Cege

I will suppose that Papias was told that Mark's account was correct, and Papias believed what he was told, because there is no report that Papias was acquainted with Jesus. Same goes for believing what he'd heard about the order of events recalled by Mark.

By the time Papias was writing, other accounts about Jesus both oral and written were being circulated. My impression is that Papias defended Mark's gospel stories with an attempt to harmonize them with other gospels and traditions that were becoming known.

Eusebius was not impressed by Papias' method of reasoning, but did preserve Papias' writing in part by quoting from it.

Roger Pearse

It's certainly the logical consequence of much of what one reads in this forum.

But... sanity check. Is it possible that a movement like Christianity was founded by people who never met anyone and never wrote to anyone? That none of the early Christians ever talked to each other?

Revisionism usually demolishes itself eventually.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Solo

Careful what you wish for: the orthodox Christianity itself is revisionism. The church revised the views of loosely related cults whose members either invoked Jesus for a claim they knew everything, or for one he popularized, namely that the world is on the brink of imminent collapse.

Jiri

Ben C Smith

Well, some of us do.

Ben.

Ben C Smith

Neither of these. Polycarp was supposed to have been a hearer of John, and so was Papias.

That Polycarp heard John is fairly certain. That Papias did is controversial. In both cases the matter of which John (John of Zebedee? John the elder?) has to be dealt with.

Ben.

Malachi151

I believe he made this claim because he knew of both the Gospel of Matthew and Mark, and he considered Matthew primary, and the two Gospels have the events taking place in different orders, thus one has to be out of order, and if Matthew were primary, that would make Mark out of order.

Malachi151

Can you provide any evidence to the contrary?

Surely someone knew, but did any of the people that we have documents from, and of the real founders of Christianity, Papias, Clement, Irenaeus, Martyr, etc., have any personal contact with any of the authors of any of the documents that they commented on?

It seems that everything was interpretive. From the very start, people had documents that they had to try and divine the meaning out of themselves, because they couldn't ask the authors what they meant.

Roger Pearse

That's almost a stock atheist reply to any response to one of their posts that they do not like. It is very, very tedious. Please don't do it.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Malachi151

It's a serious questions and now you are being evasive. There does not seem to be, in any account, a continuous line of knowledge or understanding from the authors of any of the New Testament documents to the people who made commentaries on them and used them as religious artifacts and complied them into authoritative texts.

I have yet to find once single commentary that does anything other than guess at what the authors of documents meant, and given that so much has been wrongly classified and interpreted by Christians I cannot conclude anything else than there is some gap between authorship and use.

It would certainly seem to me that the authors of each of the gospels had no personal knowledge of each other or of Paul, except possibly that the author of Mark could have known Paul IMO.

Te authors of the other Epistles certainly didn't know Paul or anyone else, save possibly that the Epistle of Jude was really written by a brother of some James, possibly, though who knows.

I see no evidence that anyone that we know of other than Paul knew Peter.

I see no evidence that anyone that we know of personally knew or had intimate knowledge of any of the Gospel writers, hence the reason they got so much information wrong about the Gospels.

Our first commentaries come from the 2nd century, and from the very beginning, all we have is guesswork on their part.

DCHindley

Roger,

Who, exactly, is doing this revisionism?

The term commonly refers to those who challenge the status quo by revising previous interpretations of historical evidence in order to bring them into conformity with modern understandings of how the world, and societies, work.

However, it is important to remember that the socalled "revisionists" were in fact asserting the the status quo understanding of things were frequently naive rationalizations, often strung together into elaborate myths, that when examined using modern methods and a broader comprehension of the available evidence, just do not make coherent sense.

Whether for good or for bad, 2nd century Christian writers and their interpreters of the 3rd and 4th centuries seemed to have had only the sketchiest knowledge about the early personalities and the events that forged the faith that they themselves knew. They also projected back the beliefs of their time into the past, and thus the brothers and uncles of Jesus observed a pure and unadultered Christian message until wiped out somewhere around the time of Trajan, when the movement of Jewish "christians" they headed fell into "error."

History is all about interpretation of an incomplete set of facts that have come to us by the accident of preservation. One of the most important tools for the interpreter is the use of alalogy. One of the unfortunate byproducts of this is that all historians project a certain degree of their own conceptions of reality back into the period they are interpreting.

As our understanding of the world and societies increases, revision of previously held interporetations will, and must, occur.

Dave Hindley