Matthew, because he’s a tax collector. Or Judas, because he held the purse. As a side note here, this is the sort of lazy thing the gnostic gospels do all the time, one among numerous signs that they’re forgeries (and not, as Alex O’Connor has been going around repeating, left out of the canon at the Council of Nicaea because people were so arbitrary and rude like that).

But in John’s record of the feeding of the five thousand, Jesus doesn’t pick any of these disciples when he turns to ask where they could buy bread in a nearby village. He asks Philip, who is practically a non-entity in the gospel accounts, even though he later plays an important role in the book of Acts. This question is recorded in John 6.

Where is this miracle taking place? To answer that question, we need to flip to Luke 9:10, which places it in the vicinity of Bethsaida (technically a “solitary place” outside town, as clarified in Matthew’s description of it, though Matthew doesn’t name Bethsaida). But Luke’s account includes nothing about Philip. Mystery still not solved.

Now, given these two pieces, what third piece of information would make everything snap together? What would it be nice to find casually dropped somewhere, preferably in a completely unrelated context?

Very good: Philip was from Bethsaida. We learn this also in John, in the first chapter, when Philip is first introduced (before hardly ever being brought up again). His name is mentioned along with Andrew, who’s also from Bethsaida. A completely banal detail. And now all is clear.

4. Lovest thou me?

This is a personal favorite. In John 21, after Jesus is resurrected, he’s having a conversation with Peter where he asks Peter three times if Peter loves him. “Lovest thou me more than these?” he presses (“these” being the other disciples), causing Peter some distress as he replies surely Jesus knows Peter loves him. This raises something of a question mark. Why is Jesus pushing Peter so hard, and why is he making this contrast with the other disciples? It’s not explained in John, but if we go back to Mark 14:29, we see that before Jesus’ crucifixion, Peter made a boast that even if all the other disciples denied Jesus, Peter would never abandon or deny him. Of course, he famously turns around and breaks this promise, three times. And now Jesus’ severity is clarified: In his lovingly firm way, he’s reminding Peter of that boast. Note that in John’s account of the conversation in Mark 14, all Peter says is that he is willing to lay down his life for Jesus. The boasting comparison to the other disciples is unique to the Synoptic gospels (you can also find it in Matthew), which don’t include the post-Resurrection exchange.

Note on an objection: Most of the examples I picked here involved connections between John and the synoptics, but some have objected to using this argument between synoptics, as in example one, based on the theory that they were interdependent, or perhaps had common source material (google “the Q document” if you really want to go down that rabbit hole). This is sometimes known as “the synoptic problem,” or “synoptic puzzle.” But as Dr. Jonathan McLatchie explains in this article discussing the objection, even if one were to grant the theory, the evidential value of casualness remains, and remains unexplained by a theory of interdependence or common sourcing. It’s rather comical to try to picture these interlockings happening as some sort of coordinated effort to… do what, exactly? To dole out information as inefficiently as possible? Further, there are bits of information unique to each gospel, which provides evidence that each writer had his own independent access to the stories, even if (say) there were times when Matthew was looking at a scroll of Mark’s gospel. Although the other synoptics record that Herod (among others) wondered whether John was raised from the dead, only Matthew records that he said it “to his servants.” The smooth way to pull the threads together would be for just one gospel to say, “This Herod said unto his servants, which the disciples were told by Joanna, the wife of Chuza, Herod’s steward.” Instead, the information is awkwardly split apart. Again, this is the epistemic value of casualness.

Closing thoughts: I picked out two examples from mundane contexts and two in contexts that overlap with miracle stories. This reflects the evenness with which these interlockings are generally scattered about the mundane and the miraculous—a relevant note in favor of the accounts’ integrity.

Of course the skeptical reader may say, “But the miraculous is so unlikely I’m inclined to eliminate it as a hypothesis out of hand,” and fair enough. But with this series, I’m inviting the skeptic, just for a moment, to consider an alternative view. Think of it as if you’re taking the gospels for a test drive, a “what if” — what if these were historical documents? What if Christianity was true?

The experiment can’t hurt, at least. As Pascal would say, what is there to lose?