Amaleq13

It is consistent with the claim but it does absolutely nothing to suggest the claim is reliable and, as has already been pointed out (by me ), we already have a really good reason to question Papias' reliability.

Why do you think the majority of scholars, including those who compiled The Catholic Study Bible, disagree with your conclusion?

hatsoff

My guess is that I'm wrong. But I can only go on the evidence I see.

Diogenes the Cynic

Not if it's fiction. It's fallacious to say that if a character plays a prominent role in a story that the author must have known that character personally.
Lying and running away to save his own hide isn't abandoning? You don't think it's significant that Mark's last image of Peter is as a coward who fled?
You are far from alone. Most people (including me) do not truly realize the abruptness and full significance of Mark's ending without having it pointed out to them.
You're engaging in what we call a priori interpretation. You're looking for ways to make the text fit a preconceived conclusion rather than just reading it at face value. That's ok, everybody does that to some degree. It's extremely difficult to be truly objective and not to inject (often subconsciously) a spin or an angle which fits what you already believe. In the case of Mark's ending, it's especially difficult to divest yourself of your awareness of the other Gospels and the appearance narratives (something which is only compounded if you're accustomed to reading the interpolated ending). But you have to remember that Mark was the first Gospel written. The others didn't exist yet. Mark's audience had never heard the appearance narratives in the other Gospels. This was the first time they were hearing about the empty tomb. All they knew was what Mark told them, and all Mark told them was that the disciples ran away and that the women didn't tell them about the tomb. Mark's audience could not inform its reading with the other Gospels as you are doing and would have no reason to make the same assumptions.
I think that Mark could not deny Peter's apostleship because it had already been established to a certain extent by Paul. Mark's intent was not to deny apostleship but to try to persuade his audience that the Pillars in Jerusalem had not really understood Jesus and that they had been faithless. Mark's Gospel reflects a division between the original movement in Palestine and Paul's movement outside it.
The Hebrew Bible is also known as the Old Testament. Many people prefer calling it the Hebrew Bible (HB) or the Tanakh because calling it the OT reflects a certain Christian bias (if you are Jewish, it's not the Old Testament, it's just "the Bible"). It's just a polite convention.
Mark's Gospel is not the result of random anecdotes and sayings written in no particualr order. Peter did not go around speaking in Greek chiasms. GMark uses literary structures and allusions which cannot arise from simply transcribing oral anecdotes. Mark's order is meticulous. It cannot have been produced by random chance.

hatsoff

That's not what I'm saying. By itself, Peter's prominence in GMark means little. When taken with Papias' claim, though, it adds strength to the theory that Peter and Mark worked together closely.

Peter didn't flee; according to Mark, he was the only one who followed Jesus, albeit at a distance, as far as the Sanhedrin.

I've been careful not to use "a priori" interpreting, as you call it. Taking GMark at face value, we see that Jesus has been resurrected, and that he is on his way to Galilee to meet with the disciples. The text is not cryptic in that matter.

But let's say for the sake of argument that GMark does not include that passage, and that we are left wondering as to the fate of the disciples. That still doesn't point to an anti-Petrine angle. The story, after all, is about Jesus, not Peter. While Peter does play a prominent role, we should not expect the Gospel to focus on him at all times.

GMark paints the Apostles as somewhat bumbling, but not faithless.

Again, Papias did not claim GMark was "produced by random chance" or that it was "written in no particular order." He merely said: "It was not, however, in exact order that he related the sayings or deeds of Christ."

Amaleq13

No, it is only consistent with Papias' claim (as I've already noted) but it is not specifically supportive. It is also consistent with the claim that Peter would be depicted as prominent in any story about the origins of that faith regardless of the author because he was a prominent apostle when faith in the risen Christ was first proclaimed.

If a piece of evidence is consistent with all possible authors, it cannot be said to make any specific author more likely.

Again, what is out of order in Mark's story?

hatsoff

Nobody knows. From the Christian perspective, one would identify the chronology by comparing the synoptics to John. However, from a non-Christian perspective, John is just a fictionalized tale, and therefore not useful for such a comparison.

The fact remains, Papias makes a very reasonable and plausible claim which is 100% consistent with internal and external evidence.

Diogenes the Cynic

Hello, hello? Is this thing on?

I really don't think you get it about Mark being in order. It's not just a simple quetion of chronology (although Mark does follow a consistent chronology in that it begins at the beginning and ends at the end and everything that happens happens after what happened before it. That, in itself, is enough to contradict Papias). Mark uses specialized literary arrangements which have to be composed. It is not possible for these structures to be spontaneously and unintentially spoken aloud. Chiasms do not arise by chance. What are the odds that a collection of oral anecdotes would just coincidentally turn out to be formed as rhyming couplets or as haikus or as limericks? Mark's chiastic structures are more complex than any of those things. The entire book is arranged in a deliberate, sophisticated literary order which could not possibly just arise coincidentally from Peter's stories.

Add to this, the fact that Peter was an illiterate Galilean fisherman who spoke little, if any Greek. What are the chances that he would just, by blind chance, leave a set of oral anecdotes which arrange themselves in complicated Greek literary forms which are rife with oblique parallels to the Hebrew Bible?

Papias' claim, as applied to the Canonical Gospel of Mark, is neither reasonable nor plausible. It is not independently corroborated externally and the internal evidence pretty much obliterates it as a serious hypothesis.

There are reasons that virtually no one in NT scholarship except the most rock-ribbed, religious conservatives still accepts the tradional authorships of the Gospels.

Amaleq13

Could you clarify what you mean by "external evidence"? When you used it earlier, you referred to later repetitions of the claim but you seemed to drop that when it was pointed out they were apparently dependent upon Papias.

How do you obtain 100% consistency when you've admitted that you cannot confirm a significant part of what Papias says about the text (ie out of order)?

IIUC, the "internal evidence" is Peter's prominence, correct?

Assuming that to be the case, I have made a claim that is very reasonable and plausible which is 100% consistent with the internal evidence but it suggests no specific claim of authorship can be made from that evidence.

On what basis did you decide to accept his claim over mine?

hatsoff

Yes it is. Papias claims GMark is not in perfect chronological order. That is the long and short of it.

No it isn't. GMark certainly appears to be in chronological order, but since we have no idea what actually transpired, there is no way to say with certainty if it truly is so. And since we cannot tell if GMark is chronological or not, Papias' claim that it is not doesn't conflict with internal evidence.

I agree. Mark seems to have drawn from other sources (particularly oral tradition), and he apparently put great effort into composing a natural, flowing narrative. But none of that is in conflict with Papias' claim that the chronology isn't perfect.

Neither I nor Papias made any such claim.

Maybe I exaggerated a bit when I said Mark "probably" wrote GMark, but it is certainly plausible. Moreover, in absence of any other suspect, Mark is the most likely author.

hatsoff

Yes, I was wrong about that, sorry. Live and learn, I suppose.

Consistency is neither tantamount nor dependent upon confirmation. All I mean is that there's no contradictory evidence. Papias' claim, while unverified, remains plausible.

Yes.

On further reflection, I must say I can't accept either claim as more likely than the other.