Why did the author turn into a miracle the foresight that is explained quite rationally within the story? The most likely explanation is that he himself does not understand this rationality or does not fully understand it. This is what happens, I believe, in the story of the renunciation. The editor clearly sees that there is some consistency behind the external inconsistency in Peter's behavior, but he does not know what it is. He sees the importance of the concept of "skandalon", but does not know how to use it, and only repeats word for word what he has heard on this subject from Jesus himself or from the first mediator. In the same way, the editor does not understand the role of the rooster in this story. It's not so scary, but two misunderstandings quite naturally attract each other and combine, eventually leading to the miracle of a rooster's crow. The two ambiguities correspond to each other and reflect each other, although in the final analysis each seems to explain the existence of the other, but inevitably in a supernatural way. An inexplicable but tangible rooster focuses the inexplicability scattered throughout the scene. In any knowledge that is inaccessible to them, people are inclined to see some kind of miracle, and one outwardly mysterious, but concrete detail is enough for the crystallization of the myth to occur. And here we have a rooster, partially turned into a fetish.

My analysis is inevitably speculative. But there are indications in the Gospels that support it. Jesus is critical of the disciples' excessive love for miracles and their inability to understand the teaching they imparted. There are two weaknesses here, or rather two aspects of the same weakness, which must be assumed in order to understand the insertion of a miracle into a scene that does not need a miracle in the least. The unnecessary presence of this miracle harms the scene of renunciation, since it overshadows the excellent understanding of human behavior that is manifested in the text. And a miracle encourages intellectual and even spiritual laziness in both believers and non-believers.

The text of the Gospels was worked out among the first disciples. The testimony of the first and then the second Christian generation, although corrected by the experience of Pentecost, knew the shortcomings that Jesus himself points out. The texts emphasize the lack of understanding of revelation by the disciples, even the best ones, not to humiliate the disciples of the first hour or to belittle them in the eyes of posterity, but to indicate the distance that separates Jesus and his spirit from those who first heard his message and passed it on to us. I think this indication should not be neglected when we interpret the Gospels two thousand years later in a world which has no more natural insight than it did in the time of Jesus, but which, however, for the first time became able to understand certain aspects of his teaching, because this world, our own, has been slowly imbued with his teaching over the centuries. These are not necessarily the aspects that first come to mind when we hear the words "Christianity" or even "Gospels," but they are most necessary in order to better understand texts such as the scene of the renunciation.

If I am right, if the evangelists do not fully understand the rationality of Peter's denial and Jesus' prophecy about him, then our text is striking in that it tells both the miracle inserted into the scene by editors who do not fully understand its logic, and the data that today allow us to reveal this logic. That is, it is the Gospels that give us all those fragments of testimony that they themselves are not fully capable of interpreting, since they replace the rational interpretation with an irrational interpretation, which we ourselves identify on the basis of the same data. I always remember that we cannot say anything about Jesus that is not taken from the Gospels.

Our text adds a wonderful explanation to a scene that is easier to interpret without the help of this miracle. Consequently, despite their inability to understand the full meaning of the testimony, the Gospel editors collected and reproduced fragments of this testimony with astonishing accuracy. If I am right, then their inability in some points is compensated by their extreme accuracy in all other points.

At first sight this combination of merits and demerits is difficult to reconcile, but it is enough to think about it and we will see that it is, on the contrary, quite plausible and even probable, if even in part the elaboration of the Gospels was influenced by that mimeticism of which Jesus constantly reproaches his first disciples, a mimeticism which is manifested in their behavior and the functioning of which they (quite normally) cannot fully comprehend. because they did not quite manage to get rid of it.

The mythological crystallization around the rooster, if I read it correctly, would reveal a phenomenon of mimetic exacerbation analogous to those exemplified by the Gospels themselves. For example, in the murder of John the Baptist, the motif of the head on a platter arises from a too literal imitation. To be truly true, the transmission of meaning from one individual to another, translation from one language to another, requires a certain distance. The copyist, who is too close to his model because he is too absorbed in it, reproduces all its details with admirable accuracy, but from time to time he succumbs to weaknesses, mythological in the proper sense of the word. It is the all-powerful mimetic attentiveness, the utmost concentration on the victim-model that leads to primitive sacralization, to the deification of the scapegoat, whose innocence is not recognized.

The merits and demerits of the Gospel witness are revealed in a particularly clear and contrasting form in the interpretation of the key concept for mimetic interpretation – the concept of "scandal".

All the most interesting cases of the use of the words skandalon and skandalidzein are put into the mouth of Jesus himself and appear in the form of fragments distributed more or less randomly. Important statements are not always given in a logical sequence and their order often changes from one Gospel to another. This order, as researchers have shown, can be determined by the presence of a word in a given phrase that entails another phrase solely because this word also occurs there. It can be assumed that we are dealing with the recitation of phrases learned by heart and interconnected by mnemotechnical techniques.

Therefore, in order to find out the explanatory value of the "scandal," we need to rearrange all these phrases, we need to treat them as pieces of a puzzle that will coincide with the mimetic theory once we find the right arrangement for them. This is what I tried to show in "The Innermost from the Creation of the World".

Thus, we have an extremely coherent whole, but this coherence could not be seen by the interpreters, because its constituent parts were mixed up, and sometimes even distorted, due to the lack of competence of the Gospel writers. Left to themselves, they do not know how to explicate this knowledge, although they make the general statement that Jesus "knew what is in man" (Jn 2:25). All the data are in their hands, but they are presented in a kind of disorder and littered with miracles, since the authors have only half of these data.

The Gospels have an irreducibly supernatural aspect, and I am not trying to deny or belittle it. For the sake of this supernatural aspect, however, we must not abandon the forms of understanding that are now available to us, and if they are indeed forms of understanding, they cannot but diminish the role of the miraculous. The miraculous, by definition, is incomprehensible; therefore, it is not a genuine work of the spirit in the Gospel sense. There is a greater miracle than a miracle in the narrow sense, and this miracle is in the fact that the previously incomprehensible becomes comprehensible, in the fact that mythological obscurity becomes transparent.

Faced with the Gospel text, all bigoticisms, both pro- and anti-Christian, want to see nothing but miracles and unreservedly condemn even the most legitimate attempts to show that the role of miracles may be exaggerated. But there is nothing anti-evangelical in such attempts: the Gospels themselves warn us against abusing the miraculous.

The rationality that I am discovering here, the mimeticism of human relations, is too systematic in its principle, too complex in its effects, and too clearly present, both in the "theoretical" passages about "scandal" and in the passages entirely subordinated to the idea of "scandal," to appear here by chance. And yet this rationality is not fully thought out, and therefore certainly not created by the people who placed it here. If they had fully understood it, they would not have placed the clumsy screen of the wonderful between the readers and the episodes interpreted above.