Note 74 — Chapter III · RETIREMENT TO THE MOUNT OF OLIVES, ARREST, TRIAL, CONDEMNATION AND CRUCIFIXION OF JESUS.

Meanwhile by such a discrimination of the accounts out of respect to the veracity of the Evangelists, there was incurred the danger of impeaching the yet more important veracity of Jesus; for he had spoken of a threefold denial: whereas, on the plan of discrimination, according to the more or less consequent manner in which it is carried out, Peter would have denied Jesus from 6 to 9 times. The old exegesis found help in the canon: abnegatio ad plures plurium interrogationes facta uno paroxysmo, pro unâ numeratur.74 But even granting such a mode of reckoning admissible, still, as each of the four narrators for the most part notices a greater or less interval between the separate denials which he recounts; in each instance, denials related by different Evangelists, e.g. one narrated by Matthew, one by Mark, and so forth, must have occurred in immediate succession: a supposition altogether arbitrary. Hence of late it has been a more favourite expedient to urge that the thrice τρὶς in the mouth of Jesus was only a round number intended to express a repeated denial, as also that Peter, once entangled in the confusion to a supposed necessity for falsehood, would be more likely to repeat his asseverations to 6 or 7 than merely to three inquirers.75 But even if, according to Luke (v. 59 f.), the interval from the first denial to the last be estimated as more than an hour, still such a questioning from all kinds of people on all sides, as well as the ultimate impunity of Peter amid so general a suspicion, is extremely improbable; and when expositors describe the state of mind of Peter during this scene as a complete stupefaction,76 they rather present the condition which befals the reader who has to arrange his ideas in such a crowd of continually repeated questions and answers having an identical meaning—like the incessant and lawless beating of a watch out of order. Olshausen has justly discarded the attempt to remove such differences as a fruitless labour: nevertheless he, on the one hand, immediately proceeds to a forced reconciliation of the divergencies at some points of the narrative; and on the other, he maintains that there were precisely three denials, whereas Paulus again has evinced a more correct discernment in pointing out the premeditated effort of the Evangelists to show that the denial was threefold. What on that evening happened repeatedly (not, however, eight or nine times), was represented as having happened precisely three times, in order to furnish the closest fulfilment to the prediction of Jesus, which was understood in its strictest literality.