In regard to the text of 1 Cor. xv, 3 sq., he describes as surprising the argument that the account of the appearance of Jesus to "five hundred at once" is shown to be late by its absence from the Gospels. This very silence of the evangelists, he insists, "renders unplausible [invraisemblable] the entirely gratuitous hypothesis of an interpolation." [205] One is driven to wonder what conception M. Loisy has formed of the manner of the compilation of the Gospels. On his view, Paul had very early put in currency the record that the risen Jesus had appeared to "above five hundred brethren at once"; yet this record, so welcome to the Church, was never inserted in the Gospels. Why not? In M. Loisy's opinion, one of them, at least, was penned or redacted in the Pauline interest:--
One may without doubt ... affirm that the oldest of the synoptics, the Gospel of Mark, was composed, in a certain measure, in favour of Paul.... The same Gospel seems to have the conscious purpose of lowering the Galilean disciples to the advantage of Paul and his disciples. [206]
And while M. Loisy justly rejects, as opposed to the internal evidence, the claim that "Luke" is the intimate of Paul, and even denies that the third Gospel is really Pauline in tendency, [207] he will hardly say that it is anti-Pauline, or likely on that or any other score to repel an important item of testimony to the appearances of the risen Jesus, supplied by such an authority as the Apostle to the Gentiles. He can give no reason whatever, then, why the "five hundred" item should appear neither in Gospels nor Acts. It is in point of fact to be taken as a very late interpolation indeed. And if M. Loisy, as in duty bound, would but note the sequence: "then to the twelve; then ... to above five hundred ... then to all the apostles," he might, as simple critic, see that there have been successive tamperings.
As to the genuineness and the dating of the epistles, it may be well at this point to put the issue clearly. The general case of Van Manen is decidedly strong; and the entire absence from the Acts of any mention of any public epistle by Paul is all in Van Manen's favour. The Epistle to the Romans is so far dissolved under criticism that it might be classed as neither Pauline nor an epistle. [208] That there are late literary elements in the rest of the cardinal "four" I have myself argued, [209] independently of the question of the interpolations of quasi-history. For a free historical student there can be no primary question of how the dating of the epistles will affect the problem of the historicity of Jesus: the problem is to be scientifically solved on its merits. But while the school of Van Manen fail to recognize interpolations in the epistles as they stand, and to revise their chronology in the light of that fact, they are postponing the critical settlement. That the rejection of all the Pauline epistles as pseudepigraphic is not at all a counter stroke to the myth theory is shown by Mr. Whittaker's definite acceptance of both positions. Van Manen was premature on the historicity question.