<p>18:18- see on Mt. 26:75; Lk. 22:32.</p><p><em>Now the servants and the officers were standing there, having made a fire of coals. For it was cold, and they were warming themselves; and Peter also was with them, standing and warming himself</em>- The extra information about the fire being of charcoal coals was in order to highlight the similarity with the Lord's later appearance to Peter, again by a charcoal fire, where the three denials are as it were undone by three asservations of loyalty. &quot;The servants and the officers&quot; refers to the very same group who had just arrested the Lord in the garden. In the full Passover moon, they would surely have discerned Peter, and known that it was he who had tried to murder Malchus their colleague. These background factors made Peter's attempts to deny the Lord all the more hopeless, just as hopeless as trying to defend the Lord against a few hundred armed men by trying to kill one of them. Peter is thereby presented as not simply hot-headed, but rather simple, not thinking through the obvious outcome of situations. And yet he, the one with simple loyalty and the sins of a simple man, was the one chosen to establish the Lord's church. The record thereby appeals to the simple, that the Lord's way and even responsibility in His church is for them too.</p>