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Tim McGrew radio interview, Easter, 2011

On Sunday my husband Tim was interviewed on a New Jersey radio show called Evidence4Faith. He talked about the argument from undesigned coincidences, which he also discusses in talks I've mentioned here and here.

Click on podcasts at this link. If I can get a permalink to the particular podcast of his interview later, I will add it. Tim's interview begins just after the seven-minute mark and goes to about the fifty-one-minute mark.

As I was listening to Tim's examples, I was struck by all the reasons there might be for a real eyewitness not to fill out the explanation for a detail. Think for example how tedious it is to listen to someone who goes back to explain every little detail he mentions in a story. When Matthew (8:16) tells of Jesus healing many people who were brought to him one evening, it would be quite natural, if he were telling something that he really remembered, for him not to pause and explain, "Oh, the reason that it was evening is that this was the Sabbath, so the people couldn't come to him earlier in the day." He mentions that it was evening in passing, casually and naturally, as an eyewitness would do. On the other hand, were someone making up the story, there would be no point in forging the detail that the people were brought to Jesus at evening while leaving that detail hanging meaninglessly, unexplained.

Similarly, as John is telling the story about the feeding of the five thousand, it would be quite natural for him to say that Jesus asked Philip where they could buy bread if he were really an eyewitness--that is, because he remembered that Jesus did ask Philip. (Tim talks about why it was Philip in the interview.) But John himself might have had to stop and think for a moment if someone had asked him, "Why did Jesus ask Philip rather than any of the other disciples?" Presumably when John told the story, he wasn't particularly thinking about some special reason for Jesus to select Philip for the question. But if someone were forging the story as fiction, he would have a reason for choosing to use a given disciple as a character at that point in his fictional narrative, and therefore he would be unlikely to choose that character without making the reason clearer to his readers.

All sorts of such things can happen when one is telling a true story, especially a story one has witnessed. One gets caught up in what one actually remembers and drops in incidental references to small facts, which facts are to some extent selected randomly by the memory as one brings the scene back to memory. This is typical of real memoirs but not of elaborate forgeries.

Comments (14)

Patrick O'Brian employs this in "The Mauritius Command". Jack Aubrey is finishing a letter to his wife, Sophie...

He sighed, smiled, and was about to seal when Stephen walked in, looking mean and pinched. "Stephen," he said, "I have just written to Sophie. Have you any message?"

"Love, of course. And compliments to Mrs Williams."

"Lord," cried Jack, writing fast, "thank you for reminding me. I have explained about Lady Clonfert," he observed, as he closed the letter up.

"Then I trust you kept your explanation short," said Stephen. "Circumstantial details destroy a tale entirely. The longer, the less credible."

"I merely stated that she did not appear at the rendezvous, and passed on."

"Nothing about three o'clock in the morning, the hocus-pocus at the inn, signals disregarded, the boat being made to row as though we were escaping from the Day of Judgment, and the lady ditched?" asked Stephen, with the unpleasant creaking noise that was his nearest approach to a laugh.

I have to admit that my knowledge of elaborate forgeries is limited, but it was my understanding that forgers tried to make their accounts seem as much like genuine accounts as possible. So unless the forgery is incompetent, it should be expected to have the same features you'd expect to find in a genuine account. Skilled liars include details that don't seem to advance their agendas and exclude details that might support them specifically in order to make their accounts seem less obviously contrived. But, of course, the forgery theory is a straw man anyway. The authors of the gospels were almost certainly trying to provide an accurate account, and no doubt included many details because one or another of the sources they trusted had mentioned them. Thus, there are details which do not appear to be calculated to advance an agenda because the authors didn't calculate details to advance an agenda. This doesn't in any way entail that the details are accurate; memory is quite unreliable, and possibilities for error are enormous even if we make the large assumption that all those the gospel authors trusted were trustworthy.

So unless the forgery is incompetent, it should be expected to have the same features you'd expect to find in a genuine account.

You are clearly unfamiliar with non-canonical "gospels," Aaron. This is not an exercise in empirical equivalences. Moreover, in some cases, the coincidences in question go in such a direction chronologically among the gospels that they would have been exceedingly difficult to arrange. As a matter of actual fact, it is _very_ difficult to make these things come out like this over and over and over again (as they do among the gospels) in fiction even given the modern tradition of the historical novel.

This has, by the way, nothing to do with "advancing an agenda." It has rather to do with things like mentioning for no apparent reason that people were brought to Christ at evening and then having it turn out (known only from another gospel) that the day in question was the Sabbath, mentioning in passing that Jesus asked Philip where to buy bread and then having it turn out that Philip was from the region, and so on and so forth. This actually makes it quite probable that their memories _were_ reliable, because they confirm one another in these many incidental ways.

And if we abandon the deliberate fiction theory altogether as a so-called "straw man" (which it is not, it's just that "later legendary elaborations" sounds nicer than "fiction"), and argue that they were _trying_ to give an accurate account, then the point becomes even stronger--These details that dovetail with one another show that they were not only trying, they succeeded, and succeeded in a way that makes most sense if they either were direct eyewitness accounts or were written by way of consulting eyewitnesses who remembered these incidental details in exactly the way that witnesses do.

"Later elaboration" doesn't just sound nicer than "fiction," it's a totally different process. And later people trying to make sense of sometimes conflicting and confusing earlier sources can very well introduce the kind of details you're talking about (though you probably also wildly underestimate how much mere coincidence is inevitably found in any material people look at long enough).

Actually, I shouldn't exaggerate the difference from fiction. Consider the kind of changes Gao E made to the Red Inkstone manuscript of Dream of the Red Chamber; they're almost always intended to resolve some contradiction or implausibility in the Red Inkstone manuscript (which are in endless supply, partly because the author originally left it unfinished, partly because others had already started doing what Gao E tried to do). And Gao E nearly always made tiny changes, both because he didn't have the time to substantially rewrite the work, and because he didn't think he could do it better than the original author anyway; he always made the smallest substition possible (incidentally inserting new contradictions and implausibilities of his own, because there was too much to keep track of).

Surely someone trying to get the story right would be even more concerned about apparent conflicts and implausibilities, and someone recording religiously inspired stories would no doubt be very reluctant to make more than the tiniest changes to correct what they think they must have misremembered or some earlier source must have misrecorded. So there would be very small new coincidences as contradictions are removed and linkages created, and mistakes in the effort to reconcile the problems would produce new contradictions (of which there are plenty in the gospels, of course). You'd expect someone trying to make an accurate record from confusing and conflicting but believed to be holy sources to produce something very much like what we see, in other words. And something very much like quite a number of other holy texts, and quite a number of other historical texts in general, for that matter.

[I]t was my understanding that forgers tried to make their accounts seem as much like genuine accounts as possible

Not really. What they try to do (when they care at all that the forgery be believed) is to write them in such a fashion that, by their lights, the forgery will be undetectable -- which is not at all the same thing.

Consider the Coptic "Gospel" of Thomas, for example, with its complete lack of circumstantial details. It is just a list of 114 decontextualized "secret teachings," most of them introduced with "Jesus said, ..." Some of them resemble statements Jesus makes in the four canonical Gospels; many do not.

When forgeries and fakes do descend into detail, then, as Bill White's lovely quotation above notes, they tend to come apart at the seams -- often spectacularly. For example, consider the book of Judith in the OT Apocrypha. It features a king of Assyria who never existed, a Nebuchadnezzar ruling at Nineveh where no Nebuchadnezzar ever ruled and defeated in the twelfth year of his reign in the territory of an unknown king of the Elamites at an epoch when Elam had ceased to have an independent existence. The conflict is set in a plain which is made to be, at the same time, near the Euphrates, the Tigris, and the Hydaspes -- a river in India. We find a king of the Medes who bears the Shemitic name of Arphaxad, a name given to a descendant of Shem in Genesis 10. After having conquered the Medes, the king of Assyria becomes conquerer of the world. His general, who bears a Persian name, conquers all of Syria, but the description of his campaign is full of mistakes in geography. He comes at last to Judah, which is under an unnamed king and lays siege to an unheard of city, which is delivered by the heroine of the story, Judith.

This is not a matter of one or two debatable claims; the entire fabric of the tale comes apart. Something similar holds with Philostratus's Life of Apollonius of Tyana.

We are not, in this matter, at the mercy of bare conjecture; we have plenty of material to work with in the form of ancient forgeries.

And later people trying to make sense of sometimes conflicting and confusing earlier sources can very well introduce the kind of details you're talking about
You'd expect someone trying to make an accurate record from confusing and conflicting but believed to be holy sources to produce something very much like what we see, in other words.

I'm sorry, Aaron, but you do not know what you are talking about here. There's no question in the cases of the earlier documents' being "conflicting" or of "resolving contradictions" (which none of Tim's examples involve). Nor is this a matter of "making tiny changes because you think the stories are holy." This is a matter of _incidental allusion_ in two different documents of a sort that is typically the mark of truth. The fact is that contemporary skeptics simply are unfamiliar with this argument and with the way this type of thing works in actual testimony. I have a strong feeling that I am wasting my time, but here is just one of many, many examples worked out in somewhat more detail:

Mark 6:31, just before the feeding of the five thousand, says, "There were many coming and going, and they had no leisure so much as to eat."

John 6:3, in the lead-up to the same miracle, says, "And the passover, a feast of the Jews, was nigh."

Let us consider the non-fact theory. On the non-fact theory, of course no feeding of the five thousand took place. Mark's reference therefore to "many coming and going" (which prompts Jesus and his disciples to try to go away and get some peace and quiet) is therefore just a surd. It is an unexplained detail which the author of Mark includes in this non-factual story for no particular reason. When we come to John, the non-fact theory tells us that John's is an "elaboration" of the story in Mark. But at this point, John's account is not written like an elaboration of the point about "many coming and going," because John does not mention that there were many coming and going. In v. 2 he says that a great multitude followed Jesus because they saw his miracles of healing, but he does not mention in any general way that there were simply "lots of people around," which is what Mark's account implies. So, while the non-fact theory would tell us that John's inclusion of the detail that the Passover was nearly here is an also non-factual elaboration of Mark's account, actually the point it is supposed to be "elaborating" (namely, the fact that lots of people were coming and going) isn't included at all! Nor does John appear to be including this detail to explain the detail in Mark about "many coming and going," because, again, John does not mention that detail!!

On the non-fact theory, then, we have Mark including a detail in a non-factual account for no apparent reason and John "elaborating" or "explaining" this detail quite unnecessarily (for John needn't have said anything about the time of year and could simply have left Mark's casual mention of the many people unexplained) without actually elaborating it, because he doesn't include it!

Another version of the non-fact theory might be that John was being oh-so-coy by not including Mark's mention of "many coming and going," precisely so that people would find his, John's, non-factual account more believable. But this is purely ad hoc; indeed, if such super-human restraint succeeds in making the account more believable, it is precisely because typically people who are telling non-factual stories and adding elaborative details do not leave out the points they are elaborating! In fact, it is very unlikely for someone writing a fictional elaboration even to _think_ of dropping in a passing mention of something like the Passover in the bare hopes that someone will happen to notice the incidental concurrence of such a detail with an equally casual detail in an earlier account and therefore believe the later account more strongly.

The "fact" theory has none of these drawbacks. Rather, that theory is that a _real event_ of the feeding of the five thousand took place, that both Mark and John were drawing on or providing eyewitness accounts of this event, and that that _real event_ took place shortly before Passover when, as it happened, many people were coming and going. Peter (from whom tradition tells us that Mark got his account) happened to remember and mention the crowds from whom they tried to escape, without bothering to stop and mention the cause. John happened to remember and mention that this happened around the time of Passover.

This is the mark of truth. This is how real eyewitness accounts do dovetail--in exactly these casual, incidental comments.

A man-made mystery is unraveled sooner or later, but a natural mystery is a mystery forever.

On the side point of fiction: literary critics of the Bible argue about how to define the categories history and fiction. I think the question has been answered by the comp lit and Bible critic Meir Sternberg. It's one of those few cases where the best criterion is also the simplest.

Sternberg gives a one-dimensional definition: the criterion is truth-claim, not truth-value. A narrative that claims to be telling the truth about what happened is history. A narrative that does not claim to be telling the truth is fiction. Of course the claim is usually implicit in the text, not explicit. The truth-value of the narrative is irrelevant to this definition. Anyone interested can check this out in Sternberg's The Poetics of Biblical Narrative, an amazingly excellent book.

In this terminology, the question is whether the history writing is (a) believed to be true by the authors and (b) in fact true. But there's no doubt that the biblical narrative is classified as history writing.

I know this is an irrelevant side point, but personally I thought it was really interesting when I read about it.

Mark 6:31, just before the feeding of the five thousand, says, "There were many coming and going, and they had no leisure so much as to eat."

Just prior to this scene in Mark is the gruesome murder of John the Baptist. After which a group of five thousand men gathered, "they were like sheep without a shepherd" - which was virtually an army at that time. Based on that, the most likely reason for that many men to gather after the death of a popular prophet would be to appoint his successor. In Mark, the possibility of Jesus being appointed to lead them is never mentioned, in John's gospel it is mentioned and further states that Jesus withdrew from them because of that reason.

So another explanation goes like this: Mark knew why the group of five thousand had gathered, but only alluded to it because John the Baptist's group didn't offer to make Jesus their new prophet even after the miracle of the feast. John (the gospel writer) did not know why the group of five thousand had gathered, but did know that Jesus was not the leader of an army of men afterward, so he improvised by placing it around the time of Passover and saying that Jesus mysteriously chose to decline their appeals to be their leader.

There doesn't seem to be any indication that they had any thought of making Jesus the "successor" to John the Baptist. I completely disagree that "the most likely reason" for there being many men around after John's death would be "to appoint a successor." This in fact seems like a fairly weak conjecture.

Your theory, Step2, also seems to imply that there was some real event which the gospel of Mark is recounting, a real event before which there were really a large number of people about. Given the occurrence of a real event, it is sheerly ad hoc to conjecture that John did not know about this event nor about its setting and that he _made up_ the statement that the event took place at Passover because of his lack of knowledge. The theory that a real event took place and that it really did happen before Passover explains _both_ accounts and details, whereas your theory simply assigns different pieces of data arbitrarily to different theories, apparently for no reason whatsoever except that by such means one avoids attributing the gospel of John to an eyewitness who actually knew about the circumstances of the event. The ad hoc theory that does not explain all the data in a unified fashion is a poorer explanation.

I completely disagree that "the most likely reason" for there being many men around after John's death would be "to appoint a successor."

Every political and charismatic religious movement in history has had to deal with the problem of succession if there is nobody already appointed to the role. Why would I think something different about John's followers?

Given the occurrence of a real event, it is sheerly ad hoc to conjecture that John did not know about this event nor about its setting and that he _made up_ the statement that the event took place at Passover because of his lack of knowledge.

No, I'm giving a reason that Mark might have been obscure about describing the purpose for the gathering, and because that purpose was obviously unknown to John he might have done what nearly every other chronicler/historian does when there are gaps in his knowledge, and fill in those gaps with explanations that seem plausible to him.

You are also overlooking the meta-point, which is that this undesigned coincidence happens within a context that is needlessly confusing at best and completely contradictory at worst. Mark drew a faint link between the death of John the Baptist and the gathering of five thousand men by placing them in immediate sequence, with no mention of a holiday event, while John states explicitly there were five thousand already present for Passover, with no mention of the murder of John the Baptist. You need to provide a reason for someone to narrow their focus to the content of two specific verses instead of looking at the larger context and conclusions about it that appear to disagree.

Every political and charismatic religious movement in history has had to deal with the problem of succession if there is nobody already appointed to the role. Why would I think something different about John's followers?

There is no reason that I know of to think of John the Baptist's "movement" as consisting of thousands of followers who thought of themselves as needing to get together to "appoint" a successor to John. No reason whatsoever. This seems, in fact, a somewhat anachronistic way of even thinking about the matter.

There's nothing about the two passages that "appear to disagree" at all. You are the one attempting in the first place to draw a connection between the death of John the Baptist and the presence of many men milling about in the region. I don't think Mark draws even a "faint" connection between those, and it is only by assuming that John must not have known about this entirely conjectural "connection" that you get to the point of imagining John as, himself, _conjecturing_ that the Passover was nigh at hand rather than actually recounting something that he knew and remembered, which itself dovetails well with what Mark actually says. Again, this is a completely chopped-up, complex, messy, and ad hoc hypothesis, relying crucially on a dubious conjecture at the outset.

There is no reason that I know of to think of John the Baptist's "movement" as consisting of thousands of followers who thought of themselves as needing to get together to "appoint" a successor to John. No reason whatsoever.

How about the claim of Flavius Josephus that the real reason Herod had John the Baptist killed was to prevent him from using his great influence among the people to start a rebellion? That seems like a fairly strong reason.

No, not really.

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