4/14/2024 0 Comments Story of lazarus bible summaryHis claim is a limited one of having heard those who had been in contact with such eyewitnesses. In the first place Papias does not attempt to claim too much, even though he has great interest in what all the apostles and the Twelve have said. All of this is interesting in several respects. 100 (see the ABD article on Papias), which is to say only shortly after the Fourth Gospel is traditionally dated. Papias had heard personally what Aristion and the elder John were saying, but had only heard about what the earlier apostles had said.Īs most scholars have now concluded, Papias was an adult during the reign of Trajan and perhaps also Hadrian and his work that Eusebius cites should probably be dated to about A.D. Eusebius is clear that Papias only knew the ‘elders’ who had had contact with the ‘holy apostles’ not the ‘holy apostles’ themselves. It is notable as well that Eusebius reminds us that Papias reflects the same chiliastic eschatology as is found in the book of Revelation, something which Eusebius looks askance at. 3.39-3-7) who is distinguished by Eusebius himself from the John in question. Eusebius in referring to the Preface to Papias’ five volume work stresses that Papias only had contact with an elder John and one Aristion, not with John of Zebedee (Hist. Papias ascribes this Gospel to one elder John, whom he distinguishes presumably from another John and it is only the former that he claims to have had personal contact with. It is therefore telling that this seems not to have been the conclusion of perhaps our very earliest witness-Papias of Hierapolis who was surely in a location and in a position to know something about Christianity in the provenance of Asia at the beginning of the second century A.D. 180 stressed that this Gospel was written in Ephesus by one of the Twelve- John. Irenaeus, the great heresiarch, in particular around A.D. There was an increasing urgency about this conclusion for the mainstream church after the middle of the second century because the Fourth Gospel seems to have been a favorite amongst the Gnostics, and therefore, apostolic authorship was deemed important if this Gospel was to be rescued from the heterodox. This does not alleviate the necessity of explaining how the Gospel came to be ascribed to someone named John, but we will leave that question to the end of our discussion.Īs far as the external evidence goes it is true enough that there were various church fathers in the second century that though John son of Zebedee was the author. In my view, the internal evidence should certainly take precedence in the case of the Gospel of John, not least because the external evidence is hardly unequivocal. This means of course that all four Gospels are formally anonymous and the question then becomes how much weight one should place on internal evidence of authorship (the so-called inscribed author) and how much on external evidence. Even more tellingly they were likely added only after there were several familiar Gospels for the phrase ‘according to….’ is used to distinguish this particular Gospel from other well known ones. Martin Hengel and Graham Stanton among other scholars have reminded us in recent discussions of the Fourth Gospel that the superscripts to all four of the canonical Gospels were in all likelihood added after the fact to the documents, indeed they may originally have been added as document tags to the papyrus rolls. The problem with the traditional ascription of this Gospel to John Zebedee THE HISTORICAL FIGURE OF THE BELOVED DISCIPLE IN THE 4TH GOSPEL I'll let you decide whether you find it illuminating or inflammatory. If you can accomplish both with one theory, well, you've created a Mallox moment! I seem to accomplished this at the last SBL meeting in November when I gave the following lecture. If you want to cause Biblical scholars to get their knickers in a knot there are two sure fire ways to accomplish that end: 1) you can skewer a sacred cow whether a liberal or conservative one 2) you can propose a theory that requires one to believe in the possibility of the miraculous to even entertain the thesis.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |