Synoptics Section 333 Peter's Denial

Peter’s Denial in John, Mark, Matthew, and Luke

So for those of you just now catching up, we've just been, we read section 315 of the predictions of Peter's denial and noticed the only difference between them was Mark's use of cock crow twice. And we're now looking at section 333 of the Synoptic Gospels and we're just reading from John chapter 18.

So we saw the first denial is in the face of one of the maids, one of the women who says to Peter, then here they said to him, well, who's they? Well, it's a generic, whoever's at the fire. So it could be men, it could be women, it could be both, don't know.

Are you not also one of the disciples? He denied and said, I am not. One of the servants, the high priest, a kinsman of the man whose ear Peter had cut off asked, did not see you in the garden with him.

Peter again denied it and at once the cock crowed. So there you have John's fulfillment of what we had in 315. Now let's go back to Mark. And as Peter was blown in the courtyard, one of the maids of the high priest came and just double checking here from, yeah, okay.

Mark 14, 66. And as Peter was blown in the courtyard, one of the maids, the high priest came and seeing Peter warming himself. So we have the consistency of the fact it was cold because they're lighting fires and warming themselves, so it was not a warm evening.

And seeing Peter warming himself, she looked at him and said, you also were with the Nazarene Jesus. They denied it saying, I neither know nor understand what you mean. And he went out into the gateway.

And the maid saw him and began again to say to the bystanders, this man is one of them. But again, he denied it. And after a little while, again, the bystanders said to Peter, certainly you are one of them if you are a Galilean.

And he began to invoke a curse on himself and to swear, I do not know this man of whom you speak. And then it says, and immediately the cock crowed a second time. Now, I look back through Mark and I don't see a quote unquote first time.

Did anybody see a first time? I don't see a first time. So, there is a cock crowing that takes place after Peter begins to invoke a curse on himself and to swear, I do not know this man of whom you speak.

And Peter remembered how Jesus had said to him before the cock crows twice or 93 times and he broke down and wept. Then we look at Matthew. Peter was sitting outside in the courtyard and a maid came to him and said, you also are with Jesus the Galilean, but he denied it before them all, saying, I don't know what you mean.

And when he went out to the porch and the maid saw him and she said to the bystanders, this man was with Jesus of Nazareth. And again, he denied it with an oath. I do not know the man. Now, a little while, the bystanders came up and said to Peter, certainly you are one of them if your accent betrays you.

Very similar to what you have in Mark, you are a Galilean. Then he began to invoke a curse on himself and swear I do not know a man. And immediately the cock crowed. Name or anything like that, just cock crowed.

Peter remembered saying to Jesus before the cock crows 93 times. He went out and wept bitterly. Luke is a little bit shorter than a maid seeing him as he sat in light and gazing him that this man also is with him, but he denied it, saying, woman, I do not know him.

A little later, someone else saw him and said, you are also one of them. Less specific than Matthew and Mark. Peter said, man, I am not, though he says man. And after an interval, about an hour, still another insistent saying, certainly this man also is with him, for he is a Galilean.

So you have the direct parallel with Mark. But Peter said, man, I do not know what you are saying. And immediately, while he was still speaking, the cock crowed and the Lord turned and looked at Peter.

Now there's one we don't have from Matthew and Mark. And Peter remembered the word of the Lord, how he had said to him before the cock crowed, say you will deny me three times. And he went out and wept bitterly.

The Nature of Synoptic Parallels and Authorial Purpose

Now having, for most of us anyways, there are some who, well, how many years now? Almost a decade, so we have some folks who haven't been here from the start. If you've been here from the start, you sit in one of these two seats over here, basically.

And so we've got some, let's just put it this way. We've been doing this so long, Codex Ricketonius was still a new manuscript when we started this. That's how long we've been at this. And I would like to get a picture of Brother Ricketts from when we started and now, put them together, a little comparison type thing, just sort of how long does it take to get to the Synoptic Gospels of PRBC?

Look for yourself, and that'd be sort of fun. But if you have been here for at least even a majority of the time period, you've already gotten used to reading parallel accounts and placing them in an appropriate context.

The appropriate context is not MP3 recordings. The appropriate context is the genre of what we're reading itself. And the fact that each author has the right to draw from the information available to him, the level of detail and the details he wants to include in light of his specific purposes.

So when we see differences, unlike the novice who for some reason begins with the assumption that Matthew, Mark, and Luke in particular are simply meant to be the exact same story and the exact same words, why you'd have three of them, I have no earthly idea, but we've already worked through so many synoptic issues.

We understand telescoping, we understand authorial purpose, we understand the fact that normally Matthew is gonna be a little bit shorter than Mark in the detail of stories. Not all of that necessarily becomes applicable once we get into the arrested crucifixion narratives because obviously for all of the writers, pretty much everything that's come before has been leading up to this.

And there are some striking differences between the writers once we get into this area as well as the rather obvious fact that they are relating to us, certainly the same historical incident, but from different perspectives.

And so once we look at this, most of us go, well, okay, really the only real issues when you think about it is what does the cock crowing twice mean to Mark in comparison to Matthew, Luke, and John? Is that simply, is there something significant that Mark just forgets to mention to us because he just simply introduces this idea of as soon as he invokes a curse on himself and immediately the cock crowed a second time.

If there was some kind of significance to a first time versus a second time, then the first time would have to be in there somewhere with some kind of significance attached to it, but it's not. So there's a much higher probability that you're talking about a idiomatic way of saying the cock really crows.

I've told you last week, or whenever it was, week four last, whenever it was, I lose track, about my trip to Italy a number of years ago and the fact that I stayed at someone's home one night and the next door neighbor had a very vocally well endowed rooster, would be the kindest way to put it.

And I can assure you, he did not crow just once or twice or three times. I almost had chicken for breakfast that morning. Let's just put it that way. It would have been raw, but that's okay. This thing made a lot of noise and it seemed to get worse as the time went by.

So it seemed that when light first breaks, it's not quite as, I'm not loud as simplistic, but jubilant or I don't know, it seems to get more confidence as the light gets brighter. Maybe there's something about being able to see around it or something, I don't know why it does what it does, but it does what it does.

And it does not seem to me like there is any weight whatsoever put upon anything other than the fact that there's going to be three denials and the crowing of the rooster is what reminds Peter, together with the very interesting extra tidbit in Luke of the glance from the Lord, which means he was close enough to be able to see him, that causes Peter to go out and weep bitterly.

If there were meant to be anything in regards to the double crowing, I don't have any idea what it would be and the text gives us no indication of what this would be. The other issue is sort of the order of the denials and the particular context.

John gives the simplest outline and just doesn't really give us much in the way of details. You have the maid, you have sort of a generic group and then a servant of the high priest, a kinsman of the man whose ear Peter had cut off.

That's fairly nonspecific, but you have very clearly in John, you have a woman who is involved in bringing these accusations and then you have one of the servants of the high priest. That is pretty much also indicated in the other parallel accounts.

You have the maid who in Mark is a maid of the high priest, which would make sense. You're in the high priest's house, most of the maids that are gonna be there are gonna belong there. And so the first accusation is made by the maid in all of the accounts.

But then in Matthew, you have the most detail. You have, well, I'll take that back. You have some location detail. When he went out to the porch. There's not a lot, it's interesting. Matthew gives some location detail and Luke gives some time detail.

Remember Luke said after an interval of about an hour. So, you know, this, you have to keep in mind this is all taking place during the trial. And we went through the trial last week and you have all these witnesses and they're contradicting each other.

Well, it takes time for witnesses to give their testimony and then to contradict each other and to do everything else and it says multiple witnesses. And so there's time passing by here and Luke gives us some of that indication when he says after an interval of about an hour, still another insistence saying certainly this man also was with him.

Now, when it says still another, still another whom, another maid? Matthew has a maid on the porch and as we noted, John just simply has a they. So it's just a generic, someone brought this up. And so you have just different levels of specificity in between each of these texts.

And if you have a group that is involved in making an accusation, it would not be unusual, especially in giving a generic description of it, to use the masculine rather than focusing upon a specific woman.

In fact, that would have been the norm. In fact, it probably would have been the norm up until just very recent times. I remember when I wrote my book on justification, my publisher sent me the first edition to proof and they had randomly gone into the text and had randomly changed a certain percentage, about a third of my pronouns from masculine to feminine.

And I start reading this thing and it's like slapping me in the face every time I'd come up to a generic statement about, can't think of one off the top of my head, but just a, you know, where you'd use a generic masculine pronoun historically, at least when I grew up, you did, and all of a sudden it would say she or her.

And I'd immediately start trying to figure out, when did I start talking about a woman in here? And I'd stop until I finally figured out what in the world they were doing. And so from that point on, it was real easy.

Change, change. I just put a big old note at the beginning of the manuscript. Uh-uh, sorry, I don't remember exactly how I put it, but no thank you, and they honored my request and it was at least consistent because really, for people my age, that is something very odd and strange and they force you to do that now these days?

Not in the academic setting? Yeah, it just, I don't know, pretty soon we're gonna have these, what are these new non-gendered pronouns? Zim and zur and, they can't use zit, that's not gonna work, so.

Oh, I know, yeah. No other country, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not looking for any sanity, I'm just wondering if they, in writing papers and stuff like that, if they've actually enforced that now because I mean, this is a Christian publisher and this was 2004, this wasn't like two years ago.

This was a decade ago and I'm like, what are you doing to me? Anyway, so there are generic ways of speaking and up until recently, the masculine would be the default in a situation like that. So it seems that what you have is more of a, some of the authors are giving more detail whereas others are giving less detail and using default language.

In both Matthew and Mark, you have Peter invoking, there's an escalation and when you get to the final denial, there is an escalation, he began to invoke a curse on himself and to swear. And then the same thing in verse 71 of Mark 14.

Luke, the only, I guess the only strengthened element of Luke's third denial is man, I do not know what you are saying. And then the addition of the Lord turning and looking at Peter. But there is an escalation that leads finally to basically Peter going out and he weeps bitterly.

And most down to the years have seen a parallel between Peter and Judas in that they go out, they weep bitterly, but one was told by Jesus, what you do, do quickly. He's called the son of perdition and we're gonna see here in a moment how he dies.

And then with Peter, you've got the statement, I have prayed for your faith, when you have turned, strengthen your brethren, et cetera, et cetera. And so traditionally down through the years, there has been the contrast drawn between the two.

And it's not that Peter is better or stronger or something than Judas. It is focused upon Jesus, who does not say to Judas, I have prayed for you, but what you do, do quickly. And the description of him as the son of perdition of which the scriptures speak.

In comparison to Peter, who is one of the 12, who knows who Jesus is, who's received revelation from the fathers to the identity of Jesus. And therefore there is a upholding of his faith, even in the midst of failure.

Has, I think, something to do with what we read this morning in Sunday school in regards to the perseverance of the saints or first and foremost, the preservation of the saints, which results in the perseverance of the saints.

But it is interesting, as we will note in a number of other instances coming up here in the crucifixion. If the standard theory that we described a decade ago now is correct and what you have is Mark writing first and then Matthew and Luke in a almost simplistic, slavish way, editing Mark and fixing Mark and the like, why once we get into this particular portion, the arrest, trial, crucifixion, resurrection, why do they go such very different ways?

Why are we going to have to deal with a number of places where Matthew, Mark, and Luke diverge from one another and they focus upon different things and it's just different than what we have up to this point.

Theories of Gospel Origins and the Question of Q

Various theories have been propounded, but as in most of the instances, as I have pointed out, the adoption of that Mark in priority literary dependence theory, which is what you will find in 85 to 90 of the commentaries that you will purchase on any of the Gospels or any of the New Testament since 1900, be my estimation.

That adoption of that theory while it has become almost a given ends up raising far more questions than it actually ends up answering. And it's one of those situations where yeah, if you want to be cutting edge in New Testament studies, that's sort of where you've got to be.

Though I do find it interesting that one of the best known names in New Testament today who I haven't debated him, we had a radio discussion about his rather unique views on justification, but Dr. N .T. Wright, Tom Wright from England, doesn't mind leaving the consensus behind many times.

And I remember very clearly him dialoguing with the late Marcus Borg and saying, you're assuming we know when the Gospels were written. We don't know when the Gospels were written. We don't know what order the Gospels were written in.

Scholars will tell you that they know that, but it's all just a theory. And I appreciated that. It's sort of what led to my coining the phrase, N .T. Wright giveth and N .T. Wright taketh away. And at one point he'll say something wonderfully conservative and then five minutes later we'll hit you with a left hook that just leaves you utterly dazed.

That's just the nature of dealing with N .T. Wright. But he is exactly right, Wright is right, in regards to the issue of the fact that we don't know the order of the writing of the Gospels. And I mentioned a long time ago, I think the best way to look at these is that each one was drawing from their own independent sources of tradition.

And what is amazing is the consistency of that oral tradition over time and the fact that you have these authors writing at different times and different places. And yet very clearly the message has gone forth to wherever it's gone forth, whether it be Rome where Mark is normally located or Caesarea where Luke is normally located or who knows where Matthew is.

Yes sir. Not just one, I mean it, well, it comes out of German scholarship in the 17th and 18th century, well 18th and 19th centuries as the very term itself Quella source means. But there's not any one individual.

It's not like you've got the Graf Wellhausen hypothesis where you've got specific names attached to it. There were a number of people that were involved in its various incarnations because it remains a rather nebulous thing.

I mean you can buy an entire book on Q but it's all theoretical. You've never found it. There's no specific rules by which you can necessarily identify what is and what is not. And that's what makes it such a wonderful thing for scholars to play with because you can come up with your own spin and that's how you get published.

And that's why doing scholarship the way that others do scholarship, where you have to come up with something new and all the rest of that stuff. When you do that with Christian theology and stuff like that, all the time you have to come up with something new, that's generally how heresy comes up too.

And it's unfortunate that we sometimes lose our balance at that point. And someone who is doing something that would really deepen our understanding of a traditional Christian belief, if it's already been done before, you need to find something, you gotta find your niche, your new thing.

You know and unfortunately that has led to all sorts of speculative things that we have. So anyway, so those are the two issues. You have three denials. Matthew gives us some geographical movement. Luke gives us some temporal indication.

And you do have the direct parallels of the fact that the more Peter talks, the more he gets himself in trouble. Because, which is normative for Peter, as we've noted in other places. But we get the clear indication that Peter has an accent.

And that you can tell the difference between a Galilean and a Jerusalemite by their accent, by how they speak. But you also have the indication of the fact that Peter's rash action in the garden, in the cutting off the servant's ear, comes back to haunt him as well because it's a relative of that person who is going, didn't I see you?

And you might go, well how could they not know that? Well remember folks, this is nighttime. And unlike Phoenix, Gary and I went out and did a ride yesterday and one of the things we noticed is we got far enough out of town, it's like, stars!

Wow! It's like, we just have such bad light pollution in the valley that you only see the brightest stuff up there and you get out where there's no light pollution and there's no moon and guess what? It's really dark!

Most of us never really experience that. Even at night, once you really get your eyes accustomed, you open your eyes and you can see where the window is because there's light coming in. It's not just because there's a street light outside, it's just this glow that's just always there.

Well, unless there's a major power outage then you find out how dark things are. It was dark in that torches and stuff like that, it's not like a nice 350 lumen light like we have today. It's flickering light and it's a whole lot more difficult to recognize people in both situations.

So don't let that throw you a curve either. So there we have Peter and unless there is something significant about two crowings, I don't see where there's any major issue to be dealt with in regards to this.

And the focus is, of course, upon Peter's collapse, his eventual restoration and the contrast between himself and Judas as far as that is concerned. Anything on that? Because the next one's even worse.

Yes, sir? Yeah, I remember back at the, years and years ago since it's been over a quarter of a century and I've been here now, but over a quarter of a century ago at the church we were at that would be a regular debate.

There were lots of folks that felt that Judas was saved and it all goes back to this idea of, as long as you make a profession of faith, you got your ticket punched, you're going to heaven, it doesn't matter what you do after that.

So if you buy into the non-lordship, no repentance, no election, no purpose in God's salvation, you can have, you can't make clear distinctions between saving faith and non-saving faith or even allow there to be such a distinction.

Once you adopt that perspective, then yeah, Judas certainly would've made a profession of faith at some point, so he got his ticket punched and man, it's a shame what happened, but you better learn from Judas.

And it's like, well, have you noticed this son of perdition? But if you don't have a concept of election in your thinking, which very few people there did, then that just blinks out, that just becomes washed over in all the rest of the stuff.

We haven't even gotten to Judas, but I guess we're getting to him now, yes sir. Well, there's always an element of truth and you would think that the words that Jesus uttered to the Pharisees about the amount of light they had had and the judgment that would be theirs would only be tenfold of Judas.

But it's interesting, you never get anything like that. And I think the reason you don't get anything like that is because the consistent description of Judas is that he was fulfilling prophecy. He was the son of perdition.

This was his role. And there's no embarrassment on the part of the New Testament writers in confirming this right of God to use someone in this way. It's only modern Christians that are all squeamish about looking at that.

Judas Iscariot, Prophecy, and His Death in Matthew and Acts

And speaking of Judas, the big question, it's only, now it doesn't become a big question in the synoptic because, well, because it's not really, it does not take into consideration the book of Acts. But everybody knows what the issue is here, so let's, yeah, five minutes, that's not gonna get us anywhere, is it?

At least we can sort of introduce it, I suppose. Especially since my Bible doesn't wanna, my phone doesn't want to function at the moment. Matthew 27 is the only section that gives us a report on Judas's death.

When Judas's betrayer saw that he was condemned, he repented and brought back the 30 pieces of silver to the chief priest and the elders, saying, I have sinned in betraying innocent blood. They said, well, is that to us?

See to it yourself. And throwing down the pieces of silver in the temple he departed and went and hanged himself. The chief priest, taking the pieces of silver, said it is not lawful to put them into the treasury since they are blood money.

You gotta love how folks are so picky about certain elements of observing the law and in the middle of gross sin. So they took counsel and bought with them the potter's field to bury strangers in, therefore the field has been called the field of blood to this day.

Then it was fulfilled what had been spoken by the prophet Jeremiah, saying, and they took the 30 pieces of silver, the price of him on whom a price had been set by some of the sons of Israel, and they gave them for the potter's field as the Lord directed me.

Now, just a couple things. The prophecy is found in both Zechariah and Jeremiah. It's a conflict prophecy. Again, we've covered a number of these conflict prophecies in the past. And we've noted, we noted when, within the first week of getting into the text, that at the beginning of Mark, for example, as it is said in Isaiah the prophet, well, later we changed that into the prophets because it's a conflict prophecy.

It's drawing from different portions of the Old Testament, putting them together, and a lot, especially later scribes, not understanding Jewish tendencies and Jewish ways of doing things, thought, well, if it's Isaiah plus others, then we can't have the name Isaiah there because there are some words that aren't found in Isaiah.

The major prophets become the bookmark, the means by which you find stuff. Remember, they used scrolls back then. And you'd have certain, you'd have a Jeremiah scroll or an Isaiah scroll. That's why we have the Isaiah scroll from the Dead Sea Scrolls and things like that.

So they didn't utilize the same methodology of scrolls and citation that we would use today. As you know, the order of the canon that we have today, Genesis to Malachi is not how the Jews had it. The last book in the Jewish canon was 2 Chronicles, and everything else was in between someplace.

Different order of the canon, hence different organization, hence the scrolls would be different. Minor prophets are always subsumed under the major prophets depending on which scroll they would be in.

So a lot of later scribes and critics today are ignorant of these things, and therefore they go, oh, no, no, that's Zechariah, that's not Jeremiah. Well, this is a conflated multiple origin citation, and you go with the major prophet, not the minor prophet.

So yes, you've got stuff from Zechariah, but you also have language from Jeremiah 32 and 18 as well. So that's where that comes from. You'll run into people constantly raising those as objections against the authority of scripture and things like that, but we've gone over that before.

So here you have, it is interesting, it's called the Field of Blood to This Day. So that would be one of the indicators to me anyways that that rings to me of a pre -70 date for Matthew because there's nobody in Jerusalem.

Nothing's being called anything to that day after AD 70. It's raised to the ground. So I know a lot of people don't see it that way, but it certainly would give that indication to me. But the issue is the contrast between Matthew and what we have in Acts chapter one in regards to falling down in the field and his guts bursting forth and so on and so forth.

So next time we get together, since we don't have time for that in five minutes and now 30 seconds, we'll reread this and compare it with Acts. And who knows, maybe I'll let you all come up with your best explanation of how to harmonize the two so it's not all on me.

Maybe that's what we'll do next time around. We'll see. All right, let's close our time with a word of prayer. Once again, Father, we thank you for the freedom we have had to gather, the availability of your word, and the time we've had to consider these things.

We ask that we would continue to have a deep desire to be good students of your word, that you would continue to grow within us our faith in your truth and our ability to explain it to others for we know that is a great need in our day.

We ask you to be with us now as we go into worship. We pray in Christ's name, amen.