M. Loisy, it will be observed, here assumes that we are dealing with real cures, and tacitly rejects the qualifying clauses in Mark vi, 5, and Matthew xiii, 58, as he well may. They are indeed stamped with manipulation. "He could there do no mighty work save that he laid his hands upon a few sick folk and healed them," says the first; "he did not many mighty works there because of their unbelief," says the other. Such passages raise in an acute form the question how any statement in the Gospels can reasonably be taken as historical. What were the alleged mighty works done elsewhere save acts of healing the sick? And how many cases for such healing would naturally be presented by one small hamlet? If, again, all the healings were spiritual, what are we left with beyond the truism that sinners who did not believe were unbelieving?
As the modifications produce pure counter-sense, it is critically permissible to surmise that they were lacking in the first copies, and were inserted merely to guard against profane cavils. But as the whole episode is found only in Matthew and Mark, it cannot figure in Dr. Petrie's Nucleus; and for similar reasons it is absent from the Primitive Gospel of the school of Bernhard Weiss. M. Loisy, recognizing that it is the kind of item that Luke would avoid for tactical reasons, is loyal enough to accept it as historical without the modifying words, and seeks no better explanation than that given in the cited words of Jesus.
For those who aim at a rational comprehension of the documents, the critical induction is that the story was inserted for a reason; and the explanation which satisfies M. Loisy is so ill-considered that it only emphasizes the need. A prophet is likely to be looked at askance by his own people: yes, if he be an unimpressive one; but upon what critical principles is M. Loisy entitled to assume, as he constantly does, that the historic Jesus made a profound and ineffaceable impression upon all who came in contact with him, from the moment of his call to his disciples, and that nevertheless he had not made the slightest impression of superiority upon his own kinsmen and fellow-villagers, up to the age of thirty? How can such propositions cohere? Jesus has only to leave Nazareth and to command men to follow him, in order to be reverently recognized as a Superman: for M. Loisy, it is his mere personality that creates the faith which, after his death, makes his adherents proclaim him as a re-arisen God. Is this the kind of personality that in an eastern village would be known merely as that of "the carpenter," or the carpenter's son?