Is Papias Talking About 'Our' Gospels of Matthew and Mark? Answering Bart Ehrman and Richard Carrier

[@Michael-bk5nz]

I am always struck by Bart Ehrman’s hyperliteral interpretation of everything he reads, to argue that Papias couldn't be talking about the gospel of Mark because such a short document could not possibly contain EVERYTHING Peter remembered is an argument based on such an absurdly overliteral interpretation of an obviously hyperbolic statement that it is difficult for me not to conclude that he is being deliberately deceitful here

[@faithbecauseofreason8381]

I had the same thought when I first read his book. I was thinking that he reads both Papias and the Bible like a fundamentalist.

[@Michael-bk5nz]

@@faithbecauseofreason8381 I think this is common to atheist critics of the Bible in general. Whenever I read lists of alleged Bible “contradictions” I'm always struck by how many of these alleged contradictions are based on an absurdly literal reading of the text

[@captainobvious8983]

You know what's interesting and my new hypothesis about Mark being Peter's scribe is that in the original Mark the ressurection was not present and was added to instead the second century. This is fact. So you think that Peter would have "forgotten" to tell Mark, oh yeah Jesus ressurected and we all touched his hands and feet and talked to the guy? 😂

[@OrthodoxInquiry]

I'm actually very grateful to have come across Bart Ehrman's writings and arguments fairly early, because he completely destroyed any semblance of faith that I had in academia as a valid source of truth, and epistemic authority.

[@dennythedavinchi3832]

But still. There is no Hebrew sources previously written before Greek source we read. You can't argue that.

[@faithbecauseofreason8381]

Well I myself don't believe that there was a proto-Hebrew Gospel of Matthew. However, I also find most of the arguments against this to be inconclusive. But it's a non-issue for me since Papias' words can be interpreted either way.

[@muskyoxes]

How would this even work? When people eventually decided to put a fake title on a gospel, did they say "well, this guy Papias mentioned a name for some random sayings book a few decades ago, so let's just attach that name on this completely unrelated thing, because it's better than finding a name ourselves"

[@soarel325]

Hearsay and legendary attribution like this happen all the time. Similar scenarios happen even today if you look into the origins of, say, UFO mythology.

[@WDLR23]

If everything Mark got was from Peters sermon how would this explain the verbatim agreements between the Synoptics(more specifically Matthean priority)? You could say Peter was using Matthew in the sermon but he didn’t obviously remember it word for word, and if Peter was using a copy of the Gospel then it would make no sense for the Roman people to ask Mark for a handwritten copy of the sermon when they could have just used Matthew’s Gospel. Would u say the Roman’s requested a handwritten copy of the sermon by Mark because Peter said some extra info and stories in his sermon that Matthew doesn’t in his Gospel?

[@faithbecauseofreason8381]

Good question. My thought is that Peter utilized aspects of both Matthew's and Luke's Gospels in his sermon. Mark, I'm sure, remembered the gist of what Peter said as well as some particular highlights. So in crafting his Gospel, he attempted to use those aspects of Matthew and Luke which he remembered Peter utilizing along with whatever other highlights he may have recalled (which accounts for Mark's unique material).

[@soarel325]

There are all manner of reasons the text we now call Matthew would have been attributed to him - most plausibly, given the spread of second-century pseudepigraphia like the Gospel of Peter, Gospel of Thomas etc. it makes sense why the proto-orthodox sect would want to assign apostolic authorship to the four Gospels that conformed with their theology. This certainly makes more sense than the laughably absurd idea that a text which features its supposed author as a minor character, yet contains no qualifications that describe this character as its source or author (or uses their eyewitness as a basis for scenes, instead being a text that cribs entirely from another one) was authored by that person. If you’re going to make the argument that the text Papias is referring to is related to our Matthew, you’re better off arguing that he was referring to the hypothetical Q source, since the text he’s describing sounds like it. Ultimately though, there is not any reason to take Mr. Exploding Giant Judas particularly seriously in the first place, given what little we know about him indicates he was a highly gullible person who fell hook line and sinker for fanciful legends.

[@faithbecauseofreason8381]

This objection was already dealt with the full video defending traditional authorship where I demonstrated that it was not uncommon for ancient authors to refer to themselves in the third person or to fail to identify themselves as the author within the text.

[@soarel325]

@@faithbecauseofreason8381 Even historians who write without attaching their names to their works will go out of their way to mention either being present themselves for the events they’re describing, or attest to their sources being people they spoke to directly, because ancient authors actually greatly valued eyewitness testimony. There is a massive gulf between the writings of Julius Caesar and Xenophon, and what the authors of the Gospels (Matthew especially) are doing. I think you can only make the argument that you're making if you have little to no familiarity with the contents of other ancient texts written without bylines, or which make stylistic use of the third person. If the Matthew character really did write GMatt, the text would describe his witness to the events described in detail, or demarcate where the author of the text was present, even if the author never named himself directly in the text. We do not see this - Matthew instead remains an extremely minor character in the Gospel later assigned his name, only mentioned once outside of the list of the Twelve. The story of how he met Jesus, the only mention of the character, is copied word-for-word from Mark, a text recognized as written by a non-eyewitness even in the “traditional authorship” model. No story in GMatt in which the Matthew character is (presumably) present features any signifiers that the author of the text was an eyewitness to these events. If the author were claiming to be one, they would have put such signifiers in.

[@marksolum1794]

Gospel of Thomas could have been started while Jesus was still alive.

[@soarel325]

@@marksolum1794 Where'd you get that idea from?

[@marksolum1794]

@@soarel325 That is what it says at the beginning. He could have started writing things down as Jesus said them. It is just sayings, with about 40% in the other Gospels.

[@kadenreijgers1351]

Great video

[@paulkickling7828]

Amazing work my man. Expose that hack.

[@faithbecauseofreason8381]

Carrier or Ehrman?

[@2010Juve]

both of them @@faithbecauseofreason8381

[@MrSeedi76]

Oh, Ehrman, what a waste of a good education. Here are my thoughts as a theologian and translator - if a translation is any good, nobody can say "this text wasn't written in another language and then translated". Nobody can tell when the translation is good. Especially when people are bilingual, like many Jews in that time were. Being able to speak Aramaic and Greek, sometimes also Hebrew is not that unusual an idea.

[@faithbecauseofreason8381]

I've always found the objections to the possibility that Matthew was originally written in Hebrew to be very weak and presumptuous.

[@Tzimiskes3506]

Yeah seriously i really dont know why westerners think it's unusual to be learned in multiple languages. I've spent my entire schooling years in the Middle east and we've learnt like 5 languages in school.

[@MrSeedi76]

​@@Tzimiskes3506here in Germany it's also normal to learn at least 2 languages in school, often English and French but you can also learn Spanish. Or Latin and ancient Greek which might be very useful when interested in the Bible. I didn't take Greek at school so I had to learn it at university, together with Latin. I'm not really fluent however so I have to look up words in Greek or use a "linear translation" to check. The problem with scholars like Ehrman and others from this school influenced by the German "higher criticism" is that they think the gospels have been written in a vacuum. Somehow nobody knows when, nobody knows who, nobody knew each other, but strangely they instantly were considered to be authoritative. I have a hard time believing that. But the less influence, and the more removed the gospels seem to be from the normal world in which they were actually written, the easier it is to speculate and come up with a lot of fancy ideas to write books about or dissertations. I think it's highly likely that the gospel writers, at least the synoptics, knew each other. It's not like people never traveled. So the traditional view about authorship makes more sense to me. We might never solve the synoptic problem but I have no doubt that all the gospels are based on eyewitness testimony. Even the "consensus" claims that Mark was written in 70 or shortly after. Many who knew Jesus would still be alive. I think they were written much earlier.

[@KaijuOfTheOpera]

Its unusual when scholarship shows that is was pretty rare. Bilingualism was largely confined to the educated and many Jews during that time, didnt grow up where education was a thing. Jesus was one of these Jews. He probably only knew Aramaic and also couldnt read or write. Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine by Cathren Hezer is a great read. You are literally lying saying that the jewish people were bilingual back in the day and scholarship doesnt support this. And you had the audacity to say Bart Ehrman wasted his education while literally making up something. I also kind of find it funny that people are commenting on this post trying to use their modern education to compare it to a time when the vast majority of people didnt have an education.

[@busfeet2080]

I always felt like this argument from Ehrman was cope. It feels like he only asserts that Matt & Mark that Papias refers to are different because if they are the same, then it become almost impossible to argue that the gospels were anonymous.

[@tookie36]

How does anything in this video suggest papi was reliable???

[@faithbecauseofreason8381]

The video doesn't purport to show that Papias is reliable. It purports to show, contrary to what Ehrman and Carrier claim, that Papias was indeed talking about the canonical Gospels of Matthew and Mark. At the very least it aims to show that Ehrman's and Carrier's objections to this idea do not work.

[@monkeyman-t8n]

isn't Mathew papias is talking about is q?

[@faithbecauseofreason8381]

I don't believe so. I don't think that there is good reason to think that a Q document ever existed.

[@monkeyman-t8n]

why not? that's what papias says. also its the material found in Luke and Mathew and not in mark.@@faithbecauseofreason8381

[@GreatMusicLessons]

This isn’t your position though is it? You think that Peter was basically just reciting Matthew & Luke (very occasionally adding his own material) and that Mark copied from Matthew & Luke with occasional input from Peter.

[@faithbecauseofreason8381]

What isn't my position?

[@GreatMusicLessons]

A couple of other things, why does it matter whether it is everything Peter vs Mark could remember. And why would everything he could remember (from one sermon) be the most likely interpretation?

[@GreatMusicLessons]

@@faithbecauseofreason8381, That you think what I described above. Right?

[@GreatMusicLessons]

You make it sound in the video that you think Mark was recording Peter’s recollections, but you think he was actually copying almost entirely from Matthew & Luke via Peter sort of.

[@faithbecauseofreason8381]

@@GreatMusicLessons well I don't see those activities as being mutually exclusive.

[@stouce25]

Do you think it’s fair to say that Peter/Mark would remember Jesus appearing to his disciples? Papias says that he took “special care, not to omit anything he heard.” As you accuse others of misrepresenting arguments I feel like you left out the biggest hole in that statement which is that Mark’s account does not include Jesus appearing to his disciples but ends at 16:8 with “And they went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.“

[@faithbecauseofreason8381]

I addressed this very issue. Did you watch the video through?

[@stouce25]

I did. The closest thing I heard was that not everything was in Peter’s sermon. Is there a time stamp for the other argument. Will watch again in the meantime

[@faithbecauseofreason8381]

@@stouce25 which other argument are you referencing?

[@stouce25]

I think we can both agree that this argument holds no water in regards to the missing appearances to the disciples. I would agree with you that it could potentially account for Mark being a shorter gospel but it would never account for the fact that Jesus does not appear to his disciples in Mark’s gospel

[@faithbecauseofreason8381]

@stouce25 why wouldn't it accout for that? If it wasn't included in Peter's sermon, it wouldn't make it into Mark's Gospel. It accounts for this just fine. Or os the claim that Peter wouldn't have left it out of his sermon? If so, then you'll need to justify that claim.

[@Achill101]

Adding Carrier to the list of opposing scholars dilutes the video. Carrier is his own show of showing Jesus didn't exist and is not respected by academic scholars. I would cut out everything relating to Carrier, his theses and the response to them.

[@faithbecauseofreason8381]

Unfortunately he is popular among internet counter-apologists. That's why I took him on in addition to some of their other favorites.

[@Achill101]

@@faithbecauseofreason8381 Yes, unfortunately, he is.

[@lukemedcalf1670]

yeah that man is a joke. Bart is a solid scholar, but, he has made some pretty obvious blunders here and there that make me squint and go "hmmmmmm I don't think so"

[@TaxEvasi0n]

There's a reason why Bart Erhman is the most attacked scholar.

[@faithbecauseofreason8381]

Yeah, cuz he's popular

[@marksolum1794]

Papias is wrong about Mark as he did hear Jesus but was too young to follow him around like the Apostles. The last supper was at his mother's house.

[@theonik6082]

You should consider orthodox christianity my friend

[@faithbecauseofreason8381]

I have

[@theonik6082]

@@faithbecauseofreason8381 why didn't you become Orthodox

[@x-popone6817]

The government should censor Ehrman and Carrier's work. Such evil intended to draw people away from Christ ought not be allowed.

[@faithbecauseofreason8381]

The government's job is to keep people safe from physical harm, not to keep them close to Christ. I don't support this sort of censorship. By letting the skeptics have their say, and then offering substantive rebuttals to it, we can show that Christianity is intellectually robust. Trying to censor the skeptics makes it appears as though we are afraid of their arguments and have no answers to them.

[@hoverboard]

Nice theocracy you’re planning there 😂

[@x-popone6817]

@@faithbecauseofreason8381 "The government's job is to keep people safe from physical harm, not to keep them close to Christ" The governement should help people morally, not just keep them safe from physical harm. I disagree with you.

[@faithbecauseofreason8381]

@@x-popone6817 on what grounds?

[@truthbebold4009]

​@@x-popone6817That's how inquisitions kick off

[@anaromana8183]

Dosent matter that Paul accuse Peter about his way of life. What matter is that Peter try to compel people to live like jews. Another nonsense bla bla bla. You have problem to understand logic?