Papias-wrote-it theories

The following are my own theories: I thought they were needed, because they use the earliest "testimonies" properly, and don't dismiss Church Fathers on flimsy grounds. Also: they accept both the onomastic argument for the Gospels as biographies, and they are based on the Markan Priority theory.

Papias-wrote-it theories

The Gospels are biographies, not pure fiction, according to the onomastic argument. That doesn't imply that everything about the Gospels must then be perfectly true, which appears to be claimed by the inventors of the argument, it just means that there is a historical background wherein the personage refers to people that for the most part were real people, but we must also have a biographer. What indications do we have about a historical biographer on the life of Jesus? We have Papias of Hierapolis, who wrote a commentary on the logions of Matthew and John Mark! According to the history Papias used logia from Matthew and John Mark to write his commentaries. These logia sets were not written down in order, nor did they provide a coherent biography. Matthew wrote his logia set in chronological order, but not as anecdotes, and he wrote them in Hebreew, or more likely in Aramaic. John Mark wrote his logia set in Greek, and he wrote them as short stories that he allegedly recorded from the apostle Peter, but they were not arranged in chronological order. What did then Papias do? He interviewed elders and other persons with indirect knowledge about the Jesus events. Why? Probable answers: 1. he wanted to identify important persons in the Jesus movement, 2. he wanted to establish a context for the logia of Matthew, in order to interpret them, 3. he wanted to establish a chronology and context also for the logia of John Mark.

Papias-Mark theories

To accomplish that, he wrote a sketch of the life of Jesus, and this sketch is the most original proto-Mark. It may have contained Matthew statements that are absent from our Gospel of Mark, but they may also have been absent, because Papias kept the Matthew logia in a separate set. So in essence Papias is the collator of Gospel of Mark, which was called the Memoirs of the Apostles.

Papias-Matthew theories

Papias translated Matthew's logia from Aramaic to Greek that he kept in a series which is now regarded as Q. Papias' list contained more logia than our currently known Q, and this list was the basis for the additions to our Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Now Papias redacted the Gospel of John Mark – which he himself, or someone else wrote/collated – by adding the statements of Q where he saw fit. So in essence Papias is the collator of the Gospel of Matthew from earlier sources.

Papias-Mark-Matthew theory

Papias wrote the Gospel of Mark based on John Mark's logia. That was the first edition of the Memoirs of the Apostles. Next he amended the Gospel of Mark with logia of Matthew that he had translated in a later stage, and that book now constitutes the Gospel of Matthew. That was the second edition of the Memoirs of the Apostles. He used them as short stories to analyse the Logia sets of John Mark and Matthew, with no intent that they should constitute eye-witness accounts.

• Papias and the Gospels, © 6 oct 2012, Richard Bauckham
• The Gospel of Matthew, John the elder, and the Papias tradition: A response to R H Gundry, David C Sim

Why Jesus really did exist, personal opinion

For a very long time after losing my confidence in Christianity, I was bewildered by the lack of proofs that Jesus existed, and the relative strength of some of the Jesus-Myth theories' arguments. I was in a vacuum whether Jesus really did exist or not, since I could find neither the Jesus-existence arguments nor the Jesus-myth arguments convincing, until I saw a serious historian making a Youtube video series validating the arguments from a historians perspective. This series can be found here: Fishers of Evidence.

Fishers of Evidence easily sank my Josephus three-point verification argument for Josephus actually referring to Jesus. My three-point verification argument was formulated as follows:

★ Josephus's Antiquities of the Jews claims that Jesus existed and was the Messiah in a completely unlikely and obviously interpolated glorification from a Jew that was on the losing side in a war against the Romans, and now considers emperor Vespasian being the real Messiah. Someone (whom everybody suspect is the Christian historian Eusebius) messed with the text. ★ On the other hand Origen complains against Josephus that he doesn't regard Jesus as Messiah (Eusebius had no chance to make a scribble on Origen's texts), and ★ we have alternative versions of Josephus in Syriac and Arabic that doesn't praise Jesus but instead regard him as a magician. ERGO – I thought – Josephus must really have written about a real Jesus, Josephus was three-point verified in analogy of verifying a HTTPS web server (Josephus) with a Certificate Authority (Origen).

Update 190717: This three-point verification is now doubly falsified because the "alternate versions" of Testimonium Flavianum has been proven[?] to be spurious.

Except the Fishers of Evidence just asked where from Josephus got his information. Plausibly from some Christian, which in the phase of history when Josephus wrote books, was more likely to believe that Jesus was a real person. The three-point verification system just verified that Josephus wrote something.

Now, a much heavier argument why Jesus existed is the Onomastic argument, which is an unlikely application of statistics. It claims that the Gospels are referring to (mostly) real persons, that probably existed, based on their names. The names in the Gospels distribute fairly similar to the names found on archeological tombstones in the region of Judea and Galilee. In fiction names are chosen as to not collide with each other so that confusion does not occur. For the Gospels to have been written as fiction, the author must either unlikely take the names of a clearly delimited group of people, keeping the names of all of them, and then fantasize a completely fictional story around them, or, impossibly: guess that readers of the Gospels in the future will doubt the content, and therefore contrive a random distribution of persons, that counterparts the statistics of real persons in the geographical vicinity. Statistics was invented in the 17th century Europe. ERGO: not necessarily Jesus, but most of the persons in the Gospels must have existed. It is less likely then that the main character Jesus is mythical than say one of the Jameses.

Henceforth I will write this blog as if Jesus the man really existed. The Jesus-mythicists sometimes have good arguments, but their main case is weak.