Coincidence I.7: “Are You the King of the Jews”
The Alleged Coincidence
In all four Gospels Jesus is brought to Pilate to be judged. In John’s version, Pilate asks the Jewish leaders, “What accusation do you bring against this man?” The Jews reply, “If this man were not a criminal, we would not have handed him over to you.” Pilate acquiesces to the Jews’ demand to judge Jesus, and the first thing he asks Jesus is, “Are you the king of the Jews?” (John 18:29–33). 1
McGrew finds this account puzzling. The Jewish leaders call Jesus a criminal, but they don’t mention any specific charges against Jesus. So McGrew asks, “Why would Pilate even think that Jesus claimed to be the king of the Jews?” (original emphasis). 2
According to McGrew, the answer is found in Luke. In his account, when the Jewish leaders bring Jesus to Pilate, they tell him, “We found this man inciting our nation, forbidding us to pay taxes to Caesar and saying that he himself is the Messiah, a king” (Luke 23:1–2). Now we have an answer: Pilate asks Jesus whether he is the king of the Jews because, as reported by Luke, the Jewish leaders had told him Jesus made that claim.
The accounts coincide, then, because Luke explains why Pilate asks Jesus if he’s the king of the Jews in John.
First Failure: No Evidence for Reliability
I agree there’s a coincidence here: The Jewish leaders’ statement in Luke that Jesus was “saying that he himself is the Messiah, a king” can explain why Pilate asked Jesus whether he was the king of the Jews.
But, ironically, that it can explain Pilate’s question is exactly why the coincidence cannot be evidence for reliability. Luke, like John, has Pilate ask Jesus: “Are you the king of the Jews” (Luke 23:3). This means that Luke (or a storyteller before him) had a need to explain why Pilate would ask Jesus whether he was the king of the Jews. Thus, Luke (or a storyteller before him) could have invented the Jewish leaders’ accusations against Jesus in front of Pilate precisely in order to explain Pilate’s question.
Therefore, the coincidence is not evidence for reliability.
I’m not actually disputing that the Jewish leaders had a role in Jesus’s death, or that they might have informed Pilate of Jesus’s messianic claims—if, indeed, Jesus made such claims. I’m only pointing out that this coincidence is not evidence that they did.
And I’m certainly not disputing that the historical Pilate asked Jesus whether he was the king of the Jews. I think he almost certainly did. But I don’t think so because of a coincidence. I think so because Jesus was crucified. Crucifixion was a Roman punishment reserved for thieves and insurrectionists. That Jesus was crucified means Pilate found him guilty of sedition. And in the course of coming to that conclusion, Pilate would likely have asked Jesus if he did actually claim to be king of the Jews.
Second Failure: No Evidence for Eyewitness Testimony
The coincidence is also not evidence for eyewitness testimony. Even if Pilate did find out about Jesus’s claim to be king from the Jewish leaders, this fact could have traveled through oral and literary traditions before being written down by Luke.
Thus, this coincidence fails to be evidence that the Gospels are based on eyewitness testimony.
Third Failure: Eyewitness Testimony Cannot Explain the Trial Scenes
Not only does the coincidence fail, but trying to use the trial scenes in the Gospels to argue for reliability and eyewitness testimony is a fool’s errand. These scenes are among the most problematic in the Gospels, comprising contradictions, discrepancies, polemic, theological inventions, and historically implausible details. These problems lead to one conclusion: These accounts do not come from eyewitness testimony but from differing oral and literary traditions.
I’ll discuss just one example of the problematic nature of the trial scenes: the alleged tradition of releasing a prisoner at Passover.
In all four Gospels, Pilate is extremely reluctant to crucify Jesus (a detail that is itself very unlikely, given what other sources say about his character). He declares Jesus innocent multiple times, but the Jewish leaders and crowd continue to demand Jesus’s death. Mark, Matthew, and John then all report that Pilate offers to release Jesus in accordance with a Passover custom, but the crowd demands instead that he release a man named Barabbas. (Luke neglects to mention the custom or Pilate’s offer; they simply demand the release of Barabbas.) We are told that Barabbas is “a man who had been put in prison for an insurrection that had taken place in the city and for murder” (Luke 23:19).
Here’s the problem: Not only is there no evidence for a custom of releasing a prisoner at Passover, but such a custom is blatantly ridiculous. One of Pilate’s main duties as governor is to suppress any local insurrections. Indeed, the only reason he was in Jerusalem during Passover was because Passover was an unstable time, when Jewish messianic hopes were high and anti-Roman sentiments amplified. The idea that Pilate would willingly release a known insurrectionist, especially at an incendiary time such as Passover, is ludicrous. 3
And not only is the episode extremely implausible and thus clearly invented, but it’s extremely obvious why such an episode was invented. First, having the Jews chose Barabbas over Jesus is another way in which Christian storytellers can emphasize Pilate’s innocence and the Jews’ guilt in Jesus’s death, a theme they’ve been emphasizing. And second, it creates a devastating irony. The name “Barabbas” means “son of the father”, and is clearly another invention. Indeed, in some manuscripts of Matthew the prisoner’s name is “Jesus Barabbas” (Matt. 27:16). The literary and theological result is clear: The Jews need to choose between two different prisoners named Jesus “son of the father”. And they reject the one who is actually their messiah, the man sent to save them, in favor of a murdering insurrectionist.
The Barabbas episode, then, is fiction. It’s not coming from eyewitnesses. And it’s a transparent example of the “literary or theological embellishments” that McGrew insists are absent from the Gospels. 4
Conclusion: A Failure in Plain View
This coincidence, then, is a giant bust. It provides zero evidence for reliable eyewitness testimony, and the accounts of Jesus’s trial in all four Gospels include details that were clearly invented by later storytellers, not passed down by eyewitnesses.
- Unless otherwise noted, I use the NRSVue for all biblical translations. ↩
- 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 numbers useless. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from McGrew in this post come from Chapter I, section, “7. Are you the king of the Jews?” ↩
- We’ll eventually be looking at another alleged coincidence involving Pilate’s question to Jesus (Coincidence II.5: “So You’re a King? No Problem!”). And as we’ll see, in arguing for that coincidence McGrew will argue that Pilate had to take charges of sedition seriously. I agree. He had to. Which is exactly why the Barabbas episode must be theological fiction. ↩
- “Literary or theological embellishments” is a phrase McGrew uses in the “General Introduction”, section “Organization and Argument of this book”. ↩