Bible Study for Amateurs #78 – A Feeding Miracle, Bethsaida, and Undesigned Coincidences

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Hey, everyone! I’m Ben – the Amateur Exegete, and this is episode seventy-eight of Bible Study for Amateurs. Today’s episode is, “A Feeding Miracle, Bethsaida, and Undesigned Coincidences.”¹

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In her 2017 book Hidden in Plain View: Undesigned Coincidences in the Gospels and Acts,² philosopher Lydia McGrew makes the argument that the reason Jesus asks Philip in John 6:6 where they can find bread to feed the five thousand is because, Luke’s version of the story tells us (Luke 9:11), the miracle happened at Bethsaida, the city the Johannine Evangelist reports was the town from which Philip hailed (John 1:44).³ “If Philip is from the nearby town,” she writes, “Jesus is in essence saying, ‘Philip, you’re from around here. Where can we get bread for all these people?’”⁴ For McGrew, elements from the Lukan Gospel dovetail with elements from the Johannine in such a way that speaks to their historical reliability. But as appealing as this argument may be (and, indeed, it is a darling of those who follow McGrew’s apologetic methods),⁵ it isn’t without its problems. 

The Location of the Feeding Miracle in Mark

Let’s begin with one of the central issues with locating the feeding at Bethsaida: the Gospel of Mark. In his version of the story, the Markan Evangelist initially does not provide a specific location for the miracle. It begins in Mark 6:30 with a statement about the apostles reporting to Jesus “all that they had done and taught,”⁶ a resolution to the pericope that had begun in v. 7 of Jesus sending forth the twelve to preach and perform miracles. Following this, Jesus invites them to “a deserted place,” away from the crowds that “were coming and going” (v. 31). Traveling by boat, they arrive on shore but are greeted by the masses who, by foot, had come from nearby towns. Jesus sees that they are in disarray, “sheep without a shepherd” in the words of the Evangelist (v. 34). As evening comes, the disciples ask Jesus to dismiss the crowds to more populated areas where they can “buy something for themselves to eat” (vv. 35-36). Tersely, Jesus responds, “You give them something to eat” (v. 37). The disciples are unable to do so, and it is then that Jesus, taking five loaves of bread and two fish from the disciples, miraculously feeds the five thousand. 

If Mark does not tell us the exact location of the feeding miracle, he at least tells us where it did not happen. In v. 45, we read, “Immediately he made his disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side, to Bethsaida, while he dismissed the crowd.” They do not, of course, end up in Bethsaida as v. 53 notes,⁷ but the fact that Jesus instructs them to go to Bethsaida means that the feeding miracle itself did not take place in Bethsaida. Interestingly, McGrew responds to this contradiction early in Hidden in Plain View by claiming, sans evidence, that the Greek preposition rendered “to” in the phrase “to Bethsaida” (i.e., pros)⁸ could be translated as “over against.”⁹ Such speculation is clearly in service of avoiding the contradiction, one that, despite McGrew’s insistence otherwise, nevertheless calls into question the historicity of the account or, at the very least, the reliability of these purported witnesses. 

The Location of the Feeding Miracle in Luke

Another problem with locating the feeding at Bethsaida is that Luke seems to contradict himself in this regard. At the top of the pericope in Luke 9, after the apostles have returned from their preaching and healing tour (cf. Luke 9:1-6), Jesus takes them and they go into Bethsaida (Luke 9:10). But they are met not with respite but with ruckus as the crowds follow them and Jesus engages them by teaching and healing. In v. 12, we read that the day was coming to a close and the twelve request that Jesus send the crowd away “into the surrounding villages and countryside” so that they can find lodging and food because, they tell him, “we are here in a deserted place” (Luke 9:12). Tersely, Jesus responds, “You give them something to eat.” But all the disciples have is five loaves of bread and two fish (v. 13). With this meager fare, Jesus miraculously feeds the crowd.

Luke places the feeding miracle at Bethsaida, in contradiction to Mark, but agrees with Mark that Jesus feeds the crowd “in a deserted place.” Bethsaida is hardly “a deserted place,” and so we are left wondering what the Evangelist means. McGrew understands the reference to indicate that Jesus has left the city itself “and fed five thousand people in an uninhabited area near the town of Bethsaida.”¹⁰ The narrative itself never makes this move, and it isn’t clear that we should either. More likely, this is an example of the phenomenon of editorial fatigue, a situation wherein an author starts a story that he has taken over, makes certain changes, but then lapses into the language of his source to the detriment of his own storytelling.¹¹ In this case, Luke’s carelessness has led him to an internal contradiction,¹² a veritable continuity error or, in the words of Michael Goulder, “a muddle.”¹³

Whatever the case may be – whether we are to think of Jesus moving to the outskirts of Bethsaida to feed the people, as McGrew suggests, or that this is an example of the phenomenon of literary fatigue – the main take away is that Luke and Mark do not agree on the location of the feeding miracle. So, even if there is an undesigned coincidence between Luke and John on the location of the feeding miracle, it is at the expense of Mark who does not agree with his Evangelical colleagues. But do Luke and John dovetail in the way that McGrew claims? I’m not convinced.

The Location of the Feeding Miracle in John 

The Johannine version of the feeding miracle contains some strange things. First, it begins rather abruptly, at least as it concerns the narrative context in which we find it. “After this Jesus went to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, also called the Sea of Tiberius,” we read in John 6:1. “After this” renders into English the Greek meta tauta,¹⁴ a prepositional phrase that, notes Lidija Novakovic, “is routinely used in the [Fourth Gospel] to refer to the previous events.”¹⁵ To what does it refer here? It refers to Jesus’s time in Jerusalem for an unspecified festival (cf. John 5:1). But how can Jesus go to “the other side of the Sea of Galilee” when he hasn’t been on any side of it but in Jerusalem? This led Rudolf Bultmann to write, “The present order of chs. 5 and 6 cannot be the original one.”¹⁶ Analyzing this section of John’s Gospel, he concluded that the order should have been chs. 4, 6, 5, and 7.¹⁷ Whatever one makes of such a reconstruction,¹⁸ this section is odd and may be an example of a Johannine literary seam.¹⁹

Another oddity is the language of going “to the other side.” In Mark, this terminology is frequent. For example, in Mark 4:35 Jesus tells his disciples to cross “to the other side” by boat, and they end up in the region of the Gerasenes on the eastern shore of the lake (Mark 5:1), near predominately non-Jewish populations.²⁰ Later, Mark 5:21 reports, they leave that region and “cross again in the boat to the other side,” landing in more Jewish territory, undoubtedly on the western shore.²¹ But what does the phrase mean here? We know from John 6:17 that when the disciples depart the location of the feeding miracle that they head toward Capernaum, situated on the northwestern shore of the lake. Craig Keener reasons that, given Jesus’s propensity for being on the western side of the Sea of Galilee, the reference to “the other side” likely indicates his being on its eastern side, “though,” he writes, “the exact location is uncertain.”²² Bethsaida, being a city on the northeastern shore of the lake, is certainly a viable candidate for the location of this miracle in that case. But I’m not sure that “the other side” must refer to the eastern shore at all.

The Johannine Feeding Miracle Near Tiberias?

Later on in the narrative, in vv. 22-24, we read about the crowd of people that were forced to stay behind when the disciples left for Capernaum. Stranded though they were, vv. 23-24 tells us that “some boats from Tiberias came near the place where they had eaten the bread after the Lord had given thanks” and took them to Capernaum. Setting aside the implausibility of having enough boats to transport five thousand people, that these boats came from Tiberius, a city located on the southwestern shore of the lake, is perhaps suggestive that the miracle took place closer to the southern shore of the Sea of Galilee. The fact that John clarifies in v. 1 that the Sea of Galilee is also known as the Sea “of Tiberias”²³ and then adds the detail about ships coming from Tiberias suggests to me that while the feeding clearly did not happen in Tiberias it nevertheless may have happened nearby. Because of the strange jump in narrative from Jesus in Jerusalem in 5:1 to his crossing to “the other side” of the lake in 6:1, there is no way to be certain what “this side” was. It stands to reason that Jesus may have gone to Capernaum after he returned from Jerusalem, something he does after leaving a wedding in Cana (cf. John 2:1, 12). Capernaum, then, may have been a kind of home base for Jesus (as it is in the Synoptics)²⁴ which, if so, helps explain how the stranded crowds know to go to Capernaum to look for him there (John 6:24).²⁵

It should also be noted that in v. 25 the crowd asks Jesus, “Rabbi, when did you come here?” Jesus does not provide an answer to that query, but the question speaks to their surprise that Jesus has gone from the location of the feeding miracle to Capernaum without crossing by boat (cf. John 6:22).²⁶ Given that it would have been generally quicker to travel by boat than by land, the crowd wonders about the exact manner of Jesus’s arrival in Capernaum. But such a question seems (to me) less likely to have arisen if Jesus had come from Bethsaida given that the distance between the two cities is relatively short, roughly 2.5 miles.²⁷ Tiberias, on the other hand, is about 10 miles away from Capernaum and, therefore, meant a much longer walk, especially since it would have happened at night without the aid of lighted paths and other conveniences we take for granted in the modern period. Add to this the apparent need for the crowd to travel to Capernaum by boat instead of walking. All of this makes much more sense to this amateur exegete if the feeding miracle happened closer to Tiberias than if it happened at Bethsaida.²⁸

No Undesigned Coincidence

What this means is that there is no undesigned coincidence between John’s version of events and Luke’s. Though they narrate the same event, like Mark’s version and Luke’s they do so with details that place them in two different locations. Neither the abrupt speaking role for Philip in the story nor the earlier note in the Johannine narrative that he was from Bethsaida²⁹ dovetail with material from the Lukan Gospel because John’s miracle does not take place in Bethsaida but, in my reading, near Tiberias. 

That’s it for this episode of Bible Study for Amateurs.  I’ll see you next time! If you’d like to support this podcast, share it on social media, subscribe to it on the listening platform of your choice, or head over to amateurexegete.com and click on the support button. Or do all three! And, most importantly, remember, in the words of Richard Elliot Friedman, “One does not need to deny what is troubling [about the Bible] in order to pay respect to what is heartening.”³⁰

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1. Throughout the endnotes readers will find various abbreviations. For a list of what abbreviations I use and the works to which they refer, please see the page “Commonly Used Abbreviations.” ↩︎
2. Lydia McGrew, Hidden in Plain View: Undesigned Coincidences in the Gospels and Acts (DeWard, 2017). ↩︎
3. McGrew, Hidden in Plain View, 107-110. ↩︎
4. McGrew, Hidden in Plain View, 109. Interestingly, F.F. Bruce (The Gospels & Epistles of John [Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1983], 143) reasons similarly, though not with an eye for undesigned coincidences: “Since Philip came from the neighbouring town of Bethsaida (cf. John 1:44), it was natural that he should be consulted about places where food might be bought.” ↩︎
5. See, e.g., Peter J. Williams, Can We Trust the Gospels? (Crossway, 2018), 91-94; Jonathan McLatchie, “The Historicity of the Feeding of the Five Thousand: An Appraisal of the Evidence” (3.5.21), jonathanmclatchie.com (accessed 3.19.26); S.J. Thomason, “Undesigned Coincidences in the Feeding of the 5,000” (7.2.22), christian-apologist.com (accessed 3.19.26); Erik Manning, “The Feeding of the Five Thousand: Myth or Miracle” (9.20.25), youtube.com/@TestifyApologetics (accessed 3.19.26). ↩︎
6. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations of the Bible are from the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition. ↩︎
7. Mark 6:45 has been the thorn in the side of interpreters for some time. Adela Yarbro Collins (Mark: A Commentary, Hermeneia [Fortress Press, 2007], 326-327, 333) thinks that in Mark’s source (perhaps a collection of miracle stories) the pericope in Mark 8:22-26 followed Mark 6:45. Eugene Boring (Mark: A Commentary, NTL [Westminster John Knox Press, 2006], 188] acknowledges that the geography of this section in Mark is problematic but opines that this would have mattered little to Mark’s original audience since they “seem to have been unaware of the actual geography involved.” See also Bas M.F. van Iersel, Mark: A Reader-Response Commentary, translated by W. H. Bisscheroux, JSNTSup 164 [Sheffield Academic Press, 1998], 231n69.  ↩︎
8. Πρός. ↩︎
9. Vincent Taylor (The Gospel according to Mark, second edition [MacMillan, 1966], 327-328) was “doubtful” about this rendering, noting that when πρός is used with verbs of motion then it means either “to” or “toward.” That πρός can be used to indicate something over against (i.e., facing) another is no doubt one of the uses of the preposition, e.g., John 1:1 (ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν = “the word was with [or facing]God”). See further Lidija Novakovic, John 1-10: A Handbook on the Greek Text, BHGNT (Baylor University Press, 2020), 2. Here in Mark, however, πρός quite clearly means “to” or, perhaps, “toward.” ↩︎
10. McGrew, Hidden in Plain View, 90. See also Joel B. Green, The Gospel of Luke, NICNT (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, Inc., 1997), 363n30. ↩︎
11. On this phenomenon, see the classic work by Mark Goodacre, “Fatigue in the Synoptics,” NTS 44 no. 1 (Jan. 1998), 45-58. Goodacre discusses this particular example on pp. 50-51. ↩︎
12. So Luke Timothy Johnson, The Gospel of Luke, SP 3 (The Liturgical Press, 1991), 146. ↩︎
13. Michael D. Goulder, Luke: A New Paradigm, JSNTSup 20 (Sheffield Academic Press, 1994), 433.  ↩︎
14. Μετά ταῦτα. ↩︎
15. Novakovic, John 1-10, 94. Examples in John can be found in 3:22; 5:1, 14; 6:1; 7:1; 13:7; 21:1. ↩︎
16. Rudolf Bultmann, The Gospel of John: A Commentary, translated by G.R. Beasley-Murray (The Westminster Press, 1971 [originally in German 1964]), 209. ↩︎
17. Bultmann, The Gospel of John. He writes further that “[t]his is confirmed by the fact that this order makes good sense of 4.44, which otherwise makes no sense at all…and also by the fact that 6.2…is now seen to be a reference back to the exemplary story of 4.46-54.” Cf. Ernst Haenchen, John 1: A Commentary on the Gospel of John Chapters 1-6, translated by Robert W. Funk, Hermeneia (Fortress Press, 1984 [originally in German 1980]), 270. ↩︎
18. Ernst Haenchen (John 1: A Commentary on the Gospel of John Chapters 1-6, translated by Robert W. Funk, Hermeneia [Fortress Press, 1984 (originally in German 1980)], 270) found Bultmann’s reconstruction “impossible” and contends that the order of material as we currently have it is preferable. See also Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel according to John (i-xii): Introduction, Translation, and Notes, AYB (Doubleday & Co. Inc., 1966), 235-236. ↩︎
19. See Bart D. Ehrman, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings (Oxford University Press, 2016), 179-180. ↩︎
20. Mark reports that the healed demoniac proclaims what happened to him in the Decapolis, an area known for Hellenistic culture. See Joel Marcus, Mark 1-8: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, AYB 27 (Yale University Press, 2000), 347; Jean-Paul Rey-Coquais, “Decapolis,” translated by Stephen Rosoff, in ABD 2:119-120. ↩︎
21. John R. Donahue and Daniel J. Harrington, The Gospel of Mark, SP 2 (The Liturgical Press, 2002), 172. Robert Guelich (Mark 1-8:26, WBC 34a [Word, Inc., 1989], 294-295) observes that Mark uses the word πάλιν (palin = “again”) which “takes the reader back to the setting of Jesus’ initial departure in 4:35,” i.e., the seashore near Capernaum (see Mark 4:1; cf. Mark 3:20). ↩︎
22. Craig S. Keener, The Gospel of John: A Commentary (Baker Academic, 2003), 664. In a footnote (p.664n.9), he opines that “the feeding seems to have occurred in the Transjordan far from Capernaum.” ↩︎
23. The Greek text reads τῆς θαλάσσης τῆς Γαλιλαίας τῆς Τιβεριάδος (tēs thalassēs tēs Galilaias tēs Tiberiados). Some mss (e.g., D, Θ, etc.) read της Γαλιλαιας εις τα μερη της Τιβεριαδος. (tēs Galilaias eis ta merē tēs Tiberiados) = “of Galilee into the region of Tiberias,” placing the miracle on the western shore.  ↩︎
24. See Matthew 4:13, Mark 2:1. ↩︎
25. While John 6:16 reports that the disciples “started across the sea to Capernaum,” nowhere is there an indication that this was public knowledge. ↩︎
26. Andrew T. Lincoln, The Gospel according to St John, BNTC (Continuum, 2005), 226. ↩︎
27. Scholars debate the precise location of biblical Bethsaida. Two sites in particular have come out as main contenders: et-Tell, about a mile or so from the shore of the lake, and el’Araj, right on the shore. See further James F. Strange, “Beth-Saida,” ABD 1:693-693. See also Robert R. Cargill, “First Person: Where Is the Real Biblical Bethsaida?” (2.27.20), biblicalarchaeology.org. Accessed 3.30.26.  ↩︎
28. See also Brown, The Gospel according to John (i-xii), 258-259. ↩︎
29. As Jo-Ann Brant (John, Paideia [Baker Academic, 2011], 52) writes, “John’s accent on Philip’s association with a city in a region with a prevalently Syrian and Greek population figures more prominently later in the narrative (12:21) and demonstrates the coherence of his narrative.” See also Keener, The Gospel of John, 478. ↩︎
30. Richard Elliot Friedman, The Exodus: How It Happened and Why It Matters (HarperOne, 2017), 214. ↩︎