I've argued, in other posts here and elsewhere, that they were. But if they weren't, what would follow?
There still would have been other individuals in early church history who had been an eyewitness of one or more of the apostles. There would have been many eyewitnesses, and some of them would have lived well into the second century. That's the nature of life. Skeptical challenges to the eyewitness status of individuals like Papias and Polycarp don't change that. It's not as though the presence of eyewitnesses depends on the status of particular individuals who have traditionally been thought to have been eyewitnesses of the apostles. The fact that eyewitnesses would have existed and have lived until well into the second century can't reasonably be denied. Keep that in mind when you see people questioning the eyewitness status of certain people.
And even those who weren't eyewitnesses could have been in a good position to have had significant information. They were contemporaries of the apostles, lived in an area where one or more apostles had been, etc. Think of the evidence for the apostle John's long lifespan and his interactions with Christians and churches in Asia Minor, for example. On his long lifespan, see here. For a discussion of the evidence for his influence on the Asia Minor region, go here. That post is focused on Ephesus, but much of what's said there is also applicable to Smyrna and other locations in the area. It's not as though Polycarp had to be a disciple of John in order to have had significant information about John and other eyewitnesses of Jesus. Polycarp was in the right place, at the right time, in the right sort of leadership position to have had a lot of reliable information about Jesus and the apostles, even if he wasn't a disciple of John (though the evidence suggests he was).
Anytime skeptics raise doubts about an issue like whether a certain person was an eyewitness of the apostles or whether a New Testament author was an eyewitness of whatever type, it's helpful to begin by asking what's at stake. Even if the skeptic's position were granted for the sake of argument, what would follow from it? Often, even if we granted the skeptic's position, the source in question still offers a large amount of evidence against the skeptic's view of Christianity.
From a confirmation-theoretic perspective, I would say "yes and no" to this post. The "yes" part is that of course you are right that it can be not only possible but even plausible that an author has a lot of knowledge about events even if he didn't observe them himself. This is particularly relevant to the Gospel of Luke and to the stories of Jesus' birth and infancy. The "no" part is that each "remove" from the events produces a new place for potential slippage between what happened and the record that we have. This is one reason why I emphasize for all the Gospels that they are at very few removes from the events they record. When an author is an eyewitness of an event, the only sources of slippage are things that pertain to him--how well he remembers what happened, how clearly he expresses it in what we have, and his motivation to tell or not tell the literal truth. When the author is (as in the case of Luke) not an eyewitness of the event, there is one more set of sources of possible slippage--his human source's memory, clarity of expression, and motivation. And this is true at each stage. We can see that, as multiple removes are inserted between the events and the document we have, the potential for slippage eventually builds up to the point where it is quite significant, as would be the case if, say, a Gospel was produced initially in the middle of the second century, written by someone who couldn't even in principle have spoken to an eyewitness of any of the events.
ReplyDeleteIn the case of Papias and Polycarp, it is already built in that they weren't witnesses of the *events*, and the information we're seeking from them concerns their knowledge of, say, Gospel authorship, since they could in principle have personally known at least one apostle (John). They also provide evidence of the attitude of the early church toward what they heard or read about Jesus; this is why I think a quote from Papias about truth is really valuable as a refutation of silly but all-too-common claims that the Gospels' original audiences didn't care much about boring facts but more about theological truth, even when the latter was expressed by means of made-up facts.
I would be reluctant to concede *merely* for the sake of the argument an additional "remove" between a person and the original events or the fact of authorship. I would however concede it if I genuinely thought that the evidence we have is vague. For example, I think it's plausible that Papias (due perhaps more to geography than to time) never personally knew John, the author of the fourth Gospel, or any other member of the twelve, though he seems to have known some people (Aristion?) who were actual eyewitnesses of Jesus' ministry, and he valued his acquaintance with them. Generally I'm inclined to hold the line on how many removes someone is from the events of Jesus' ministry, due to the epistemic issue of additional sources of slippage. This is one reason why I push back somewhat in The Eye of the Beholder even on the "other John" theory in its Bauckham version, because Bauckham thinks that John (the author) go his information about the Galilean ministry at second hand, due to the fact that he was a stay-at-home Jerusalemite. While that still would put him very close to the facts, I see no reason to concede it since I don't think it's true and, more crucially, since some of the internal indications of truth in the Galilee stories (such as unnecessary details and pointless geographical notes) are best explained as a direct preservation of oral memoir. They seem unlikely to be preserved if the author were even at second hand from those events.