Note 54 — Chapter III · RETIREMENT TO THE MOUNT OF OLIVES, ARREST, TRIAL, CONDEMNATION AND CRUCIFIXION OF JESUS.

After this, the author of the fourth gospel very inappropriately holds up the solicitude which Jesus manifested that his disciples should not be taken captive with him, as a fulfilment of the declaration of Jesus (xvii. 12), that he had lost none of those intrusted to him by the Father; a declaration which was previously more suitably referred to the spiritual preservation of his disciples. As the next feature in the scene, all the Evangelists agree, that when the soldiers began to lay hands on Jesus, one of his disciples drew his sword, and cut off the ear of the high priest’s servant, an act which met with a reproof from Jesus. Still Luke and John have each a peculiar trait. Not to mention that both particularize the ear as the right ear, while their two predecessors had left this point undetermined; the latter not only gives the name of the wounded servant, but states that the disciple who wounded him was Peter. Why the synoptists do not name Peter, it has been sought to explain in different ways. The supposition that they wished to avoid compromising the apostle, who at the time of the composition of their gospels was yet living,54 belongs to the justly exploded fictions of an exegesis framed on the false principle of supplying conjecturally all those links in the chain of natural causation which are wanting in the gospels. That these Evangelists elsewhere for the most part omit names,55 is too sweeping an accusation as regards Matthew, though he does indeed leave unnamed indifferent persons, such as Jairus, or Bartimæus; but that the real Matthew, or even the common evangelical tradition, thus early and generally should have lost the name from an anecdote of Peter, so thoroughly accordant with the part played by this apostle, can scarcely be considered very probable. To me, the reverse would be much more conceivable, namely, that the anecdote was originally current without the mention of any name (and why should not a less distinguished adherent of Jesus—for from the synoptists it is not necessarily to be inferred that it was one of the twelve—whose name was therefore the more readily forgotten, have had courage and rashness enough to draw his sword at that crisis?), but a later narrator thought such a mode of conduct particularly suited to the impetuous character of Peter, and hence ascribed it to him by a combination of his own. On this supposition, we need not appeal, in support of the possibility that John could know the servant’s name, to his acquaintance with the household of the high priest,56 any more than to a peculiar acquaintance of Mark with some inhabitants of Jericho, in explanation of his obtaining the name of the blind man.