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Mat_26:75. Ἐξελθ . ἕξω ] namely, from the porch (Mat_26:71) in which the second and third denial had taken place. Finding he could no longer repress the feeling of sorrowful penitence that filled his heart, the apostle must go outside to be all alone with his remorse and shame. The fear of being detected (Chrysostom) had by this time undoubtedly become to him a very secondary consideration; he was now himself again.
εἰρηκότος αὐτῷ ] who had said to him (Mat_26:34), in itself a superfluous expression, and yet “grande participium,” Bengel.
πικρῶς ] he wept bitterly. Comp. Isa_22:4, and the passages in Wetstein. How totally different was it with Judas! “Lacrymarum physica amaritudo (comp. Hom. Od. iv. 153) aut dulcedo (comp. γλυκύδακρυς , Meleag. 45), congruit cum affectu animi,” Bengel.
REMARK.
Seeing that the whole four evangelists concur in representing Peter as having denied Jesus three times, we are bound to regard the threefold repetition of the denial as one of the essential features of the incident (in opposition to Paulus, who, in the discrepancies that occur in the various accounts, finds traces of no less than eight different denials). The information regarding this circumstance can only have been derived from Peter himself; comp. also Joh_21:1 ff. As for the rest, however, it must be acknowledged—(1) that John (and Luke too, see on Luk_22:54 ff.) represents the three denials as having taken place in a different locality altogether, namely, in the court of the house in which Annas lived, and not in that of Caiaphas; while to try to account for this by supposing that those two persons occupied one and the same dwelling (Euthymius Zigabenus, Ebrard, Lange, Lichtenstein, Riggenbach, Pressensé, Steinmeyer, Keim), is a harmonistic expedient that is far from according with the clear view of the matter presented in the fourth Gospel; see on Joh_18:16; Joh_18:25. (2) That the Synoptists agree neither with John nor with one another as to certain points of detail connected with the three different scenes in question, and more particularly with reference to the localities in which they are alleged to have taken place, and the persons by whom the apostle was interrogated as to his connection with Jesus; while to say, in attempting to dispose of this, that “Abnegatio ad plures plurium interrogationes facta uno paroxysmo, pro una numeratur” (Bengel), is to make a mere assertion, against which all the accounts of this incident without exception enter, so to speak, an emphatic protest. (3) It is better, on the whole, to allow the discrepancies to remain just as they stand, and to look upon them as sufficiently accounted for by the diverse forms which the primitive tradition assumed in regard to details. This tradition has for its basis of fact the threefold denial, not merely a denial several times repeated, and, as Strauss alleges, reduced to the number three to agree with the prediction of Jesus. It is to the narrative of John, however, as being that of the only evangelist who was an eye-witness, that we ought to trust for the most correct representation of this matter. Olshausen, however, gives to the synoptic narratives with the one hand so much of the merit in this respect as he takes from the Johannine with the other, and thus lays himself open to the charge of arbitrarily confounding them all.