All the same, he accepts the narrative as history; and he sees nothing in the fusion of the two speeches: "Sleep on.... It is enough.... Arise now,"... though he rejects the proposal of Bleek, Volkmar, and Wellhausen to turn "Sleep on" into an interrogation, [159] and admits that the "It is enough" is an "unclear and very insufficient transition" from "Sleep on" to "Arise." Once more, which is the more superficial, this lame handling or the recognition of a transcribed drama with two speeches combined because of the omission of an exit and an entrance, in what M. Loisy admits to be "a highly dramatic mise en scène"?
But it is over the trial in the house of the high priest that M. Loisy most astonishingly redacts the narrative. In his commentary he recognizes that Matthew's story, in which the scribes and the elders are "already gathered together" in the dead of night when Jesus is brought for trial, and the story of Mark, in which they "come together with" the high priest, are equally incredible; and that the story of the quest for witnesses in the night is still more so.
Once again we have a sans doute with which we can agree. "The nocturnal procedure, no doubt, did not take place." [160] Recognizing further that a Jewish blasphemer was by the Levitical law to be stoned, not crucified, he simply gives up the whole narrative as a product of "the Christian tradition," bent on saddling the Jews rather than the Romans with the responsibility of the crucifixion. [161] In his smaller work he simply cuts the knot and alleges:--
"As soon as the first daylight had come (dès les premiers lueurs du jour), a reunion was held at the house of (chez) the chief priest," where it was without doubt [!] arranged that they should content themselves with denouncing the Galilean prophet to the Roman authority as a disturber and a false Messiah. But it was necessary to arrange the terms of the accusation and distribute the rôles, to get together and prepare the witnesses. These measures were soon taken. As soon as morning had come (dès le matin) the priests brought their prisoner chained before the tribunal of Pontius Pilate. [162]
One certainly cannot call this manipulation of the texts "superficial." It is sheer deliberate dissolution and reconstruction of the narrative, by way of substituting something more plausible for the incredible original, when all the while the credibility of the original is the thesis maintained. And yet even the reconstruction is so thoughtlessly managed that we get only a slightly less impossible account. Only a scholar who never followed the details of a legal process could suggest that the task of hunting up witnesses and arranging a procedure could be carried through between "earliest dawn" and "morning." And for the headlong haste of such a procedure, only an hour or so after the arrest of the prisoner, no explanation is even suggested. A violent impossibility in the record, destructive of all faith in its historicity at this point, is sought to be saved by a violent redaction which simply "makes hay" of the very documents founded on. And this illicit violence is resorted to because M. Loisy recognizes that if he is to retain a historical Jesus at all he must bring the whole trial story into a historical shape. He certainly had cause to take drastic measures. Long ago it was pointed out that by Jewish law a prisoner must not be condemned to death on the day of his trial: Judicia de capitalibus finiunt eodem die si sint ad absolutionem; si vero sint ad damnationem, finiuntur die sequente. [163] This might alone suffice to "bring into doubt" the priestly trial; to say nothing of the modern Jewish protest that a capital prosecution and execution on either the day after or the day of the Passover, at the instance of the High Priest, was unthinkable. [164] There were good reasons, then, for seeking to found on the trial before Pilate.