M. Loisy, it is true, claims that Jesus had needed a period of solitude and meditation in the desert to make him a teacher, thus partly implying that before that experience the destined prophet might not be recognizable as such. But is it a historic proposition that the short time of solitude had worked a complete transformation? Was a quite normal or commonplace personality capable of such a transfiguration in a natural sense? That the critic had not even asked himself the question is made plain by his complete failure to raise the cognate question in regard to the marvellous healing powers with which he unhesitatingly credits the teacher, on the strength of the wholly supernaturalist testimony of the Gospels. These powers, according to M. Loisy, were also the instantaneous result of the short period of solitude in the desert. What pretensions can such a theory make to be in conformity with historical principles? Cannot M. Loisy see that he has only been miracle-mongering with a difference?
It is bad enough that we should be asked to take for granted, on the strength of a typically Eastern record of wholesale thaumaturgy, a real "natural" gift for healing a variety of nervous disorders. But a natural gift of such a kind at least presupposes some process of development. M. Loisy obliviously asks us to believe that all of a sudden a man who had throughout his life shown no abnormal powers or qualities whatever, began to exercise them upon the largest scale almost immediately after he had left his native village. Now, whatever view be taken of the cynical formula that a prophet has no honour in his own village, it is idle to ask us to believe that a great healer has none. The local healer of any sort has an easy opening; and the redacted Gospels indicate uneasy recognition of the plain truth that Jesus needed only to heal the sick at Nazareth as elsewhere to conquer unbelief. It was precisely the cures that, in the Gospel story, had won him fame in the surrounding country. M. Loisy has merely burked the problem.
A little later he takes as historical the "terrible invectives" pronounced against Capernaum and the neighbouring cities, which he attempts to explain. After all, the multitude had not gone beyond a "benevolent curiosity, quite ready to transform itself into an ironical incredulity. They had seen the miracles; they awaited meantime the kingdom, without otherwise preparing for it; and as the kingdom did not come they inclined less and less to believe in it." So they were doomed to a terrible judgment for their faithlessness. But why then was nothing said of the wholly unbelieving Nazareth? [145] If the towns which would not receive the disciples were to be testified against, what should be the fate of the hostile birthplace?