S.C.Carlson

Not when I ask you for evidence. But that's what I'm hearing now.

Historical evidence is, by and large, hearsay evidence. People who can't handle it shouldn't do history.

Stephen

jakejonesiv

Thanks for the correction. Apollinaris sez!

"Judas walked about in this world a sad example of impiety; for his body having swollen to such an extent that he could not pass where a chariot could pass easily, he was crushed by the chariot, so that his bowels gushed out."
Papias, "Exposition of the Oracles of the Lord" Book II, as allegedly quoted Apollinaris of Laodicea.

But aren't we suppose to believe it because Papais is supposed to have written it? "Historical evidence is, by and large, hearsay evidence. People who can't handle it shouldn't do history."

Hopefully, we can dispense with the critical crickets entirely.

Gamera

Is "heresay" a freudian slip for "heresy"?

By the way hearsay evidence is a legal construct under the rules of evidence for trials and other contested hearings. It has no epistemological meaning outside that context. Unless you have significant trial experience (and I do enough) even most lawyers don't understand the rules of hearsay. Indeed, if somebody wants to impugn hearsay evidence in historiography, he would need to throw out each and every historical text and every other ms in existence -- under the rules of evidence all historical texts would be deemed inadmissible hearsay unless a hearsay exception applied.

I take it most nonlawyers use the term "hearsay" to mean the author didn't see an event happen, but heard about it from somebody else. I suspect that that kind of knowledge represents not only 99.99% of historical texts, but also 99.99% of our knowledge of important facts in general.

S.C.Carlson

One difference is that Mark was probably written (c. 70) during Papias's lifetime and within his informant's adulthood, while the death of Judas happened a full generation earlier. It is not inconsistent to find his testimony on the former more credible than on the latter.

Stephen

Ben C Smith

Of course not! You believe it because I said so.

Just kidding.

Actually, these two Papian reports are so different as to make an historical comparison almost moot:

1. The story of Mark remembering Petrine preaching and writing a text is perfectly credible, while the story of the death of Judas seems a stretch, to say the least, and perhaps a little too fitting a death for the betrayer of our Lord (see number 3).

2. As Stephen mentioned, Papias attributes the story of Mark to an elder who, on almost any reconstruction of the dates, would have been contemporaneous with the composition of Mark, while he does not, as far as we can tell, attribute the story of Judas to anybody in particular, and that story would predate even the composition of Mark by about four decades.

3. The story of Mark is just the story of the composition of a text, and is as far as we can tell meant to be taken as an historical datum, while the story of Judas looks (as Vinnie has noted a couple of times) like a typical assignment of a death befitting a scoundrel. (One of the main reasons I reject most of the canonical infancy narrative of Jesus as history is because it looks like a typical after-the-fact wondrous birth narrative, like that of Augustus or of Alexander.)

4. The story of Mark is not contradicted by earlier or more reliable evidence, while the story of Judas is contradicted by both Matthew and Luke (who also contradict one another).

5. There are several coincidences between the gospel of Mark and descriptions of both John Mark and Peter in Acts that make the story of Mark look all the more credible, while I am not aware of any coincidences involving the story of Judas that would help confirm it.

6. Later fathers appear to have evidence independent of Papias that helps to confirm Papias (for example, that Mark was composed in Rome), while I am not aware of independent evidence for the story of Judas. (But this last point is mitigated somewhat by the possibility that Papias wrote something about Peter and Mark in Rome that we no longer have.)

Ben.

spin

Hey, I'm the one asking for evidence here, not unsourced stuff from two centuries after the supposed events. As I said, you like listening to the crickets, otherwise you couldn't take this Papias stuff seriously.

I think you're still working from an 18th century idea of history.


spin

spin

Talk about freudian slips! You should watch where you drop those banana skins.

It's interesting that you went off half-cocked without considering the second half of what you cite -- when you can't give the data any chance of being viable. It was said for a reason, Gamera. Consider it. And take your foot to the doctor.

And plainly you are wrong with your 99.99% of historical texts, when applied to the ancient world. Thucydides experienced much of the history that he wrote. Xenophon did likewise. To a lesser degree so did Polybius. Umm, Caesar's Civil War? Velleius Patercolus? Cornelius Nepos? Josephus at least with BJ? The latter part of Tacitus's Histories was written about times in which he lived in public life. This was the early tradition of historians. They wrote histories of their times. You should understand them a bit better.


spin

S.C.Carlson

Last time I checked, Thucydides is dead and otherwise unable to speak up. All we have are copies of what he supposedly wrote. Those copies are hearsay.

Stephen

spin

Are you joining Gamera in his historical ludditism?


spin

spamandham

It might dispell some of the more audacious mythicist positions, such as Christianity was invented by Eusebius, etc., but it would have no impact on the more popular mythicist positions, which already allow for Paul and Q in the mid first century, with Mark (or pre-Mark) in the latter first century.

None of this is inconsistent with the core mythicist position that Christ started off as a mystical heavenly allegory and was later misunderstood to be historical.

We see evidence of the mystical Christ ideas emerging 100+ years before that in the books of Enoch.