Coincidence III.3: Woe to Bethsaida!
The Alleged Coincidence
In Matthew and Luke, Jesus curses two towns because their inhabitants rebuffed Jesus’s message to repent. 1 According to Matthew:
Then he [Jesus] began to reproach the cities in which most of his deeds of power had been done because they did not repent. “Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the deeds of power done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes. But I tell you, on the day of judgment it will be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon than for you.” (Matt. 11:20–22) 2
The same “woe passage” can be found in Luke 10:13–15. The problem is that Matthew doesn’t mention Chorazin or Bethsaida anywhere in Gospel. So what “deeds of power” in Chorazin and Bethsaida is Jesus referring to in these passages?
The partial answer supposedly comes from Luke. Although Luke doesn’t mention Chorazin (nor does any other Gospel), he does say that the feeding of the five thousand, along with some healing miracles, occur in or near Bethsaida (Luke 9:10–17). Matthew mentions these healings and the feeding miracle, but he doesn’t say they took place in Bethsaida (Matt. 14:13–21). But if Luke is correct about the location of these miracles, then these could be the “deeds of power” Matthew’s Jesus, in the woe passage, is referring to when he curses Bethsaida for not repenting.
Thus the passages coincide, says McGrew, because “Luke, therefore, explains Matthew by answering the question, ‘Why did Jesus say that mighty works were done at Bethsaida?’” 3
First Failure: No Evidence for Reliability
Even if there were a coincidence here—and I’ll argue below that there isn’t—it provides no evidence for reliability. All that this alleged coincidence shows is that Matthew and Luke knew about traditions in which Jesus did miracles in towns like Bethsaida and cursed some of them, including Bethsaida. But these traditions don’t have to be true in order for the authors of Matthew and Luke to have known about them. Hence, there’s no evidence for reliability.
However, some may wonder whether this alleged coincidence is more likely to come about if the details are reliable than if they’re unreliable. But it’s not. Whether the traditions are true or false, this coincidence came about by chance: Luke, by chance, mentions miracles in Bethsaida; and Matthew, by chance, mentions the post-miracle curses in Bethsaida but does not say what these miracles were. Therefore, one cannot argue these passages are evidence that the details are more likely to be reliable than unreliable.
Another way to see the chanciness of undersigned coincidences is to consider Chorazin. Jesus also curses Chorazin in the woe passage. So where is the purported undesigned coincidence explaining the miracles in Chorazin? There isn’t one. So either Jesus really did do miracles in Chorazin or there were invented stories of Jesus doing miracles in Chorazin. In either case, it’s just chance that none of the Gospels authors heard about or decided to narrate these miracles. Thus, whether true or false, undesigned coincidences occur and don’t occur by chance.
This alleged coincidence, then, is not evidence for reliability. It can be explained as the result of different authors recording different oral and literary traditions about Jesus traveling to different towns performing miracles and cursing those who didn’t heed his teachings. This point is bad enough for McGrew’s argument that this alleged coincidence is evidence for reliability, but the problem is even worse because this alleged coincidence involves a miracle story. The likelihood that this alleged coincidence is the product of invented oral and literary traditions is much higher than the likelihood this miracle actually occurred. As evidence for reliability, then, this alleged coincidence is truly pathetic.
Second Failure: No Evidence for Eyewitness Testimony
If Jesus didn’t really do miracles in Bethsaida or curse the inhabitants afterwards, then there couldn’t have been eyewitnesses to these events. And since the coincidence provides no evidence for reliability, there’s also no reason to think it provides evidence for reliable eyewitness testimony.
But even if we thought Jesus did miracles in Bethsaida and cursed the inhabitants afterwards, the coincidence wouldn’t be evidence for eyewitness testimony. The authors of Matthew and Luke could have heard these traditions from oral and literary sources and included them.
Third Failure: No Coincidence
As we’ve just seen, the alleged coincidence fails to be evidence for reliable eyewitness testimony even if a coincidence actually exists here. But there’s a coincidence here only if the woe passage is actually referring to the feeding miracle, and McGrew’s case that it is is extremely flimsy. It rests entirely on the fact that Luke appears to set the feeding miracle near Bethsaida. But that identification is problematic.
First, Luke’s account at this point is ambiguous. Initially Luke says that Jesus and company “slipped quietly into a city called Bethsaida” (Luke 9:10). But Luke appears to contradict himself later in the scene because suddenly the events are taking place in a “deserted place” (Luke 9:12). McGrew doesn’t seem concerned about this apparent contradiction. She writes that Luke is “implying” that the miracles took place “in an uninhabited area near the town of Bethsaida”. Maybe. But maybe not. This apparent contradiction could also be the result of Luke patching together different traditions, and neglecting to smooth out the resulting discrepancy. If this explanation is correct, then we can’t use Luke to identify the location of the feeding as near Bethsaida.
Second, Mark and Matthew paint a different picture. In their accounts (and Matthew is probably just following Mark), Jesus is seeking a deserted place to get away from people, and he’s traveling by boat. According to Mark:
He [Jesus] said to them, “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.” For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat. And they went away in the boat to a deserted place by themselves. (Mark 6:31–32)
Mark’s and Luke’s accounts are discrepant. If Jesus were seeking solitude and traveling by boat, then they would avoid Bethsaida; they wouldn’t head into or even toward Bethsaida, but toward a remote bit of shore far from a town.
Third, Mark explicitly says that the miracle didn’t take place near Bethsaida. After the crowd is fed, Mark writes, “Immediately he [Jesus] made his disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side, to Bethsaida, while he dismissed the crowd” (Mark 6:45; my emphasis). If Mark is correct, then Luke is wrong, and there’s no coincidence. (McGrew argues that this verse in Mark should be translated differently. I’ll address this argument in this post’s last section.)
Fourth, the woe passage makes it clear that the “deeds of power” failed to impress the inhabitants of Bethsaida, and that they subsequently rejected Jesus’s message of repentance. But there’s no indication in any of the accounts of the healings and feeding miracle that the crowds rejected his message. In fact, according John, the crowd was impressed: “When the people saw the sign that he had done, they began to say, ‘This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world’” (John 6:14). Indeed, they were so enthusiastic that Jesus became alarmed: “When Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself” (John 6:15). This hardly sounds like a crowd unwilling to listen to Jesus. 4
And finally, and ironically, McGrew cannot argue that the woe passage is referring to the feeding miracle. Earlier she argued that the crowd is made up of Passover pilgrims. But if that correct, then Jesus would have no cause to curse the inhabitants of Bethsaida. It wouldn’t make sense to condemn a town for the behavior of nonresidents. Therefore, in order to save this coincidence, McGrew will have to acknowledge that her other coincidence is nonexistent.
In short, we can reject this coincidence because there are strong reasons to discount McGrew’s suggestion that the “deeds of power” in the woe passage are referring to the episode of the feeding of the five thousand.
Fourth Failure: A Lose-Lose Dilemma
McGrew mentions one obvious objection to this coincidence: Matthew’s woe passage appears before his account of the feeding of the five thousand. Obviously, if Jesus in the woe passage is referring to the feeding miracle, then Matthew has the order wrong.
McGrew thinks there’s a simple solution to this:
However, it is widely acknowledged that Matthew in particular among the Gospels does not always relate the events of Jesus’ ministry in chronological order. . . . There would be nothing remarkable about Matthew’s relating the woes before his account of the events in Bethsaida to which one of the woes referred, especially since Matthew does not mention that the feeding of the five thousand took place near Bethsaida at all and may not even have remembered that detail. 5
There are two problems with this answer.
First, McGrew is merely gesturing toward an argument instead of providing one. If McGrew wants to convince us that Matthew topically arranged this passage alongside others, then she needs to explain what this topical arrangement is. But she doesn’t. So I have no reason to think that Matthew’s placement of the passage is chronologically out of order. Indeed, Luke could be the one who has the saying in the wrong place chronologically.
Second—and far worse—is that this argument undermines her entire big-picture argument. Her goal in her book is to convince us that the Gospel authors “have primarily a testimonial project rather than a literary or redactive one”, that they are “ultimately aiming to tell what really happened” (original emphasis). 6 If, however, Matthew is arranging events topically rather than chronologically, then Matthew has engaged in literary and redactive techniques. Moreover, he is no longer telling us “what really happened”. And that’s because one cannot innocently remove an incident from its historical and chronological context without consequences.
For example, according to Luke, Jesus cast woe on the towns after John the Baptist died (9:9), after the Transfiguration (9:28), and after he began his journey to Jerusalem (9:51), while giving instructions to the seventy-two disciples he was sending out on missions. But as a result of Matthew’s literary and redactive choices, Jesus now condemns Chorazin and Bethsaida before John the Baptist dies (Matt. 11:2ff.; 14:1–12), before the Transfiguration (17:1ff.), and before he begins his journey to Jerusalem (19:1ff.), while discussing the Baptist after speaking with messengers sent by a still-alive John the Baptist. If Luke’s sequence is correct and Matthew knew it, then by rearranging material Matthew was willing to let his readers walk away with historically incorrect information. He has rendered his account unreliable.
In other words, McGrew faces a dilemma. Either she can admit there’s no coincidence because Matthew’s woe passage occurs before his account of the miracles that, Luke says, took place in Bethsaida. Or she can insist that Matthew rearranged his material topically, thereby making his account historically unreliable. Either way, her case for the Gospels’ historical reliability is undermined.
Conclusion: A Failure in Plain View
This alleged coincidence is a colossal failure. Because there’s no indication in Luke or any other account of the feeding miracle that Jesus’s audience rejected his message of repentance, and because the other accounts make clear that Jesus isn’t near any towns, McGrew’s case for a coincidence crumbles. But even if there were a coincidence, it would provides zero evidence for reliability or eyewitness testimony because the passages can be explained without presuming either. Moreover, to make this coincidence work, McGrew has to suggest that Matthew rearranged traditions about Jesus. By doing so, however, she has ironically undermined her overall argument that the Gospels are reliable and that none of the Gospel authors “ever ‘make’ things happen in a way contrary to the way that, to the best of his knowledge, they actually happened”. 7
Pros and Contradiction
As noted above, there are problems with McGrew’s suggestion that the feeding miracle took place near Bethsaida, as Luke says. One other problem is that Mark is explicit that the miracle took place on other side of the Sea of Galilee. According to Mark, after the feeding, “Immediately he [Jesus] made his disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side, to Bethsaida, while he dismissed the crowd” (Mark 6:45; my emphasis). Not only does Mark’s statement contradict Luke, but also John, who says that the disciples got in the boat and “started across the sea to Capernaum” (John 6:16; my emphasis). Capernaum is on the western shore, across from Bethsaida.
However, McGrew uses this example of an “alleged contradiction” to argue that undesigned coincidences can resolve them. According to McGrew:
Since (as I will discuss) subtle intersections [i.e., undesigned coincidences] among John, Matthew, and Luke all converge to support the conclusion that this event took place somewhere near the town of Bethsaida, the question of the location of this event is far from an embarrassment to the advocate of the Gospels’ reliability. Very much to the contrary. That realization, in turn, places in a fairer light the remaining puzzle about how to translate and/or construe the Greek preposition pros (“to” or “towards,” but also possibly “over against”) in Mark 6.45 and whether it is legitimate to translate it in a way that resolves the apparent discrepancy. It is a case of realizing where the weight of the evidence falls. In this case, the weight of the evidence about the location of the feeding is highly favorable to the reliability of the Gospels, whereas a focus on the alleged discrepancy creates a false impression that the question of its location is a point against their reliability. (Original emphasis) 8
This analysis is shockingly egregious and widely misses the mark (pun intended). Even if Matthew, Luke, and John all suggest that the event took place near Bethsaida, that doesn’t mean Mark must too—especially when he appears to say the opposite. Furthermore, translation decisions are based on lexicology, the study of words, their meanings and forms; translation is not based on making one author agree with what another author says. And as far as I can tell, there is no lexicological or contextual justification for translating Mark 6:45 as “opposite Bethsaida”; the only reason to translate it such is to make Mark agree with Luke and John. But that’s apologetics, not lexicology.
In the end, then, Mark’s account contradicts John’s and Luke’s.
- He also curses Capernaum in the passage, but that section isn’t relevant to the coincidence. ↩
- 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 III, section “3. Woe to Bethsaida!”. ↩
- One may want to insist that although the people were willing to accept Jesus as a prophet and their king, they were unwilling to repent. Regardless, there’s still no evidence in the accounts that the people rejected Jesus’s message to repent. ↩
- McGrew, Hidden in Plain View, Chapter III, n.13. ↩
- McGrew, Hidden in Plain View, “Conclusion”. ↩
- McGrew, Hidden in Plain View, Chapter I, section “4. ‘Unless You Eat the Flesh of the Son of Man and Drink His Blood . . .’”. ↩
- McGrew, Hidden in Plain View, “General Introduction”, section “Organization and Argument of This Book”. ↩