Coincidence I.8: What Happened to Malchus’s Ear?
The Alleged Coincidence
In John’s account of Jesus’s trial before Pilate, Jesus says:
“My kingdom does not belong to this world. If my kingdom belonged to this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.” (John 18:36) 1
But according to all four Gospels, one of Jesus followers did try to fight to prevent his arrest. This follower (said to be Peter in John’s account only) attacked one of the high priest’s slaves with a sword and cut off his ear. This incident seems to undermine Jesus’s claim in John, that his followers would not fight to prevent his arrest.
McGrew points out that Pilate at this point could have presented the maimed slave, named Malchus in John, as evidence that Jesus’s intentions were violent and aimed at establishing a worldly kingdom. So, asks McGrew, “why (based only on John) would Jesus make this argument, knowing that such evidence could be produced against him?” 2
The answer supposedly comes from Luke. In his account of Jesus’s arrest, Jesus heals the slave’s ear (22:51). Now Jesus’s words in John are explained. As McGrew writes:
Jesus could confidently declare that his kingdom is not of this world and even say that his servants would be fighting if his kingdom were not peaceful. If anyone tried to say that Peter cut off a servant’s ear, the wounded servant himself could not be produced to show this, and an admission that Jesus healed the ear would be further evidence of Jesus’ non-violent intentions, not to mention evidence of his miraculous abilities. This undesigned coincidence thus confirms John’s and Luke’s separate accounts of the events of Jesus’ passion and trial.
The passages coincide, then, because Luke explains why Jesus in John could claim, without fear of contrary evidence, that his followers wouldn’t fight to protect him.
First Failure: No Coincidence
This alleged coincidence is a confused mess.
If the question is why isn’t Jesus found guilty right then and there of inciting violent insurrection, then Jesus’s ear-healing in Luke could possibly answer it. As McGrew says, it could be “evidence of Jesus’ non-violent intentions”.
But that’s not the question. The question is why would Jesus say his followers wouldn’t fight, when in fact one of them did. Luke’s ear-healing cannot answer that question. Even though the detached ear couldn’t be produced, Jesus in John is still saying something false: one of his followers did fight to prevent his arrest. And the detached ear wouldn’t need to be produced to undermine Jesus’s claim, since there were supposedly several witnesses to the incident: the soldiers and police and Jewish leaders and even the miraculously healed slave himself. That the healed ear would be evidence of Jesus’s non-violent intentions is irrelevant: John still has Jesus say that none of his followers would fight even though one of them did, and there were enough witnesses to verify it.
Luke’s ear-healing story, then, does not explain Jesus’s words in John. There’s no coincidence here.
Second Failure: No Evidence for Reliability
Let’s assume, however, that there is a coincidence. We still wouldn’t have evidence for reliability. The coincidence could still come about even if the story of the sword-wielding disciple at Jesus’s arrest and Jesus’s words to Pilate in John were invented.
Even under McGrew’s hypothesis—that all events are reliable—the following still had to have happened: (1) all four Gospel authors had to know or hear about the attacking disciple at Jesus’s arrest and include it; (2) Luke had to hear about the healing of the servant’s ear and include it; and (3) John had to hear about Jesus’s words to Pilate and include it. But all three of these circumstances could have happened even if the stories are inventions. (And in case I haven’t made this clear yet, this point is true of all the alleged coincidences.)
Thus, even if there were a coincidence among these accounts, it wouldn’t be evidence that the accounts are reliable.
Indeed, there are independent grounds for thinking neither the sword attack nor Jesus’s response to Pilate at John 18:36 are historical. If the sword attack did happen, then whoever swung the sword would have been arrested as well—if not killed. 3 And Jesus’s language of people and things being either “of this world” and “not of this world” is uniquely Johannine (see, for example, 1:10; 12:31; 13:1; 14:28–31; 15:19; 16:8–11; 17:11, 14–16). Jesus doesn’t talk this way in the Synoptics. Therefore John (or someone before him) likely invented the saying.
Of course, McGrew and others may disagree with these arguments. But that’s irrelevant. The point is that for people like me who agree with these arguments, this alleged coincidence provides no reason to change our minds.
Third Failure: No Evidence for Eyewitness Testimony
Obviously, if there’s no coincidence, or if the coincidence could have occurred even if the stories are inventions, then the (alleged) coincidence provides no evidence for eyewitness testimony.
But we can go further. Even if the stories are based on historical events, these stories could have entered the oral and literary traditions from which the Gospel authors pulled their stories. (And in case I haven’t made this clear yet, this point is true of all the alleged coincidences.)
Thus, true coincidence or not, reliable or not, theses stories provide no evidence for eyewitness testimony.
Fourth Failure: Eyewitness Testimony Cannot Explain the Ear-Healing Miracle
In addition to the problems above, there’s also the problem that the ear-healing miracle is not well explained by eyewitness testimony. If Jesus actually healed the slave’s ear, and if the Gospels are based on eyewitness testimony, then it’s absolutely implausible that only one Gospel would report it. Surely the eyewitness sources behind Mark, Matthew, and John would have remembered and reported the miraculous healing. So why is it missing from these three Gospels?
The problem is more acute for Mark’s Gospel, if one agrees with the traditional view that Peter was Mark’s main source, and if John is correct that it was Peter who cut off the slave’s ear. If so, then why doesn’t Mark mention that it was Peter who cut off the slave’s ear, along with the healing? Surely Peter would have told Mark that it was he who attacked the slave during Jesus’s arrest—if it happened. 4 And surely Peter would have told Mark that Jesus then miraculously reattached the slave’s ear—if it happened.
This coincidence, then, not only fails to provide evidence for reliable eyewitness testimony, it also involves an event—the ear-healing—that is itself evidence for invented traditions about Jesus.
Conclusion: A Failure in Plain View
This alleged coincidence is a miserable failure. Because plenty of witnesses were around, according to the story itself, Jesus’s healing the ear doesn’t explain why he felt confident enough to falsely claim his followers wouldn’t fight to prevent his arrest. Indeed, the ear-healing is evidence against eyewitness testimony; if it happened, then surely all four Gospels would mention it.
Instead, John’s accounts of Peter’s attacking the slave and Jesus’s response to Pilate at 18:36 contradict, and the ear-healing doesn’t resolve the contradiction. If one insists that both accounts are historical, then one has to conclude Jesus didn’t notice the contradiction. But a better explanation, given the other reasons to doubt the reliability of the accounts, is that the contradiction is the result of different oral and literary traditions being combined together. The author of John’s Gospel simply didn’t see the contradiction between these traditions.
This alleged coincidence, then, fails to be evidence for reliable eyewitness testimony. It is, instead, evidence that the Gospels are based on oral and literary traditions.
Postscript on Miracles
McGrew argues that since this undesigned coincidence involves a miracle, it therefore “is some confirmation of the occurrence of that miracle”.
Because I don’t think there is a coincidence here, and because I don’t think it’d be evidence for reliability and eyewitness testimony even if there were, I obviously don’t agree that this alleged coincidence is “some confirmation” that Jesus miraculously reattached the slave’s ear.
McGrew, however, thinks that it’s significant that “the Gospels tell of miracles in the same way in which they tell of other events”. Specifically, she claims “there is no general pattern according to which miracle stories are vague while non-miraculous facts are related with circumstantial detail”. 5
If this point is supposed to be evidence for the reliability of the miracle stories in the Gospels, it’s remarkably naive. The presence of “circumstantial details” is not evidence of reliability or eyewitness testimony, but of good storytelling. A good storyteller may be reporting historical events with lots of detail (which may be true or false), but he or she may also be telling a fictional story with lots of detail. The presence of circumstantial details cannot tell us which is the case.
McGrew has also chosen a terrible example with which to demonstrate her point. The ear-healing miracle is not “related with circumstantial detail”. All that Luke says is, “And he touched his ear and healed him” (22:51). That’s it. Luke got all the surrounding non-miraculous details from Mark’s account, which, significantly, has no miracle.
Moreover, the problem with miracle stories is not the way that they are told, but the implausibility of the events being told. It shouldn’t be controversial that the invention of a miracle story is enormously more plausible than the occurrence of a miracle.
McGrew appears to agree—at least to a certain extent. She writes, “I grant that claims of miracles are legitimately held to a higher evidential standard than non-miraculous claims.” Presumably that higher evidential standard is necessary because miracle claims are inherently less plausible than non-miracle claims. But McGrew also writes, “I do not want to concede an artificial separation between the miraculous claims in the Gospels and the non-miraculous ones, as though the former were prima facie false or dubious.” 6 However, if miracle claims are not “prima facie false or dubious”, then why do they need a “higher evidential standard than non-miraculous claims”?
In any event, anyone like me who thinks miracles are massively implausible is not going to find undesigned coincidences persuasive evidence for their reliability. We will think it’s far more plausible that any coincidence is the result of invented oral or literary tradition. More evidence could change our minds, but pointing to the presence of “circumstantial details” won’t do it.
- 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 “8. What happened to Malchus’s ear?” ↩
- See Bart Ehrman’s discussion of why the account of the sword-wielding disciple is likely invented in his Jesus Before the Gospels: How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior (HarperOne, 2016), pp. 167–171. ↩
- Perhaps one thinks Peter was too embarrassed to mention that he was the rash and violent disciple who attacked the slave, or that Mark didn’t mention Peter’s name in order to save Peter’s reputation. Neither excuse is plausible, however, since Mark mentions other embarrassing episodes involving Peter (e.g., 8:31–33; 14:27–31; 14:37–38; and most famously, 14:66–72. ↩
- This last quote comes from “Introduction: Undesigned Coincidences in the Gospels”. Note McGrew’s assumption that the non-miraculous details in the Gospels are “facts”. ↩
- McGrew’s quotes in this paragraph come from “Introduction: Undesigned Coincidences in the Gospels”. ↩