jakejonesiv

Let's take a little quiz.

Who crucified the flesh?
Who bears the stigmata?
Whose sufferings in the flesh completed what was lacking in Christ's afflictions?
Who was welcomed as if he were Christ Jesus Himself?
Whom did God predestine before his birth to reveal His Son in?
Who was crucified, and now he no longer lives, but Christ lives in his flesh?
Who already had been raised up to sit together in heavenly places?
Who, reading this post, sees what I am getting at?

Jake Jones IV

Gamera

That's a principled position to take. Its consequences are we teach classical history not as known events, but historiographical claims, i.e., as textual histories in which we focus on the narratives not on the unknowable substrate of possible events and personages.

I'm up for that, but I don't think most established curricula are.

Gamera

This may weaken the case for Papias's claims, but not invalidate it. Pseudographia almost always attaches itself to known historical personages. That's kind of the point of the "pseudo." So let's assume there is a pseudo Papias whose texts Iraneus and Eusebius drew upon. That implies an actual Papias, and while that may cast into doubt the details of his alleged writings, it is secondary evidence for the historicity of Jesus and the mss tradition that resulted in the gospels. Why else would there be a bishop of Hierapolis in the early second century, unless there was this cast of characters that started the Jesus movement on its way?

To get back to the hearsay rule (regrettably and only reluctantly), this is exactly not hearsay because the truth of the matter asserted in Papias' writings is not at issue, only their existence as evidence of the existence of a bishop of Heirapolis in the early second century that somebody bothered to use as a basis for a pseudographic text because they had some knowledge of his existence. And a bishop in the early 2nd century is probative of a religious movement that established that institution. And a religious movement requires an origin and means of tranmitting ideas. And the orthodox view seems to fit the bill, whereas a JM approach doesn't.

Ben C Smith

Paul and fellow believers, in an obviously metaphorical sense.

Francis of Assisi.

Paul (but only according to an early admirer).

Lots of people in history, including Paul.

Paul, for one.

Paul and fellow believers.

Pseudo-Paul and fellow believers.

I for one do not. Sorry. Maybe I am just not smart enough to connect all these dots.

Ben.

Ben C Smith

Remember, as per your first statement, that we are trying to see if Eusebius has quoted Papias somewhat accurately.

Here are the data, working back from Eusebius, who writes:

[Papias wrote:] And the elder would say this: Mark, who had become the interpreter of Peter, wrote accurately, yet not in order, as many things as he remembered of the things either said or done by the Lord. For he neither heard the Lord nor followed him, but later, as I said, Peter, who would make the teachings to the needs, but not making them as an ordering together of the lordly oracles, so that Mark did not sin having thus written certain things as he remembered them. For he made one provision, to leave out nothing of the things that he heard or falsify anything in them.

Irenaeus had already written:

But after the exodus of these men Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, himself also delivered to us in writing the things preached by Peter, and Luke also, the follower of Paul, set down in a book the gospel preached by that man.

Now, it is possible so far that Eusebius got this tradition from Irenaeus, either developing it himself or finding it already developed, and attributed it to Papias. Except that we also have Victorinus:

Mark, the interpreter of Peter, having remembered the things that he taught in his duty wrote it down, but not in order, and began with the word of prophecy announced beforehand through Isaiah.

Now, it is quite unlikely that Eusebius knew this passage from Victorinus, since his knowledge of Latin literature was so poor. Andrew Carriker, in The Library of Eusebius of Caesarea, lists every volume known (from references in both Origen and Eusebius) to have been available to our favorite bishop, and Victorinus is not there.

This makes a true triangulation possible. Eusebius, while he certainly knew Irenaeus, is not dependent on Victorinus; nor (and this is important) is Victorinus dependent solely upon Irenaeus, since Victorinus preserves a detail that Irenaeus does not, the not in order bit. (And Victorinus, a chiliast, is for entirely independent reasons already thought to have known the work of Papias.)

It seems unlikely that someone in the age of orthodoxy would add the not in order detail to the tradition, but of course nobody would blink if Irenaeus omitted it.

This places the origin of the Mark-interpreter-of-Peter-but-not-in-order tradition before Irenaeus.

We can go further. Justin calls the gospel with the Boanerges detail the memoirs of Peter. This does not mean that Peter authored it, since the memoirs of Socrates, for example, were authored by Xenophon. But it appears to connect Peter with some recension of our canonical Mark (I will not commit to its exact form at this stage).

The question then presses itself: Which form of the tradition is probably earlier, the form that mentions only Peter or the form that has Mark remembering what Peter said? Surely it is more likely that the gospel was originally attributed to Mark on the basis of Peter, then later Mark could drop out from time to time.

This means the tradition most likely predates Justin (who was free to select only the best bits of it). And Papias, as presented to us by Eusebius (known already for his lengthy verbatim quotations), fits the bill.

I thought you might say that. Good thing there are historians around who are not so squeamish.

I am struggling to see what this has to do with anything to date. Of course Eusebius is credulous. Of course he makes mistakes. Egregious ones. But I think he was quoting an actual document. I do not think he made up the tradition. Nor is the Abgar tradition quite traceable in the same way that the Papias tradition is.

The above is based on intrinsic probabilities. It is not iron-clad. But Papias writing basically what Eusebius attributes to him (at least the parts confirmed by Victorinus) seems by far the best explanation of what Justin, Irenaeus, Victorinus, and Eusebius later write.

Give content to what? Irenaeus explicitly attributed an entire paragraph to Papias (about vineyard productivity in the millennium). It just had nothing to do with gospel authorship.

I like the middle recension myself. But I am open to other ideas. Still, I do not know what this has to do with Papias.

If you want to say that Eusebius attributed his lengthy quotation to Papias incorrectly, just present your case. I have presented a case that seems to place the origins of the tradition before Justin Martyr. If you want to deny it to Papias and attribute it to his brother by the same name, so be it.

Yes, yes, all traceable errors or exaggerations. Take Tertullian and Ebion, for instance. Since so many of the heresies were named after their founders, it is understandable that somebody might presume the same of the Ebionites. Hence Ebion. That is truly excellent scholarship. Now, what can you offer me of that same quality for Papias? If the attribution was in error, trace the error. Not my job is certainly not going to cut it.

This particular Papias quote appeals to me precisely because I can justify it historically. Some of the later attributed quotes, such as those raised from the dead living to the time of Hadrian, are much less historically appealing to me because I can see the source of the error (in this case a confusion with Quadratus).

Ben.

Ben C Smith

Jake, I apologize for my denseness. Perhaps it is because I am fighting off a head cold.

I am having great difficulty connecting a descent into the underworld what Paul ascribes to Jesus. Are you saying that Paul thought of the crucifixion as having happened in the underworld?

The Elysian fields... were they not thought to be on earth somewhere, in the far west? Like the isles of the blessed?

The stuff about ascending to heaven. Yes, people were thought sometimes to ascend to heaven. What does that have to do with this?

Ben.

spin

Ben C, it would be nice when referring to text that you give your references please. I don't have a text of Victorinus, so I can't search for the context of what he is supposed to have said. I have to find it on the web and a reference would help to know what I'm looking for.

When dealing with traditions, we are not dealing with individuals so much as communities. That Mark was an interpreter Peter is nothing astounding. You've already noted it in Irenaeus. You'll find it in Tertullian's Contra Marcion 4.5, so then notion was found in the Latin christian tradition shortly after the time of Irenaeus, but then there is no comment about stuff not being in order. There was obvious cross-fertilization from Greek to Latin and vice versa. Sometime between the time of Tertullian and Victorinus someone noted that Mark may have been out of step with the other gospels. It enters the shared tradition, pipes up in Victorinus and also in Eusebius. Victorinus is after all only a generation before that of Eusebius. I see no triangulation as you would have it.

The notion of someone not so central to the religion being an interpreter of someone more famous is important from the time of Irenaeus onwards as a means of separating the sheep from the goats. If you really knew someone important then you were ok. Various claims of people interpreting more famous people also appears in Clement of Alexandria's Stromata 7.17 dealing with various claimants including Basilides who "claims for his master Glaucias, the interpreter of Peter". Being an interpreter establishes an apostolic tradition, a tradition which seems to appear around the time of Irenaeus. That Eusebius's Papias talks of Mark being an interpreter of Peter seems to date the relationship to the need for an apostolic tradition.

Your approach with the Justin thing, which has little to do with anything regarding Papias, Irenaeus or Eusebius, is like a game I saw in a magazine once where the magazine had supplied a squiggle the week before and contestants were supposed to draw a picture using the squiggle. You can imagine the similarities between the pictures based solely on the squiggle.

Now this is very cute.

So you have a text referred to by Justin as "his memories" (tois apomnhmoneumasiv autou) and the subject of the sentence is Jesus and the translation I have has "the memoirs of Him" (ie the translator thinks it refers to Jesus), you think that it's Peter's memoirs.

But if it were Peter's memoirs you are happy to retroject later works onto Justin to make these memoirs (you want to be Peter's) be those mentioned in later works as Mark interpreting Peter, despite the fact that it was probably Irenaeus who was the first father to know the name Mark as the interpreter of Peter, or perhaps of Mark as gospel writer.

They are welcome to their speculations, but they have no weight.

That means nothing. The importance is that Eusebius receives traditions of varying qualities and he is unable to distinguish their merits. We cannot assume that he vetted the material about Papias any better than he did the material about Abgar.

Sorry, but I find it teleologically oriented, with no probabilities of any noteworthiness. As I said, 95% conjecture.

Give content as they did with Paul and Laodiceans twice and 3 Corinthians.

Umm, Epistle to the Tarsians, Epistle to the Antiochenes, Epistle to Hero, Epistle to St John, Epistle to the Virgin Mary??

And of course what about the other "recensions"?

I think your case is spurious. As I said, you have to make a case for the Papias stuff and what you've provided doesn't actually do it at all.

So by the time Ebion has a home town according to Epiphanius or works according to Jerome, we should overlook the development of the Ebion tradition because it doesn't suit you?

Like yours?

I don't attribute the back-formation of Ebion to Tertullian, though it could have been. I doubt it though.

You are not doing your job. Until you have done so, I can do little.


spin

S.C.Carlson

You're not going to find the right recension of Victorinus on the internet, but Ben has usefully quoted some of the more important bits at: http://www.textexcavation.com/papias.html

Stephen

UPDATE: I'm wrong. I just found a copy of the 1916 Haussleiter edition of Victorinus here: http://www.archive.org/details/victo...scop49victuoft

Ben C Smith

I do apologize for that. I should have given the reference, which is On the Apocalypse 4.4. However, one reason I felt it did not matter is because, as Stephen pointed out, the standard internet version is that of Jerome, which censored a lot of what Victorinus said (mainly because the latter was a chiliast, but in this case possibly because the not in order comment was seen as disrespectful to Mark; note that Jerome does not mention this detail in On Famous Men 8). I had to get my hands on SC 423 by M. Dulaey in order to get the original context of this comment.

I was unaware that the original Victorinus was available online until Stephen found that new link.

And you really think this kind of comment is more likely to have arisen later than earlier in the course of church tradition?

The triangulation is made possible by the unlikelihood that Eusebius knew the works of Victorinus. Even for the great Tertullian Eusebius depended on a (rather poor) Greek translation.

But surely that detail does not date from the time of Irenaeus or later. Surely Clement would not have made up the Glaucias-Peter connection (which I also note on my Papias page). I take this as a real window onto Basilides. I think that this was indeed what Basilides claimed, and indeed Basilides may have been right.

And this need stretched all the way back to early century II, IMHO. Basilides is an example.

That is not true. Jesus is the understood accusative subject of the clause in indirect speech, not of the sentence.

Well, of course I do. Peter is the closest noun to the pronoun, and Justin elsewhere always attributes the memoirs to the apostles, not to Jesus. Who cares what the translation you have says? The original, along with good old horse sense, is what matters.

Now, you have used a probability term, probably. What makes it probable, in your judgment, that Irenaeus was the first to think of Mark as interpreter to Peter?

How are you envisioning this? Are you imagining Eusebius inventing this reference wholesale? Having the works of Papias but then adding this reference to them? What exactly?

This is what I am asking you. With Paul to the Laodiceans we have a reference in Colossians that was the obvious catalyst for the pseudepigraphon. With 3 Corinthians we have mention in 1 and 2 Corinthians of further Pauline correspondence with that church. What was the catalyst in what Irenaeus wrote about Papias? Just the fact that Irenaeus attributed 5 books to him? Did the later fathers write up five volumes for him because Irenaeus said he had written them?

Did Papias write 5 volumes in the first place, in your judgment?

What are you talking about? Where did I say to overlook the development of the Ebion tradition?

So do I. Which is why I said somebody.

Ben.

spin

Yup, but wait...

I was actually helpful in the previous comment here. I said, "It enters the shared tradition, pipes up in Victorinus and also in Eusebius." No, I didn't imply that Eusebius knew the works of Victorinus. We are dealing with traditions, not so much individuals. Ideas went around christian communities.

Again, I would not have thought that Clement would make up such things. It's more likely that he received the tradition. It would be too coincidental in my mind that it just so happened that all of the references we look at were the products of the few individual writers, those small windows we have into the developing traditions of which so much must have happened outside any glimpse that has remained for us.

When were apostolic connections important? Or should I say, better apostolic connections?

Maybe, but I doubt it. Apostolic tradition was important at the end of the second century.

The claim that Peter is the closest noun is quite deceptive. Peter is supplied here merely as the name. The whole paragraph is about Jesus. And what value is the closest noun necessarily to the issue, when for example the "star arose in the heaven at the time of his birth", what was the nearest noun for "his"? What about when "he should arise like a star from the seed of Abraham...", he? There probably isn't one 3rd person singular pronoun in the whole paragraph that doesn't refer to Jesus.

You've changed my meaning. I didn't say that Irenaeus was the first to think of Mark as interpreter to Peter. I said he "was the first father to know the name Mark." What may not have been transparent was that "father" was the new information in the sentence along with "first" and by "father" I meant one who left writings to us.

Sorry, Ben C., but where the fuck did you get that idea from? I'm talking about "Eusebius receiv[ing] traditions". Did I say anything at all that would help you conceive of the idea that I didn't mean that he received them, but that he made them up?

Could be, but it wouldn't be necessary. Just a few fragments here and there.

It would seem that Irenaeus believed so.

The clear evidence for the development of this spurious tradition is a strong analogy to the sort of development for the historically weak Papias tradition that one must find means to negate, before touting the data as historical fact.




spin