head or throat. This blow with a sword is violence with possibly mortal consequences. The anonymous young man has also offered resistance. In the struggle, his clothes are torn off, so that he has to run away naked. Both these people were in danger in the aftermath. As long as the high priest’s slave was alive (and as long as the scar from the sword cut was visible) it would have been inopportune to mention their names; it would not even have been wise to identify them as members of the early Christian community. Their anonymity is for their protection, and the obscuring of their positive relationship to Jesus is a strategy of caution. Both the teller and the hearers know more about these two people. Only they could tell us who they were, whether Peter was the one with the sword, whether both are the same person, and whether reference was made to them in order to make the story of Jesus’ end more credible. All that will have to remain closed to us.
Nevertheless, on this basis, it is made plausible that the anonymity of these characters is for the sake of prudence.
Theissen writes: “If we are correct in our hypothesis of protective anonymity, the location of the Passion tradition would be unmistakable. Only in Jerusalem was there reason to draw a cloak of anonymity over followers of Jesus who had endangered themselves by their actions. The date could also be pinpointed: parts of the Passion account would have to have been composed within the generation of the eyewitnesses and their contemporaries, that is, somewhere between 30 and 60 C.E.”
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- The Third Station: Jesus Is Condemned by the Sanhedrin by Mark D. Roberts (trinityspeaks.wordpress.com)
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