The first is a discussion with somebody who questions Paul's authorship of the letters traditionally attributed to him. The discussion is primarily about the evidence from First Clement, but other subjects came up as well.
The second discussion is a response to a conversation that occurred on the June 28 edition of Greg Koukl's Stand To Reason radio program. A caller asked about Papias' testimony concerning the origin of Mark's gospel. That caller posted some further comments on the subject in the thread here. I posted a response to him, which initially didn't appear in the thread, then did appear, then disappeared. I don't know what's going on. The site might be having technical problems. Regardless, here's what I wrote:
tcampen,
Papias probably was a disciple of the apostle John. Multiple sources who had access to his writings say so, and the one source who argues otherwise, Eusebius, is inconsistent on the issue. I've discussed this subject in depth in threads here and here.
When Papias discusses the gospel of Mark (Eusebius, Church History, 3:39), he refers to his source as "the elder", a term that the early Christians associated with the apostle John (2 John 1, 3 John 1). As I've argued elsewhere, it's unlikely that there was some other prominent early church leader named John with whom the apostle was confused. The John known by Papias probably was the apostle, the son of Zebedee.
Regardless, Papias' source seems to be somebody older than he was, since he refers to the individual as "the elder" and considers him a source of information on events of earlier times. Papias lived in the late first century and into the second century. He was a contemporary of the apostles. The timing of his life is more significant than the timing of his writing.
But there's no good reason to date what he wrote a few decades into the second century. Greg Koukl referred you to Richard Bauckham's Jesus And The Eyewitnesses (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2006), and Bauckham discusses the dating of Papias' work there (pp. 13-14). Even if we accept the suggestion of Philip of Side, to the effect that Papias wrote sometime during the reign of the emperor Hadrian, that emperor was in power from 117 to 138. The assumption that Papias wrote around 130 or 135 is a rough estimate based on the assumption that Philip of Side is reliable on this matter. Bauckham doubts his reliability. And Hadrian came to power in 117, so a date under Hadrian could be as early as that year. But even if Papias did write as late as, say, the year 135, the fact remains that he lived earlier and was drawing information from his earlier experiences.
People pass on information from generation to generation. If the gospel of Mark had initially circulated anonymously, or had initially been attributed to some other author, we wouldn't expect to see universal agreement, from Papias and his source onward, concerning Mark's authorship of the document. But that's what we do see. You can speculate that all of the sources were mistaken, but that isn't the most likely scenario.
The traditional gospel authorship attributions are widely attested early on. We have testimony from sources representing a wide diversity of locations, personalities, theologies, etc. Multiple heretical, Jewish, and pagan sources corroborate the traditional attributions in some manner. See here. We know that both the early Christians and their early enemies were willing to question document attributions and discuss such controversies publicly, as we see with 2 Peter and Revelation, for example. The authorship of Mark wasn't disputed.
And there's significant internal evidence for authorship by Mark. See, for example, here.
Here's some of the other relevant evidence:
"All four Gospels are anonymous in the formal sense that the author's name does not appear in the text of the work itself, only in the title (which we will discuss below). But this does not mean that they were intentionally anonymous. Many ancient works were anonymous in the same formal sense, and the name may not even appear in the surviving title of the work. For example, this is true of Lucian's Life of Demonax (Demonactos bios), which as a bios (ancient biography) is generically comparable with the Gospels. Yet Lucian speaks throughout in the first person and obviously expects his readers to know who he is. Such works would often have been circulated in the first instance among friends or acquaintances of the author who would know who the author was from the oral context in which the work was first read. Knowledge of authorship would be passed on when copies were made for other readers, and the name would be noted, with a brief title, on the outside of the scroll or on a label affixed to the scroll. In denying that the Gospels were originally anonymous, our intention is to deny that they were first presented as works without authors. The clearest case is Luke because of the dedication of the work to Theophilus (1:3), probably a patron. It is inconceivable that a work with a named dedicatee should have been anonymous. The author's name may have featured in an original title, but in any case would have been known to the dedicatee and other first readers because the author would have presented the book to the dedicatee....In the first century CE, most authors gave their books titles, but the practice was not universal....Whether or not any of these titles originate from the authors themselves, the need for titles that distinguished one Gospel from another would arise as soon as any Christian community had copies of more than one in its library and was reading more than one in its worship meetings....In the case of codices, 'labels appeared on all possible surfaces: edges, covers, and spines.' In this sense also, therefore, Gospels would not have been anonymous when they first circulated around the churches. A church receiving its first copy of one such would have received with it information, at least in oral form, about its authorship and then used its author's name when labeling the book and when reading from it in worship....no evidence exists that these Gospels were ever known by other names." (Richard Bauckham, Jesus And The Eyewitnesses [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2006], pp. 300-301, 303)
"Nevertheless the fact remains that it is utterly improbable that in this dark period, at a particular place or through a person or through the decision of a group or institution unknown to us, the four superscriptions of the Gospels, which had hitherto been circulating anonymously, suddenly came into being and, without leaving behind traces of earlier divergent titles, became established throughout the church. Let those who deny the great age and therefore basically the originality of the Gospel superscriptions in order to preserve their 'good' critical conscience, give a better explanation of the completely unanimous and relatively early attestation of these titles, their origin and the names of authors associated with them. Such an explanation has yet to be given, and it never will be. New Testament scholars persistently overlook basic facts and questions on the basis of old habits....Another comment on the name Matthew: apart from the first Gospel, to which he gives his name, Matthew plays no role in primitive Christianity. He appears only in the lists of apostles. He is only mentioned rather more frequently at a substantially later date in apocryphal writings on the basis of the unique success of the Gospel named after him. That makes it utterly improbable that the name of the apostle was attached to the Gospel only at a secondary stage, in the first decades of the second century, somewhere in the Roman empire, and that this essentially later nomenclature then established itself everywhere without opposition. How could people have arrived at this name for an anonymous Gospel in the second century, and how then would it have gained general recognition?...the First Gospel [Matthew] already established itself quickly and tenaciously in the church at the beginning of the second century...this writing [the gospel of Mark], quite novel in earliest Christianity, managed to establish itself in the communities and to be used extensively by such self-confident authors as Luke and the author of the First Gospel - in the case of Matthew around eighty percent and of Luke more than sixty percent - only because a recognized authority and not an anonymous Gentile Christian, i.e. a Mr. Nobody in the church, stood behind it....Therefore nothing has led research into the Gospels so astray as the romantic superstition involving anonymous theologically creative community collectives, which are supposed to have drafted whole writings." (Martin Hengel, The Four Gospels And The One Gospel Of Jesus Christ [Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: Trinity Press International, 2000], pp. 55, 71-72, 80-81)
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