Coincidence 1: “He Was Before Me”
The Alleged Coincidence
In Luke we read that Elizabeth becomes pregnant with John the Baptist six months before Mary is told that she will conceive the Son of God (Luke 1:24–36). Thus the Baptist, according to Luke, is older than Jesus. McGrew wants this detail from Luke to coincide with John 1:15, where the author quotes the Baptist: “He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.” 1 The Baptist is referring, of course, to Jesus.
To concoct a coincidence between these two passages, first McGrew argues that the meaning of the Baptist’s words in John are ambiguous:
John the evangelist seems to be taking John the Baptist’s words “he was before me” to be an assertion of, or at least an allusion to, Jesus’ pre-existence, which he has been teaching in the prologue. But if one looks at the Gospel of John alone, it is not clear why those words should mean that. Could they not mean that Jesus was literally older than John the Baptist? John’s Gospel says nothing to the contrary. 2
Second, she argues that Luke reveals the words’ meaning: “When one looks at the Gospel of Luke, the significance and the almost pun-like nature of John the Baptist’s words [in John] are made clear.” Luke says Jesus is six months younger than the Baptist. And if Jesus is younger than the Baptist, then John’s words “he was before me” now must refer to preexistence, not biological age. McGrew sums it up:
Hence, Jesus came after John the Baptist both in the sense that his ministry began later and also in the human sense that he was six months younger. But he “was before” John the Baptist, if one accepts the doctrine of the Incarnation, in the sense that his existence did not begin with his human conception.
Thus, the passages in John and Luke coincide because both presume that Jesus is younger than the Baptist, and the passage in Luke explains the passage in John.
First Failure: No Coincidence
There’s only a coincidence here if the Baptist’s words at John 1:15 actually presume that Jesus is younger than the Baptist. But why should we think they do? McGrew argues we should because the words could mean that Jesus is older than the Baptist. But since the words refer to Jesus’s preexistence, the author must know and be presuming Jesus is younger.
This argument is shoddy. First, the phrase “he was before me” can refer to Jesus’s preexistence without also meaning Jesus is younger than the Baptist. And second, we don’t need to assume the author thinks Jesus is younger in order to understand the words’ meaning. Their meaning is very clear from their context. They appear in the prologue where, as McGrew points out in the quote above, the author is discussing preexistence. We also find references to the preexistence of Jesus throughout the Gospel of John (e.g. 3:13, 17; 8:23, 58; 17:5, 24), making McGrew incorrect when she writes, “if one looks at the Gospel of John alone, it is not clear why those words should mean that [preexistence]”.
Earlier I said that McGrew has “concocted” a coincidence, and this is why. In order to manufacture a coincidence she needs the words “he was before me” to be ambiguous. But they simply aren’t, and so there’s no coincidence here.
Second Failure: No Evidence for Reliability
But let’s assume McGrew is right and that the Baptist’s words do presume Jesus was younger than the Baptist and thereby coincide with Luke’s explicit claim of the same. The result, according to McGrew, is that the Baptist’s words are confirming Luke’s claim that Jesus was younger than the Baptist.
However, the coincidence (if it exists) is not evidence that Jesus was younger than the Baptist. Christian storytellers could have falsely assumed or invented the idea that Jesus was younger, and incorporated it into stories about Jesus. This is what I meant when I said in my introductory post that details don’t need to be true in order to coincide. In this case, Luke’s and John’s accounts can coincide because their sources presumed that Jesus was younger, which they could have presumed even if he wasn’t.
To be clear, I’m not denying that Jesus was younger than the Baptist. I’m only pointing out that this coincidence, on its own, is not convincing evidence that he was.
Third Failure: No Evidence for Eyewitness Testimony
McGrew then tries to argue that the coincidence cannot be the result of invention. Regarding Luke’s account, she writes:
A skeptical scholar might conjecture that Luke made up the respective ages of Jesus and John the Baptist in his narrative, or that it was a legendary addition that he copied down, and that it became accepted on that basis, but that is to add an unnecessary layer of explanation. There is no particular theological reason in Luke for making John the Baptist six months older. (Original emphasis)
This objection is feeble. We can explain why Luke, or a storyteller before him, made the Baptist six months older than Jesus: If the storyteller wanted the fetus of the Baptist to leap for joy at Mary’s greeting, then the age of the fetus needed to be four to eight months old. An apologist may want to press the question: Why six months specifically? But since the fetus needed to be four to eight months old for the story to make sense, I can respond: Why not six months? (I also don’t see how postulating invention “add[s] an unnecessary layer of explanation”. Whether we explain the claim as true or false, historical or invented, there’s only one layer of explanation.)
But let’s assume McGrew is correct that there’s no reason to doubt that Jesus was six months younger than the Baptist. The coincidence still wouldn’t be evidence that the details in the rest of Luke’s infancy narrative—that Jesus and the Baptist were related, that the Baptist’s parents were Elizabeth and Zechariah, that the Baptist “leaped for joy” in the womb when Mary greeted his mother (Luke 1:44), etc.—are reliable and that Luke received these details from eyewitnesses. These details could have been invented for theological reasons by storytellers who knew that Jesus was six months younger than the Baptist, and Luke could have received the details from earlier oral and literary traditions.
McGrew, then, offers no good reason to reject the hypothesis that Luke’s account comprises invented details and is based on oral and literary traditions. She next argues that no storyteller would have invented the Baptist’s speech in John:
It is implausible that an author would go to the trouble to invent words that John the Baptist never said while leaving their point obscure, requiring for their understanding an historical data point that the inventing author does not even mention in his own account. But if John was recounting what John the Baptist actually said, happening to remember it, noting its significance to himself, and mentioning it as a brief aside before getting back to his own theological argument, he may well not have stopped to think about whether all of the relevant background had been fleshed out for his readers. (Original emphasis)
In other words, the Baptist’s speech wasn’t invented because it doesn’t make sense unless it’s known that Jesus was younger than the Baptist. And whereas an eyewitness might neglect to mention that detail, an inventor would be sure to include it.
Here we see McGrew deploying the argument I discussed in my introductory post. And as I pointed out, it’s a terrible argument. There is simply no good reason to suppose that an eyewitness might omit necessary details, but that a non-eyewitness or storyteller would be sure to include all necessary details. If the Baptist’s words are actually “obscure” at John 1:15, as McGrew insists, then all we can say is that the author, whether an eyewitness or a later storyteller, didn’t realize he was being unclear. He may have been an unskillful storyteller, or he may have assumed that everyone knew that Jesus was younger than the Baptist.
But McGrew’s argument is moot anyway. As I’ve pointed out above, the Baptist’s words are not “obscure”. It’s clear from the context of the prologue and the rest of John’s Gospel that the phrase “he was before me” refers to Jesus’s preexistence.
And even if the Baptist’s words do presume that Jesus was younger, we wouldn’t have evidence that the Baptist really said them, or that Jesus preexisted, or that John the author was an eyewitness or heard these details from eyewitnesses. Again, these details could have been invented by a Christian storyteller who presumed that Jesus was younger than the Baptist.
And so, once again, McGrew doesn’t provide a good reason to reject the invention hypothesis. Indeed, what we most likely see in Luke and John are two authors who have invented or inherited traditions about the Baptist that, although different, serve the same purpose: to make absolutely clear that the Baptist endorsed Jesus’s mission but was inferior to him. In Luke, the Baptist is actually related to Jesus, and approved of Jesus’s mission as a fetus in his mother’s womb. And in John, the Baptist not only acknowledges his inferiority to Jesus, but also declares Jesus a preexistent being—a major teaching of John’s Gospel.
Fourth Failure: Eyewitness Testimony Cannot Explain the Baptist’s Words
But this alleged coincidence touches upon an even bigger problem for McGrew’s overall argument that the Gospels are based on eyewitness testimony. As we’ve seen, the Baptist in John 1:15 claims Jesus preexisted. However, the claim that Jesus preexisted is found only in the Gospel of John, the last Gospel to be written. Why is this astounding and crucial claim missing from the three earlier Gospels?
McGrew’s eyewitness hypothesis requires one to believe that the eyewitness sources behind the Synoptic Gospels (Mark, Matthew, and Luke) either didn’t know about Jesus’s preexistence or didn’t think it was worth mentioning. But that explanation is hugely implausible. It’s obviously far more likely that Jesus’s preexistence was a later invention, which in turn means the Baptist never taught that Jesus preexisted. The Baptist’s words in John’s Gospel were invented; they don’t reach us via reliable eyewitness testimony.
This point about Jesus’s preexistence also refutes another big claim that McGrew makes. She argues that undesigned coincidences confirm the reliability of material unique to John, which “is bad news for the proposal that the Gospels developed, adding more non-factual elements over time” (original emphasis). 3 But the preexistence of Jesus is material unique to John, and its absence from the earlier Gospels demonstrates that it’s a later theological development. It’s non-factual in the sense that the historical Jesus did not teach it about himself. (Whether or not it’s actually non-factual is a theological, not historical, question.)
Thus, the fact that only John, and none of the Synoptics, teaches the preexistence of Jesus is strong evidence that the belief was a later development, and is one of several examples of traditions about Jesus that clearly developed later. 4 All these developed traditions, when taken together, are formidable evidence that the Gospels are not based on eyewitness testimony. And as we’ll see going forward, none of the alleged undesigned coincidences challenges this evidence.
Conclusion: A Failure in Plain View
Thus, this first undesigned coincidence is a colossal failure. It fails to provide evidence that Luke and John are based on reliable eyewitness testimony. The coincidence, if it even exists, can be explained as the product of storytellers inventing stories while presuming the Baptist is older than Jesus—a detail that may or may not be true. Furthermore, McGrew’s eyewitness hypothesis cannot explain why the three earliest Gospels don’t mention Jesus’s preexistence, making it overwhelmingly likely that his preexistence was a later, non-factual development.
- I use the NRSVue for all biblical translations, unless otherwise noted. ↩
- I’m using the Kindle version of McGrew’s book, Hidden in Plain View: Undesigned Coincidences in the Gospels and Acts (DeWard, 2017), making page number useless. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from McGrew in this post come from Chapter I, section “1. He was before me”. ↩
- This quote comes from Hidden in Plain View, “Introduction: Undesigned Coincidences in the Gospels”. ↩
- A few other significant examples: In the Synoptics, Jesus teaches about the kingdom of God and the need to repent to be saved; but in John, Jesus teaches about himself and the need to believe in him to be saved. In the Synoptics, Jesus never claims to be divine, but in John he does. ↩