Coincidence I.9: Why Is Jesus Being So Mean?
The Alleged Coincidence
In the final chapter of the Gospel of John, the resurrected Jesus meets the disciples at the Sea of Galilee. At one point Jesus asks Peter, “Simon son of John, do you love me more than these [other disciples]?”(John 21:15). 1 McGrew is troubled by this passage. She asks, “Why, specifically, does [Jesus] ask Peter if he loves him more than the other disciples love him?” (original emphasis). 2 That, according to McGrew, “seems almost cruel of Jesus”.
McGrew finds the answer to her question in a scene found in Mark and Matthew. On the night of his arrest, Jesus tells the disciples that they will abandon him that night (Mark 14:26–31 // Matt. 26:31–35). Peter, they report, objects: “Even if all fall away because of you, I will never fall away” (Matt. 26:33; cf. Mark 14:29). This promise, alleges McGrew, explains the passage in John 21. She writes: “It seems that Jesus singles Peter out for questioning in these terms later not only because he denied him but also because he boasted that his love for Jesus was greater than the other disciples’ love.”
The passages coincide, supposedly, because Peter’s boast (as McGrew calls it) to Jesus in Mark and Matthew explains why Jesus questions Peter about his love in John.
First Failure: No Coincidence
The two stories don’t coincide.
According to McGrew, when Peter says, “Even if all fall away because of you, I will never fall away”, he’s boasting that he loves Jesus more than the other disciples do. But Peter isn’t saying that he loves Jesus more than the others, nor is he predicting that the other disciples will desert Jesus because they love him less than Peter does. Peter is simply saying that he won’t desert Jesus even if the others do. There’s no boast. And since there’s no boast, McGrew’s explanation of Jesus’s question to Peter in John 21 has evaporated. There’s no coincidence.
Furthermore, we don’t need a coincidence to explain why Jesus, in John, asks Peter if Peter loves him more than the others. Any storyteller might have invented the question to explain how Peter, who had been Jesus’s most devoted disciple but who had also denied Jesus after the latter’s arrest, remained a leader in the Jesus movement. Jesus’s question to Peter gives Peter a chance to reaffirm his love for and devotion to Jesus after his denial, and it explains why Jesus asks Peter to “feed my lambs” and “tend my sheep” (John 21:15–16): Jesus bestows leadership on Peter because Peter loves him the most.
And so, Jesus’s question Peter in John makes perfect sense on its own. No coincidence is needed to explain it.
Second Failure: No Evidence for Reliability
But let’s get crazy and assume that the two passages—Peter’s promise in Mark and Matthew, and Jesus’s question in John—coincide. Do we have evidence for reliability? Is Peter’s promise to Jesus in Mark and Matthew evidence that Jesus asked Peter the question in John, and vice versa?
No. Even if we accept that the passages coincide, we don’t have to accept that either story is historical. Although invented, the story of Peter’s promise, found in Mark and Matthew, could have inspired a storyteller—either the same one or a later one—to invent Jesus’s question to Peter. The author of John either learned about the latter but not the former, or he learned about both but decided to include only one. These are exactly the same options available to McGrew’s eyewitness hypothesis: John—whether an eyewitness or someone who interviewed an eyewitness—either didn’t know (or forgot) about Peter’s promise, or knew about both but decided to include the question and not the promise.
Therefore, since the coincidence can be explained without presuming the stories are historical, the coincidence is not evidence for reliability.
Third Failure: No Evidence for Eyewitness Testimony
As we should expect, McGrew thinks any explanation of the coincidence as the product of invented stories is lousy. She argues that if Jesus’s question to Peter in John 21 alludes to Peter’s promise in Mark and Matthew, then there’s no reason for John to omit Peter’s promise. She writes, “Such an omission serves no literary purpose. Someone writing a literary work containing back-references and foreshadowings includes all of those aspects in the work.”
These objections are absolutely irrelevant. I’m not arguing that John omitted Peter’s promise for a literary purpose. Nor am I arguing that John wanted Peter’s promise to foreshadow Jesus’s question and Jesus’s question to back-reference Peter’s promise. Obviously, if John wanted those literary effects, then he would have included both! I’m arguing that John the author either knew about Peter’s promise and decided to omit it, or he didn’t know (or forgot) about it—which are, once again, exactly the same options available to McGrew’s eyewitness hypothesis.
McGrew also argues that if the author of John knew that Jesus’s questioning of Peter was “a legend that had grown up in some way in the Christian community”, then “he would be more likely at least to include the story of Peter’s boast which explains this aspect of such a legend”. We’ve seen this type of argument several times now: Whereas eyewitnesses might inadvertently omit important explanatory details, storytellers will always include important explanatory details, so that their accounts are believable. And we’ve also seen the weaknesses in this argument.
First, this argument is based on naive, and obviously erroneous, assumptions. Both eyewitnesses and storytellers want their accounts to be believable, and both eyewitnesses and storytellers will try, but inevitably fail, to include all important explanatory details. Therefore, the presence of a problematic and unexplained detail cannot tell us whether an account is based on direct eyewitness reports or oral and literary traditions.
And second, McGrew’s eyewitness hypothesis cannot explain the absence of Peter’s promise from John better than the oral-and-literary-tradition hypothesis. According to McGrew, “the author of John was a disciple and remembered the conversation [in John 21]” (original emphasis), and that, “as a witness, he put down what was said because that was how he remembered it, casually, without bothering about including everything necessary to explain precisely why Jesus said this or that”. But if John the eyewitness could report Jesus’s question to Peter without thinking he needed to explain it by including Peter’s promise, then surely a storyteller also could have decided it wasn’t necessary to include Peter’s promise to explain Jesus’s question. And if McGrew wants to argue that John the eyewitness forgot about Peter’s promise but remembered Jesus’s question to Peter, then I can argue that John the storyteller had heard about the question but not about the promise.
Therefore, the coincidence is not evidence for eyewitness testimony, since it can be explained without presuming eyewitness testimony.
Fourth Failure: Reliable Eyewitness Testimony Is Not the Best Explanation
Let’s imagine that McGrew concedes that the coincidence between the two passages can be explained without presuming reliable eyewitness testimony. But then she’d likely insist that reliable eyewitness testimony best explains the coincidence.
That position, however, is irrational. McGrew’s hypothesis entails that a dead man came back to life, cooked fish, and hung out on the beach with his friends. And although this notion isn’t strictly speaking impossible, supposing that it’s more probable than my hypothesis—of stories inspiring other stories, not all getting written down—is absurd. Certainly nonbelievers in Jesus’s resurrection will not be convinced that McGrew’s hypothesis is more probable, but even believers in the resurrection should be able to agree.
McGrew does address the problem of the miraculous nature of the scene in John 21. She points out that the story “is of a lengthy encounter between Jesus and the disciples after the resurrection” (original emphasis). She continues: “It is not a brief vision; it is not ambiguous. It is resolutely physical.” She takes this to be evidence for reliability:
If this [story] represents accurately what the disciples were claiming happened, then they either lied, had the most improbable, polymodal hallucinations that just happened to fall upon all of them as a group in the same way at the same time, or told the truth. This is not the sort of event that a group of people could be merely mistaken about!
This argument is terrible. To get off the ground, it first has to assume that the story in John 21 is accurate—that the disciples did indeed have an experience with Jesus after his death on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. Only then can McGrew make the argument that the best explanation of their experience is that Jesus really was resurrected. But the problem is precisely that the account is so improbable that the account is far more likely to be fiction than history. We therefore have no reason to concede that the account “represents accurately what the disciples were claiming happened”.
But even if we did concede that the disciples had an experience of Jesus after his death like that found in John 21, it would be ludicrous to suppose that “polymodal hallucinations”, even if extremely improbable, are more improbable than a dead person coming back to life.
And finally, McGrew is impressed that the account in John 21 is lengthy, not ambiguous, and “resolutely physical”, but there’s no reason she should be. In the noncanonical Acts of Thomas we have this account of the risen Jesus:
And as he [Thomas] was thus speaking and considering, it happened that a merchant named Abban, who had come from India, was there, sent from King Gundaphorus, having received an order from him to buy a carpenter and bring him to him. And the Lord, having seen him walking about in the market at noon, said to him, “Do you wish to buy a carpenter?” He replied, “Yes.” And the Lord said to him, “I have a slave who is a carpenter, and I wish to sell him.” And having said this he showed him Thomas from a great distance and agreed with him for three pounds of uncoined silver, and wrote a bill of sale saying, “I, Jesus, son of the carpenter Joseph, declare that I have sold my slave, Judas by name, to you, Abban, a merchant of Gundaphorus, king of the Indians.” When the purchase was completed the Saviour took Judas, also called Thomas, and led him to Abban, the merchant. When Abban saw him he said to him, “Is this your master?” The apostle answered and said, “Yes, he is my Lord.” And he said, “I have bought you from him.” And the apostle held his peace. 3
We all would agree this account is not historical. But it’s a lengthy scene. It’s not ambiguous: Jesus walks around a market in the middle of the day; he engages in a transaction with a merchant. It’s also “resolutely physical”: Jesus writes a bill of sale; he takes Thomas over to Abban. Sure, it’s not as long as the twenty-first chapter of John, and there’s fewer conversations and people involved, but it’s of the same nature. And it shows that lengthy, unambiguous, physical scenes of a resurrected Jesus can be invented.
So even if the two stories coincide, reliable eyewitness testimony cannot be the best explanation of the coincidence. The presence of the resurrected Jesus in John 21 makes it exceedingly likely that story is an invention, and that any coincidence with another story is the result of oral and literary traditions.
Conclusion: A Failure in Plain View
This alleged coincidence is a tremendous failure. McGrew’s explanation of Jesus’s question to Peter in John doesn’t work because there’s no boast, and no boast means no coincidence. But even if the stories do coincide, it can be explained without presuming reliable eyewitness testimony. And since the story in John 21 involves a resurrected Jesus, the best explanation of the coincidence is as a product of oral and literary traditions, not reliable eyewitness testimony.
- 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 “9. Why is Jesus being so mean?” ↩
- The Acts of Thomas, chapter 2. From Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Scriptures: Books That Did Not Make It into the New Testament (Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 123. ↩