Papias most likely wrote c. 130, indeed a hundred years late, and he was a gullible fool
https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/10064
Papias claims that (although we can’t confirm that he was referring to the same Gospel we have) half a century after the fact. But Papias shows he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He thinks Matthew was translated from Hebrew when in fact it’s a direct copy of the Greek of Mark and relies on Septuagint Greek elsewhere, and the Greek edition of Q (if you believe in Q), and thus can’t ever have been in Hebrew. And he evidently doesn’t know that Mark is a Gentile Gospel, whereas Peter was a Torah-observant Christian, and thus would never have been preaching the version of the Gospel we find in Mark (but rather the version we find in Matthew, if anything). There are other quotes from Papias that show he was very gullible and believed all kinds of absurd stories. Even Eusebius said he was a man of very little intelligence. He’s pretty much the worst source you could ever base anything on.
Christians (alone in antiquity, and solely in this case) quickly conflated these concepts because they needed the sources to be the authors themselves, and legends grew advocating that view (e.g. it’s obvious Irenaeus, and everyone else, got this idea from Papias, who says he learned it from dubious oral lore, even though Papias was a stupid and gullible man, as Eusebius reports, and what he wrote about the Gospels is either false or not even referring to our Gospels, since we can see it fails to match them).
He never mentions who the authors of the Gospels are.
The others say nothing more than what Papias does (beyond elaborating on it with even more ridiculous legends) and they either identify Papias as their source (e.g. Irenaeus) or don’t even mention how they know what they report.
Mark is a Pauline Gospel (Papias errs in thinking it’s a Petrine Gospel, when in fact it is anti-Petrine and promotes Paul’s view, not Peter’s). Thus, one can infer an attempt was being made to connect it as directly as possible to Paul, without trying to claim Paul wrote a book no one ever heard of before (a claim that would raise immediate suspicion, since Paul’s writings were known, and known not to have included or referred to any such book). Then someone in Peter’s sect got annoyed by this and “rewrote” Mark to sell Peter’s sect instead of Paul’s…that Gospel is known as Matthew. Since it copies verbatim from Mark, it clearly isn’t an honest book (they are pretending to tell the true story, but secretly stealing someone else’s story, word for word, and passing it off as their own, and changing it, rather than telling their own story). Matthew is an apostle’s name.
https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/425
https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/16580
According to Papias, there was an Elder John who with Aristion were other disciples of Jesus in addition to the Twelve about whom there’s no particular interest in a mythological background. Many scholars think, and I think with very good reason, that the Elder John is the same one who wrote the Johannine epistles and begins 1 John, “That which we have seen and heard and touched, we deliver as witnesses to you.”
Added Note: Again MacDonald here starts leaning on a ton of undemonstrated (and frankly implausible) assumptions about the texts of Papias and the Johannine epistles. I didn’t get the chance to call them all out in out ensuing dialogue. But for the record:
- Papias never links the person he calls “John the Elder” to either the Gospel or any of the Epistles that would later be attributed to a John (Eusebius says Papias used material from what we call 1 John but not whether Papias knew it as such, and no actual quote from Papias confirms either);
- There actually are no Epistles in the Bible that themselves say they were written by any John—they only say “the Elder,” not which one (and 1 John doesn’t even say that much); so far as we know, the name “John” was assigned to those letters later, not by their author;
- The Beloved Disciple whom the authors of the Gospel of John claim as their source is also never called John, or the Elder (and all the evidence in the Gospel itself argues it’s Lazarus that was meant: see On the Historicity of Jesus, pp. 500-05, with scholars supporting cited);
- At no point does the Gospel of John say it was written by anyone named John, or the Elder, or had anyone named John or the Elder as its source;
- Papias never says “John the Elder” or “Aristion” were “in addition” to the twelve disciples (Papias also never says how he knows they were disciples, and remember, Papias is well known to be an extremely unreliable source);
- The text of Papias we have never says either John the Elder or Aristion were still alive—Papias’s own quoted words only say he hunted down what others reported them to have said; not that he got it from them—he never says who he got it from (Irenaeus and Eusebius would later mistake this for Papias claiming to have “heard them” directly, but that’s clearly not what Papias actually said—they likely confused this for his tutelage under a different Elder named John).
- I should also add that the line in 1 John about handling Jesus so self-evidently is a derivative reference to the Thomas passage in the Gospel of John (as also the first lines of John) that I struggle to comprehend how anyone could think it precedes it, or is in any way actually written by a real witness. So that requires yet another undemonstrated assumption, on top of all those just enumerated, where in each case MacDonald rests his case for Jesus on assumptions beyond or even contrary to what’s actually in evidence.
- Although I should further add that MacDonald will go on to say he “demonstrates” that latter, rather strange opinion in his book The Dionysian Gospel; I haven’t had occasion to check that, but from how he kept arguing here on other like subjects, I expect what he means is, if we adopt a whole raft of undemonstrated assumptions, then we can conclude 1 John predates John. Which would not be a demonstration, but an unsupported speculation.
https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/17763
. . . The great church historian of the fourth century, Eusebius, dismissed Papias by saying that he was “a man of very small intelligence” (Church History 3.39).
https://vridar.org/2016/03/12/the-ever-convenient-papias/
Richard: Yeah. I mean, Papias never connects the John that he’s talking about with any letters, or with the Gospel, and I side with the scholars, and there have been several who have published on this, that the person that they’re talking about in John 21 in Lazarus, not John. And there’s a real big, I mean, a really good literary case for this that I documented in On the Historicity of Jesus.
Richard: Yeah, and I think Eusebius says that there are problems there as to which John is who, and whether Papias is correct. Eusebius didn’t trust Papias.
https://infidels.org/library/modern/richard-carrier-ntcanon/
The first author who shows a more concerted interest in textual sources is Papias. We do not know when he wrote, but presumably it was between 110 and 140, and most likely 130 or later (M 51-2). What he wrote has not survived, apart from fragmentary quotations in other works of his “Expositions of the Sayings of the Lord” which purported to be a collection of things he had actually heard said by the students of elders who claimed to have known the first disciples (yes, this sounds a lot like “a friend of a friend of a friend”), since he specifically regarded this as more useful than anything written, according to a quotation of his preface by Eusebius (History of the Church, 3.39.4), where Papias says “I did not think that information from books would help me so much as the utterances of a living and surviving voice” (M 52). Thus, Papias reveals the early Christian preference for oral rather than written tradition. It was only in the later 2nd century that this preference began to change. Other quotations of his work show how destructive this ‘preference for oral tradition’ was, since Papias apparently recorded the most outlandish claims as if they were true, such as the fact that Judas’ head bloated to greater than the width of a wagon trail and his eyes were lost in the flesh, and that the place where he died maintained a stench so bad that no one, even to his own day, would go near it (from book 4 of the Expositions, quoted by Apollinaris of Laodicea, cf. footnote 23 in M p. 53).
Of note in the surviving quotations of this same work are his claims about the writing of Mark and Matthew. The latter, he claimed, was a collection by Matthew of the sayings of Jesus in Hebrew, which several others had translated “as best they could” (M 54). This is the origin of the belief that the Gospel of Matthew was originally written in Hebrew, but there are three points against such a belief. First, we have seen that Papias is hugely unreliable. Second, he is not describing a Gospel at all, but a collection of sayings. He is thus describing some other book now lost (some have suggested it was the Q document), or that had never existed in the first place. Third, it is distinctly possible, since the text is vague, that instead of the “Hebrew sayings of Jesus” this book contained the “Hebrew (i.e. OT) prophecies about Jesus,” which curiously fits the fact that the Gospel of Matthew is the one to include many of these prophetic claims and allusions. Moreover, the word for “translated” may mean “interpreted,” in which case what Papias is describing is perhaps a proto-Matthew containing a bare collection of OT prophecies, from which were drawn a few by the later author of the Gospel of Matthew, who had done his own “interpreting” of how they applied to Jesus. But this is speculative. At any rate, Papias only hints at a possible name for a possible Gospel author. And this reference is most likely to a different, now lost, work. This remark of Papias thus could have become an inspiration for naming a certain Gospel after the same man. So this is not entirely helpful.
Papias’s account of Mark is stranger still. He says Mark was Peter’s secretary (perhaps getting the idea from 1 Peter 5.13), and though he had never known Jesus, he followed Peter around and recorded everything he said, leaving nothing out and changing no details (M 54-5). However, he did not “set in order” the sayings of Jesus. It is hard to tell what he means, but scholars see in his account a growing apologetic in defense of Mark: Mark was regarded as unreliable because he did not know Jesus, and he was attacked for being incomplete and disorderly, and so on, so Papias defends him by putting him in the entourage of Peter and asserting that he faithfully recorded what Peter said, and so on. What is evident is that this, the first historical thinking about Christian literary traditions, shows a possible corruption of reliability by oral transmission and a readiness to engage in apologetic distortions.[5] This does not create much confidence in later reports, and raises the real possibility that other claims to authority are rhetorical rather than genuine (such as that made in the closing paragraphs of the Gospel of John). But at least we now discover (perhaps), between 110 to 140 A.D., the first definite name of a Gospel author: Mark. There is one outstanding problem for these references to Mark and Matthew in Papias: they appear only in Eusebius, who is notorious for reporting (if not creating) forgeries.[6] We cannot establish whether this has happened in this case, but there must always remain a pall of suspicion. Even if accurate, there is another side of the story: the situation evident in Papias is that there is little regard for any written Gospels, in contrast with nearly complete faith in oral tradition, with little critical thought being applied.[7] More importantly, the context seems to be one where there were perhaps no set written Gospels in his day, but an array of variously-worked texts. And this picture is somewhat confirmed by the remarkable discovery of fragments dated c. 130-180 A.D. from a lost synoptic Gospel, the composition of which has been dated “not later than A.D. 110-30” (M 167). In this text, there are echoes from all four Gospels, but also miracles and sayings of Jesus found nowhere else, and it appears the author was working not from textual sources but from memory, and composing freely in his own style (M 168). It is likely that this, in part, is how all the Gospels were written. Moreover, it is possible that the canonical Gospels did not achieve their final (near-present) form until during or shortly after the time of Papias.
In the same period, Polycarp wrote a letter which cites “Jesus” for certain sayings a hundred times, and the sayings match closely those appearing in the Gospels (and even things written in numerous Epistles, which were not originally attributed to Jesus), but he does not name any sources (M 59-61). We see the authority of oral tradition is again elevated above the written–like all the previous authors, no NT text is called scripture, though many OT texts are, and the only cited source for NT information is the report of ‘unnamed’ evangelists (Epistle of Polycarp, 4.3). However, a sign of a change lies in the very purpose of the letter: it is a preface to a collection of letters by Ignatius which another church had requested be copied and sent on to them. The interest in written documents is thus rising among Christian congregations in this period (unfortunately, this could also be a source of interpolated Gospel quotations in Ignatius). And so it is in this milieu, between 138 and 147 A.D., that the first philosophical defense of Christianity addressed to an Emperor (Antoninus Pius) appears, written by Aristides of Athens, in which there was vaguely mentioned “what [the Christians] call the holy Gospel writing” (M 127-8) which is alleged to be powerful in its effect on readers.
Yet Tertullian attacks Marcion for not having named the author of the book, but simply calling it “the Gospel” (Against Marcion 4.2), even though everyone had been doing just the same thing before him. Thus it is possible, if not likely, that by 144 the Gospel of Luke had not yet received its name. We have already seen how around 130 Papias perhaps names Mark so as to defend its authority, and alludes to a text by Matthew which could have inspired naming another Gospel after him, the one which seemed to rely most on OT prophecies. Thus, the very need to assert authority is perhaps compelling church leaders to give names to the Gospel authors sometime between 110 and 150, in order that the authority of certain Gospels can be established.
In the first of these works, Justin describes “Memoirs of the Apostles” (borrowing consciously from the idea of Xenophon’s “Memoirs of Socrates”) which he says are called Gospels (1st Apology 66.3). He quotes Luke, Matthew and Mark, and uses distinctly Johanine theology, which accords to a great deal with the Judaized Neoplatonism of Philo the Jew, who wrote c. 40 A.D. Justin calls Mark the “Memoirs of Peter” (M 145), perhaps influenced by Papias (or both are following a common oral tradition). Justin also tells us that services were conducted by reading from these books, followed by a sermon, then communal prayer (1st Apology 67.3-5), demonstrating the rising interest in and use of written texts in the churches. Justin’s choice of Gospels could have been influenced by his location (Rome) or some other preferences unknown to us, but it is a crucial consideration because the first “orthodox” canon is devised by Justin’s pupil, Tatian, who would thus have favored the choices of the man who had converted and instructed him. Finally, Justin quotes a lot of additional oral tradition outside these Gospels (M 147-8), including the belief that Jesus was born in a cave outside Bethlehem (Dialogue with Trypho 78.5). He also refers to the Revelation to John, but never mentions or quotes any Epistles.
It may have preserved the tradition that Mark was Peter’s secretary (the second line implies parallels with remarks about this by Papias). But it clearly states the belief that Luke was a physician and Paul’s secretary (based no doubt on Col. 4.14, Philem. 24, and 2 Tim. 4.11), and adds that John was written by the Apostle John and then reviewed and approved by all the other Apostles.
renaeus describes Papias as “the hearer of John and a companion of Polycarp” (in Against Heresies 5.33.4). Not Polycarp was the hearer of John. Moreover, we know from Eusebius (History of the Church 3.39) that the “John” Papias meant was not John the Apostle, but a much later John, John the Elder (Ibid. 4-6). Papias was older than Polycarp. Yet Papias himself never says he met any Apostles—John or otherwise—but only rummaged the earth for rumors others were telling about what the apostles of old had said. As with Polycarp, the notion that Papias met any apostles was a later legend claimed by others, but clearly contradicted in quotations of Papias himself. And if Papias was an older companion of Polycarp, and Papias never met any Apostles, it’s fair to say Polycarp didn’t either. To the contrary, by confusing which John Papias claimed to have tutored under, the legend grew that Papias had studied under John the Disciple, and as Papias was a companion of Polycarp, this became “Polycarp studied under John the Disciple.” Just another telephone game.
https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/15999
We can tell from Papias that no one had such lists earlier on, and that people had lost track of even what went on in Christianity in the period from the 60s to the 130s. The lists only appear later, unsourced. And everyone had their own. Which is why few scholars today trust them.
But as I noted, even if they were real, they tell us nothing, because mere names are not what we want to know. We want to know what each party said to the next one, what traditions they kept or changed, and whether they actually chose their successors or someone else did (e.g. one man can be ousted and another appointed by the congregation or a faction, causing a complete change in teachings, and it would look identical on a mere list of successors), etc. So even if we could somehow verify any of these lists were accurate and not made up later (and we can’t), we’re in the same place we started.
As to Papias, no one who quotes Papias attesting facts of the early church ever quotes him mentioning succession lists (yet they surely would have, had he done do), and the quotes we do have from Papias show doctrine was then not being disseminated by any specific succession but by diverse successions, informally and orally (e.g. he says he hunted down and spoke to people who were the disciples of apostles or the disciples of the disciples of apostles; there being, evidently, no single tradition he could hew to), and what Papias reports is frequently demonstrably false, confused, or poorly informed, thus demonstrating there was no reliable transmission of anything in his day.
No comments:
Post a Comment