Peter's Third Denial

Some additional details add to the story. Luke tells us an hour has passed. Furthermore, Peter has moved out into the courtyard after the earlier accusation by the servant girl. Now, another serving girl and others accuse Peter of being a Galilean.

John gives us a detail that seems to have continually given Peter away. It was that the man he had earlier disfigured by cutting off his ear was in the group of servants. Little wonder that he could identify Peter. The crowd continues its earlier accusation that Peter is a Galilean, now strengthened by the fact that Jesus has been moved to a more official court. If openly and forcefully accused of being a “Galilean,” and therefore a member of what was a growing political rebellion, Peter would have been in much greater danger than we generally assume.

Thus, he again denies an affiliation with the rebel they have captured, and does so with all the vulgarity a fisherman could muster. It seems to be at that height of his cursing that, as Mark says, the rooster crew a second time here. Peter then realized the depth of his betrayal.

Initially, there seems to be a variance between Mark and the other evangelists as to the number of times the rooster crowed before Peter left in tears. The prophecy of Peter’s denials, according to some current translations of Mark, is that Peter will deny the Messiah three times before the rooster crows twice. Also, in the KJV, there is a listing (14:68) of the rooster crowing at Peter’s second denial as well as again, at the final denial. (Some of the modern translations leave this initial report of the rooster crowing out.) Then at the final denial, Mark is quoted as saying that the rooster crowed a second time.

Some early manuscripts of Mark (prior to the earliest English translations) report this slightly differently. They end the prophecy without the detail that the rooster would crow twice. They report an earlier crowing of the rooster at Peter’s second denial, however, but leave out the detail of the crowing at Peter’s final denial as being a second time the rooster crowed. Matthew and Luke only report that the rooster crowed. John says that at the point of Peter’s third denial, the rooster began to crow.

What actually occurred? The first rule is that the oldest record is the most dependable. If so, Jesus’s prophecy probably only referred to the general time when chickens begin to rouse themselves at the first light of day, not the specific number of times one would crow. Later copyists may have made it more specific to fit what occurred. The earlier manuscripts, however, list two times roosters crowed before Peter realized what he had done.

Generally, it is accepted that Peter was Mark’s source—though we contend that he also had the book of Matthew, or the same source Matthew used. If so, Peter would have been Mark’s primary editor of Matthew’s record and could have given him additional information that Matthew did not know. He could have told Mark that he had ignored the initial crowing of the rooster, but was struck with shame when he heard it crow again—thus this second crowing of the rooster would have been in Mark, but not Matthew, Luke or John.

We would speculate that later copyists of early manuscripts—and modern translators—have muddied up the water by trying to clarify rather than just copy. If so, the reference to the initial crowing (Mark 14:68) got left out and was corrected—so to speak—by the second crowing added in 14:72. Worse, they may have then “corrected” their copy of the prophecy to make it more exact than the copy they were supposed to be duplicating. (This is sheer speculation, but would certainly fit what resulted.)