Vinnie

Nothing wrong aside from it being all but impossible. Marcan priority is one means. Internal arguments are another. Potential external references for Mark or texts dependent upon him before 140 are another (e.g. Papias on Mark? Ignatius and Matthew? the school of Matthean and Lucan gospel harmonization evident in Justin's writings which places this gospels back some as they both had to get popular and become authoritative amidsts so many other gospels to be harmonized in such ways).

We don't have Papias' works and therefore evaluating their reliability is rather difficult. I doubt Papias possessed anything more reliable than say that found in Gmark, which is to say nothing really reliable.

We can evaluate his "gospel claims" however.

This is a 100% misinterpretation of Papias. See Gamble (Books and Readers in the Early Church p. 31). Its an execellent text on the nature of Christian texts. It goes through the writing proccess, publication and spread of works in antiquity.

Papiss did not disparage written documents in favor of oral tradition. He himself wrote five books!!!! Thats quite the incompetant paadox on his part if you are correct!

He also seems to habe prioritized, not oral tradition in general, but FIRST HAND INFORMATION.

The sort of saying by Papias "that I cared not for what I learned from books but a living voice" is not exclusive to Papias, but appears frequently in ancient literature and constitutes a topos in certain contexts. A near contemporary with Papias, Galen a learned physician, expressed a similar thought. Galen's comments show us that learning from a living voice over books was proverbial at least to craftspeople.

In the ancient world apprenticeship was the norm and learning from first hand demonstration is better than books. There are at least two other contexts: rhetoric "where the importance of ex tempore composition and live performance were emphasized and among hellenistixc philosophical schools, where the transmission of tradition was thought to be ideally accomplished through personal tutelagw and where books were often represented as written compendia of oral instruction best employed under the personal guidance of a teacher. In none of these contexts, however, were texts unavailable, unused, or not valued...." (Gamble p. 31).

But Papias had no such texts. The opnly potential gospel he knew is GMark and he had to defend it significantly as not everyone shared his belief that it was written by Mark, an interpreter of Peter.

This is far too simplistic. The real question is what is meant by order? Order compared to what? Luke implicitly critiques Mark for a lack of order in his prologue (Many have undertaken....but here is my orderly account). And this critique comes despite the fact that he follows Mark's order significanly. There is nothing didfficult with Papias saying Mark is not orderly, even less considering that Mark's order and chronology is clearly artifical! Order may or may not have anything to do with chronology. It may be a logical order more dependent upon content.

As I wrote elsewhere:

We don't know what order means by Luke appears to critique Mark for it as well.

This is useless. Eusebius and others abound with Gospel quotations. Why do they need to quote Papias' appeal to themwhen they have the sources themselves? But all Papias may evidence is GMark. He wrote ca 100 and its immensely difficult to show that he knew Matthew and Luke who date near this time. The evidence for knowing Mark is not all that powerful but there is some and I think its better than not knowing Mark, but Mt and Lk appear dead in the water.

How extensive are the quotings of Papias? You = advocating bad argument from silence. Besides, Eusebius considered Papias a man of small intelligence anyways as he says and he had his own eyewitness accounts (Gospels). Eusebius uses Papias for whatever he finds useful (e.g. authenticating his gospels). But there is no reason for Eusebius to go on uoting Papias when he disliked him and had his own firsthand accounts (in his mind).

Problems on this front are well known by everyone. As Sanders and Davies write:

Also difficult is determining what came from the Elder and what comes from Papias. How far does the Elder’s statement go? Many translations, including the one reprinted above, print the citation as if the entire phrase goes back to the Elder. Sander and Davies contend, “Many scholars, however, think that the Elder supplied only the first sentence (Mark wrote accurately but not in order), while the rest is Papias’ own commentary (the explanation that Mark had not heard the Lord, and especially the statement that he left out nothing that he had heard). We think that the second is the stronger position. Ancient documents do not have quotation marks or inverted commas, but it was natural to begin one’s own interpretation with ‘for’, and thus we would assign to the Elder only the first sentence.� Studying the Synoptic Gospels, p. 9, Sanders and Davies)

You've just beemn given some "accurate" evidence. Stick with that

Vinnie


Many things.[/QUOTE]

Amaleq13

The evidence described above seems to suggest that Luke's author did not have Mark in mind if "my orderly account" is understood as an implicit criticism of other, disordered accounts.

Vinnie

All the supplements and "corrections" Luke put into Mark's gospel suggests it is. Luke rearranged Markan and other preicopes. Even under Lukan dependence on Matthew he changed the order of the material and even. There is also no suggestion that Luke meant "chronlogically more accurate history" by order. He knew he was writing mythology....

Besides, I don't see their being many more potential sources granted I date Luke earlier than you (surely an influentail factor either way).

Vinnie

Ted Hoffman

Granted.
H.E. 3.39. "For I did not consider that I got so much profit from the contents of books as from the utterances of a living and abiding voice."
There is no evidence for this. Plain and simple. If you want to believe everything you read, do you also believe the fanciful account from fragment number three where Papias narrates a fanciful account of the death of Judas, or how Barnabas drank snake poison, or about Papias' claims that the dead that were raised by Christ survived until the reign of Hadrian?
Wrong. First hand information from non eye-witnesses?
Does it constitute a topos in Papian's inexistent corpus? No. Because we cant tell. We dont have the texts. Red herring.
False analogy. Evangelism doesn't analogue well with apprenticeship.
So, why talk about such texts? Arguing for argument's sake?
So, you dont know what Papias meant? Why talk about order then?
Get serious.
Red herring. What is at issue is not whether or not he knew Mark, but whether Eusebius believed that canard. Eusebous did NOT.
He doesn't use him for what would have mattered most: A saying from the very mouth of an apostle.

Amaleq13

Make up your mind.

Did Luke's author follow "Mark's order significantly" or did he change the order? If it cannot be said with any degree of certainty that Luke's author considered Mark's story chronologically accurate, it makes no sense to use Luke to support the notion that Papias is talking about "our" Mark.

Did Luke's author mean the chronological order or something else? If what Luke meant by "orderly" cannot be reliably understood, it makes no sense to try to use the author to support Papias.

That is really only a problem for anyone wishing to use Luke as support for the notion that Papias is talking about "our" Mark. The author clearly states that he has considered what "many" have claimed.

andrewcriddle

There is pre-Eusebian evidence for five books by Papias
Irenaeus in 'Against Heresies' Book 5 ch 33 says in reference to a rather weird saying attributed to Jesus about the fruitfulness of the millenium I suspect that the claim of Philip of Side that Papias said that those raised from the dead by Christ survived till the time of Hadrian is a conflation of two statements by Papias. Papias probably claimed a/ that the resurrected dead survived until his own time (ie until after he (Papias) was born) and b/ that he was writing this material during the time of Hadrian. Philip misunderstood this as a claim that the resurrected survived till the time of Hadrian.

Quadratus according to Eusebius made similar claims see Ecclesiastical History book 4 section 3. (I have wondered whether Philip of Side is confusing what Quadratus claimed and what Papias claimed but IMHO they probably made a similar claim independently)

The claim that the resurrected dead survived into the lifetime of those who were still alive in the reign of Hadrian is chronologically perfectly plausible whatever its other problems.

Andrew Criddle

Ted Hoffman

Jesus allegedly died c. 33CE. Reign of Hadrian was 117-138CE.

Thats around a century dude. You still wanna stick with "perfectly plausible"?

It requires a stretch of imagination to believe that Jesus only raised toddlers from the dead. Or will you argue that people generally lived over 120 years?

This same person claimed he wrote 5 books that were never seen. Irenaeus relied on him for that since he never read the 5 books himself. As things stand, it was simply a claim Papias made, and Papias made several other fantastic claims. Without positive evidence, his claims cannot be taken at face value.

I would hesitate to rely on such a man.

andrewcriddle

I think you're misunderstanding what I meant sorry if I didn't make myself clear.

Assume Papias was born in say 75 CE and wrote his account in say 130 when he was 55 during the reign of Hadrian.

Jairus's daughter is supposed to have been raised from death or near death in say 30 CE when she was 12 years old. She has probably nearly another 60 yers of life probably dying in the late 80s CE at which time Papias is an adolescent.

Hence it is true on these assumptions that a/ Jairus's daughter survived into the lifetime of Papias b/ Papias wrote during the reign of Hadrian.

Andrew Criddle

Ted Hoffman

If Papias wrote in 130, Jarius' daughter would be (130-30)+12 = 112.
That is, assuming Jarius' daughter was raised in c.30 and she was 12 years old.

What are the odds of that? Living to 112 during those times I mean. After the wars, the ensuing confusion, arbitrary killings and the scattered communities and the resettlements, somehow, Papias had a bug on her, knew her movements and knew her heart was still beating as he wrote.

Hmmmm.....

How many other Children did Jesus raise from the dead publicly? - since Papias speaks in plural.

Killer Mike

Tend to agree. The concensus dates Mark to about 70, shortly after the failure of the 1st Jewish Revolt against the Romans. You go to any major university (Harvard, Yale, Brown, Hebrew University, Oxford, etc..) and you will be taught Jesus did exist. Even GA Wells who for over 25 years wrote books like "Did Jesus Exist" has recently come to accept an historical Jesus. I dont think we need to come up with highly speculative ideas to disprove Christianity. Modern scholarship has disproven it already. We know the Gospels are neither histories nor biographies but mythopoetic. We also know Jesus was probably not even buried in a tomb as described in the Gospels. This is because it was common practive for the Romans to let bodies hang for days on crosses and let the body decay and rot following executions. This was done to remind people of the penalty for disobeying Roman authority. All one needs to do is take an intro New Testament course at any major university to learn about things like source and literary criticism. There you will find everything you need to refute Christianity. :thumbs: