Note 17 — Chapter XV · THE METHOD OF M. LOISY

Again and again we find in the Gospels such traces of a strife over Petrine pretensions. In the story of the Denial, which we have found so incompatible with the attitude ascribed to Peter in the Acts, everyone since Strauss has recognized a process of redaction and interpolation. M. Loisy, saying nothing of the central problem, avowedly finds in Mark “a manipulation, deliberate and ill-managed, of a more simple statement.”17 This might have sufficed to put him on his guard; but all he has to say, after reducing the confused details to the inferred “simpler statement,” is that “if there is in any part of the second Gospel a personal recollection of Peter it is the story of the denial in the form in which Mark found it.”18 Which makes sad havoc of the Peter-Mark tradition; for the story of the denial betrays itself as a late anti-Petrine invention, as aforesaid.