judge

Does it really seem this way?

The sources were apparently known. Of course we can't prove the truthfulness of the traditions, in any absolutely foolproof way, but, would we really expect to be able to prove it in such a way?

We can be sceptical about the traditions but does this scepticism really amount to making it seem they aren't true?

Added in edit: Mind you personally I think by 150 AD the religion seems to have totally lost the plot WRT understanding eschatology.

But that might just be because only certain views and writings were retained by the institutions.

gstafleu

I think what M151 has in mind here is something like Socrates->Plato->Aristoteles. And this has side branches as well, e.g. Xenophon knew Socrates. That does paint a much more solid picture of a tradition then the disparate mess of Christian documents. Having said that, I'm not sure how representative the neat chain S->P->A is for reality in general.

Gerard Stafleu

Malachi151

It seems pretty obvious to me. Obviously no one knew who wrote any of the Gospels, hence all of the guessing. It's also apparent that no one that we know of knew the author of the Gospel of Mark, and obviously no one that we know of talked to or got information from any of the Gospel writers concerning how they wrote their Gospels and where they got their information from.

If they had then they would have known that the author of Matthew copied from the author of Mark, etc.

The process of how these Gospels were written is very clearly unknown to any commentor that we know about. No on knows what their sources were, which wouldn't be the case had there been a continuous line of knowledge from the writers to the "users" of the documents.

Maybe it was kept secret by the writers on purpose, but I kinda doubt it, especially in the case of Luke. It just seems that the information was lost somehow.

Obviously no one that we have writings from knew Paul, or else there wouldn't have been so much speculation as to what he meant.

Obviously there was a lot of confusion around this James the Just fellow. It's clear from Acts and other writings that James is not who later people thought he was, and we don't have any real clear picture of who he was, other than someone apparently based on out Judea and presiding over a Jewish type sect of Christians, supposedly.

It's clear that by the second century these documents had taken on a life of their own. How and why that happened we don't know, there is a gap in the information.

I have not seen anything in any writing that makes it apparent that someone had an intimate knowledge and understanding of any of the Christian scriptures, who wrote them, why, how, when, where, and what they meant by them.

All we have is scriptures, and then later speculators.

gstafleu

I wonder, could this be part of the reason why Christianity was so successful? The documents we have don't exactly form a coherent tradition of thought. The advantage of that is that you can make pretty much anything of it that you like. Take e.g. the rapture nonsense that this Irish guy came up with. He didn't have much problem "deriving" it from the bible, did he? I can see this really helping in spreading the word: give it a meaning you like and call yourself Christian. Still happens every day. In such an environment I think you would actually expect the disjoint situation we have, rather than the opposite.

Gerard Stafleu

Ben C Smith

In order to come to the scenario that nobody knew anybody else in a chain of transmission one has to already have dismissed certain lines of evidence. The early Christians certainly did not give the impression that nobody knew anybody else; they traced the succession of bishops, the reception of texts, and other personal connections at almost every opportunity.

Peter -> Mark ~> John the elder -> Papias.
The beloved disciple (John) -> Papias.
John -> Polycarp -> Irenaeus.
James -> Clopas -> Symeon ~> Hegesippus.

Ben.

ModernHeretic

What he doesn't tell you is that 'John' was actually John Lennon, and 'Paul' was actually Paul McCartney. So, apparently the Beatles were apostles of Christ!

Malachi151

This is true, but I think it's pretty clear that this is also bogus, once against leading to the conclusion that no one knew what they were talking about.

Papias had no idea that Matthew was based on Mark. It's well accepted now that Mark didn't get his info from Peter.

I will argue strongly that the "beloved disciple" is not John, hell John and James ben Zebedee are absent from GJohn probably intentionally because they were disliked by whoever the author of "John" was, whcih shows again a total misunderstanding on the part of Papias.

Irenaeus couldn't keep his Johns straight, and he thought that the same John wrote both GJohn and Revelation, so obviously he didn't really know either author.

Hegesippus I believe also misunderstood who James was, thinking that he was a real brother of Jesus when in fact I again would argue strongly that this is impossible.

Ben C Smith

I myself think it is pretty clear that some of it is accurate and some of it is inaccurate.

I do not think Papias is directly referencing our canonical Matthew.

The ancients, BTW, did not often talk about sources in the same way we do. It is anachronistic to expect Papias or anybody else to admit that one evangelist copied another wholesale.

I dissent. I think that Mark got his information from Peter.

I agree that the beloved disciple is not John of Zebedee. But I think that he was named John.

As for this part being a total misunderstanding on the part of Papias, I am calling your bluff. Please cite for me the fragment(s) in which Papias mistakes the author of John as John of Zebedee.

Again I am calling your bluff. Please cite for me the passage(s) in Irenaeus in which he confuses John the elder with John of Zebedee.

Who under heaven claims that Irenaeus knew the author of either the gospel or the apocalypse of John?

I think you are quite mistaken.

But let me lay it out for you without holding back. I do not think you have a good grounding in the original texts. When you start searching for the Papian fragments for any misunderstanding as to the authorship of the gospel of John, you will see what I mean. I also do not think you have a good grounding in the relevant scholarship. Have you read Orchard and Riley? Have you read either Hengel or Hill? Have you read Bauckham? I will readily admit there are a few relevant scholars I have not yet read on the matter (Kurzinger, for example). But I am not making extravagant claims as you are.

Please prove me wrong.

Ben.

Cege

John the Presbyter, mentioned by Papias as quoted by Eusebius, may be the same person as John the disciple/apostle. Eusebius believed that Papias was referring to two different men. Traditional church belief is that John the Presbyter and John the disciple/apostle were the same person.

If the men are the same, then Papias claimed to have heard Christian teaching directly from John who was an apostle. If not, Papias heard the teachings from a different John who was acquainted directly with the disciples and told Papias what those disciples were teaching about Jesus.

Polycarp was a companian of Papias (I'm still not clear on who was the teacher and who the disciple in that relationship) and also a hearer of John, whether John the disciple or another John known as the Presbyter.

Polycarp and Papias are the closest to the actual apostles' teachings that can be historically established by their writings and quotations from their writings, as best as I can tell.

The authors of the gospels have been traditionally accepted as either disciples who bear the names of the gospels (Matthew and John) or companions to disciples (Luke and Mark) but modern biblical scholarship has cast doubt on that belief. The traditional churches still accept the gospels as having been written by authors who were either disciples themselves or Christian converts who knew the disciples well.

Malachi151

That John ben Zebedee a.k.a. John the apostle, wrote the Gospel of John is totally unbelievable.

Even assuming that Mark made up his account of John being a Jewish fisherman, there are so many holes in this story that it's absurd.

Presumably John was a companion of James, and this a more Jewish oriented apostle, while John is a highly Hellenized, if not indeed anti-Jewish, work.

It's late and builds on other traditions.

It still attests to various miracles, etc. If "John", either a mystery religion apostle that Paul met, or a disciple of the real human Jesus, wrote this he was either lying or a witness to real live miracles.

John and James ben Zebedee are never mentioned in the Gospel (aside from in 21, which was added later). That this would be because John is the author is totally ridiculous. That this would be because the author didn't like John and James or their sect was generally out of favor is the much more likely reason.

Not only is this Gospel certainly not written by John ben Zebedee, but its probably written by someone who didn't like the Zebedees.

Again, that these early commentators could be so far off the mark shows how truly out of the loop they were. They were clueless.

They said that John ben Zebedee was the author in order to try and account for why such an obviously important figure, both he and his brother, we absent from the Gospel. This was really the only thing that they could think of to explain why this glaring omission was made.

Again, to me this just shows complete ignorance on the part of the earliest writers that we have on this topic. They were totally ignorant of what these documents were, where they came from, who wrote them, why, or the politics involved in the early movement.

That Papias actually knew the person who wrote the Gospel of John is a total farce.

Someone might have known the John who wrote Revelation, that I can buy, but not anyone who wrote a Gospel, or any of the apostles that Paul mentioned or that are referred to in the Gospels.