Note 71 — Chapter III · RETIREMENT TO THE MOUNT OF OLIVES, ARREST, TRIAL, CONDEMNATION AND CRUCIFIXION OF JESUS.

According to all the Evangelists, it was in this court, αὐλὴ, that Peter, intimidated by the inauspicious turn in the fortunes of Jesus, and the high priest’s domestics by whom he was surrounded, sought to allay the repeatedly expressed suspicion that he was one of the followers of the arrested Galilean, by reiterated asseverations that he knew him not. But, as we have already intimated, in relation to the owner of this habitation, there exists an apparent divergency between the fourth gospel and the synoptists. In John, to judge from the first glance at his narrative, the first denial (xviii. 17) happens during the trial before Annas, since it stands after the statement that Jesus was led to Annas (v. 13), and before the verse in which he is said to have been sent to Caiaphas (v. 24), and only the two further acts of denial (v. 25–27), in so far as they follow the last-named statement, and as immediately after them the delivery to Pilate is narrated (v. 28), appear in John also to have occurred during the trial before Caiaphas and in his palace. But to this supposition of a different locality for the first denial and the two subsequent ones, there is a hindrance in the account of the fourth gospel itself. After the mention of the first denial, which happened at the door of the palace (of Annas apparently), it is said that the night being cold the servants and officers had made a fire of coals, and Peter stood with them and warmed himself, ἦν δὲ καὶ μετ’ αὐτῶν ὁ Πέτρος ἑστὼς καὶ θερμαινόμενος (v. 18). Now, when farther on, the narrative of the second and third denial is opened with nearly the same words: And Simon Peter stood and warmed himself, ἦν δὲ Σίμων Πέτρος ἑστὼς καὶ θερμαινόμενος (v. 25): this cannot be understood otherwise than as an allusion to the previously noticed circumstances of the fire of coals, and of Peter’s standing by it to warm himself, and hence it must be inferred that the Evangelist intended to represent the second and third denial as having occurred by the same fire, consequently, on the above supposition, likewise in the house of Annas. It is true that the synoptists speak of a fire in the court of the palace of Caiaphas also (Mark v. 54; Luke v. 55), at which Peter warmed himself (here, however, sitting, as in John standing): but it does not thence follow that John also imagined a similar fire to have been in the court of the actual high priest, and according to the supposition on which we have hitherto proceeded, he only mentions such a fire in the house of Annas. They who regard as too artificial an expedient the conjecture of Euthymius, that the dwellings of Annas and Caiaphas perhaps had a common court, and that consequently Peter could remain standing by the same fire after Jesus had been led away from the former to the latter, prefer the supposition that the second and third denial occurred, according to John, not after, but during the leading away of Jesus from Annas to Caiaphas.71 Thus on the presupposition that John narrates a trial before Annas, the difference between the gospels in relation to the locality of the denial remains a total one; and in this irreconcilable divergency, some have decided in favour of John, on the ground that the scattered disciples had only fragmentary information concerning this scene,—that Peter himself being a stranger in Jerusalem did not know in which palace he had, to his misfortune, entered; but that he, and after him the first Evangelists, supposed the denials to have taken place in the court of Caiaphas; whereas John, from his more intimate acquaintance with the city and the high priest’s palace, was able to rectify this mistake.72 But even admitting the incredible supposition that Peter erroneously believed himself to have denied Jesus in the palace of Caiaphas, still John, who in these days was in the society of Peter, would certainly at once have corrected his assertion, so that such an erroneous opinion could not have become fixed in his mind. Hence it might be preferred to reverse the attempt, and to vindicate the synoptists at the expense of John: were it not that the observations contained in the foregoing section (according to which John, after having merely mentioned that Jesus was led away to Annas, may speak from v. 15 of what occurred in the palace of Caiaphas), present a possible solution of this contradiction also.