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"He was before me"--undesigned coincidence in John 1

My contract with DeWard Publishing for a book on undesigned coincidences has just been signed and countersigned, and we move forward to copy editing, typesetting, and production issues. I do not have a projected release date as of yet.

But here as a topical teaser is an undesigned coincidence included therein, one of the few that I discovered on my own. The wording used here is not the same as the wording in the book. I'm writing this post without looking at the book manuscript.

In the great prologue on the Word made flesh in John 1, the evangelist pauses a couple of times to make parenthetical comments about John the Baptist. He's going to start the narrative of his gospel in vs. 19 with the ministry of John the Baptist, and John crops up twice in the prologue --at vss. 6-8 and vs. 15.

Verse 14 is justly famous as a declaration of the great doctrine of the Incarnation: "And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father) full of grace and truth."

Verse 15 says,


John bare witness of him, and cried, saying, This was he of whom I spake, He that cometh after me is preferred before me: for he was before me.

After that the evangelist turns back for several more verses to teaching about Jesus Christ as the only begotten Son of the Father.

Why is verse 15 there?

A moment's thought shows that it's there at least in part because the evangelist takes it to agree with what he has just been teaching--the pre-existence of Jesus and the fact that Jesus is the eternal Son of God and did not come into existence when he was conceived. The words from John the Baptist, which the evangelist repeats in vs. 30 at their proper place in the narrative, are an aside in vs. 15, meant to call John the Baptist to witness of the doctrine being taught in the prologue.

It's easy to read past those words. If you know the Bible well, you know that John the Baptist had a lot to say about Jesus and seemed to have supernatural knowledge about him. (John the Baptist himself says so in vs. 33.) And we're all familiar with the saying, "He must increase, and I must decrease." So we think, "Yeah, John the Baptist knew that Jesus was greater than he was and existed before he did. Got it."

But if you read John's gospel only, there is nothing in the narrative to preclude a non-miraculous interpretation of John the Baptist's words, "He was before me." That is to say, how do we know from John's gospel alone that John the Baptist was not saying that Jesus was literally older than he was?

The answer is, we don't. The gospel of John says nothing at all about the births of Jesus and John the Baptist. It tells us nothing about who was older. So the interpretation of John the Baptist's words as a reference to Jesus' divine pre-existence is not clearly determined by John's gospel, except in the sense that the author of the gospel clearly interprets them that way.

Only the gospel of Luke explains their biological ages. Luke 1 tells of the conception of John the Baptist followed by the annunciation to Mary and the conception of Jesus. Luke is explicit that Jesus was six months younger than John the Baptist, his cousin. (Luke 1:36)

Luke, however, does not record the words of John the Baptist, "He that cometh after me is preferred before me, for he was before me." He records only the historical fact of their birth order.

Once one reads Luke, one realizes that John the Baptist must have been indirectly referring to the fact that Jesus was, in fact, biologically younger than he was. That is, his words take on theological significance when one realizes that John would have known that Jesus was not really "before" him biologically. And John the evangelist would have given them theological significance only if John the evangelist knew that Jesus was biologically younger than John the Baptist. Indeed, the aside in the prologue to the gospel of John is unexplained otherwise, but it is well-explained once we know that Jesus was actually younger than John the Baptist.

Among other things, this is support for the mundane fact that John the Baptist was older than Jesus. This appears to have been known to the author of John. This supports the accuracy of Luke.

But it also supports the accuracy of John the evangelist in reporting John the Baptist's words. If John the evangelist were making up speeches for John the Baptist, it would be rather surprising for him to leave to chance whether his readers understood the full import of words he was putting into the mouth of John the Baptist. Some in his audience might not have read Luke's gospel or heard it read. Maybe not a lot of people were still alive who actually knew that John was older than Jesus. If John the Baptist really said this and the evangelist was simply reporting it, then the reportage is entirely natural. John the evangelist knows that John the Baptist said this, perhaps even from hearing it himself. It made a big impression on him, especially when he realized that Jesus was actually younger than John. When he is writing his prologue it comes back to him, and he emphasizes it in an aside. Wanting to get on both with his theological prologue and eventually with his narrative, he doesn't pause to explain that John was actually older than Jesus.

This is the way memoirs go. We all have (or all should have) talked to people telling us their memories. This is how real people talk. They interrupt themselves, go backward and forward, sometimes pause to explain, often don't pause to explain. They report what other people have said, use it to make a point, and so forth.

John and Luke support one another at this point, but with no appearance of deliberateness.

Comments (12)

I've only haphazardly and occasionally followed your posts on the issue of undesigned coincidences, but they've raised a question in my mind about the method (which perhaps you answer in the book): what is the base rate of apparent--but false--undesigned coincidences. At first glance, undesigned coincidences' presence--and their presence in the quantity you seem to imply--seems inexplicable unless the events being related actually happened and were observed and narrated independently. Have you, though, ever checked this by looking at an analogous set of texts (maybe the Qur'an and corpus of hadith, or some other set of scriptures) that you don't believe narrate true events to see if undesigned coincidences are present? What if it turns out you could find lots of analogous undesigned coincidences in the hadith (e.g., two different hadiths by different companions of Mohammed that complement each other in the manner Luke and John do here). Not being a Christian myself, my suspicion is that in a sufficiently complex set of texts (especially if they are at least in part historically accurate, as I would be willing to admit parts of the Bible are) a motivated searcher could find apparent undesigned coincidences that do arise randomly and not due to the fact that two independent sources are narrating the same true occurrence.

Well, to begin with, I don't deny that Mohammad existed or anything of that kind! If there were undesigned coincidences in the hadith (I have never systematically read through the hadith) this could mean that there were events there that actually happened and were accurately related--things Mohammad actually said or what-not.

However, my understanding is that the hadith are admitted to be *written down* over a hundred years after the existence of Mohammad, therefore such coincidences are *less* to be expected. My understanding is also that the hadith, unlike the gospels, are rarely claiming to be relating the same events.

In general the UC's are intended to be, inter alia, an argument for the early and traditional authorship of the gospels, but similar claims of authorship are not made for the hadith in the first place.

Certainly one would not expect the hadith to show the same pattern that we find between the Acts and the Pauline epistles, as the latter are letters written by one of the main characters in Acts and often refer to the same people and allude to the same events. (Many undesigned coincidences can be found between Acts and even the epistles granted to be Pauline by "mainstream," non-conservative scholars.)

I will be honest: I think that the whole idea of a "base rate" is somewhat confused as applied to historical inquiry. What's the base rate of false statements that Caesar crossed the Rubicon?

However, to give the closest answer I can to your question, in general this is _not_ the sort of thing that we find by chance in fiction by different authors or in other literature with no claim to historicity. We certainly find nothing of the kind in the gnostic gospels.

I know of one modern novelist who has _deliberately_ created the appearance of such coincidences between two novels about (some of) the same events--these are Gilead and Home by Marilynne Robinson. But of course those do not arise by chance but rather because a) Robinson wrote both novels herself and b) Robinson is a genius and did it on purpose. Even then there are a couple of interesting anomalies where I think Robinson forgot or didn't bother about some time-line and other issues of coordination between the novels. I'm the kind of person who puts myself to sleep at night trying to work out the chronology in a series of novels by the same author, and I think Robinson made a couple of small mistakes there.

I think it's important that undesigned coincidences not be evaluated by anything like hand-waving: _Surely_ if we looked hard enough we could find these, etc. There needs to be cash value for such claims.

I notice that you even qualify your conjecture by the fact that the gospels are "at least in part historically accurate." That's a useful qualification, because in that case of course it seems that you are admitting that some undesigned coincidences could be arising only pseudo-randomly and in fact would be owing to the fact that more than one document would be alluding to some true fact.

But if we are going to go that route, we have to ask ourselves whether the number and variety of _types_ of undesigned coincidences can be explained by some such conjecture as that the gospels (and Acts) are merely partly historical, related by people who didn't really know the events, who just got a _few_ things right here or there because of their partial historicity. This is where the whole of the evidence has to be taken into account.

Another point to remember is that there are a lot of other arguments that also support _high_ reliability and sourcing very close to the time related--such as the vast number of minute, external confirmations of Acts discussed by Colin Hemer and others.

Not being a Christian myself, my suspicion is that in a sufficiently complex set of texts

By the way, this really should have nothing to do with whether or not one is a Christian. What we're doing is taking for a test drive the hypothesis that the gospels are what they purport to be as texts--memoirs written by his close associates or by friends of his close associates. We're seeing if that hypothesis explains what we find better than its negation. If someone believes that he has examples of the actualizing of this suspicion--that is, large numbers of apparent, but unreal, undesigned coincidences in non-historical texts that really are just coincidences, I suggest that he bring that forward. A mere suspicion won't do.

Of course, it's possible that some of the UCs *are* sheer coincidence. For example, maybe Jesus asked Philip where to find bread that the people might eat just because Philip happened to be standing at his elbow at the moment and not because Philip was from the nearby town of Bethsaida. Or, if one thinks the whole story was made up, perhaps one will think that John just made up that Jesus said this to Philip and it just happened to be the case that Philip was from the town that (according to Luke, not John!) was near where the event took place. This is why the argument is a cumulative case. One of the most interesting things is how many UCs cluster around the feeding of the five thousand (to which the "why ask Philip" one relates). At a certain point, the "They all made it up" hypothesis becomes extremely strained.

what is the base rate of apparent--but false--undesigned coincidences. ... Not being a Christian myself, my suspicion is that in a sufficiently complex set of texts (especially if they are at least in part historically accurate, as I would be willing to admit parts of the Bible are) a motivated searcher could find apparent undesigned coincidences that do arise randomly and not due to the fact that two independent sources are narrating the same true occurrence.

rukn, I am curious as to how such a suspicion arises. Do you have specific examples that you think are, actually, false examples of undesigned coincidences, in other texts? (Or in the Bible?)

I sit here considering what it would mean to have a "rate" of false positives, and I am not sure it would be even possible to identify such a thing. In order for the "coincidence" to arise, the two texts would have to be about the same event. (Or "event", if fictional entirely). Now, you can indeed have two independent accounts of the same real event from different persons, but you cannot have two wholly independent accounts of a WHOLLY fictional event from two different persons, because somebody has to first originate "the event" as fiction, and all other texts are borrowing off that first account. All later texts will be dependent on the first, and thus they will not be completely independent of each other, either. If one author decides to create fictional element X, which matches perfectly with some other later author's decision to create fictional element X', either (a) the match, the fit, the congruency is either trivial (A says he drank a glass of water, B says he went and fetched a glass - but nearly everyone drinks a glass of water now and then), or complex. If trivial, we don't account it as the sort of thing that gets written up as a significant work of corroborating each other. We only count things as significantly in the class of "undesigned coincidence" if it is something that would NOT apparently happen by mere chance. If complex, then it would be ipso facto highly implausible that the later author was acting independently of the earlier. You would have to have really good evidence that the later had never been influenced by the earlier...which is hard to come by. How would we KNOW an instance was a false positive?

As for partially real and partially fictional accounts, (like historical fiction, say), my sense is that you don't actually get any new realities out of this. If someone is an eye witness (or closely associated with an eye witness and can go back and check his text with the eye-witness), then the factual parts are factual and you don't get false positives. As for the made-up parts (exaggerations, fill-in inventions, elisions of significance, changes of order), it is even LESS plausible that some other eye witness in writing *independently* will accidentally latch onto a complex element of fiction that matches up with the former account.

The whole point of the UC category is noticing something of which we say "huh, real people don't MAKE UP that kind of thing." You are suggesting that we may have too low a bar for what "people make up", but you need examples to flesh out your thesis. Without examples, all you are doing is hypothesizing the contrary: maybe people do. "Maybe" isn't yet an argument.

Thank you both for the considerate and detailed responses. I admit to having some trouble cogently expressing my idea (and you may both be right that it is not a good one!). The following three statements from your responses, though, are indicative of the assumptions behind what's being attempted with the UCs that are ringing alarm bells in my head:

"This is why the argument is a cumulative case...At a certain point, the "They all made it up" hypothesis becomes extremely strained." What is the basis for judging the point at which the accumulation of UCs in a corpus makes the 'they all made it up' hypthesis strained? Obviously one is not good enough, but are 20? 50? 100? Is it really good enough to say we have a common sense intuition as to when that's the case? Shouldn't there be some empirical, comparative basis for the judgment?

"If complex, then it would be ipso facto highly implausible that the later author was acting independently of the earlier." How do we know it's ipso facto highly implausible? Is this just an a priori judgment? Aren't many things that are ipso facto highly implausible (like someone winning the lottery twice) actually quite unremarkable when viewed against the proper framing of their likelihood?

"The whole point of the UC category is noticing something of which we say "huh, real people don't MAKE UP that kind of thing."" What's the basis of that judgment? Is it just an intuitive judgment or is it grounded in some actual comparative study of parallel (purportedly) historical texts?

I admit to this being weak and preliminary without examples, but is it so implausible to think that we could, say, find four purportedly contemporaneous accounts of a battle -- three of which were truly written by eyewitnesses and one that we now know to have been written by someone not present and based on hearsay and with lots of embellishment -- and look to see if we can find apparent, complex UCs among the fictional account and the true accounts? I admit that at this point I am just hypothesizing that 'maybe people do', but while Lydia's arugment is obviously at a much more sophisticated and advanced stage I fear that it has proceeded from the unverified assumption that 'probably people don't.'

"If complex, then it would be ipso facto highly implausible that the later author was acting independently of the earlier." How do we know it's ipso facto highly implausible? Is this just an a priori judgment?

I don't think it's _just_ an a priori judgment. It's something we both see in real life experience, and can reason to. The more complex something is, the more difficult it is to make it - to put it together, and to make it work right. A machine with 100 parts takes more thought, more applied experience, more engineering background, to be a working machine than one with 5 parts. A story with 100 parts takes more thought, more applied experience, more craftsman background, to be a working story. Anybody can tell a 2-line joke. It takes a real comedian to tell a 10 minute joke and pull it off.

The reason, of course, is that many disparate elements (things put near each other by external agency) have no internal principle of organization, so all of the organization to make the whole work to the end intended must come from the external agent. And the more parts there are, the more interactions there are, exponentially... so the more ways for the interactions to potentially interfere with the end intended. Thus it takes more thought, more comprehensive understanding of the art, to make something with many pieces. It is less and less reasonable to expect that the parts of a thing with more parts avoid interfering with each other by mere chance rather than by forethought, as compared to a thing with fewer parts.

I don't think it is an unthinking bias or prejudice to expect the principle also holds in telling independent stories with coincidental facets. To the extent that the coincidences involve more elements, it is less plausible that it happens by chance, just as we find in good machines and good stories.

Thanks, Tony. Even if we accept that the principle is broadly true, as you note -- and as Lydia stated -- it works in a cumulative fashion (' It is less and less reasonable...'), but I still see that that needs to be bench-marked against some external standard.

Another point is that the comparison here isn't (or doesn't have to be) between a claim that the Gospels were written down relatively soon after the events they described occurred by four independent eye witnesses and a claim that they were written many years later and independently made up out of whole cloth. I'm much less familiar than you with the various claims about the authorship of the Gospels, but under the various hypotheses like the two-source I again simply don't see the initial basis for claiming, in effect, that 'well, of course someone (like the author of Luke) having access to an earlier Gospel and a document which we no longer possess (X) and various other sources that we no longer have that may or may not have been shared by the authors and maybe making the occasional thing up simply wouldn't produce such a density of UCs.'

I again simply don't see the initial basis for claiming, in effect, that 'well, of course someone (like the author of Luke) having access to an earlier Gospel and a document which we no longer possess (X) and various other sources that we no longer have that may or may not have been shared by the authors and maybe making the occasional thing up simply wouldn't produce such a density of UCs.'

Luke was not an eyewitness, and nobody says he was. (Well, nobody I know of anyway, and certainly not I.) Luke himself didn't claim to have been an eyewitness. However, he appears (strong evidence from the book of Acts) to have been an associate of the Apostle Paul and to have been a very careful recorder. It looks like he interviewed eyewitnesses.

I'm not sure what you have in mind as the nature of these hypothetical documents we no longer possess and various other sources. I would say that the evidence is that the various sources were often _people_. I would possibly make an exception for the earliest chapters of Luke, which are so different in style (so much more Hebraic) from the rest of the gospel that there is legit. reason to suspect an actual document possessed by Luke, plausibly (given its content) coming from Jesus' relatives. But in general, the use by the author of witness sources is not in contrast with the picture I am putting forward but rather supports it. Luke is close up to the facts and reliable. I would say within one to two (max) removes of the events. That's because of what we find in what he writes. And much closer than that in several parts of the book of Acts. The shipwreck in particular looks like it was written by an eyewitness who was a landsman with a good memory. He knew what he saw but didn't always understand what it meant.

The problem with source criticism is that *as it is actually practiced* it a) always assumes a written rather than a personal source and b) is placed wrongly in competition with eyewitness testimony.

Mark was ascribed from earliest tradition, the reliability of which we do not have reason to doubt, to a companion of Peter. I suspect that alleged "sources" like the entirely hypothetical pre-Markan passion narrative, were named "Peter." Thus Mark was not an eyewitness but came from someone who was.

is it so implausible to think that we could, say, find four purportedly contemporaneous accounts of a battle -- three of which were truly written by eyewitnesses and one that we now know to have been written by someone not present and based on hearsay and with lots of embellishment -- and look to see if we can find apparent, complex UCs among the fictional account and the true accounts?

Given what I am guessing you mean (you don't elaborate your example), yes, it is *so* implausible. Try to make something up. Go ahead. Try. Here's a short one (I don't want to take a lot of time making up examples for your argument.) I assume you mean that source 4 is based on *unreliable* hearsay. I assume you don't mean that source 4 is a careful journalist/historian who goes around and talks to people who *were* actually there. Now, given that that is what you mean, suppose that source 4, working from unreliable hearsay, says that on the morning of the battle the general could not find his favorite sword. Suddenly a boy came running up to the army carrying the sword and told the general that he left it the night before at (I'm making up this name) Warwick, a town nearby where the army had slept. The general immediately took off his second-best sword and left it lying in a field of pease nearby and put on the favorite sword to go into battle. This event is recorded nowhere in the other documents.

What we would have *no* reason to expect (especially if we have strong reason to think author #4 had no access either direct or indirect to the other documents) to find by sheer coincidence would be something like this: Another document records that, after the battle, a passing farmboy found a sword lying in a nearby pease field which, upon inquiry, he was able to identify as the second-best sword of the general.

This would be a highly surprising coincidence. The hypothesis that this dovetailing occurred *by chance* would be more improbable than an hypothesis that would explain it. Now, that explanatory hypothesis might be that the fourth author actually had access to the other documents and *made up* the incident to fit together with the reliable documents. I discuss that kind of dependence hypothesis a lot in the discussions in the book.

But it's a matter of sheer probabililistic logic that the conjunction of these two contingencies (the report of the finding of the sword in the field and the report of the change of swords) are more improbable if independent than if dependent under some explanation.

By the way, as an empirical matter, J. Warner Wallace has given some good discussion of this kind of thing from the perspective of criminal investigation and what he finds in interrogating witnesses.

A probabilistic point that may help here is that *any* highly specific, contingent, historical event is highly improbable *all by itself*. Hence, any two or more such events, treated as independent, are exponentially more improbable. (The probability of probabilistically independent propositions is the product of their individual probabilities.)

In cases that we attribute to sheer coincidence, the reason that this point does not mean anything epistemically is that the combined improbabilities are not particularly *better* explained by any remotely plausible alternative hypothesis and therefore not better explained by the negation of sheer coincidence. If I notice that the Powerball winner's first name is the same as the middle name of my third cousin twice removed, this is indeed improbable (as any multiplied set of contingencies is improbable) but it *doesn't matter* because it does not suggest nor confirm any remotely plausible non-chance hypothesis. (That some powerful person who can "fix" the Powerball lottery has a special desire to honor my third cousin twice removed in this arcane way is sufficiently ridiculous that we don't bother even to think about it.)

So there really is *no problem* arguing that it is improbable on sheer chance that, say, John the evangelist would attribute those words to John the Baptist and also that Luke would say that John the Baptist was six months older than Jesus. The improbability on sheer chance is the *easy* part of the argument. It doesn't require "base rate studies" or anything of the kind. It's strictly the multiplied improbabilities of two highly specific and highly contingent propositions.

This is why in various biological areas you don't hear biologists talking about things as happening by sheer coincidence. (Just to give an example.) A biologist who argues from similarity in genome to common ancestry is arguing for, in a sense, a non-chance hypothesis--that is to say, the _similarity_ between the genomes is not being attributed to sheer coincidence but rather to an explanation that makes the probability of the conjunction something better than the product of the individual improbabilities. Whether the biologist is correct to do that or not is a different question, as there might be other legitimate non-chance hypotheses worth considering, but the point is that when there is this remarkable similarity nobody just shrugs his shoulders and says, "Sheer coincidence."

Similarly, in a case of texts that fit together in this way, it would make much more sense to argue for some non-chance hypothesis such as machination on the part of one of the authors than to argue that these two highly specific events *just happened* to fit together in this highly specific way. This is why machination hypotheses are the alternative hypotheses I usually address explicitly. One wouldn't argue that it was just chance in my story of the two swords, either. One would reasonably argue either that source 4 actually *did* have access to the other source and devised his scene deliberately to fit with it or that source 4 had access somehow or other to an anecdote that was at least in its core facts true. Which of course would in turn cast some doubt upon the claim that source 4 is working from unreliable hearsay. And the more such things that turned up, the more one would be forced to re-evaluate the reliability of source 4 if one had previously deemed it unreliable.

Most scholars would agree Luke was completed prior to the completion of the fourth Gospel.

Most scholars would also agree that the fourth Gospel echoes Luke in having a woman anoint Jesus's feet, in mentioning "Lazarus," etc. So it appears the author of the fourth Gospel had knowledge of the earlier Gospel of Luke.

So, trajectory-wise, if the interpretation of "before" is correct in vs.15, it might prove another connection between those Gospels, with the priority most likely being Lukan.

Some precise examples of what I meant in my comment directly above about GLuke being completed prior to GJohn, and the GJohn building on GLuke (and also Mark to some extent): http://edward-t-babinski.blogspot.com/2011/02/perfumed-jesus.html

If your claim (or implication) is that John put this in because he was making something up (the words of John the Baptist) to make it fit with Luke, I addressed that in the main post.

In the words of the 19th-century lawyer Edmund Bennett, “Forgers do not rest content with such roundabout confirmations.”

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