The only serious difficulties for M. Loisy, apparently, are the miracles and the prophecies. On the latter he makes no use of the Savonarola argument; and in his smaller work he ignores the "rock" text; but for him "the scene of Cæsarea Philippi, with the Messianic confession of Peter, seems thoroughly historic"; and on the other hand the story of Peter's denial of his Master causes him no misgiving. For a rational reader, the conception of the shamed Peter figuring soon afterwards as the merciless judge and supernatural slayer of the unhappy Ananias is extremely indigestible. The personage thus evolved is not only detestable but incredible. How could the coward apostle figure primarily and continuously as a pillar of the Church described? Harnack's method, as Professor Blass complains, [154] treats the denigration of Peter as the result of the strife between the Judaizing and the Gentilizing sections of the early Church; it is the natural hypothesis. Without it we are left to the detestable and impossible figure of the apostle who denies his Lord and has no mercy for a weak brother who merely keeps back part of a sum of money when professing freely to donate the whole. The critical reader will prefer to follow Harnack. But if we give up the story of the Denial, how shall we retain those which exalt and glorify the Judaizing apostle? If we give up Matthew's "rock" texts, with what consistency can we take as pure history the episode in Mark in which Peter, first of the twelve, declares "Thou art the Christ," eliciting the charge to "tell no man of him," followed by the prediction of death and resurrection, spoken "openly"? The episode in Mark passes into, and in Matthew is followed by, the fierce rebuke to the expostulating Peter, "Get thee behind me, Satan, for thou mindest not the things of God, but the things of men"--a strange sequel to Matthew's "Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-Jonah; for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in Heaven." This is one of the passages that force the conclusion either that "Mark" had before him the fuller record, in "Matthew" or elsewhere, and turned it from a Petrine to an anti-Petrine purpose, or that a redactor did so. There is no escape from the evidence that we are dealing with two sharply conflicting constructions. The "Blessed art thou" passage and the "Satan" passage will not cohere. Which came first? Had "Luke" either before him? His "Get thee behind me, Satan" (iv, 8; A.V.), addressed to the devil in the Temptation, is ejected from the revised text as being absent from most of the ancient codices; and its presence in the Alexandrine suggests an attempt to get in somewhere a saying which otherwise had no place in the third Gospel. The absence alike of the blessing and the aspersion on Peter sets up the surmise that both are quite late, and that the insertion of one elicited the other.