Coincidence II.5: “So You’re a King? No Problem!”
The Alleged Coincidence
For this coincidence, we return to Luke’s and John’s accounts of Pilate’s interrogation of Jesus. Previously McGrew argued that John’s account can explain a detail in Luke’s; now she argues that a detail in Luke’s can explain a detail in John’s.
In Luke, Pilate asks Jesus, “Are you the king of the Jews?” and Jesus answers, “You say so.” Pilate then declares, “I find no basis for an accusation against this man” (23:3–4). 1 According to McGrew, Pilate’s reaction is incomprehensible. Although Jesus’s reply of “You say so” is ambiguous, McGrew thinks it means one of two things. Either Jesus is affirming that he is king, in which case Pilate’s reaction seems to be the implausible, “So you’re a king? No problem!” Such a charge was, as McGrew writes, “of a kind that Pilate, as the Roman governor, was bound to treat seriously”. 2 Or Jesus is refusing to answer the question. As McGrew writes:
In neither case is there any explanation for Pilate’s going back to the crowd and stating that he finds Jesus innocent. Why does Pilate not even question Jesus further? Why does he seem so unfazed by Jesus’ reply? Why does he go so far as to declare Jesus free of all guilt concerning the charge?
John supposedly supplies the answer. When Pilate asks Jesus whether he is the king of the Jews, Jesus responds, “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36). Pilate, argues McGrew, finds Jesus innocent because Pilate is concerned only about claims to be king in this world. McGrew writes, “Pilate evidently concludes that he [Jesus] is a harmless religious crank of some sort, and it is in this fuller context that Pilate tells the Jewish leaders that he finds no guilt in Jesus.”
The passages allegedly coincide, then, because Luke’s account contains an explanatory gap—why does Pilate declare Jesus innocent?—which John’s account fills.
First Failure: No Evidence for Reliability
Let’s suppose McGrew is right and that there is a coincidence: Jesus’s words at John 18:36 do explain Pilate’s reaction. 3 But far from being evidence for reliability, the fact the words explain Pilate’s reaction can also be evidence that Jesus’s words were invented.
John, like the Synoptics, records Pilate declaring Jesus innocent. Like the Synoptics, then, he needs to explain why Pilate finds Jesus innocent. Therefore, he might have invented Jesus’s words precisely in order to explain Pilate’s declaration of Jesus’s innocent.
Thus, as evidence for reliability, this coincidence is truly pathetic. No only can it be easily explained without presuming the reliability of the passages, but the coincidence itself can be evidence for invention!
Second Failure: No Evidence for Eyewitness Testimony
Since John 18:36 could have been invented to explain why Pilate declares Jesus innocent, it also cannot be evidence for eyewitness testimony. And McGrew provides no other arguments to think it comes from the memories of eyewitnesses rather than the imagination of storytellers.
Moreover, there are strong reasons to conclude John 18:36 is not historical.
First, as I mentioned in another post, the phrasing of John 18:36 is uniquely Johannine. Only in John do we find Jesus speaking of people and things being either “of this world” and “not of this world” (see, for example, 1:10; 12:31; 13:1; 14:28–31; 15:19; 16:8–11; 17:11, 14–16). Since Jesus doesn’t talk this way in the Synoptics, it’s highly likely that John (or someone before him) invented these statements of Jesus’s.
Second, the idea of the Kingdom of God being up in heaven rather than down on earth (“not of this world”) is also distinctly Johannine. In the earlier Synoptic Gospels, Jesus teaches that “the Kingdom of God has come near” (Mark 1:15; my emphasis). It is not some heavenly place we go to after we die. It was coming to earth, brought by the Son of Man (Mark 8:38), and it would be arriving imminently: “Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the Kingdom of God has come with power” (Mark 9:1; my emphasis). But John, writing sixty years after Jesus’s death, has either changed Jesus’s message or inherited a different one, and it’s not difficult to understand why: The earthly kingdom hadn’t yet arrived as promised. Instead, in John’s Gospel, the kingdom is no longer a future one on earth, but rather a current one in heaven. It’s where Jesus is from (John 6:38), and where he is soon to return, after his death, “to prepare a place” for those who believe in him (John 14:1–6).
These differences in the way Jesus speaks and what he teaches between the Synoptics and John are clear examples of how the teachings of Jesus have changed over time. They cannot plausibly be explained as the different memories of different eyewitnesses. But the historical Jesus most likely taught what is found in the Synoptics rather than in John. 4
For these reasons, it seems almost certain that the historical Jesus never said, “My kingdom is not of this world.” And if Jesus didn’t say it, it didn’t come from an eyewitness.
Third Failure: McGrew’s Explanation Is Hugely Implausible
But there’s more: McGrew’s hypothesis that Pilate would have released Jesus because he determined that Jesus was “a harmless religious crank of some sort” is extremely implausible. The Pilate we know from other sources was cruel, brutal, and callous. As one scholar says, commentating on Mark’s portrayal of Pilate:
The picture of Pilate here as weak and vacillating, anxiously trying to please the Jews, in no way squares with what we know from elsewhere of the man, viz., a cruel tyrant who would have not had the slightest compunction in executing an odd Jew or two to keep the peace. 5
The Pilate depicted in these other sources is a not a man who would have cared about a Jewish peasant’s innocence. 6 He would not have defended Jesus as strenuously as he does in the Gospels. And he absolutely wouldn’t have run back and forth between the Jewish crowds outside and Jesus in the Praetorium, as is depicted in John’s account. This Pilate is a Christian invention.
Instead, the historical Pilate wouldn’t have hesitated to execute Jesus. Even if Pilate thought Jesus was a “harmless religious crank”, he still would have ordered his crucifixion. The reason he was in Jerusalem during Passover was to neutralize political threats and to prevent insurrections. Executing Jesus would have been the simplest and safest action for Pilate to take, and as “a cruel tyrant” he’d have had no moral compunction against doing so.
But why would Christian storytellers invent a Pilate who fought for Jesus’s release but who eventually caved in to the demands of the Jewish leaders and crowds? There is widespread scholarly agreement that the Gospel authors want to blame the Jews, rather than the Romans, for Jesus’s death. The reasons are clear: At the time the Gospels were being composed, Jewish–Christian relations were fraught, and the early Christians wanted to assure the Roman authorities that they were politically harmless. At the same, time, however, the authors cannot deny outright that Pilate ordered Jesus’s execution. Jesus was, after all, crucified, which was a Roman form of execution. So the authors portray Pilate as acquiescing to the Jewish leaders. As Paula Fredriksen explains:
Given Jesus’ manner of death, we can only assume that Pilate, and not the High Priest or the Sanhedrin, was responsible. The task of the trial narratives is to reverse the burden of that responsibility in the face of the fact, too central to the tradition to be dropped or altered, that Jesus died on a cross. Pilate had indeed acted—but only, they urge, because he was compelled by the Jews. 7
Thus, McGrew’s explanation—that Pilate wanted to release Jesus because he considered Jesus “a harmless religious crank of some sort”—is enormously implausible. It depends on a portrait of Pilate that comes from Christian imagination rather than history. And this fictional depiction of Pilate in the Gospel is conclusive evidence that the Gospels’ accounts of Jesus’s death come from Christian storytelling, not eyewitness testimony.
Conclusion: A Failure in Plain View
As evidence for reliable eyewitness testimony, this coincidence crashes and burns—and it burns the hand that holds it. Not only is the coincidence itself evidence that Jesus’s comment at John 18:36 was invented by Christians storytellers to explain Pilate’s reaction, but the statement itself and the portrayal of Pilate’s character are strong evidence that the Gospels are based on oral and literary traditions that have been shaped by Christian polemic and theology.
Postscript on Contradictions
At the end of her discussion of this coincidence, McGrew again reminds her readers of the earlier coincidence involving Luke’s and John’s accounts of the trial: “We saw before that John’s account is incomplete just a few verses earlier concerning the charges against Jesus.” Then she writes, about this coincidence, “Now we see that Luke’s account is incomplete as regards Jesus’ answer.” And then she makes a dig at “skeptics”: “How tempting it would be for a skeptic to attempt to make the various omissions in Luke and John at this point into contradictions.” 8
As a skeptic myself, I find this statement ridiculous. First, omissions cannot contradict; only statements can. And second, the omissions she’s referring to here—the omission of the charges against Jesus in John, and the omission of an explanation of Pilate’s decision in Luke—have no possibility of contradicting.
In any event, I am tempted by her comment to point out two contradictions between the accounts of Jesus’s trial before Pilate.
After saying “You say so,” Mark says Jesus “made no further reply” (15:5), and Matthew says that Jesus “gave [Pilate] no answer, not ever to a single charge” (27:14). But in John, after Jesus says, “You say that I am a king,” Jesus and Pilate have further dialogue. Jesus says, “For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice” (18:37). And a little later, Jesus tells Pilate, “You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above; therefore the one who handed me over to you is guilty of a greater sin” (19:11).
An apologist might be tempted to argue that Mark and Matthew simply aren’t reporting everything that was said. However, this counterargument doesn’t work. There’s no room in either account for these other statements of Jesus’s. In Mark and Matthew, Pilate gives Jesus more opportunities to respond to the charges (Mark 15:4; Matt. 27:13), and they are clear that Jesus said nothing.
This apologetic counterargument also can’t explain the contradiction that, in the Synoptics, Pilate is interrogating Jesus in front of the Jewish leaders and the crowd, whereas in John he’s interrogating Jesus inside the Praetorium, away from the Jewish leaders and the crowd (John 18:28).
And so, even if there is no contradiction where McGrew says there might be, there are others, both among the accounts of the trial before Pilate and throughout the Gospels.
- 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 “5. ‘So you’re a king? No problem!’”. ↩
- I’m actually not sure that Jesus’s words in John 18:36 do explain why Pilate finds Jesus innocent. According to John, after Jesus tells Pilate his kingdom is not of this world, Pilate asks again, “So you are a king?” (John 18:37). That Pilate returns to the original question strongly suggests that he doesn’t find Jesus’s words sufficiently exonerating. ↩
- In a nutshell, the arguments for the apocalyptic nature of the historical Jesus’s message are: (1) it’s found in the earliest layers of tradition; (2) it’s independently attested in Mark and in the sources behind Matthew (M and Q) and Luke (L and Q); (3) it fits the historical context; and (4) it’s not what later Christians would want to attribute to Jesus. The arguments are presented more fully and with more expertise in books by excellent scholars such as Bart Ehrman, Paula Fredriksen, J.P. Sanders, Dale Allison, and more. Happy reading! ↩
- C.M. Tuckett, “Mark”, section “(15:1–15) Trial before Pilate”. In John Muddiman and John Barton, eds., The Gospels, Oxford Bible Commentary (Oxford University Press, 2010, Kindle edition). ↩
- For example, according to Philo of Alexandria, Agrippa I described Pilate as a man of “inflexible, stubborn and cruel disposition” who was guilty of “venality, thefts, assaults, abusive behavior and . . . frequent murders of untried prisoners” (Legatio ad Gaium 38.302; quoted in Paula Fredriksen, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews: A Jewish Life and the Emergence of Christianity (Knopf: 1999), p. 171). ↩
- Paula Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ: The Origins of the New Testament Images of Jesus, second edition (Yale: 2000), p. 121. ↩
- McGrew’s point is not simply that Luke’s and John’s omissions don’t contradict, but that the accounts are “complementary” and clearly independent. But even if the accounts are independent, that doesn’t make them reliable or based on eyewitness testimony, especially given the obvious historical implausibilities contained within the accounts. ↩