This thread is intended to give an example of what I am talking about here: to wit, an example of an option involving oral transmission of a tradition being ignored in favor of two mutually exclusive, yet pervasive, hypotheses of a purely documentary nature. I will outline the two different approaches before pointing out another possible option; I will mount an argument for this option, but only in order to show that it is viable, not necessarily to show that it is the best one of the three, though I do lean in that direction. It is one thing to consider an option and reject it for sound reasons, quite another not even to consider it at all because of a blind spot. (To clarify, I am not even going to argue that the authors in question suffer from this blind spot, though it is entirely possible that they do. Rather, my point is that these kinds of options — options involving either an oral component in the transmission — are the ones that I see ignored time and time again.)Ben C. Smith wrote: ↑Sat Nov 24, 2018 8:53 amAll of this matters because those in the "no oral tradition" camp sometimes tend to treat the evangelists as dwelling in a vacuum: there were the scriptures, and then there was Paul, and then there was Mark, and then there were Matthew and Luke and John; and every idea in the later texts in this stream just has to derive either from one of the earlier texts or from the author's own vivid imagination, or from some combination of the two. There were no wandering preachers giving instructions or telling stories which may have found there way into the gospels; there were no Christians talking amongst each other, giving each other ideas; there was no liturgy from which details of the passion could have arisen, no ethical instruction which one of the evangelists may have borrowed from his fellow Christians, no lost texts or traditions. But these tacit assumptions fly in the face of the internal evidence of our gospels, that they are not (any of them) individually seamless tunics (John 19.23) woven as a whole without parts; and they fly in the face of analogies involving religious groups and how their ideas grow and change and merge over time. YMMV.
The mutually exclusive options in question for this thread involve exactly how Papias of Hierapolis might have "known" that Mark wrote his text out of order. If you think that Papias is the fraudulent invention of Irenaeus, of Eusebius, or of the Medici, this thread is not for you; the scholars I am quoting here take both his existence and the following quotation seriously:
Two different hypotheses are very common among scholars. First, there is the hypothesis that Papias was comparing Mark's order to that of John. Second, there is the hypothesis that Papias was comparing Mark's order to that of Matathew.
Here is an example of the first hypothesis, Mark versus John:
By this argument, Papias must have known the gospel of John because his list of seven disciples seems like a Johannine list, and also because Irenaeus probably got a dominical saying from Papias which appears in the gospel of John. Matthew and Mark are not very different in order, at least compared to John. Also in favor of this proposal are the many examples from century II in which the church fathers noticed the differences in order between John and the synoptics, as opposed to the very few in which they noticed or cared about the differences between any two of the synoptics. Therefore, Papias knew both the gospel of John, even though Eusebius does not credit him with such knowledge, and Mark is out of order by comparison with John. Neat.
Here now is an example of the second hypothesis, Mark versus Matthew:
Because MacDonald is sure that John postdates Papias, the comparison in Papias must be between Mark and Matthew, the only two gospel texts which he actually names. This makes sense. Furthermore, MacDonald disposes of Bauckham's certainty that Papias knew the gospel of John by calling the list comparison a "a house of cards. To be sure, the first three names are in the same order (though Peter in John initially is called Simon), but then the Fourth Gospel mentions Nathaniel..., Nicodemus..., and Thomas.... The names James and John never appear in the Gospel, and in chapter 21, generally considered an epilogue, they are called simply 'the sons of Zebedee' .... Matthew's name, too, is absent. In other words, there is no list of the Twelve in John, and to make Papias' list conform to John's order, one must omit two names from John's account (Nathaniel and Nicodemus), add three (James, John, and Matthew), and monitor the introduction of characters from the first chapter to the epilogue" (page 17).
MacDonald is correct that the procedure required for tracing Papias' seven names throughout the gospel of John is too complicated, but what he fails to reckon with is that Papias' list is Johannine in character. It is not just a random selection of the disciples' names from the synoptic lists. I have already pointed out elsewhere how well the list of seven disciples fits a matrix of tradition rather than any single text, and this is what Bauckham fails to appreciate: that Papias' references to persons or concepts now found in the gospel of John do not have to come from the gospel of John itself. Why can they not have come from exactly the source that Papias himself names?
Papias attributes his most valuable information, not to any written gospel text, but to travelers claiming to be handing down quotes from the seven disciples on his list. This would explain why Eusebius does not quote Papias mentioning the gospel of John: that gospel, as MacDonald suggests, postdates Papias (and probably relies upon him to some extent!). It would explain why the names on Papias' list are the ones with solid speaking parts in John but in few other texts: Papias learned about those disciples from his travelers, and John drew some of their words from what Papias recorded about them. It would explain why Irenaeus may have gotten a dominical saying now found in John from Papias (he actually attributes it to "the elders," but this may at least include Papias): Papias got that saying from his travelers, and John got it from Papias. Finally, it would explain why Papias thought that Mark was out of order: most of the examples of church fathers from century II noticing the differences between John and Mark could easily have been gleaned from know-it-alls passing down stories. The timing of the temple incident (right at the beginning or very near the end?), the length of Jesus' ministry (three years or only one?), the calling of the disciples (before John was arrested or after?)... all of these matters of chronological order are the kinds that would play into the retelling of the stories. "At the beginning/end of his ministry, Jesus went into the temple...." "After/before John was arrested, the disciples met Jesus...." Most obviously, the timing of the Last Supper (Passover feast or not?) figured into the Quartodeciman observation of the feast in Asia Minor; every knowledgeable Asian Christian would know on which day the Asian churches celebrated their spring feast!
Now, you may still not be convinced that Papias knew, not John, but rather Johannine tradition (and indeed helped to develop it), but that is fine. My point, again, is that this scenario is possible. It ought to be considered. But neither MacDonald nor Bauckham considers it.
MacDonald even ties himself up into a knot of sorts in overlooking the possibility that I have sketched out. He agrees with Bauckham that Papias was suggesting that, while the original Hebrew Matthew was in order, the translations (into Greek) were not. So Greek Matthew is, like Mark, actually out of order. Yet MacDonald then goes on to assume, throughout the rest of his work, that Papias followed Greek Matthew's order (as superior to Mark's) as he presented his material! This awkward conundrum arises only because MacDonald has to dismiss the more obvious "correct" order, the Johannine order, on the simplistic grounds that the gospel of John had not yet been composed; I agree with him on that point, but just because John's implied order was not yet in writing does not mean it was not on the lips of Asian travelers chattering into the eager ears of Papias.
The entire enterprise, both for MacDonald and for Bauckham, is one of finding or not finding connections between Papias and John. Bauckham sees them and thinks that Papias must have known John; MacDonald does not see them, which lines up with his thinking that John postdates Papias. Too many things wind up toggling back and forth between two options: (A) if Papias has connections with John, then Papias must know the text of John and the connections mean everything; (B) if John postdates Papias, then the connections with John must be an illusion and mean nothing. Both options equally assume that the order of which Papias speaks must have derived from a text. Neither considers that Papias may have received a different picture from his travelers and from his own local liturgical practices than he received from the text of Mark.
I cannot be sure why Bauckham and MacDonald overlook this option, of course, but I know I have seen, on this very forum, similar oversights from amateur researchers (not a slur: I am one too) who, probably not coincidentally, are not very keen on oral traditions being a possible explanation behind any part of the NT texts. That, I submit, is the peril of reading a book which for the most part correctly argues that many/most pericopes in the extant gospels do not have to derive from oral tradition and then concluding from that book that one no longer has to reckon with oral tradition as a possible explanation for any given pericope: obvious options of high explanatory value get overlooked.
YMMV.
Ben.