Mark 6:39’s “Green Grass” and Lydia McGrew’s Undesigned Coincidences

Acknowledgements: This particular post went through the process of “pal review” (HT: Chrissy Hansen). I asked three friends – Mark Edward, Matthew Hartke, and The Non-Alchemist – to review the first draft of the post. Collectively, they offered many suggestions, some of which have been incorporated into the final version of the post. I am particularly indebted to Mark Edward who took the draft, made numerous notations, and sent them back to me. Additionally, he took time to track down a lecture by Mark Goodacre that proved useful in this essay. (See endnote 16.) To all three gentlemen, I extend my deepest gratitude.

INTRODUCTION

I’m taking a break from working on a review of Gregory Sterling’s excellent book Shaping the Past to Define the Present: Luke-Acts and Apologetic Historiography (Eerdmans, 2023) so I can offer some thoughts on one so-called “undesigned coincidence” Christian apologist Lydia McGrew talks about in her book Hidden in Plain View: Undesigned Coincidences in the Gospels and Acts (DeWard, 2017). In case neither of my readers know what is meant by “undesigned coincidence,” I’ll use the definition offered by McGrew in Hidden in Plain View:  

An undesigned coincidence is a notable connection between two or more accounts or texts that don’t seem to have been planned by the person or people giving the accounts. Despite their apparent independence, the items fit together like pieces of a puzzle. (p. 12)

Thus, undesigned coincidences are intended to bolster the credibility of the Gospels. There are at least two assumptions underlying McGrew’s definition. The first, of course, is the belief that the Gospels are either by eyewitnesses or rooted in eyewitness testimony. She vocalizes this on p. 15 when she writes, 

I suggest the reader take seriously the hypothesis that [the Gospels] are what they appear to be prima facie and what they were traditionally taken by Christians to be – historical memoirs of real people and events, written by those in a position to know about these people and events, either direct eyewitnesses or friends and associates of eyewitnesses, who were trying to be truthful.

The second assumption is that these texts are in some way independent of one another. As one reads Hidden in Plain View, it is clear that McGrew is unconvinced of both Markan Priority and the notion that the later Evangelists were creative redactors of their sources. As far as she is concerned, to appreciate undesigned coincidences “you do not have to decide whether Mark or Matthew were written first or solve the puzzles that surround Matthew, Mark, and Luke, known as the Synoptic Gospels” (p. 28).^[1] Furthermore, even if Matthew and Luke depended upon Mark for some of their material, this does not suggest that the later Synoptics “developed from Mark in an evolutionary fashion or that Matthew and Luke did not have reliable, independent information of their own” (p. 84). Literary dependence does not “mean that the differences among [the Gospels] are due to redactive manipulation of earlier material as opposed to differences in eyewitness perspective” (p. 83). 

It should go without saying that I take issue with both assumptions, though I am hesitant to offer a response in full here. In all honesty, it is difficult to take seriously anyone who does not acknowledge the redactive work of the Evangelists as they pored over their sources. And as I hope to show in this post, it is possible that this is precisely what has happened in a particular example McGrew proffers, turning an “undesigned coincidence” into intentional design. 

Mark and John: Hand in Glove

The particular undesigned coincidence that I want to talk about is found on pp. 66-67 of Hidden in Plain View. McGrew observes that in all of the versions of the feeding of the five thousand, only one mentions the color of the grass upon which the crowd sat: “Then [Jesus] ordered [the disciples] to get all the people to sit down in groups on the green grass” (Mark 6:39, NRSV). She queries, “Why does Mark specifically mention that the grass was green?” The answer to that question pieces together the Markan text with a parallel passage found in the Gospel of John: “Now the Passover, the festival of the Jews, was near.” McGrew writes, 

Passover, of course, falls in the spring. The grass is not generally green in that region, but it is green in the spring after the winter rains, around the time of Passover. There would have needed to be quite a lot of green grass to make Mark’s statement true, since he implies that more than 5,000 people sat down on it. At that time of year, but not at others, such a quantity of green grass would be possible. 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.

This seems to be a tidy explanation for Mark’s green grass. But does it truly work? 

Winter Green

One of the many books I’ve been reading as of late is James Riley’s Strange’s recent work Excavating the Land of Jesus: How Archaeologists Study the People of the Gospels (Eerdmans, 2023). While reading ch. 1, I came across a section on remote sensing and the tools archaeologists use to locate a potential dig site. One such tool are online satellite imaging services that, among other things, can provide researchers with multiple images of an area taken at different times over the course of many years. One image may be from June of 2000 and another from March of 2001 and another from November of 2003. Such data allows researchers not only to detect changes in the landscape but also “shows images taken at times of the year when ancient structures are most visible” (p. 29). When is the best time of year to look for these structures? According to Strange it “is usually between the end of August and the end of October, after harvesting and grazing has removed much of the ground cover and before the autumn rains have encouraged it to grow back.” But that’s not the only time of year useful in these images to look for structures. “Another good time,” he writes, “to view images is in the winter, as grass begins to green the hills, and in the spring, as crops begin to grow. Subterranean structures close to the surface often stunt plant growth and reveal the lines of ancient structures” (pp. 29-30). 

Strange’s mention of autumn rains and the greening of landscapes in winter in Israel stirred up my memory of this undesigned coincidence in McGrew’s work. Despite hedging her words with the adverb “generally,” McGrew doubles down when she claims that it was only during springtime around Passover that there would have been sufficient grass upon which a large crowd could sit. But this simply isn’t true. If roughly seventy percent of annual rainfall in Palestine comes in November through February,^[2] then it is difficult to imagine that it would be in springtime “but not at others, [that] such a quantity of green grass would be possible” (to quote McGrew). Indeed, in her commentary on this passage, Mary Ann Beavis remarks, “For members of the audience familiar with Palestinian climate, the reference to greenery situates the incident in the rainy season, October to early May.”^[3] That is quite the time frame!^[4]

The question then is, Why couldn’t the feeding have happened in, say, winter? So far as I can tell, there is nothing in the text of Mark to preclude such a possibility. Perhaps it happened in February rather than in April. Below is a photograph taken in early February of 2014 in an area south of the Sea of Galilee. Note the presence of sheep grazing upon green grass.

All this is to say that unless one insists that John have a say in how to interpret Mark there is nothing within the Markan account itself to force the conclusion that the feeding must have happened around Passover. 

Varying Chronologies 

Another difficulty with McGrew’s harmonizing is that in terms of chronology the Markan and Johannine Gospels are quite different. In a number of places, this is very obvious. Take, for example, the incident in the temple. Whereas each of the Synoptics agree that this event took place shortly after the Triumphal Entry (Matthew 21:12-17, Mark 11:15-10; Luke 19:45-48), John alone moves it to the beginning of Jesus’s public career (John 2:13-22). We also find this in the anointing of Jesus that happens before his death. In Mark, the scene takes place after the Triumphal Entry (Mark 14:3-9; cf. 11:1-11), but in John’s account it takes place before (John 12:1-8, 12f).^[5] These are isolated examples for which apologists have mustered creative retorts, but they are nevertheless problematic.^[6]

A more interesting and, arguably, more serious difficulty is the differing structural chronologies of the two Gospels. The late R.T. France explains: 

In Mark’s account Jesus visits Jerusalem only once, and the whole story seems designed to build up to that visit: note the two references in the Galilean phase to Jerusalem as the place from which opposition comes (3:22; 7:1), and the references to the hostility of the Jerusalem establishment (even when the city is not named) which punctuate the journey from north to south (8:31; 9:31; 10:33-34). All this contrasts strongly with the pattern presented in the Gospel of John, which has Jesus making frequent journeys between Galilee and Jerusalem (generally in connection with Jewish festivals), so that even in the period before Jesus’ dramatic entry to the city in Jn. 12:12-19 he seems in this gospel to have spent at least as much time in Judaea as in his own territory.^[7]

In other words, the Johannine Gospel takes place over the course of a few years. But in reading Mark’s account, one gets the impression that the story takes place over mere months, not years. Mark is fond of parataxis and of employing the Greek adverb euthys^[8] (“immediately”) which keeps the story at a steady pace, especially in the earliest sections. As one approaches the Passion, particularly in the second half of the Gospel, the story unfolds in a way that suggests mere weeks pass from Peter’s confession at Caesarea Philippi (Mark 8:27-30) to his arrival in Jerusalem in ch. 11. And, of course, the final six chapters of the Gospel take place in only eight days. This large-scale difference between the Markan and Johannine Gospels makes lining up their stories the way in which McGrew insists on doing problematic. Let me explain.

In John 2, the incident in the temple takes place when Passover was near (v. 13; cf. v. 23). By ch. 5, this Passover has come and gone as there is another festival in view.^[9] A chapter later, we arrive at the feeding of the five thousand which takes place near yet another Passover, implying that (at least) an entire year has transpired since the cleansing of the temple in ch. 2. Significantly, this is the second noted Passover in the Gospel. The final Passover comes in John’s Passion narrative. Thus, the feeding of the five thousand in the Gospel of John doesn’t happen before the final Passover of Jesus’s public career. It happens before (presumably) the penultimate one. 

This is decidedly not what we find in Mark’s Gospel. The only Passover we read about in the second Gospel is the final one of his life. To summarize, in John’s version the feeding happens before the penultimate Passover of Jesus’s life while in Mark it happens before the final one. What are McGrew’s options? Perhaps she could do what she does with the varying temporal locales of the incident in the temple and claim that Jesus fed crowds of five thousand people twice in his public career. Or perhaps she could assert, sans evidence,^[10] that Markan chronology is much longer than a straightforward reading of the text makes it out to be. But only those committed to some version of inerrancy would be convinced by such hermeneutical gymnastics. The hard truth is that for McGrew to be right about the time of year the feeding occurred she must also be wrong about the structural chronology of the overarching accounts.

Undesigned Coincidence or Intentional Design?

There is another reason I find difficulty with McGrew’s thesis, and it has to do with the literary relationship of the Gospel of John and the Gospel of Mark. Though Johannine independence from the Synoptics is perhaps still the majority view in the guild of New Testament studies,^[11] a growing number of scholars are pushing back. For example, in her book What John Knew and What John Wrote: A Study in John and the Synoptics,^[12] Wendy North considers the various ways the author of the fourth Gospel reuses and reshapes material within his own account as well as material in the Jewish scriptures before using that data to assess his potential use of Synoptic material. Interestingly, her first test case is John 6:1-5 and she posits that 

John has extended and deepened what he perceives as Mark’s meaning. What seems to be the case, therefore, is that John perceives his own contribution as a kind of rereading, or relecture, of Mark – which also includes Matthew, probably in relation to Mark – that allows Mark’s text to be valid while at the same time drawing further meaning from it.^[13]

Such editorializing shouldn’t be surprising to readers of the Gospels. There are plenty of examples where Matthew and Luke take a scene from Mark and shape it to address their own concerns.^[14] For John to take Mark’s version of the feeding and make it his own fits with the redactional profiles of the other Evangelists who often acted as both preservers and creators of tradition. 

There are other signs that John knew the Gospel of Mark. In various places, a generic “they” or “them” or an otherwise unnamed individual in Mark is made more concrete with a name in John. In the anointing scene, for example, Mark speaks of “a woman” who anoints him with oil (Mark 14:3). In John, however, this woman is given a name: Mary, the sister of Martha (John 12:3). In that same pericope we find another example. In Mark 14:4, a generic group of people is upset with the woman’s actions, asking why the oil wasn’t sold for “three hundred denarii, and the money given to the poor.” In John’s Gospel, it is Judas Iscariot who poses the question to scold the woman (John 14:4-5).^[15] We find another example of this Johannine tendency in the feeding of the five thousand. In Mark’s account, when Jesus instructs the disciples to feed the hungry crowd, it is a generic “they” who responds by asking if he expects them “to go and buy two hundred denarii worth of bread” (Mark 6:37). In the Johannine account, it is Phillip who brings up two hundred denarii worth of bread (John 6:7). 

In addition to this phenomenon, there is considerable evidence that John turns Synoptic narrative into fodder for dialogue.^[16] For example, in the Gospel of Mark the story opens with a composite quotation taken from Isaiah 40:3, Exodus 23:20, and Malachi 3:1 that functions as prophetic pointer to John the Baptist’s role as Jesus’s forerunner. But what appears in Mark as the narrator quoting the Jewish scriptures becomes in John’s Gospel speech. When confronted about his identity, John the Baptist responds in dialogue with the words of Isaiah 40:3. We find something similar a few verses later. In the Gospel of Mark, as Jesus is baptized by John and comes out of the water, Jesus sees “the Spirit descending like a dove on him” (Mark 1:10). This scene cannot be found in the fourth Gospel, but you can find it spoken about by John the Baptist: “And John testified, ‘I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him’” (John 1:32). 

Why does any of this matter? Simply stated, if it is the case that John knew and used Mark’s Gospel when writing his own, then it is entirely possible that he read Mark’s “green grass” and inferred from it that it happened near Passover. If that is the case, then what we have isn’t an undesigned coincidence but is instead intentional design. 

CONCLUSION

Admittedly, the green grass example is low-hanging fruit, being one of the more ridiculous examples she and other apologists have put forward as an instance of undesigned coincidences.^[17] I will also confess that dismantling this particular “coincidence” does not destroy the edifice McGrew has built. She has many more examples in her book, some of them quite interesting. Additionally, I must confess that nothing I’ve written necessarily calls the miraculous feeding into question historically. After all, maybe John got it wrong and Mark got it right, or Mark got it wrong and John got it right, or maybe they’re both wrong and there’s some other account we don’t have that gives us the truth. But as far as I can tell, nothing about Mark’s mentioning of “green grass” does anything to narrow down the timing of the miracle. And using John’s Gospel to narrow it down creates more problems than it solves. 

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^[1] Later in the volume on p. 83, McGrew expresses her openness to Matthean priority though she does “not take a definite stand on the question.” 

^[2] Frank S. Frick, “Palestine, Climate of,” in The Anchor Bible Dictionary, edited by David Noel Freedman (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 5:122.

^[3] Mary Ann Beavis, Mark, Paideia Commentaries on the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2011), 106. Frank Frick notes that from November to February roughly 70% of annual rainfall falls on Palestine and that January is typically the wettest month.

^[4] Cf. Lydia McGrew, The Eye of the Beholder: The Gospel of John as Historical Reportage (DeWard, 2021), 365.

^[5] The Matthean account agrees with Mark that the anointing took place after the Triumphal Entry (Matthew 26:6-13; cf. 21:1-11). Luke, however, removes the anointing scene and places it much earlier in his account (Luke 7:36f). 

^[6] Regarding the incident in the temple, some apologists will argue that the event occurred twice: once at the beginning of Jesus’s career and once at the end. This solution has a storied career, originating, as far as I can tell, with Augustine (Harmony of the Gospels 2.67.129). McGrew herself tackles the incident in The Eye of the Beholder, agreeing essentially with Augustine. Cf. The Eye of the Beholder, 283-296.  

The incident generally and the idea that it happened twice strains historical credulity. In her book When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation (Yale University Press, 2018), historian Paula Fredriksen points to a number of problems present in the accounts of the temple incident. For example, in Mark 11:16 we are told that upon driving out those buying and selling in the temple Jesus “would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple.” Given the enormity of the temple plaza with its numerous points of entry, this scene is downright comical. Are we to imagine a frantic Jesus running all over the place to make sure no one enters carrying anything through the area? Is this perhaps evidence of Jesus’s deity by way of omnipresence? Or does Jesus have an army to cover the entrances? Fredriksen points out that there was in fact an army present – Rome’s. Pilate would have sent troops to the area for the festival from Caesarea and they would have been “stationed at intervals on the roof of the surrounding stoa precisely to insure that things ran smoothly” and that had they witnessed such an event and did nothing they “would have had to have been singularly derelict or incompetent to permit such a disruption. Mark’s scene, in other words, is untroubled by a strong sense of realism” (p. 46). 

Moreover, what exactly is Jesus upset over? In Mark’s account he castigates those buying and selling by claiming they had turned the temple into “a den lēstōn” (11:17), traditionally rendered “robbers” but arguably better translated as “insurrectionists” or “rebels.” In John’s version, he accuses those selling animals along with the moneychangers with turning the temple into an oikon emporiou, literally “a house of commerce.” (The Greek substantive emporion is where we get the English transliteration emporium.) But to what end? The reason there would have been money changers is because the only currency temple officials would take was the Tyrian shekel. Jews (and even gentiles) visiting from regions other than Palestine, especially those in the Diaspora, could do a currency exchange. Naturally, this would have involved a fee since the value of the shekel was generally more stable than that of other currencies. And what of those selling animals? That too was a necessary service since not everyone owned animals for sacrifice and, even if they did, perhaps could not make the journey to the city with them in tow. Fredriksen, surveying this data, writes, “Taken as a protest against sacrifice as such, in short, this scene hovers between incoherent and impossible” (p. 47). 

For these reasons and more, I doubt that the incident in the temple happened at all, let alone twice. The Romans on guard would have had him arrested and thrown in jail for disturbing the peace and that would be the end of that. But McGrew and other apologists would have us believe that Jesus got away with doing it at the beginning of his public ministry and then did it again at the end. McGrew can complain about “a priori history” (Eye of the Beholder, 292) but there is sufficient background knowledge to effectively rule out some historical “events” as ever happening. This in my estimation is one of them. 

For more on scholarly views of the temple incident, see the overview and appraisal in Eyal Regev, The Temple in Early Christianity: Experiencing the Sacred (Yale University Press, 2019), 21-34. For Regev’s view, see especially pp. 33-34.

^[7] R.T. France, The Gospel of Mark: A Commentary on the Greek Text, The New International Greek Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2002), 12. France goes on to claim that John’s chronology is more plausible historically and that within the Markan text there may be signs that Jesus has indeed been to Jerusalem before the final visit. 

^[8] Joel Marcus, Mark 1-8: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, The Anchor Yale Bible 27 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 159. Marcus notes that of the fifty-one uses of euthys in the Greek New Testament, forty-one appear in Mark’s Gospel. 

^[9] The exact identity of this festival is oft-debated. Is it Passover? Is it Sukkot? The exact identity as far as the pericope is concerned because the central concern becomes the fact that this festival occurs on a sabbath, and Jesus performs a healing miracle. See Craig Keener, The Gospel of John: A Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2003), 1:635. 

^[10] Or by employing a Johannine lens.

^[11] E.g., Marcus, Mark 1-8, 53-54. 

^[12] Wendy E.S. North, What John Knew and What John Wrote: A Study in John and the Synoptics (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2020). See also John’s Transformation of Mark, edited by Eve-Marie Becker, Helen K. Bond, and Catrin H. Williams (London: T&T Clark, 2021) as well as James W. Barker, John’s Use of Matthew (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2015). 

^[13] North, What John Knew and What John Wrote, 82.

^[14] One of my favorite examples is the position of the rejection of Jesus at Nazareth in the Gospel of Luke. In Mark’s Gospel, the scene takes place well after Jesus has established himself as a miracle worker (Mark 6:1-6) and the rejection comes in the form of unbelief. In the story itself, the Markan Jesus says only one line: “Prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown, and among their own kin, and in their own house” (v. 4). The Lukan account (Luke 4:16-30) occurs early in the narrative after a summary report wherein Jesus’s reputation is established thanks to his teaching (vv. 14-15) and his rejection comes in the form of the townspeople trying to hurl him from a cliff (v. 29). Additionally, the Lukan Jesus has a more extended speaking role, reading from a scroll of Isaiah and engaging with the people by recounting examples of gentiles to whom God sent prophets. By fronting this scene, Luke emphasizes a recurring theme in Luke-Acts, namely that the god of Israel – the god of Jesus of Nazareth – is interested in not only the house of Israel but the entire world. To quote Simeon after an infant Jesus is presented in the temple, the advent of Christ signals “a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel” (Luke 2:32).  

^[15] Interestingly, in Mark Jesus tells the people castigating the woman, “Leave her alone,” using an aorist imperative plural (aphete) that could be rendered, “Y’all leave her alone!” In John, Jesus uses the aorist imperative singular (aphes) in keeping with the change he’s made to Mark’s account. 

^[16] I am indebted to Mark Edward for the examples in this paragraph. After reviewing an initial draft of this post, including the section on the way in which John takes generic characters from Mark and makes them more specific, he tracked down and sent to me an excellent lecture by Mark Goodacre entitled “John’s Dramatic Transformation of the Synoptics” from November of 2017. Goodacre not only brings up many of the examples I mention, but he introduced me to the idea that John turns Synoptic (i.e., Markan) narration into dialogue. 

^[17] See, for example, Eric Manning’s post “Undesigned Coincidences in the Gospels: Surprising Evidence for Jesus’ Feeding of the 5,000” (8.7.19), isjesusalive.com.