show_no_mercy

Papias doesn't write against gnosticism, but his contemporary the Elder John does (actually he's probably writing against docetism in 1 John). Polycarp, who is also a contemporary of Papias does so as well. Unless you date the epistles of John the Elder and Polycarp to later than Papias? From what I've read, both of those authors were writing in the early 2nd century around the same time as Papias (or by some 1 John was written in the late 1st).

Steven Carr

Which first century document is by somebody who names himself as ever having heard of Judas or Thomas?

Roger Pearse

This places Papias much too late. John was around in AD 100. Presumably he was 20 or so when he met Jesus.

Because he lived on after the other apostles, quite a few people knew him. Indeed we could tell that he was around a lot later than the others, if we didn't know, from the way that he has left all these anecdotes scattered around the Fathers.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

aa5874

The letters with the name Paul have been found to have been manipulated. Eusebeius claimed all the Pauline letters were authentic, but as would be expected, Eusebius appears to be wrong, it has been deduced that more than one person used the name Paul.

The Pauline letters are worthless as historical markers. They have have no corroborative support and the Church writers were either fooled or try to fool their readers about letters the Pauline character actually wrote and when those letters were written.

The Church writers claimed the Pauline writer had a close companion named Luke who wrote Acts of the Apostles, but this close companion of the Pauline character produced a most fictitious outrageous account of his conversion claiming Jesus Christ blinded him to reality with a bright light. Utter non-sense.

It is just absurd to use manipulated writings filled with fiction to corroborate other sources filled with the very same unconfirmed characters and fictitious events.

spin

Well, what do we know about this John the Theologian? or was it John the Elder? This latter is associated with an otherwise unknown Aristion.


spin

jakejonesiv

Hi Vinnie,

You are correct that terminus ad quem is the latest possible date for something.

The terminus ad quem for a work is determined by by the appearance of external corroboration. For Papias, this is determined by Irenaeus mentioning him ca. 185 CE in AH.

Will you correct the useage of the term in your articles?

Best,
Jake Jones IV

jakejonesiv

Why is that? Even if for sake of argument, 1 Clement and the Ignatiana are deemed authentic, we still don’t have external attestation to any Pauline epistle before the very late first/early second century. And then it is limited to the single epistle 1 Corinthians, where the opponents appear to be the Cerinthians.

Please allow me to ask a very simple question to illustrate my point. When is the very first time that the epistle to the Galatians is mentioned by name?

Best,
Jake Jones IV

jakejonesiv

But if Jesus lived to an advanced age, (even up to the time of Trajan?), as Irenaeus believed according to AH 2:22, then all the conventional dates are off by twenty years.

Jake

Roger Pearse

One might equally ask whether Hermias was composed at the renaissance, having passed through the years without being quoted by anyone.

This whole genre of argument is horribly flawed. Date a text from the evidence, not from this "must be dated as late as possible" approach.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

RParvus

As O’Connell notes, the Papias passage is puzzling in many ways. There is, first of all, the fact that Elder John’s name occurs twice in it. He is listed among the elders whose past sayings interest Papias. And he is paired with Aristion (who is not described as being an elder). Both Aristion and elder John, as O’Connell correctly notes, “were still alive” when Papias was collecting his information. Now the question immediately arises: Why would Papias even bother about gathering information about Jesus by the indirect route (through a friend of friend of a friend) when presumably an endless supply of information was available directly from elder John who was still alive? To my mind, the most reasonable answer to that question is that access to elder John must have been limited in some way.

Other puzzles: Who was Aristion? Why is he paired with elder John? And since he was not an elder, why is his name even in Papias’ list?

I have a theory regarding the origin of John’s Gospel that I believe also provides plausible solutions to the above puzzles. For more particulars on my theory see the two postings I made to the July 17, 2009 thread “Was Acts Written by a Montanist?” Basically, I propose that the “Signs Source” used to construct the Fourth Gospel was the mid second century work entitled “Manifestaions” (Phaneroseis) written by Apelles, the ex-disciple of Marcion. Apelles’ book was a kind of gospel that he put together from revelations made by his prophetess associate Philumena. An extant fragment from Tertullian's “Against the Apelleans” describes how Philumena supposedly received her revelations from a phantom boy who appeared to her: “The same phantom appeared to Philumena dressed as a boy and sometimes stated he was Christ, sometimes Paul, and she would tell the audience what the phantom said” (Migne’s Latin Patrology 42:30, note 1).

Now, as you may know, John is often presented as the youngest of the twelve apostles. And there were some in the early church who claimed he was no more than a boy. Pseudo-Hilary wrote:

“John the most holy evangelist was the youngest among all the apostles. Him the Lord held in his arms when the apostles discussed who among them was the greatest and when he said: ‘He who is not converted as this boy (“puer”) will not enter the kingdom of heaven.’ It is he who reclined against the Lord’s breast. It is he whom Jesus loved more than the others and to whom he gave his mother Mary, and whom he gave as son to Mary.”

Ambrose too claims to have read in a gospel “dictated by the voice of John himself” that the evangelist was a youth (“adolescens”). And Jerome says he read in certain ecclesiastical histories that the evangelist John was a mere boy (“puer”), the youngest of all the apostles. (For more on the evangelist John as a boy see chapter 12 of Robert Eisler’s “The Enigma of the Fourth Gospel”).

If the discourses supposedly revealed to Philumena are behind John’s Gospel, and if the phantom boy she claimed as the source of her information was John, I believe we can make sense of what Papias was saying. Here’s how:

1. As Papias saw it, John was an elder because he was one of those whom Jesus chose to be a disciple during his earthly ministry. But elder John was also a contemporary of Papias because he was regularly appearing from beyond to Philumena and revealing to her what Jesus and Paul said. Thus the boy disciple John not only “had said” certain things back in the first century, he still “was saying” things in the second century. And it is understandable that Papias had so little regard for written sources of information, when the “living and abiding voice” of the phantom boy was still supposedly being heard, at least by Philumena. Papias doesn’t claim that he himself heard elder John speaking. He didn’t have that kind of access. That is where Aristion comes in.

2. Aristion was not an elder, but was paired with elder John because it was he who, by relaying the revelations of Philumena, was effectively the conduit for what elder John was saying. This is why Papias was interested in what Aristion “was saying” and named him before elder John. Aristion, I propose, was another name for Apelles. The “Apostolic Constitutions” (7,46) contain a reference to someone with a very similar name —Aristo—and list him as the first bishop of Smyrna. We can couple this with the fact that both the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox traditions, in their martyrologies, honor an Apelles as the first bishop of Smyrna, though they claim to know very little about him. True, other traditions consider Polycarp to be the first bishop of Smyrna. I suspect both are correct: Polycarp was the proto-orthodox bishop of Smyrna at about the same time that Apelles was the Apellean bishop of Smyrna. If, as I contend, Apelles and some of his followers eventually reconciled with the proto-orthodox church, we would effectively have two people who could lay claim to having been the first bishop of Smyrna.

3. But if this scenario is correct, why didn’t Papias name Philumena along with Aristion and elder John? I believe it likely that he did, but that her name had to be deleted later when she was caught in adultery. However much compassion Papias might have had for the fallen Philumena, he could hardly keep an adulteress in his list of sources. And note that, as O’Connell correctly points out in his article, Papias knew the story of the woman caught in adultery. This is the same story that was inserted into second century Old Latin versions of John’s Gospel as a symbolic acknowledgment of Philumena’s role in the composition of that gospel (Again, see the previously referenced thread “Was Acts Written by a Montanist?”)

Best regards,

Roger