Again and again we find in the Gospels such traces of a strife over Petrine pretensions. In the story of the Denial, which we have found so incompatible with the attitude ascribed to Peter in the Acts, everyone since Strauss has recognized a process of redaction and interpolation. M. Loisy, saying nothing of the central problem, avowedly finds in Mark "a manipulation, deliberate and ill-managed, of a more simple statement." [155] This might have sufficed to put him on his guard; but all he has to say, after reducing the confused details to the inferred "simpler statement," is that "if there is in any part of the second Gospel a personal recollection of Peter it is the story of the denial in the form in which Mark found it." [156] Which makes sad havoc of the Peter-Mark tradition; for the story of the denial betrays itself as a late anti-Petrine invention, as aforesaid. CHAPTER XVI THE TRIAL CRUX Thus lax in his treatment of the subsidiary historical problems, M. Loisy is of necessity accommodating when he faces those which he recognizes to be central. Over the story of the "purification" of the temple--which Origen found at once unjustifiable and signally miraculous, since it was inconceivable that so great a multitude should have yielded to the mere attack of one man with a scourge of small cords--he has again no misgivings. He feels that some such story was needed to motive the priestly action against Jesus. [157] In the story of the astonishing sophism ascribed to Jesus on the subject of the tribute to Cæsar he sees only "cleverness" (habileté); and yet he accepts as historical--again by necessity of his thesis--Jesus's admission that he claimed to be king of the Jews. In the story of the betrayal he sees fit, docilely following Brandt, to allege "a little confused fighting, some blows given and received" over and above the cutting off of the ear of Malchus, an imagined item which he finds in none of the Gospels. Over the prayers of the Lord while the disciples slept he had hesitated in his commentary; [158] falling back on the notable avowal that "the sort of incoherence which results from describing a scene which passed while the witnesses [!] were asleep is without doubt to be explained by the origin and character of the narrative rather than by a negligence of the narrator." For once, I unreservedly assent to the sans doute. Quite unwittingly, M. Loisy has put himself in line with our mythical theory, which postulates a drama as the origin of the narrative.