Note 9 — Chapter XVII · THE JESUS-FIGURE OF M. LOISY

In regard to the text of 1 Cor. xv, 3 sq., he describes as surprising the argument that the account of the appearance of Jesus to “five hundred at once” is shown to be late by its absence from the Gospels. This very silence of the evangelists, he insists, “renders unplausible [invraisemblable] the entirely gratuitous hypothesis of an interpolation.”9 One is driven to wonder what conception M. Loisy has formed of the manner of the compilation of the Gospels. On his view, Paul had very early put in currency the record that the risen Jesus had appeared to “above five hundred brethren at once”; yet this record, so welcome to the Church, was never inserted in the Gospels. Why not? In M. Loisy’s opinion, one of them, at least, was penned or redacted in the Pauline interest:—