Coincidence II.2: The Green Grass
The Alleged Coincidence
This next example also involves the feeding of the five thousand. Right before Jesus miraculously multiplies the loaves and fish, Mark tells us that Jesus “commanded them all to sit down in groups on the green grass” (6:39). 1 McGrew asks, “Why does Mark specifically mention that the grass was green?” 2
John supposedly provides the answer. As we’ve already seen, John says that this event took place when “the Passover, the festival of the Jews, was near” (6:4). John therefore sets the story in the springtime. According to McGrew:
The grass is not generally green in that region [i.e., Galilee], but it is green in the spring after the winter rains, around the time of Passover. . . . So here we have a perfect fit between John’s casual reference to the time of year and Mark’s specification of the detail of the green grass. (Original emphasis)
The accounts coincide, then, because John’s Passover detail explains Mark’s green-grass detail. The grass was green because it was springtime, near the time of Passover.
First Failure: Reliable Eyewitness Testimony Is Not the Best Explanation
There’s certainly a coincidence here: both details correspond to spring. 3 But that doesn’t mean the details come from reliable eyewitness testimony. Storytellers could have separately invented both details for different reasons, and the fact they’re both related to spring is just an accident.
Regarding Mark’s green grass, there’s nothing implausible about a storyteller imagining green grass when describing the crowd sitting on the ground. Maybe he was presuming the setting was the spring, but he needn’t have. The storyteller could have been from a region, like I am, where the grass is green most of the year. He may also, as has been suggested, have been drawing from Psalm 23:1–2: “The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me besides still waters.” The possible allusion to Psalm 23 is strengthen by Mark’s statement that Jesus “had compassion for them [the crowd], because they were like sheep without a shepherd” (Mark 6:34). 4
As for John, the detail about Passover also needn’t have come from reliable eyewitness testimony. John could have added the detail about Passover because of the feeding miracle’s clear Passover and Eucharistic imagery and themes. Indeed, John hammers home the story’s connection to Passover and the Eucharist by following it with the Bread of Life Discourse (John 6:22–59), in which Jesus explains he is the new manna from heaven:
“I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever, and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.” (John 6:48–51)
Furthermore, this isn’t the only time John refers to a Jewish festival in his narrative in order to show how Jesus supersedes Jewish institutions (see also John 2:13ff.; 5:1ff.; 7:2ff.; 10:22ff.; and 11:55ff.).
Whatever the case may be, the point is that this coincidence could just be a coincidence in the accidental sense: Mark and John each just happen to have included invented details that correspond to springtime. And the even bigger point is this: Although the details coincide by chance in this hypothesis, it’s still a better explanation of the coincidence than McGrew’s reliable eyewitness hypothesis. That the details coincide by chance and accident is far more plausible than a man miraculously conjuring up a large amount of food.
Second Failure: No Evidence for Reliability
I first discussed the possibility that Mark and John included two different spring-related details by accident because I think that’s probably what happened. But even if it’s no accident that the details correspond to spring, the coincidence can be explained even if the details are unreliable. The details could have been invented by storytellers who presumed that the miracle took place in the spring. These details could have then entered the oral and literary traditions, which is where Mark and John got their details from. Each author mentions only one of the two details because they knew only about one, decided to include only one, or simply forgot to mention the other.
Thus, even if the details don’t coincide by accident, reliability is not required to explain the coincidence.
Third Failure: No Evidence for Eyewitness Testimony
As I just outlined, the details could easily have come from oral and literary traditions. Thus, eyewitness testimony is not required to explain the coincidence.
Worse, McGrew’s typical argument for eyewitness testimony doesn’t work very well for this coincidence. Neither detail is very problematic, puzzlingly, or ambiguous, so she cannot really argue that only eyewitnesses more concerned with truth than sense and credibility would have included them without explanation. Not surprisingly, then, she provides no such argument in her discussion of this coincidence.
Instead, she argues that the green-grass detail is such a vivid detail that it is evidence of eyewitness testimony. First, she quotes the nineteenth-century clergyman J.J. Blunt:
It should seem . . . that the abundance of the grass was a feature of the scene of the miracle of the five thousand, which had impressed itself on the eye of the relator, as peculiar to it. It was a graphic trifle which had rendered the spectacle more vivid. 5
She then concludes, “What one sees in undesigned coincidences, again and again, are points which ‘impressed themselves upon the eye’ of the spectator and came thus into the accounts we now have.”
This argument—these vivid details come from eyewitnesses—is an argument by assertion, and an extremely underwhelming one at that. Setting aside whether or not green grass is really a vivid detail, such details can easily come from the imagination. They are not evidence for eyewitness testimony. Only a bad case of confirmation bias can make anyone think otherwise.
Conclusion: A Failure in Plain View
The coincidence between Mark’s green-grass detail and John’s Passover detail comes nowhere close to being evidence the Gospels are based on reliable eyewitness testimony. Because the feeding story is a miracle story, the chances that it actually occurred are so low that any explanation of the coincidence as the result of unreliable details will be a better, more plausible explanation. And there are a least two such better explanations: either it’s a total accident that Mark and John included details that are related to spring, or they got their details from oral and literary traditions that presumed a springtime setting for the story. In either case, the stories are not based on reliable eyewitness testimony, and yet either is a more plausible explanation of the coincidence than McGrew’s.
- 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 II, section “2. The green grass”. ↩
- I'm going to assume, for the sake of argument, that McGrew is correct that grass in the region is green only in the springtime. ↩
- The scholar Dan McClellan brought the Psalm 23 allusion to my attention in his YouTube video “Responding to Wes Huff on Undesigned Coincidences”, posted December 13, 2025, 0:16:45–0:19:00: www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQQ5NLYSpHo. Last accessed July 18, 2026. McClellan himself references an older article by Dale Allison: Dale C. Allison, Jr., “Psalm 23 (22) in Early Christianity: A Suggestion,” Irish Biblical Studies 5, no. 3 (1983): 132–7. ↩
- The Blunt quote comes from John J. Blunt, Undesigned Coincidences in the Writings Both of the Old and New Testament, an Argument of Their Veracity (The Christadelphian, 1847; reprinted 1965), p. 266. Cited by McGrew, Hidden in Plain View, Chapter II, section “2. The green grass”. As can be seen by the title of Blunt’s book, he was one who championed the argument from undesigned coincidences. ↩