Latest / Paulogia / Fact Checking the Gospel Anonymity “Fact Check”

Transcript

Fact Checking the Gospel Anonymity “Fact Check” · Paulogia

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_02: If that's the important part and the rest is just frosting, you should have made a whole six hour video about this external evidence, since it's doing all the heavy lifting.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_03: Challenge accepted.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_02: Someone made a six-hour video about gospel authorship because I asked for it.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_02: Six hours?
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_02: I don't want to complain for that long.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_02: That probably deserves a look.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_04: When we did that 15-part series on gospel reliability, we went through like data point after data point after data point of what conservative these evangelical fundamentalist scholars have put out.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_04: And no one addresses their points.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_02: So I did a two and a half hour reply to Mike's six and a half hours, pointing out many of the flaws of the arguments, a great many of which were focused on the so-called internal evidence from the words of the Gospels themselves.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_02: In his live stream response to my response, a few times he backed right off the very weak internal evidence arguments he made, as if they were just for funsies.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_04: And again, I did say in that video on the Gospel of Matthew, the internal evidence isn't enough to establish traditional authorship.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_04: You need it's meant to support the external evidence.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_04: I totally agree.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_02: If that's the important part and the rest is just frosting, you should have made a whole six hour video about this external evidence, since it's doing all the heavy lifting.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_02: To which Dave Pallman of Faith Because of Reason said, Okay, Paul, you asked for it.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_02: And here we are.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_02: And the first thing to note is the video length.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_02: Six hours, zero minutes, and zero seconds.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly six per my request.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_02: That's a baller move.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_02: Do people still say baller move?
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_04: You know what?
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_04: Respect.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_04: That's a baller move.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I suspect there was some minor padding involved throughout.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_02: I respect it.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_02: Honestly, there was much to respect in this presentation.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_02: First, it was highly structured and well organized, which is very compatible with how my brain likes things to be.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_03: The roadmap is as follows.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_03: I shall begin by exploring some variations of the anonymity hypothesis in order to have a clear target at which to aim.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_03: After this, I shall consider and critique the main arguments for the anonymity of the Gospels, based on the alleged failure of the authors of the Gospels to identify themselves, and on the silence of the early patristics who quote from them.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_03: After this, I shall consider some preliminary difficulties faced by the anonymity hypothesis, wholly apart from the Mountain of Patristic testimony standing against it.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_03: Lastly, I shall detail 17 sources from before the time of Irenaeus in AD 180 that either name one gospel author, name all four gospel authors, or attribute the gospels to the apostles.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_03: This last task will constitute the greater portion of the video and serves as the primary grounds upon which the anonymity hypothesis should be rejected.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_03: There were clear transitions.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_03: Having laid to rest the two primary arguments for the proposition that the gospels were anonymous, the path is now clear to develop my case against the anonymity of the Gospels.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_03: And periodic recaps and summaries.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_03: To summarize this section, we have considered the argument that the gospel should be regarded as anonymous because their putative authors write about themselves in the third person, and because the Gospels lack explicit internal identifications of authorship.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_02: Unlike Michael Jones, whose communication style leaves it unclear to the audience, or at least to me, which points are supposed to be primary and which points are secondary.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_04: I'm like, okay, that's not the point I was making.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_04: Just moves on.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_04: Like again, missing the main points in that video, hitting on points that are gonna be so peripheral that I'm not even gonna really fight with them on.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, like again, wow, biggest points I'm trying to bring up.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_04: I'm not saying he ignores every point, but he ignores some of the biggest points.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_03: Dave never left these delineations in doubt.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_03: This is not the primary ground upon which Eusebius' literary dependence upon Papius in Ecclesiastical History 324 should be accepted.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_03: I acknowledge that this point is somewhat speculative, and I think that the case against the anonymity of the Gospels is strong enough without it.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_03: I have argued that some of Norelli's more tangential criticisms of Hill may have weight, but that his criticisms become weakest when Hill's evidence is the strongest.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_02: To the extent where Dave spent the last 20 minutes giving himself a report card.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_03: Obviously, this video has put forward numerous extremely controversial claims.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_03: So now that my full case against the anonymity thesis is on the table, and the 17 examples of people who knew the names before Irenaeus have been put forward, I want to briefly review each example and grade my confidence in each one on a scale from one to ten, where ten represents maximal confidence.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_02: Structurally, I'm very grateful for this report card mechanism because it forms a framework through which I can economically traverse my responses to his six hours of argumentation.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_02: But before we get to that, we must first talk about Dave's misguided straw man thesis and why his video was doomed to fail before he began.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_02: For context, here's the important data.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_02: The Gospels were written somewhere around 70 to 100 AD.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_02: Justin Margar quotes them heavily around 150 with no names attached.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_02: The first surviving source to attach the four familiar names is Irenaeus around 180.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_02: Every time I say 180, that's the gap I mean.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_02: Now the video Dave made is expressly intended to combat the idea that Irenaeus personally invented the gospel author names.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_03: Irenaeus is often identified as the bogeyman who attached the names that we know to the Gospels around AD 180.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_03: Irenaeus himself is personally responsible for affixing the names that we know to the Gospels.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_03: That simply does not wash with the idea that Irenaeus attached the names of recognized authorities to the Gospels that he liked.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_03: Irenaeus did not invent the names on the Gospels, as many popular critics of Christianity would have us believe.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_02: But it's clearly expressed in my video, that is not my position.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_02: I have never proposed that some single mastermind impose the titles on the entire church.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_02: Nor do critical scholars think the names of the gospels were handed down by a single ruling body like a church council.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_02: No institution or person in the early to mid-second century had the power to enforce such a decision across the Mediterranean world.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_02: And Dave knows this is not my position.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_03: Recently, the YouTube counter-apologist Paulagia has suggested that the names may have originated with an influential copy of the New Testament or the Gospels in Rome.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_03: As for the theory he actually puts forward regarding how the names may have become attached to the Gospels, it is less susceptible to easy refutation than certain versions of the anonymity hypothesis, showcased in the earlier quotations that try to blame the names on Irenaeus.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_02: And yet, Dave opened his video with my face and is framing this video for his audience as a response to me, but is arguing against a view that he himself admits is a view that I do not hold.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_02: That's a straw man argument.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_02: It is not until after the three-hour mark that he makes this clarification about me, and many of his viewers will have been long gone by then, leaving the video thinking that I have been refuted.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_02: Indeed, some of his deluded and deceived viewers are the ones who alerted me to the existence of this video in the first place, reveling in my alleged defeat.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_03: Paul is free to reject this model himself, but he is gaslighting apologists when he claims that no skeptic or critical scholar makes this claim.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_03: I made no such statement.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_04: Please stop gaslighting me.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_04: I'm not gaslighting you.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_02: This is Dave uncharitably hearing me make a broad statement about modern critical scholarship and giving me a hashtag not all scholars in response.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_02: One can, of course, frequently find a voice for nearly any view.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_02: For example, I can confidently say critical scholarship holds that Mark was the first gospel written.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_02: But Dave just posted a video on why Mark was written last.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_03: Matthew wrote first, Luke wrote second, and Mark combined them together.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_02: So to be clear, I was not intending to make such an absolute declaration.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_02: But far more important than clarifying my personal view, Dave knows the careful Steelman version of gospel anonymity arguments exists.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_02: He describes it himself and then aims at a different target.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_03: Though more careful proponents of the anonymity thesis will say that the names developed and caught on between AD 160 and 180.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_03: Some versions vaguely assert only that the names on the Gospels stuck to them somewhere between the time of Justin Martyr around A.D.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_03: 160 and the time of Irenaeus around A.D.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_03: 180.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_03: And makes proclamations compatible with the stronger version.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_03: If these names were attached to the Gospels sometime much later than their original composition, it must have happened sometime in the decades before A.D.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_03: 180.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_03: The evidence is clear that Irenaeus inherited the names that had been on the Gospels for decades.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_02: And so when we do our report card on FBR, we'll score it against the position I actually hold, that the four names become attached to the four gospels during the middle of the second century and had won broad agreement by the 180s.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_02: Justin Murder, writing around 150 to 160, still describes the Gospels as memoirs of the Apostles.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_02: Irenaeus, writing around 180, treats the names as settled.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_02: In between these points, we can watch the tradition spread.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_02: Irenaeus did not invent it.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_02: The open question is whether any independent source before about 150 ties these four names to these four texts.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_02: Before we get to the main course, for the sake of completeness and clarity, let's do some quick housekeeping to address the first hour of Dave's video.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_03: To summarize this section, we have considered the argument that the gospel should be regarded as anonymous because their putative authors write about themselves in the third person, and because the gospels lack explicit internal identifications of authorship.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_02: If people are making that argument, it's not a great one.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_02: But the reason this does have to come up is that many Christians are unaware that the Gospels are internally anonymous, that this is near universally agreed by scholars, and that this is a necessary precondition to even have a discussion about whether the Gospels are anonymous.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_03: If third person or lack of explicit internal identification are not strong evidence of the anonymity of these other ancient works, neither should it be taken to be strong evidence of the anonymity of the Gospels.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_02: Correct.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_02: It's a necessary precondition only.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_03: We have seen that the most pressing argument in favor of the anonymity hypothesis comes from quotations of the Gospels by earlier church fathers who do not name the Gospels when quoting them.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_02: Correct.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_02: Church fathers who quote the Gospels without attribution is consistent with anonymity hypothesis.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_02: It's an argument from silence, of course.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_02: Whether it is a good argument from silence or a bad argument from silence depends on your opinion about whether we should expect them to cite a name.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_02: A step further, church fathers who quote the gospels using an attribution other than the traditional names is not only consistent with the anonymity hypothesis, it bolsters it, because they went out of their way to make a non-author attribution.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_03: For example, the Didic refers to Matthew as the Lord's Gospel, and Justin refers to the Gospels as the memoirs of the Apostles.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_02: This is at least somewhat unexpected if we are to believe the Church Father knew the name.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_02: It's not definitive, but it favors anonymity.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_03: Third, I have compared these unnamed quotations of the Gospels in earlier church fathers with quotations of the Gospels in later church fathers, and we have seen that even the later church fathers only rarely name the Gospels when quoting them.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_03: There's a cavernous difference between rarely name them and never name them.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_03: Fourth, I have pointed out that these same church fathers likewise cite the Old Testament and the Epistles of Paul without naming the authors, even though these works are obviously not anonymous.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_03: You'll be making the opposite point about Paul later.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_03: Therefore, this cannot be used to argue that earlier writers who quoted the Gospels without naming the authors thought that the Gospels were anonymous.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_03: Of course we can.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_02: You can come up with reasons, maybe even good reasons in your opinion, why writers who knew the gospel authors didn't mention them.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_02: But it will always remain on the table that a candidate reason is that they didn't know the authors.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_02: Without a mind-reading time machine, that's not only a possibility, it's the default likelihood.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_03: Once the Gospels were collected together, and this seems to have happened pretty early, there would be a practical need to distinguish between them in some way.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_02: Skeptics agree, at least in principle, probably not on how early this happened, but the need for labels tells us nothing about how many labels were used, what labels were used, by whom, when, and to what degree such labels were connected to actual truth.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_03: Compare the virtually unanimous acceptance of the names on the Gospels to the genuinely anonymous book of Hebrews.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_03: Hebrews provides an interesting test case because it is uncontroversially anonymous.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_03: As such, it can tell us what we should expect our evidence to look like when dealing with an anonymous book.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_03: Dave may not agree with me, but I mentioned Hebrews in the original video.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_02: Using Hebrews here actually backfires.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_02: Origen commended people for attributing it to Paul, even though he didn't personally believe it.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_02: Despite significant doubts among leadership, questionable apostolic authorship may have been attributed to a cherished writing that was considered useful in segments of the Christian community in order to justify its continued use in the churches.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_02: Who knows what gospel debates ended the same way, but were not recorded for posterity.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_03: It's simply a case of there being too many manuscripts with these names too quickly, if we suppose that the names originated with Irenaeus in AD 180.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_03: Too many too quickly is obviously a qualitative opinion, not a fact.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_02: There's no field-wide metric to establish such a thing.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_03: Consequently, it remains significant that there are virtually no anonymous manuscripts for any of the Gospels, despite the fact that our earliest full manuscripts of the Gospels date to later than the anonymity hypothesis claims that the four names would have been adopted.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_02: The only gospel fragment that exists that might possibly date to Irenaeus is P52, and that's a credit card-sized piece of the 18th chapter of the fourth gospel with no title at all.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_02: The next earliest fragments, P104, P90, P64, and P67, all have no title.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_02: Now, because these are all portions of the middle of the text, we are not surprised about a lack of title, to be sure.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_02: These manuscripts weigh into neither side of the debate, but are all technically anonymous.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_03: Of course, critics will be swift to point out that the earliest full manuscripts of the Gospels date to between the late 2nd and early 4th century, putting them later than the anonymity hypothesis claims that the names associated with the Gospels had stuck.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_02: Indeed, our earliest substantially complete gospel manuscripts post-date the period when traditional names are hypothesized to have become established.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_02: P66 and P75 are commonly dated to the late 2nd through 3rd centuries, while Codex Vicanus and Codex Sinaticus date to the 4th century.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_02: So the appearance of traditional author attributions in these manuscripts is entirely compatible with their having become established during the 2nd century.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_02: Simply declaring that there are too many manuscripts too quickly doesn't demonstrate otherwise.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_03: The bottom line is that the anonymous manuscripts did not simply vanish overnight.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_03: They would have survived and continued to exert influence over copyists for centuries to come.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_03: We might refer to this as scribal inertia.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_02: Scribal inertia assumes copyists passively reproduced manuscripts exactly as they found.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_02: However, early Christian scribal habits were dynamic and revising.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_02: Ancient critics like Celsus noted that Christians frequently revised, reordered, and remodeled gospel texts.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_02: Scribes routinely added reader aids, section headings, and paratextual updates.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_02: The assumption that anonymous manuscripts would have survived for centuries overlooks the physical realities of manuscript preservation.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_02: In papyrus codices, the opening and closing leaves, precisely where titles were commonly placed, were especially vulnerable to damage and loss, so were the most replaced.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_02: Once a standardized title collection was established by key Christian centers, subsequent copyists would naturally use these titles, even on existing manuscripts.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_02: While controversial and non-definitive, I like to point to P1, which is the first to preserve the beginning of the first gospel.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_02: And the header contains no title.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_02: The first manuscript where a title could be, and it's blank.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_03: This exception is P1, which is our earliest manuscript of the first chapter of Matthew's Gospel.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_03: Unlike all other manuscripts, it does lack the title, according to Matthew, at the top of the page.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_03: Now, because the manuscript is incomplete, we cannot say for sure that the title wasn't originally present as a cover page or a tag.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_03: Nevertheless, on its face, this does appear to be the one clear counterexample to my claim.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_02: In the end, I don't find the manuscript evidence too strongly support nor strongly negate either side of the anonymity hypothesis debate.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_02: It's compatible with either, in part because it is so sparse.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_02: With that down, let's get to Dave's witnesses.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_03: The primary exhibit will be a list of several people earlier than Irenaeus who knew the names on the Gospels.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_02: Indeed, it was a significant portion of the video, which we will now view through the lens of Dave's own report card rubric.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_03: Obviously, this video has put forward numerous extremely controversial claims.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_03: So now that my full case against the anonymity thesis is on the table, and the 17 examples of people who knew the names before Irenaeus have been put forward, I want to briefly review each example and grade my confidence in each one on a scale from 1 to 10, where 10 represents maximal confidence.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_03: To be clear, these numbers are a scale of my confidence relative to the evidence, not a percentage of probability.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_03: Broadly, the rubric will be that an explicit mention of a name is required to score a 10 out of 10.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_03: If the name is explicit, but one or two inferences are required to get there, a score of 7 to 9 out of 10 will be allotted based on how plausible the inferences are.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_03: Examples that are not explicit and require a few layers of inference to arrive at a name will be allotted a score of four to six out of ten, depending on how many inferences are involved and how plausible they are.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_03: A score of one to three out of ten will be reserved for sources that lack the names in any way and merely give us vague hints as to who wrote the Gospels.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_03: The first example we considered was Clement of Alexandria.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_03: He uncontroversially bears witness to all four names.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_03: So for that reason, he gets a 10 out of 10.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_03: The bigger concerns about Clement will regard whether or not he is independent of Irenaeus.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_03: Obviously, that could impact the significance of his witness.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_03: But our rating in this section is concerned with how confident we can be that each example names our Gospels.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_03: That is why Clement receives a rating of maximal confidence.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_02: Well, that scoring system isn't going to help defeat the anonymity hypothesis.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_02: We're looking for sources that clearly quote one or more of the canonical gospels, clearly attribute them to the traditional authors, and are writing before Justin Martyr.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_02: Writing at the same time or later than Irenaeus in 180 AD is irrelevant to the discussion.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_02: Scholarship places Clement's Demata at least a decade later, in the 190s and early 200 CE.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_02: In it, he mentions the death of Emperor Commodus on the 31st of December, 192 CE, which is a good enough anchor point for our purposes.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_02: And the last hypotypesis, where Clement's gospel order tradition comes from, is usually placed later still.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_02: Of course, Dave is aware of this, so he is attempting a different point.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_03: The far more important point that I will make is that Clement's account, regardless of when it was written, comes from sources that are earlier than and independent of Irenaeus.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_02: Eusebius reports that Clement of Alexandria explicitly cited Irenaeus by name among the earlier Christian writers whose works he drew upon.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_02: So they have some level of dependence.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_02: Dave spends time trying to nuance this dependence, which is very important for defeating the weaker Irenaeus name the Gospels hypothesis, but not particularly important for the stronger anonymity hypothesis.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_02: So I leave that as an exercise for the viewer if they wish.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_03: The fact that he doesn't attribute his tradition concerning the origins of the Gospels to Irenaeus, and instead attributes it to primitive elders, provides yet another reason to think that Clement's tradition is independent of Irenaeus's tradition.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_03: Tradition, and is earlier than the writings of Irenaeus.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_02: Again, I don't think that Irenaeus invented the tradition, and I also don't see how Clement, writing close to the third century, has anything other than tradition to even tell us where he got his traditions.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_03: The second example we considered was Theophilus of Antioch.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_03: I don't think it can be reasonably doubted that he names John as the author of the fourth gospel, for he both quotes from this gospel and attributes it to John by name.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_02: He certainly attributes in the beginning was the word to someone named John, but notice that he falls short of calling this John's son of Zebedee the disciple.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_02: If we're precise, Theophilus is referring merely to someone spirit-filled named John.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not going to quibble on this, but it could be quibbled.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_02: Theophilus of Antioch receives a score of 10 out of 10.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_03: Interesting.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_03: And when was Theophilus of Antioch writing this?
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_03: Theophilus' apology to Autolychus is commonly dated to around A.D.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_03: 180, making him a further contemporary of Irenaeus.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_03: That is what scholars generally say.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_03: If Theophilus is here, simply saying that Marcus Aurelius is the reigning emperor at the time of his writing, a date as early as A.D.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_03: 161 becomes possible.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_03: I don't wish to hang any part of my argument on this possibility, but it should be noted because, if correct, then Theophilus was writing considerably earlier than Irenaeus.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_03: Gotcha.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_02: So either way, Theophilus of Antioch is not earlier than 150 CE.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_02: He lands right in the window where I say the names were catching on.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_02: And that's exactly what a tradition spreading between 150 and 180 would look like.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_03: The upshot here is that even if Theophilus is not, strictly speaking, earlier than Irenaeus, he is almost certainly independent of Irenaeus.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_02: Again, this is important for the Irenaeus version of the hypothesis, not mine.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_02: It does include the most interesting tidbit about this source.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_03: Theophilus once quotes Saint John by name, but he does not mention the name of any other evangelist.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_03: He has three quotations from Saint Matthew, and perhaps one from Saint Luke.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_03: To quote John by name in this period, but not Matthew and Luke by name fits remarkably well with the anonymity hypothesis.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_03: Our third example was the anti-Marcionite prologue to Luke.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_03: Again, it receives a score of 10 out of 10, since it certainly names all four Gospel authors.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_03: The controversy here regards the dating of this text.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_02: Controversy is putting it mildly, since scholarship is talking fourth century, not early second as we're looking for.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_03: While a date in the second half of the fourth century is likely for the prologues for Mark and John, and the second part of the prologue for Luke, the first part of the latter may have been written much earlier.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_03: Now, even if we grant that only the beginning of the prologue is original, we still get the name of Luke associated with the third gospel.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_03: That is enough to challenge the idea that the Gospels were anonymous prior to Irenaeus.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_02: FBR wants to push the date back due to some Greek composition, but his review doesn't mention that this Luke introduction he wants to date earlier closely parallels Irenaeus.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_03: In conclusion, we have seen that the anti-Marcionite prologue to Luke is earlier than the corresponding prologues for Mark and John.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_03: It is at least contemporary with Irenaeus, and plausibly a decade or two earlier.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_02: Plausible becomes implausible if the prologue quotes Irenaeus, but even granting this extreme, the work doesn't in fact the strong anonymity case.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_03: The fourth example was Melito of Sardis.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_03: Melito is one of the more controversial examples on this list, since concluding that he named the four gospels depends on the success of two projects.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_03: First, it requires an intertextual analysis of several church fathers who know the tradition about the four living creatures, and the conclusion that Irenaeus is modifying and repurposing an earlier source.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_03: Second, it requires identifying that source as Melito of Sardis.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_03: I think both steps are defensible, but the second is shakier than the first.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_03: We will give Melito a four out of ten.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_02: In his writing, Irenaeus matched the four named Gospels to the four creatures, following the order in Revelation.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_02: But Scholar Luke Stephen thinks some Ezekiel-based leftovers show that Irenaeus was reworking an older source, since putting the Gospels in Ezekiel's order yields the Western order of Matthew, John, Luke, and Mark.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_02: But from whom did he borrow this?
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_02: Stephen suggests maybe Melito of Sardis' last extracts, a work no one has ever seen, is making this connection.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_02: How convenient.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_02: To be clear, no surviving fragment of Melito actually contains the Gospel Creature pairing.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_02: These are layers of speculation built atop layers of speculation.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_02: And as such, I find even a score of four of ten to be overly generous.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_03: I am aware that this section must have seemed to many viewers like building a house of cards, since there are numerous points at which Stephen's case for Melito of Sardis, being Irenaeus' source, might fail.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_03: Out of curiosity, when was this written?
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_03: Hall dates Melito's apology fairly precisely between 169 and 177.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_03: But Dave speculates that the non-surviving passage could be from an earlier book.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_03: But the most likely source that Irenaeus would be drawing from, based on Stevens' analysis, is Melito's extracts, which may well have been written as early as AD 150.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_03: For FBR, there is no end to optimistic interpretation.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_03: But at least he acknowledges it as such.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_03: Even if Stevens has incorrectly identified Melito as Irenaeus' source, I think his case is quite compelling that Irenaeus was modifying an earlier source, and that this source knew the names Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_03: And that alone is sufficient to undermine the idea that Irenaeus is the first person to name all four Gospels.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_03: Again, not my hypothesis.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_03: On the stronger version, this passage fails on both fronts.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_03: Our fifth example was Apollinaris of Heropolis.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_03: He definitely names Matthew as having written something, and we know that he is familiar with the Gospel of Matthew.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_03: But because he doesn't actually quote the Gospel in connection with what Matthew wrote, there is a small gap where doubt may still reside.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_03: In light of this, we will give Apollinaris a nine out of ten.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_02: For the criteria of quoting a passage and attributing it to one of the authors, this is a real gap, though not a defeater, since the fragment says the other side cites Matthew in support of its Passover dating.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_02: But before we quibble, let's make sure its place on the timeline makes it relevant.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_03: Ezra Abbott and Martin Hengel are examples of scholars who support this date, placing Apollinaris in 166.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_03: This places him between 10 and 20 years before Irenaeus.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_03: A few scholars ate him as late as AD 175, although this is typically just asserted without any explanation of the reasoning.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_02: I see.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_02: So virtually at the same time as Irenaeus, and well within the predictions of the strong anonymity model, particularly when we're talking about just one of the four gospels and not even a firm connection.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_03: I just thought it worth noting that Apollinaris might easily be 30 years before Irenaeus.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_03: My hypothesis can live comfortably with that possibility.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_03: The anonymity hypothesis cannot.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_03: Sure it can.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_02: A name for one gospel in the 60s or 70s is just what a spreading tradition should produce.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_03: The Muratorian fragment, our sixth example, uncontroversially named Luke and John, so it receives a 10 out of 10 for those names.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_03: While the earlier segment is missing, it very likely also named Matthew and Mark.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_03: But because the names are not present, we will give it an 8 out of 10 for the names Matthew and Mark.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_02: Dave lives in a world where missing names counts as good evidence.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_02: But again, before I quibble, let's check the dating to see if it matters.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_03: Probably a date between AD 155 and 160 is reasonable.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_02: Reasonable is not the same as widely accepted.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_02: Most scholars date the fragment to late 2nd century, around 180 to 200 CE, while at the same time a significant minority actually puts it in the 4th century.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_02: FBR's view here is a distant third.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_02: Overly optimistic.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_00: Optimism doesn't alter the laws of physics.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_03: Let's say that I've dated the Muratorian fragment too early.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_03: You have.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_03: The fragment gives us a fairly direct timestamp as to when it was written, toward the end, saying, But Hermes wrote the shepherd very recently in our times in the city of Rome, while Bishop Pius, his brother, was occupying the episcopal chair of the church of the city of Rome.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_03: We thus have two time markers provided by the fragment itself.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_03: The early date depends on three Latin words.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_02: The fragment says Hermes wrote the shepherd nuperim temporis natrus, which I'm sure I've pronounced incorrectly, which is usually translated very recently in our own times.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_02: The Latin phrase doesn't have to describe the author's own lifetime.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_02: The early Christians routinely divided history into the age of the apostles and everything that came after it.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_02: Hirenaeus said Revelation appeared almost in our own generation, even though it came out almost a century earlier.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_02: In fact, the fragment itself keeps the shepherd out of the church reading because it came after their time, meaning after the apostles.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_02: So our times most likely means the post-apostolic age, and that says nothing about when the fragment itself was written.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_02: Also, these three words survive only in the Latin translation, copied by a scribe B.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_02: F.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_02: Westcott, described as either unable or unwilling to understand the work he was copying.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_02: That can't carry the weight of the whole early date.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_02: The fragment does say that Hermes was the brother of Bishop Pius and wrote while Pius held office, which is around 140 to 154.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_02: Now the shepherd himself points to around the year 100.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_02: It mentions Clement of Rome, it knows of no single ruling bishop.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_02: It hints that some of the first generation were still alive.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_02: Hermas says he was raised and sold as a slave, and never mentions a brother.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_02: Outside the fragment, the brother's story first shows up in a 4th century source.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_02: If the author lived in Pius's day, he got wrong the very fact his argument depends on, which is far easier to imagine from a writer centuries later.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_02: As Jeffrey Mark Hanneman argues, the more reasonable conclusion is that the fragment's whole statement is in error.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_02: That said, even Dave's maximally credulous dating is fine for the strong anonymity case.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_02: But if you care to dig in, I think you'll find the fourth century dating to be better supported if one must stray from consensus.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_03: Justin Martyr, our seventh example, does not name any of the Gospels.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_03: He does associate Mark with Peter, and his reference to the Gospels as having been written by apostles and their followers fits a little too conveniently with the four familiar names to be a coincidence.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_03: Because of this, I will grade Justin a three out of ten.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_02: In the video Dave is responding to, I spoke about Justin Murder as the key witness on my side of the argument.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_02: But the silence by itself is not my argument.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_02: The times during that period when church fathers like Justin Martyr quoted the canonical gospels, but generically call them memoirs of the apostles, is more something that I consider to be evidence against traditional knowledge.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_02: So I was kind of surprised to see him here, even if a three out of ten.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_03: So I will just briefly recap that he refers to the Gospels as the memoirs of the apostles and their followers.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_03: We saw that this was suggestive, inasmuch as the plurals require a minimum of four Gospels, two written by apostles and two written by their followers, as Martin Hengel surmises.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_03: In other words, Justin knows that some of the Gospels are attributed to apostles, Matthew and John, and others to the disciples of apostles, Mark and Luke.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_02: Scholars like Helmut Coaster and Arthur Bellanzoni argue that Justin's sayings of Jesus come from harmonies blending Matthew and Luke rather than from four distinct canonical books.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_02: As Watson and Michael Coke note regarding dialogue with Trifola 3, 8, the conjunction chi and does not neatly divide the Gospels into two distinct pairs, two apostles and two followers.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_02: Instead, it indicates that the general corpus as a whole was viewed as a joint production of the Gospels working alongside scribes or followers.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_02: Furthermore, Justin frequently incorporates extra canonical details, like Jesus born in a cave, fire on the Jordan at his baptism, and ploughs made in Joseph's shop, showing that his source materials were broader than just the four canonical gospels.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_03: Justin also quotes from the Gospel of Mark and calls it the memoirs of Peter.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_02: The phrase in dialogue with Trifo 1063, that is often translated as Peter's memoirs or his memoirs, uses the Greek pronoun Ao2, which literally translates to his or of him.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_02: Because Au2 is simply a pronoun, its antecedent is grammatically ambiguous and open to two distinct interpretations.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_02: If the pronoun refers back to Jesus, the main subject of the overall passage, the phrase translates to memoirs about him.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_02: In this reading, Justin is not naming Peter as the author at all.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_02: He's using O2 as an objective genitive, referring to the memoirs concerning Jesus' life.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_02: If the pronoun refers to Peter, who is mentioned in the immediate clause describing his name change, the phrase translates to his memoirs, Peter's memoirs.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_02: Dave's strongest point here is about what the passage says.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_03: Justin does name the source of one of the memoirs.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_03: He refers to the memoirs of Peter and says that it records Jesus changing the names of the Sons of Zebedee to Baenergies, or Sons of Thunder.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_03: That's what I'm going to call you from Alan.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_03: James and John, the sons of thunder.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_03: So the source of at least one of these memoirs was indeed associated with the name Peter.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_02: Across his extensive surviving works, Justin never once mentions the name Mark, nor does he mention Papias of Heropolis.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_02: Consequently, we have no explicit evidence that Justin knew this tradition.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_02: On the other hand, scholars point out that Justin drew upon harmonized gospel traditions, written collections of Jesus' sayings, and material transmitted through early Christian teaching, catechetal settings.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_02: Any of these could have carried the Boenergies detail to Justin without his ever consulting the standalone gospel attributed to Mark.
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_02: Meanwhile, other writings circulated under Peter's name.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_02: Scholars have argued that Justin's reference could instead be to the Gospel of Peter, a text explicitly attributed to the Apostle rather than connected to him through later preserved tradition about Mark.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_02: Because the surviving portion of the Gospel of Peter contains only part of the Passion narrative, we cannot determine whether its lost sections included the Mulanergy's detail.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_03: Collectively, this material is difficult to square with the idea that Justin regarded the Gospels as anonymous.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_03: Not at all.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_02: Martyr remains prime evidence for the anonymity hypothesis.
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_02: Dave also borrows an old explanation for why Justin leaves the names off.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_02: His audience just wouldn't have known them.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_03: He is throughout addressing heathens.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_03: Nor would there have been more propriety in his giving the names of the authors of the respective gospels.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_03: Of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, neither the emperor nor the generality of those heathens who might have read his apology had probably ever heard.
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_02: Except Justin does name an apostolic author when it suits him.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_02: In Dialogue 814, he says the revelation came to a certain man with us whose name was John, one of the apostles of Christ.
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_02: So Justin can name John for revelation, yet he never once names an evangelist.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_02: And Theophilus, writing to a pagan named Atolicus, names John without any worry about his audience, as Dave notes elsewhere.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_03: As we have formerly seen, Theophilus once quotes Saint John by name.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_03: Pagan readers were never the obstacle.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_03: For Justin, the names just weren't there yet.
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_03: Our eighth example, and our first heretical example, is Marcion.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_03: We have no quotation from Marcion giving the names, but Tertullian's presentation of his argument appears to require the traditional authorship of Matthew, Mark, and John.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_03: The argument, as Tertullian presents it, makes no sense without that assumption.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_03: However, we are dependent for this information on Tertullian, who may not be representing Marcion accurately.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_03: Thus, we grade Marcion accordingly at 4 out of 10.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_03: That requires a bit more explanation.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_03: In his work Against Marcion, Tullian critiques an argument that he attributes to Marcion based on Galatians.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_03: According to Tertulian, Marcion used Galatians as an argument against the Gospels that he rejected, which would be Matthew, Mark, and John.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_03: Marcion's argument requires the apostolic authorship of Matthew, Mark, and John in order to work.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_03: Marcion isn't trying to discredit these Gospels by saying that they weren't written by apostles, rather, he grants that they were written by apostles, but then tries to discredit them on the basis that the apostles perverted the teachings of Jesus.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_03: The best explanation of the fact that Marcion chose the Gospel of Luke seems to me to be that its title and tradition already attributed it to a disciple of Paul.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_03: And since Marcion's argument assumes the traditional authorship of at least Matthew, Mark, and John, he supplies evidence, indirect though it may be, that these three Gospels were not anonymous by A.D.
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_03: 144, nearly 40 years before Irenaeus.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_02: More directly, in a hypothesis advanced by Martin Hangel, Marcion rejected Matthew and John because they bore the names of original apostles, whom Marcion viewed as having corrupted Christ's true message, rejected Mark because of its association with Peter, and adopted Luke because its established church tradition already linked it to Paul.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_02: On Hengel's view, Marcion stripped the name Luke off the text and called it simply the Gospel to claim he is restoring Paul's original preaching.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_02: The most obvious and glaring problem is that, as Dave acknowledges, none of these traditional author names are used by Marcion.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_03: His gospel is anonymous.
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_03: We come to the Gospel of Marcion, which he presented about AD 144, which, as Tertullian critically pointed out, he designated the gospel, leaving out the author's name.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_02: There is no actual evidence in the primary sources that Marcion removed Luke's name from a manuscript title or that he defended his gospel by appealing to Lucan authorship.
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_02: And this inference is far from universally accepted in scholarship.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_02: Judith Lew observes that there is nothing to suggest Marcion even knew his gospel by the name Luke, much less that he deliberately removed it.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_02: Some scholars suggest that Marcion may have only known one gospel, while others emphasize he accepted only one as authoritative.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_02: In either case, he had no practical need to affix an author's name to distinguish it from others in his collection.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_02: He called it simply the gospel, because for him, it was the only true one.
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_02: Scholars like Lou argue that later Orthodox writers, including Irenaeus and Tertullian, approached Marcion's gospel through the lens of the subsequently established fourfold gospel tradition.
• 41:07
  SPEAKER_02: Tertullian identified Marcion's anonymous text with Luke and treated it as a corrupted version of that gospel, even though there's no evidence that Marcion himself knew it by that name.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_02: This would not be dissimilar to a modern Disney Plus subscriber, identifying the movie where Luke Skywalker blew up the Death Star as Star Wars Episode 4 A New Hope.
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_02: That's how we know it today.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_02: But when the film premiered in 1977, it was called simply Star Wars.
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_02: From a little movie called The Star Wars.
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_02: It's just Star Wars.
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_02: The episode and subtitle were added in 1981, after the release of the first sequel, to distinguish it within the expanding series.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_02: Along with the other Gospels, Marcion also excluded Acts and the pastoral epistles from his canon, meaning that he did not accept two of the key sources later used to identify the author of our Gospel of Luke as Paul's traveling companion, the so-called we passages in Acts, and the reference to Luke as Paul's loyal companion in 2 Timothy 4.11.
• 42:01
  SPEAKER_02: Accepting the traditional conclusion, while rejecting the evidence used to establish it, seems unlikely.
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_02: In any case, Marcion clearly does not use the name of Luke or any Gospel name, and Dave rightly gives this one a relatively low score of confidence, as it is built on the idea that Marcion had information he deliberately withheld.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_03: Our ninth example comes to us from Heraclian, who, according to Origen, attributed one statement in the Gospel of John to the apostle rather than the Baptist, thereby implying that the name John was common to both the Baptist and the author of the Gospel.
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_03: We are dependent on Origin for this material, but the context makes it highly unlikely that Origen is making it up.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_03: There is also some inference, plausible though it may be, involved in deriving the conclusion that Heraclion doesn't name the apostle as John because that name was shared with John the Baptist.
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_03: Both of these factors will force us to moderate our confidence somewhat.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_03: Therefore, I will place Heraclion at 7 out of 10.
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_02: When second century writers called the evangelist the disciple, or John the Disciple of the Lord, they were not automatically pointing to John the son of Zebedee, one of the twelve.
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_02: Scholars like Carl Jung Bermund, Iner Thomason, and Michael Coke have shown this.
• 43:19
  SPEAKER_02: In the Asian agnostic circles of that period, whose usage surfaces in both Ptolemy and Ayrenaeus, the title often belonged to someone else.
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_02: It could designate a local authority in Ephesus, the beloved disciple, or the figure known as John the Elder.
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_02: Nor do Heracleon's own words close the gap.
• 43:35
  SPEAKER_02: Nothing in his surviving fragments mention apostolic authorship or ties to the gospel of Zibedee's son.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_02: Dave places Heracleon between 165 and 175 CE, but Alistair Logan puts his commentary on John in the late 170s or 180s.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_02: That would place it after Ptolemy, and roughly alongside or after Irenaeus's Against Heresies, around 180 CE.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_02: Irenaeus quotes Ptolemy's interpretation of the Johannean prologue, yet he shows No awareness that Heracleon ever wrote on John.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_02: Clement of Alexandria, writing in the 190s, knows how Heracleon read Luke and Matthew, but he too is silent about any treatment of John.
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_02: The commentary first appears in the 230s, when Origen engages with it.
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_02: And even on Dave's own date of 165 to 175, Heracleon sits inside the window, which is exactly where my model expects the names to start surfacing.
• 44:23
  SPEAKER_03: The evidence is somewhat more conclusive in the case of Ptolemy the Gnostic, our tenth example, Irenaeus directly quotes Ptolemy as naming John in connection with material straight from the fourth gospel.
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_03: While Irenaeus appears unlikely to be fabricating this material, because he is quoting an ideological opponent, and we cannot confirm this citation, apart from a vaguer reference in the letter to Flora, Ptolemy will drop from maximal confidence to 9 out of 10.
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_02: That's a very high score for a passage we can't confidently assign to Ptolemy.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_02: The Greek text of Against Heresies 185, preserved by Epiphanius, does credit the prologue material to the John of the Disciple of the Lord, but nothing in the Greek says Ptolemy wrote it.
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_02: The only line crediting the passage to Ptolemy appears in the 4th century Latin translation of Irenaeus.
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_02: And Christoph Marckes argues that line is a later gloss added by the redactor.
• 45:17
  SPEAKER_02: Dave's 9 out of 10 rests entirely on this passage being Ptolemy's.
• 45:22
  SPEAKER_02: Now, if we stick to what Ptolemy undeniably wrote, we're left with a letter to Flora.
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_02: There he cites John 1.3, but does not attribute it to John or any name, but generically to the Apostle.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_02: The same title he gives Paul in that very letter.
• 45:34
  SPEAKER_02: Ptolemy relies primarily on the Gospel of Matthew as his main authority, quoting Matthew's Jesus about eight or nine times, while citing John only once as a secondary proof text alongside Paul.
• 45:46
  SPEAKER_02: This is more consistent of someone unaware of authored traditions than of someone familiar with them.
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_03: Our eleventh example was Valentinus, who I surmised named John as the author of the fourth gospel.
• 45:58
  SPEAKER_03: The inference here was based on the difficulty involved in explaining how three different Valentinians, Heraclian, Ptolemy, and the source behind the Excerpta Theododi, could all have managed to agree upon the Johannine authorship of the fourth gospel if this had not been taught by their founder.
• 46:17
  SPEAKER_03: This is an inference, but I find it to be a very plausible one.
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_03: Accordingly, we will rate Valentinus at five out of ten.
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_03: That argument might not be clear from this summary.
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_03: We have just concluded that two prominent Gnostics, Ptolemy and Heraclion, both associated the fourth gospel with the name of John the Apostle.
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_03: We concluded no such thing, but carry on.
• 46:41
  SPEAKER_03: However, these are not two random Gnostics.
• 46:44
  SPEAKER_03: There is a connection between them.
• 46:46
  SPEAKER_03: Both Ptolemy and Heraclian were students of Valentinus, the founder of Valentinian Gnosticism.
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_03: Ordinarily, when two students of theology, who share the same teacher, converge on a specific theological belief like this, it is natural to attribute that convergence to that belief having been something taught to them by the teacher they shared.
• 47:09
  SPEAKER_02: As Dale agrees, in the authentic surviving fragments of Valentinius' own writings, there are no explicit citations of the Gospel of John and no mentions of the name John as a Gospel author.
• 47:20
  SPEAKER_02: I acknowledge that this point is somewhat speculative.
• 47:23
  SPEAKER_02: Given that I'm unconvinced that these students are making said claims, inference about their teacher, built on top of that failed case, isn't going to move the needle.
• 47:32
  SPEAKER_03: The twelfth example was the Docetist Acts of John, that the author identified John as the author of the fourth gospel is necessitated by three facts.
• 47:42
  SPEAKER_03: First, he claims to be John the Apostle.
• 47:45
  SPEAKER_03: Second, he claims to be the disciple that Jesus loved.
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_03: And third, he had read the fourth gospel, which identifies its author as the disciple that Jesus loved.
• 47:55
  SPEAKER_03: So although he doesn't come right out and say that John wrote a Gospel, we may be very confident that the author of the Acts of John believed that John the Apostle authored the fourth gospel.
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_03: I will rate it at 8 out of 10.
• 48:08
  SPEAKER_02: The leading critical editors of the Acts of John, Eric Janod and Jean-Daniel Castelli, date the text to be between 150 and 200 CE, making it contemporary with, or even post-dating, Irenaeus.
• 48:20
  SPEAKER_02: In terms of preserving history, scholars like Martin Hengel, Richard Bacham, and Michael Coke argue that later tradition merged distinct early figures, such as John the son of Zebedee, John the Elder of Ephesus, the unnamed beloved disciple, and for some, John the Seer of Patmos, into a single legendary Ephesian John.
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_02: The Acts of John reflects this secondary process of legendary harmonization, rather than an authentic, uncorrupted first century tradition.
• 48:46
  SPEAKER_02: Nevertheless, this is another one that is too late to help and doesn't say what it's meant to say.
• 48:52
  SPEAKER_03: Example number 13 was the Epistle of the Apostles.
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_03: It opens by saying that the Apostles have written for the whole world, and in chapter 31, it pairs a quotation from John's Gospel with a statement by Jesus that his disciples had written this about him.
• 49:08
  SPEAKER_03: John is also clearly the favorite apostle and the favorite gospel of the author of this work.
• 49:13
  SPEAKER_03: Still, a lot of shaky inferences are required here to get to the conclusion that the author of the epistle regarded John as the author of the fourth gospel, so we will rank it at a two out of ten.
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_02: No need to spend too much time piling onto a two out of ten.
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_01: Sleeperhold, sleeperhold! Sleeperhold!
• 49:34
  SPEAKER_02: As agreed, the epistle of the apostles never names the individual gospel titles nor individual evangelists.
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_02: Attributing Jesus' deeds and words to the apostles as a collective group is similar to Justin's Memoirs of the Apostles, and is most expected in a scenario where individuals are not yet strongly associated.
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_02: This example has earned its lowest ranking, as it quotes from no canonical gospels, doesn't use the word gospel to refer to any writings, and attributes no individuals directly.
• 50:27
  SPEAKER_02: That said, let me just add that though Dave prefers early dating of this to pre-just the murder times, many critical commentators date the document to the mid to late 2nd century, 150 to 200 CE, and thus is unhelpful even if it did have relevant data, which it indeed does not.
• 50:45
  SPEAKER_03: We now come to my fifteenth example, the Gospel of Thomas.
• 50:49
  SPEAKER_03: Jesus's rebuke of Peter's and Matthew's descriptions of himself in saying 13 seems to be best interpreted as an implied polemic against the Gospels of Mark and Matthew.
• 51:00
  SPEAKER_03: This is indirect, but highly plausible.
• 51:03
  SPEAKER_03: Therefore, I will rate the Gospel of Thomas as 6 out of 10.
• 51:07
  SPEAKER_03: This is a creative argument, I'll give it that.
• 51:09
  SPEAKER_03: This gospel is probably familiar with at least the synoptic gospels.
• 51:14
  SPEAKER_03: In saying 13, there is an odd story where Jesus asks his disciples to compare him to other teachers.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_03: Peter, Matthew, and Thomas all offer their own answers.
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_03: Peter compares Jesus to a righteous angel.
• 51:29
  SPEAKER_03: Matthew compares Jesus to a wise philosopher.
• 51:32
  SPEAKER_03: Jesus approves of Thomas's answer and rebukes Peter's and Matthew's.
• 51:36
  SPEAKER_03: As far as we can tell, Matthew had no particular place of prominence in early Christianity aside from the belief that he authored the first Gospel.
• 51:45
  SPEAKER_03: Many scholars have interpreted this story in the Gospel of Thomas as an implied polemic against the Gospel of Matthew, since the Gospel of Thomas has Jesus rebuke this depiction of him in favor of the depiction offered in the Gospel of Thomas.
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_03: The sayings in the Gospel of Thomas must presuppose the existence of Matthew's Gospel and its attribution to Matthew.
• 52:09
  SPEAKER_03: If Matthew in this passage represents Matthew's Gospel, then it becomes highly likely that Peter represents Mark's Gospel.
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_03: If this hypothesis is correct, then we have early, independent, and somewhat hostile, albeit implied testimony, for the propositions that Peter was the source behind Mark and that Matthew wrote a gospel.
• 52:32
  SPEAKER_03: Obviously, this is a controversial and speculative take, as Dave acknowledges.
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_03: But what about when it was written?
• 52:38
  SPEAKER_03: Standard estimates place it between AD 100 and 140.
• 52:43
  SPEAKER_03: That's at least 40 years before Irenaeus.
• 52:46
  SPEAKER_02: There is no standard estimate.
• 52:48
  SPEAKER_02: The dating debate is divided, and FBR presents one side of it as if it's settled.
• 52:53
  SPEAKER_02: Respected scholars Simon Gathercole and Jacob Rodriguez give us a date range of 135 to 200 CE, and Mark Goodacre argues for any date after 135, almost entirely after FBR's optimistic interpretation.
• 53:07
  SPEAKER_02: Goodacre and others conclude that the Gospel of Thomas is aware of the Barkokba revolt of 135 CE, making that the earliest possible date.
• 53:16
  SPEAKER_02: Since the Gospel of Thomas is first quoted by others in 200-240 CE, it could easily be late 2nd century, which is why the experts allow this in their range.
• 53:27
  SPEAKER_02: It's possibly earlier than murder, but not definitively so.
• 53:30
  SPEAKER_03: The 16th example was Polycarp of Smyrna.
• 53:33
  SPEAKER_03: We saw that by cross-referencing two passages in Against Heresies, Irenaeus tells us that Polycarp said that John authored the fourth gospel.
• 53:42
  SPEAKER_03: I then extrapolated this to the entirety of Irenaeus' tradition concerning the origins of the Gospels in Against Heresies 311.
• 53:51
  SPEAKER_03: I will therefore put it at 9 out of 10 that Polycarp named John as the author of the fourth gospel, and 7 out of 10 that he named the Synoptics.
• 54:01
  SPEAKER_03: Again, I think this one is worth some context beyond the report card.
• 54:05
  SPEAKER_03: Irenaeus was a student of Polycarp, both from himself and from other church fathers.
• 54:10
  SPEAKER_03: Irenaeus claims he could remember much of the oral teaching of Polycarp of Smyrna, whom he calls that blessed and apostolic presbyter.
• 54:19
  SPEAKER_03: Apparently Polycarp was in the habit of discoursing to them both about the teaching and miracles of Jesus, as these were handed on by John and the others who had seen the Lord, with whom Polycarp had been an associate.
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_03: The authority of Irenaeus for saying these things is once more the trustworthy Polycarp, who received directly from the Apostles the truth transmitted by the church.
• 54:44
  SPEAKER_03: There can be no doubt, therefore, that Irenaeus accepted John the Apostle as the author of the fourth gospel and believed it to have been published at Ephesus on the basis of Polycarp's testimony.
• 54:57
  SPEAKER_03: But the most important point is that Polycarp was a disciple of the Apostle John, meaning that Polycarp's knowledge of the names on the Gospels goes back to the first century.
• 55:08
  SPEAKER_03: Polycarp would be a clear example of someone who is a full generation earlier than Irenaeus and who knew the Gospels by the same names as Irenaeus.
• 55:17
  SPEAKER_02: But this is a house of cards where every card is soggy.
• 55:21
  SPEAKER_01: It is wetter than the worst day of Noah and Mrs.
• 55:26
  SPEAKER_01: Noah when they're saying, Have we got enough wood?
• 55:29
  SPEAKER_01: That is so wet.
• 55:30
  SPEAKER_01: It was wet, wasn't it?
• 55:31
  SPEAKER_01: It was wet.
• 55:31
  SPEAKER_02: Irenaeus explicitly describes himself as a mere child or boy when he saw Polycarp and Smyrna, writing against heresies.
• 55:39
  SPEAKER_02: Roughly 40 years later in Gaul, Irenaeus is relying on childhood reminiscences, which critical scholars regard as prone to confusion, idealization, and historical inaccuracy.
• 55:50
  SPEAKER_02: These specific anecdotes he actually reports, such as John fleeing the Bath House, are second-hand stereotype stories rather than detailed verifiable records of Polycarp's theological instruction.
• 56:01
  SPEAKER_02: Many Johannine scholars argue that Irenaeus confused John the Apostle, son of Zebedee, with John the Elder, a second-generation presbyter in Asia Minor mentioned by Papias.
• 56:11
  SPEAKER_02: Scholars including Martin Hengel and Michael Koch think Polycarp's teacher was this non-apostolic elder John, whom Irenaeus merged with the Apostle.
• 56:20
  SPEAKER_02: Eusebius himself corrects Irenaeus for making this very mistake about Papias, though Dave wants to frame this as sour grapes.
• 56:27
  SPEAKER_03: The first thing we have to appreciate is that Eusebius did not like Papius, even going so far as to single him out as a man of very small intelligence.
• 56:38
  SPEAKER_03: This strong dislike for Papius was born out of Eusebius' disdain for the millennialism enthusiastically embraced by Papius.
• 56:47
  SPEAKER_03: More than this, Eusebius demonstrates a clear motivation to distance Papias from the Apostle John.
• 56:53
  SPEAKER_02: Nevertheless, critical scholars view the John Polycarp Irenaeus chain not as an unbroken historical record, but as a secondary construct for combating heresy accusations.
• 57:04
  SPEAKER_02: Irenaeus had a strong polemical incentive to construct a direct, simplified line of unbroken apostolic authority.
• 57:12
  SPEAKER_02: Some scholars doubt that Irenaeus received his gospel attributions from Polycarp's oral teaching at all.
• 57:18
  SPEAKER_02: There's no such claim in the writings of Polycarp.
• 57:21
  SPEAKER_03: Irenaeus, in the second book of his work against heresies, writes as follows And all the elders that associated with John the disciple of the Lord in Asia bear witness that John delivered it to them, for he remained among them until the time of Trajan.
• 57:39
  SPEAKER_03: The word it here likely refers to John's gospel.
• 57:42
  SPEAKER_02: In Against Heresies 222-5, Uranius is arguing that Jesus lived past the age of 40, heading towards 50.
• 57:49
  SPEAKER_02: The elders who knew John in Asia, he says, testify that John passed along that information, where that information is Jesus' age, not a gospel in general.
• 57:58
  SPEAKER_02: Hill identifies the Apostolic Presbyter of Against Heresies Book 4 with Polycarp.
• 58:03
  SPEAKER_02: The four gospel tradition sits in Book 3, and David admits that stretching that identification to cover it is his own extrapolation.
• 58:11
  SPEAKER_03: The seventeenth and final example was Papius of Heropolis.
• 58:15
  SPEAKER_03: Papius fairly uncontroversially names Mark as a gospel author.
• 58:19
  SPEAKER_03: I will rate my confidence here at 10 out of 10.
• 58:23
  SPEAKER_03: Things are a little murkier with Matthew and John, since there's the question of whether or not Papius says that Matthew wrote in Hebrew, and our dependence upon the anti-Marcionite prologue for a direct statement that Papius named John as a gospel author.
• 58:38
  SPEAKER_03: But these worries strike me as minimal, and so I put my confidence at 9 out of 10 that Papius names Matthew and John as Gospel authors.
• 58:46
  SPEAKER_03: We have independent good reasons to think that Papius was familiar with the Gospel of Luke.
• 58:51
  SPEAKER_03: However, to get to Papius naming the Gospel of Luke, we require C.
• 58:56
  SPEAKER_03: E.
• 58:56
  SPEAKER_03: Hill's thesis.
• 58:58
  SPEAKER_03: Fortunately, I think that Hill's evidence is incredibly strong, especially when supplemented by the work of Dean Furlong.
• 59:05
  SPEAKER_03: Therefore, I put it at 8.5 out of 10 that Papius named Luke as a gospel author.
• 59:10
  SPEAKER_02: Well we know of Papius only from quotations by later authors.
• 59:14
  SPEAKER_02: He is undoubtedly earlier than Justin Murder in our timeline, and would warrant very important consideration if it existed.
• 59:22
  SPEAKER_02: Huge for me if true.
• 59:23
  SPEAKER_02: As you'll recall, our criteria for gospel author attestation is quoting the gospel and attributing that to an author's name.
• 59:31
  SPEAKER_02: As none of the extant quotations of Papius quote any of the canonical gospels, this low bar is not one that can even be crossed, which makes Dave's confidence levels here bewildering to me.
• 59:42
  SPEAKER_00: The thing about there being no evidence being your evidence is that there's no evidence.
• 59:47
  SPEAKER_03: Nevertheless, FBR makes a case for each.
• 59:50
  SPEAKER_03: So Matthew composed the oracles in a Hebrew dialect, and everyone interpreted them as best he could.
• 59:56
  SPEAKER_02: With no quotation provided, we cannot know to what literary composition that Papias is referring.
• 1:00:03
  SPEAKER_02: But even worse, what he does say sounds like some other work.
• 1:00:07
  SPEAKER_02: Near unanimous scholarly consensus holds that canonical Matthew was composed directly in Greek, not translated from Aramaic or Hebrew.
• 1:00:15
  SPEAKER_02: Canonical Matthew takes over about 90% of Mark's material, much of it in nearly identical Greek, and relies on Greek Q or double attestation sources.
• 1:00:25
  SPEAKER_02: It is implausible that an apostle and an eyewitness writing in Aramaic would rely verbatim on a non-eyewitness Greek text.
• 1:00:34
  SPEAKER_03: The word translated as language here is the Greek word dialecto, and it can also be legitimately translated as style or dialect.
• 1:00:44
  SPEAKER_03: On this interpretation, Papias would be saying that Matthew wrote for a Hellenistic Jewish audience.
• 1:01:01
  SPEAKER_03: Some scholars have argued that the terms Ibodie dialecto do not refer to the Hebrew or Aramaic language, but rather to a Jewish style or literary form.
• 1:01:11
  SPEAKER_02: In Hellenus the Creek, dialectos compared with a nationality explicitly means language, and Hermanuo means translation.
• 1:01:19
  SPEAKER_02: Papias's words most naturally mean that Matthew wrote in Hebrew and was translated.
• 1:01:24
  SPEAKER_02: Is the case for Matthew really built on such a minority of you?
• 1:01:28
  SPEAKER_02: And it's not mentioned often enough that Papias recounts a bizarre version of the death of Judas, where the disciple becomes grotesquely obese, swelling so enormously that he cannot pass through a space wide enough for a wagon.
• 1:01:41
  SPEAKER_02: His eyelids become so swollen that he cannot see, his genitals become hideously enlarged, and his body uses pus and worms.
• 1:01:48
  SPEAKER_02: This is, of course, wildly different from the account in Matthew 27, which simply reports that Judas hanged himself.
• 1:01:54
  SPEAKER_02: If the book Papius believed Matthew had written was the same as our canonical Matthew, it is striking that he would preserve such an extravagant alternative tradition about Judas' death without any apparent concern for its divergence from the alleged eyewitness account.
• 1:02:09
  SPEAKER_02: It is by no means clear that what Papias was describing is the gospel we are debating, and many scholars, including conservatives, concede this.
• 1:02:18
  SPEAKER_03: Papius fairly uncontroversially names Mark as a gospel author, in the very same passage, claiming that Mark, having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately, though not in order, whatsoever he remembered of the things said or done by Christ.
• 1:02:35
  SPEAKER_02: Once again, Papius' surviving description contains no identifiable quotation from the gospel he attributes to Mark, leaving us unable to verify through direct textual comparison that he was referring to our canonical Mark.
• 1:02:49
  SPEAKER_02: Canonical Mark is not a disjointed collection of raw notes or oral anecdotes.
• 1:02:54
  SPEAKER_02: It possesses a deliberate, coherent narrative structure and theological design.
• 1:02:58
  SPEAKER_02: Furthermore, internal features of Mark, like inaccuracies regarding Palestinian geography, misunderstandings of Jewish customs, antipatrine narrative themes, and reliance on Greek Septuagint Old Testament quotes, make direct dictation from Peter highly implausible.
• 1:03:14
  SPEAKER_02: Dave then tries to take Papias further than most, attempting connections with John.
• 1:03:19
  SPEAKER_03: For example, Papius lists the names of the apostles as they appear exclusively in the Gospel of John, which argues for his firsthand knowledge of the Gospel, combining the lists from John 1 and John 21.
• 1:03:32
  SPEAKER_02: This demonstrates familiarity with the apostolic names circulating in Age of Meyer, not attestation of fourth Gospel's authorship.
• 1:03:40
  SPEAKER_03: Also, consider this often neglected fragment of Papius from the anti-Marcionite prologue to John.
• 1:03:46
  SPEAKER_03: The Gospel of John was made known and given to the churches by John while he yet remained in the body, as one Papius by name of Heropolis, a beloved disciple of John, has related in his exoteric, that is, in his last five books.
• 1:04:03
  SPEAKER_02: The Latin anti-Marcionite prologue to John, which claims Papias served as John's scribe, dates to the 4th to 5th century.
• 1:04:10
  SPEAKER_03: Skeptics will be swift to point out that the prologue contains some dubious historical information.
• 1:04:16
  SPEAKER_02: Indeed, they will.
• 1:04:16
  SPEAKER_02: It is heavily garbled, misnames Papias's work, mistakes Papius' elder John for the Apostle John, and anachronistically places Marcion's ministry in the lifetime of John.
• 1:04:27
  SPEAKER_03: Importantly, however, the prologue is not the source of this information about John's authorship, for the prologue is merely passing on information obtained from Papius.
• 1:04:37
  SPEAKER_02: That's the claim.
• 1:04:38
  SPEAKER_02: If the prologue is wrong about so many other things, why should we be confident in his sourcing of material that would be from 200 years earlier?
• 1:04:46
  SPEAKER_02: By what criteria do we determine that this unattested Papias claim is correct when the author is clearly an uncareful historian?
• 1:04:53
  SPEAKER_02: In Papius' undisputed fragments, preserved by Eusebius, Papius never names John as the author of the fourth gospel, nor does Eusebius attribute any such statement to him.
• 1:05:03
  SPEAKER_02: And then Dave dedicates more than half an hour to advocating for a hypothesis from C.E.
• 1:05:09
  SPEAKER_03: Hill.
• 1:05:09
  SPEAKER_03: To get to Papius naming the Gospel of Luke, we require C.
• 1:05:13
  SPEAKER_03: E.
• 1:05:13
  SPEAKER_03: Hill's thesis.
• 1:05:14
  SPEAKER_03: In Ecclesiastical History 324, 5 through 13, Eusebius mentions a record that recounts the history of the writing of the four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
• 1:05:26
  SPEAKER_03: Eusebius does not name the source of this record, but a literary analysis by C.
• 1:05:31
  SPEAKER_03: E.
• 1:05:32
  SPEAKER_03: Hill demonstrates close parallels between what Eusebius' source says about Matthew and Mark and what Papius says about Matthew and Mark.
• 1:05:41
  SPEAKER_03: Eusebius demonstrates a clear motivation to distance Papius from the Apostle John.
• 1:05:46
  SPEAKER_03: Eusebius is definitely presenting this account of the origins of Matthew and John as from a single written source.
• 1:05:53
  SPEAKER_03: And though he does not name that source, there is no credible alternative to regarding it as Papius of.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_03: Heropolis.
• 1:06:01
  SPEAKER_03: These common elements and concerns point to a common source.
• 1:06:05
  SPEAKER_03: From a comparison with the other papian fragments on the Gospels in Eusebius, then, there is fairly conclusive support for regarding Eusebius's source in 324, 5 through 13 as being Papius' tradition about the fourth gospel.
• 1:06:21
  SPEAKER_03: Even Dave knows the most important papius scholar isn't on board.
• 1:06:25
  SPEAKER_03: In the most up-to-date collection of the fragments of Papius, Stephen Carlson, perhaps the world's leading papian scholar, includes ecclesiastical history 324, 5 through 13, as a potential citation of Papius.
• 1:06:40
  SPEAKER_03: In fairness, Carlson ultimately doesn't think that this is a genuine fragment of Papius.
• 1:06:45
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 1:06:46
  SPEAKER_02: In his 2021 edition of the Papius Fragments, Carlson lists this passage among the possible citations.
• 1:06:52
  SPEAKER_02: Then he concludes that a more fitting source for the core of the content seems to be Clement.
• 1:06:57
  SPEAKER_02: Dave's own pick for the world's leading Papius scholar points away from Papias.
• 1:07:01
  SPEAKER_02: Critical scholars like T.
• 1:07:02
  SPEAKER_02: Scott Manor, Enrico Norelli, Michael Koch, and Francis Watson argue that Hill's thesis relies on overextending an unnamed Eusebian source and ignoring major textual, logical, and historical contradictions.
• 1:07:17
  SPEAKER_02: Richard Bacham is only partially persuaded.
• 1:07:19
  SPEAKER_02: He grants that Hill has made a good case for 324, 6 to 7, but thinks the source ends at 8A.
• 1:07:26
  SPEAKER_02: Grammatical markers say this stretch doesn't work.
• 1:07:28
  SPEAKER_02: Eusebius's use of a traditional source ends at Ecclesiastical History 324.
• 1:07:37
  SPEAKER_02: Then in 8B, Eusebius introduces the Greek logical particle goon, signaling that he has finished citing his source and is transitioning into his own editorial commentary.
• 1:07:47
  SPEAKER_02: The phrase they say in 324.11 does not establish that Eusebius is quoting a formal second-century Papian text.
• 1:07:54
  SPEAKER_02: As Michael Koch observes, it could instead introduce an oral report, a popular Christian explanation, or Eusebius' own paraphrase of an earlier tradition.
• 1:08:03
  SPEAKER_02: It would also create a contradiction.
• 1:08:05
  SPEAKER_02: In Papius' undisputed fragment, he explicitly acknowledges that Mark lacks order.
• 1:08:10
  SPEAKER_02: In contrast, Ecclesiastical Histories 324, 11 to 13, maintains that the four gospels do not conflict, arguing that John wrote specifically to cover the period before John the Baptist's imprisonment, while the synoptics cover events after.
• 1:08:23
  SPEAKER_02: Bacum and Norelli emphasize that Papius could not have simultaneously maintained that Mark lacked proper chronological order while authoring a harmonization scheme defending the order of all four gospels.
• 1:08:35
  SPEAKER_02: As for a plausible alternative, Manner and Coke demonstrate that this passage represents Eusebius' own fourth century apologetic response to Origen.
• 1:08:43
  SPEAKER_02: Eusebius isn't using Papian terms like memoirs.
• 1:08:46
  SPEAKER_02: He's using Origen's exact terminology, referring to the Gospels as historical accounts, and directly echoing Origen's phrasing to claim that once his solution is understood, the Gospels no longer appear to disagree.
• 1:08:59
  SPEAKER_02: Finally, Irenaeus read Papius' five-volume work directly, and he and later writers like Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, and the author of the Meratorian fragment frequently discuss the origins and different beginnings of the Gospels.
• 1:09:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yet none of these early writers ever quote or cite the specific harmonizing argument found in ecclesiastical histories featuring John the Baptist's imprisonment.
• 1:09:21
  SPEAKER_02: If Papias had originated this solution, it is inexplicable that early authors struggling with gospel discrepancies completely ignored it until Eusebius.
• 1:09:31
  SPEAKER_03: All this points to the conclusion that Papius and Heropolis, writing probably in the 120s, knew all four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
• 1:09:41
  SPEAKER_02: Strongly disagree.
• 1:09:42
  SPEAKER_02: In the end, Papias attaches no quotes from any canonical gospels to any named author.
• 1:09:49
  SPEAKER_02: So, going back to the Gospel Anonymity Thesis, the Gospels were written somewhere around 70 to 100 AD.
• 1:09:55
  SPEAKER_02: Justin Martyr quotes them heavily around 150, with no names attached.
• 1:10:00
  SPEAKER_02: The first surviving source to attach the four familiar names is Irenaeus around 180.
• 1:10:05
  SPEAKER_03: Careful proponents of the anonymity thesis will say that the names developed and caught on between A.D.
• 1:10:11
  SPEAKER_03: 160 and 180.
• 1:10:13
  SPEAKER_03: Some versions vaguely assert only that the names on the Gospels stuck to them somewhere between the time of Justin Martyr around A.D.
• 1:10:21
  SPEAKER_03: 160 and the time of Irenaeus around A.D.
• 1:10:25
  SPEAKER_03: 180.
• 1:10:25
  SPEAKER_02: Given these criteria, I've made my own report card of Dave's 17 so-called eyewitnesses, indicating which have a broad consensus dating prior to Justin Murder, each canonical gospel they directly cite, and attribute to the traditional author name, and then an overall past fail.
• 1:10:41
  SPEAKER_02: You'll notice that none of these 17 examples are defeaters of the strong anonymity hypothesis.
• 1:10:46
  SPEAKER_02: In fact, by my lights, many of these are circumstances that bolster the idea that there wasn't a coalescing of authors' names until the mid-second century.
• 1:10:56
  SPEAKER_02: And I will incorporate them further into my projects.
• 1:10:58
  SPEAKER_02: I do want to thank Dave for the effort it would have taken to put this together, his academic demeanor, his structural and methodological clarity, and what I read as good faith motives.
• 1:11:07
  SPEAKER_02: He's clearly well read, but he's comfortable on the fringe.
• 1:11:11
  SPEAKER_02: Matthew written in AD forty-two, Mark written last.
• 1:11:15
  SPEAKER_02: These are positions that even the scholars he quotes approvingly, like Bacham and Hengel, don't share.
• 1:11:20
  SPEAKER_02: So when Dave's dating of a witness lands decades earlier than the consensus, I'd encourage readers to treat that as a feature of Dave, not of the others.
• 1:11:28
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you so much for watching.
• 1:11:29
  SPEAKER_02: And for more of this former Christian taking a look at the claims of Christians, tap on the thumbnail on screen now, and I'll see you over there.
• 1:11:36
  SPEAKER_02: Until next time.
• 1:11:38
  SPEAKER_02: Later.