The Case of the Four Gospels, Part III: Unnecessary Clues

The details nobody asked for

It’s been quiet around here. Thank you all for your patience. I’ve just spent two weeks participating in a couple of intensive seminars in Cambridge, MA, courtesy of the Abigail Adams Institute. I’d optimistically hoped to put something out while I was there, but time and energy were in short supply. My personal highlight was getting to meet the great and powerful Mary Harrington in the flesh. I don’t always agree with Mary, but I find her social criticism endlessly interesting and vital in an age where we’ve forgotten what it means to be human. (Buy her book Feminism Against Progress here.)

Now that I’ve come back down to earth, I’m happy to assure everyone that I have a number of pieces percolating, including some thoughts I’ve been wanting to jot down for a while on artificial intelligence and intelligent design. But they need some more time in the oven, so I’m going to ease back into things with a subscriber-exclusive piece picking up my leisurely series on the four gospels. I hope you enjoy. As always, if you’re paying to read this, heartfelt thanks for your support. I don’t take it for granted. Some free content is also in the works for those of you who don’t feel like helping me pay rent. (I jest. You’re great too.)

As a refresher, my first entry in this series (not paywalled) sketched out some academic frustrations with the Christian side of the Christian-atheist debate. I yield to none in my criticisms of New Atheism, but Christians are no less prone to uncritically elevating celebrities, shutting down inconvenient criticism, and recycling bad scholarship. Christian apologetics is a cottage industry unto itself, capable of being every bit as clubby (and sloppy) as the cottage industry of atheist apologetics. Of course, I still think there’s a place for Christian apologetics, otherwise I wouldn’t write things like this. I just tend to think it’s best unfolded in contexts where the power of the cumulative case can be appreciated. So, not two-hour debates. (I tried to watch some of this new one between Alex O’Connor and Dinesh D’Souza. I’m not Catholic, but I’d count it as penance if I were.)

Since I didn’t want this little corner to become a one-stop apologetics shop, I decided to focus just on the reliability of the four gospels. I say “just,” but it’s a vast topic, fraught with confusion and poor arguments on both sides. My simple contention is that the gospels are pieces of fairly unadorned reportage by Jewish writers who knew whereof they spoke, whether because they were themselves eyewitnesses to Jesus’ life (likely Matthew, John) or spoke with eyewitnesses (Mark, Luke). This is not a popular hypothesis, and it’s commonly accepted that even conservative scholars who value their academic integrity will inevitably drift away from it. Which is a shame, because I think it’s true.

C. S. Lewis famously proposed a “trilemma” for people trying to decide who Jesus was: Either he was a liar, or he was a lunatic, or he was telling the truth. The one thing he couldn’t be was sincerely mistaken. But this presupposed that the gospels preserved a reasonably accurate record of what Jesus did and said. Lewis sketched his intuition that they did, though he never fleshed it out in rigorous detail, because he wasn’t a biblical scholar per se. But plenty of others have put in that work, and it’s on that work that this little series draws. I’m suggesting that as we study the gospels, we will come down to a similar trilemma for the gospel writers: liars, lunatics, or truth-tellers. The one thing they couldn’t be was sincerely mistaken.

Some of my evidence is external to the gospels, some internal. My second piece (paywalled) introduced some internal evidence with the argument from “undesigned coincidences,” or to use a less archaic phrase, “incidental interlockings” among the gospels. For the curious reader, the book Hidden in Plain View unpacks it in more detail. (It happens to be written by my mom, but I like to think I’m not biased.) Today I want to bring out some more internal evidence, continuing the theme of that which is undesigned, unexpected, unexplained. In short, unnecessary clues.

As we test-drive this whole radical idea that the gospels are based on eyewitness testimony, I want you to think about how real people normally tell real stories. One thing you’ll notice is that they tend to drop small details you didn’t ask for. Your grandpa didn’t need to mention he’d lost his dentures on the day he caught his biggest fish, but he mentions it anyway. Your uncle didn’t need to pause for a digression on the price of beer in 1972 when telling you a tale about his youthful hijinks, but he did anyway. The country singer Jimmy Fortune, telling the story of how he got his big break with the Statler Brothers, mentions for no reason that the guy who picked him up at the airport drove a Lincoln Continental. Such things can stick in the mind and interest us, whether or not they’re relevant to the story at hand. Of course, fabulists will throw in such details as well. But they do so precisely because it gives their stories the texture of truth.

It’s sometimes suggested that the gospel writers were uninterested in “truth” by “modern” definitions of the word, less concerned with conveying an accurate account of real events than they were with conveying a “higher truth” to their readers. Like all ironically modern claims to special knowledge about How Ancient People Thought, this deserves to be taken with a handful, dare I say a shakerful of salt. It’s made clear throughout the gospels that the writers are at least intending to present these accounts as if they’re true, in the ordinary, factual sense of the word. We see this in Luke’s opening assurances that he has “followed everything carefully from the beginning” and wants to give Theophilus “a true account.” We also see it in John 19:35, which emphasizes that the Beloved Disciple witnessed the crucifixion personally and has given us a faithful record thereof. And so on.

My post on undesigned coincidences featured a number of small details that interlock with each other, like Luke’s approximate location of the loaves and fishes miracle in Bethsaida and John’s record that the disciple Philip was local to the area. In this post, I want to explore some other details that are simply…there. Example: In the story of Jesus’ meeting with Zacchaeus the tax collector, unique to Luke’s gospel, we’re told Zacchaeus climbed a sycamore tree to get a better view of the crowd. It’s independently known that sycamore trees did, in fact, grow in Jericho around that time.

Matthew’s account of a story where Jesus raises a man’s daughter contains another example of a detail with external confirmation. Matthew alone mentions that there were flute players among the mourners when Jesus arrived at the house (Matthew 9:23). We learn from Josephus that pipe players had a customary role in Jewish mourning rituals. It must always be kept in mind that these things couldn’t just be easily “looked up” by people far removed from the time and culture they wrote about—obvious, perhaps, but it seems to be forgotten when scholarly speculation runs wild.

John’s gospel alone contains numerous specifications of precise numbers, times, and other small particulars. The disciples catch 153 fish. A crippled man has been unable to walk for thirty-eight years. We’re told certain things happened at the 10th hour, or the 7th, more precise than the convention of rounding hours to the nearest multiple of three. At the wedding where Jesus turns water to wine, we really didn’t need to know the stone jars could hold “about twenty or thirty gallons” each, or that there were six of them, but John tells us anyway. If you were giving notes to a beginning fiction writer, this is the sort of thing you’d tell him to trim away so that the reader can focus on the story. (I’ve written some more specifically on John here, for those curious. John relates fewer stories than the Synoptics, at greater length, which gives his scenes a quality of longer memoir realism. A comparison I’ve often thought about is the oral history of war veterans. This past 80th anniversary of D-Day provided some especially poignant examples of very old soldiers whose memory of that momentous landing was still sharp, and studded with detail.)

An especially interesting sub-category of unnecessary detail in the gospels is the unexplained allusion—a passing reference to something odd or obscure that’s never clarified for the writers’ audience. For example, John 2:12 tells us that Jesus spent a few days in Capernaum with his family and disciples after the Wedding at Cana, with no further elaboration about what they did there. He immediately rushes on to tell us where they went next, leaving the visit dangling.

We also have passing references to current events that the people in the narrative seem to understand, but readers perhaps wouldn’t, especially Gentiles. Luke 13 includes two of these, where Jesus starts discussing recent events with people in a crowd. Some of them refer to a violent incident where Pilate killed some Galileans while they were preparing to make sacrifices. We don’t have a record of this incident in contemporary sources like Josephus. There’s no reason why Theophilus, the reader to whom Luke addresses the gospel, would have heard of it. But Luke isn’t interested in elaborating. In this same conversation, he also doesn’t clarify Jesus’ reference to “those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them.” Again, this seems like common knowledge in context, but it’s not mentioned anywhere else in Luke. This doesn’t have the quality of polished narrative.

Another passing allusion in John illustrates our human tendency for unnecessary scene-setting, like “They were talking about thus-and-such, and that’s when X happened.” In John 3, we’re told that there was some kind of argument about purification rituals between the disciples of John the Baptist (Jesus’ prophetic forerunner) and another Jew. But this is just on the way to the important bit of the chapter, when John’s disciples bring him the news of Jesus’ own flourishing baptismal ministry. Whatever the argument over purification rituals was all about, we’ll never know.

Turning back to the Synoptics (Matthew, Mark, Luke), consider the awkwardness of Matthew 27:56, which kills the intensely dramatic mood of Jesus’ death with a little list of women among the witnesses—Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Joses, and a third woman who was “the mother of Zebedee’s sons.” Here we have not one but two Marys, in addition to the mother of Jesus, including one who’s played no role in the story at all. But we know independently that Mary was a highly common name, so we would expect a need for such tedious disambiguations if the gospel writers were striving for accuracy. Common name disambiguators abound in general throughout the gospels. One of the most notable is the aside that “Judas, not Iscariot” asks Jesus a question at the Last Supper. There is no literary problem to which this trivial speaking part is the solution. By far the simplest explanation is that there really was a second disciple who had the misfortune of being named Judas, and he really did ask Jesus a question.

Moving from passion narrative to resurrection narrative, Mary Magdalene’s meeting with Jesus is narrated with charming artlessness. Her physical movements, including multiple “turns,” are almost tediously noted. She is so single-mindedly focused on “the place where they had laid him” that she doesn’t even register curiosity about the angels asking her questions. To quote the French writer F. L. Godet, “Mary remains and weeps, and as one does when vainly seeking for a precious object, she looks ever anew at the place where it seems to her that He should be….Mary answers the question of the celestial visitors as simply as if she had been conversing with human beings, so completely is she preoccupied with a single idea: to recover her Master. Who could have invented this feature of the story?” When the male disciples arrive to investigate, John provides singular details about exactly how Jesus’ graveclothes were discovered: body napkin and face cloth carefully folded, in separate places. Incidentally, this would have been a particularly odd discovery on the hypothesis that Jesus’ body was stolen by grave robbers.

There’s a detail I’m especially fond of in John 21:6, where the post-resurrection Jesus hails the disciples from the shore while they’re at sea. Peter, ever the hot-head, impetuously plunges into the sea to swim to his Master. But first, he puts his coat on. Normally, one takes clothes off before going for a swim. We can conjecture that Peter was stripped for work and didn’t want to meet Jesus naked, but John doesn’t even tell us this. He just says Peter put his coat on.

Examples like this could be multiplied, but hopefully this sampler begins to convey a picture of the gospels as works that won’t fit tidily into the folder marked “literary fiction.” They’re too singular, too oddly precise. They have too many loose ends. When C. S. Lewis said they’re “not artistic enough,” this is the sort of thing he probably had in mind. They are “artless” in the best sense. They lack artifice. They don’t read like myth. They read like history.