[16] Entstehung, p. 22. Of course Harnack’s method is really only a development of Baur’s. [↑]
[17] Les évangiles synoptiques, ii, 617. [↑]
Chapter XVI
THE TRIAL CRUX
Thus lax in his treatment of the subsidiary historical problems, M. Loisy is of necessity accommodating when he faces those which he recognizes to be central. Over the story of the “purification” of the temple—which Origen found at once unjustifiable and signally miraculous, since it was inconceivable that so great a multitude should have yielded to the mere attack of one man with a scourge of small cords—he has again no misgivings. He feels that some such story was needed to motive the priestly action against Jesus.[1] In the story of the astonishing sophism ascribed to Jesus on the subject of the tribute to Cæsar he sees only “cleverness” (habileté); and yet he accepts as historical—again by necessity of his thesis—Jesus’s admission that he claimed to be king of the Jews. In the story of the betrayal he sees fit, docilely following Brandt, to allege “a little confused fighting, some blows given and received” over and above the cutting off of the ear of Malchus, an imagined item which he finds in none of the Gospels. Over the prayers of the Lord while the disciples slept he had hesitated in his commentary;[2] falling back on the notable avowal that “the sort of incoherence which results from describing a scene which passed while the witnesses [!] were asleep is without doubt to be explained by the origin and character of the narrative rather than by a negligence of the narrator.” For once, I unreservedly assent to the sans doute. Quite unwittingly, M. Loisy has put himself in line with our mythical theory, which postulates a drama as the origin of the narrative.
All the same, he accepts the narrative as history; and he sees nothing in the fusion of the two speeches: “Sleep on.... It is enough.... Arise now,”... though he rejects the proposal of Bleek, Volkmar, and Wellhausen to turn “Sleep on” into an interrogation,[3] and admits that the “It is enough” is an “unclear and very insufficient transition” from “Sleep on” to “Arise.” Once more, which is the more superficial, this lame handling or the recognition of a transcribed drama with two speeches combined because of the omission of an exit and an entrance, in what M. Loisy admits to be “a highly dramatic mise en scène”?
But it is over the trial in the house of the high priest that M. Loisy most astonishingly redacts the narrative. In his commentary he recognizes that Matthew’s story, in which the scribes and the elders are “already gathered together” in the dead of night when Jesus is brought for trial, and the story of Mark, in which they “come together with” the high priest, are equally incredible; and that the story of the quest for witnesses in the night is still more so.
Once again we have a sans doute with which we can agree. “The nocturnal procedure, no doubt, did not take place.”[4] Recognizing further that a Jewish blasphemer was by the Levitical law to be stoned, not crucified, he simply gives up the whole narrative as a product of “the Christian tradition,” bent on saddling the Jews rather than the Romans with the responsibility of the crucifixion.[5] In his smaller work he simply cuts the knot and alleges:—