In this post I will analyze an undesigned coincidence between the Markan and Johannine chronologies of the passion week. More specifically, I will argue that the timelines subtly interlock in a way difficult to explain as either deliberate imitation or accidental verisimilitude.
John and Mark
We'll begin by dissecting the Johannine chronology.
John 12.1, 12-13 anchors the timeline: "Therefore, six days before the Passover, Jesus came to Bethany where Lazarus was, whom Jesus had raised from the dead... On the next day, when the large crowd that had come to the feast heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem, they took the branches of the palm trees and went out to meet Him, and began shouting, 'Hosanna! Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord, indeed, the King of Israel!'"
These temporal markers, unique to John, establish that the triumphal entry took place five days before the Passover. John gives us no timestamps after this but skips forward to the night of the Last Supper. For a response to the allegation that John has the Last Supper on a different day than the Synoptics, see my post here. And for a response to the objection that Jerusalem lacked palm trees, see here.
We can now turn to Mark and see whether his account lines up with John's. The first relevant passage is Mark 11.1-2, 7-8: "And as they approached Jerusalem, at Bethphage and Bethany, near the Mount of Olives, He sent two of His disciples, and said to them, 'Go into the village opposite you, and immediately as you enter it you will find a colt tied there, on which no one has ever sat; untie it and bring it here...' They brought the colt to Jesus and put their cloaks on it; and He sat on it. And many people spread their cloaks on the road, and others spread leafy branches which they had cut from the fields."
At this point we must make a plausible assumption about Mark's chronology—namely, that there's a day between Jesus approaching Bethany and and the triumphal entry, as in John. Lydia McGrew argues that this verse should be taken as "merely alluding to the fact that Bethany and Bethphage were close to Jerusalem and marked the approach to Jerusalem and the approximate location from which Jesus sent his disciples to get the colt." Lydia McGrew comments, "As some independent support for this assumption, Matthew mentions only Bethphage at the same point in his narrative—Matthew 21.1." (Hidden in Plain View, p. 114) This fits better with the amount of activity that takes place on the following day: the disciples get the colt, Jesus enters Jerusalem, and after he and his disciples were done "looking around at everything" (which probably took some time), it is said that he left for Bethany, because it was "already late". I confess that this ambiguity makes the interlocking less impressive, but it still has evidential value.
According to John's chronology, Jesus entered Bethany six days before the Passover, and rode in to Jerusalem five days before the Passover. This is quite consistent with Mark's account. Since Mark gives us temporal markers for the rest of the week, we can begin counting the days until Passover and see whether it lines up with John's account.
Mark 11.12 says "On the next day...". Since this is the day after the triumphal entry (five days before the Passover, according to John), it puts us at four days away. Verses 19-20 say "And whenever evening came, they would leave the city. As they were passing by in the morning...". This is three days away.
A lot of activity follows, plausibly filling up the third day before the Passover. This, along with the fact that this next verse mentions the chronology, strongly suggests that if John is correct, we should now be in the second day before the Passover. So consult Mark 14.1-2: "Now the Passover and Festival of Unleavened Bread were two days away; and the chief priests and the scribes were seeking how to arrest Him..."
Recall that this is the first time Mark tells us how many days until the Passover—he doesn't include the "six days before" marker that John has. John, on the other hand, includes the sixth and the fifth days before the Passover but leaves out the rest of the week, not mentioning Mark's comment about it being two days before the Passover. By making an initial minor assumption, his account lines up perfectly with John's.
The Other Synoptics
See footnote [1] for a comment on how Matthew's account makes our earlier minor assumption more probable. There is some tension between the timelines for the rest of the week in Mark and Matthew, specifically with regard to the cleansing of the temple and the withering of the fig tree. This might be the subject of a future post.
Luke doesn't give many temporal markers in his account, so we can't compare it with the Markan chronology.
Objections
There are a few objections that could be raised to this line of argument. One could argue that John deliberately mentioned "six days before" in an attempt to line up with Mark's account, or that this interlocking was entirely accidental and carries little evidential weight. I will offer some comments in response to both of these.
How plausible is it that John would deliberately follow Mark here? The first assumption necessary for this hypothesis to work is that John had access to Mark's Gospel, which many scholars doubt, but it will be granted for the sake of argument. Note that John contains nothing else from Mark's account of the final week of Jesus, up until the Passover meal. There is no Johannine account of the (second) cleansing of the temple, the withering of the fig tree, the Olivet discourse, Jesus' final parables, or the widow giving coins. It's pretty implausible that John would so subtly insert a temporal marker derived from Mark's account but then omit everything else Mark has to say, even including things that superficially contradict Mark (e.g. Jesus, rather than his disciples, getting the donkey; the law of agency absolves this discrepancy). And even if John did get his information from Mark, the fact that the would go to such a length to accurately and subtly embed a chronological detail into his narrative, when he could just as easily have left it out, shows his high concern for historical accuracy and extreme fidelity to his source material, counting in favor of his general reliability.
By far the better skeptical response to this undesigned coincidence is that the interlocking was accidental, not in the sense entailed by an undesigned coincidence, but rather a chance versimilitude that has nothing to do with the reality of the event in question. This objection has less to do with the reality of the undesigned coincidence and more with its epistemic implications. An example would be two separate Harry Potter fanfiction stories agreeing narrating an interlocking chronology. In response, it may first be stated that this kind of interlocking is undoubtedly at least somewhat more probable on the hypothesis of eyewitness testimony, and the debate is rather over the degree of that probability. In favor of a weighty probability, we may adduce certain considerations, such as the unlikelihood of Mark and John including temporal markers at all if they weren't certain about the timing of the passion week, and the otherwise vastly differing content selections in both Gospels. The skeptic might further argue that perhaps the interlocking is motivated by a common agreement as to the time of the triumphal entry, and coincidence takes care of the rest. However, any common agreement pertaining to the chronology is itself difficult to explain unless it goes back to a genuine memory of the events in question, which is exactly what this undesigned coincidence is trying to argue.
Considerations like those just discussed are one of the reasons undesigned coincidences are best presented as a cumulative argument, as no individual coincidence is inexplicable without eyewitness testimony. Rather, a pattern of plausible examples adduces a strong case for their evidential weight. I hope to have shown that this particular interlocking is plausibly the result of historical accuracy. Instead of constructing ad hoc theories to explain this agreement between Mark and John, we should accept the far simpler hypothesis that both accounts are accurately reporting the events as remembered.
