The Devil is in the Details

I happen to have been discussing P52 in Textual Criticism Yahoo Group I belong to. I guess I must have had a slow day or something but I decided to put the questions to the experts (because I am telling you people this group has EVERYBODY in the name of New Testament textual criticism participating) - why is P52 necessarily viewed as the oldest fragment of the Gospel of John?

The person who answered my question was Jack Kilmon, someone I like as much as anyone there. He responded by saying:

A single long Gospel of John that was pre-(Syriac) Diatessaronic Greek would simply have been the Gospel of John. In the case of P52, a 1st generation copy of the autograph

Yet I don't understand this logic at all. I know it represents the way scholars think today but I don't see it as a statement based on a critical examination of the facts.

My response to Jack was as follows (rather long I know but I seem to have a lot of time on my hands lately):

Thank you for your insight. You are clearly articulating the standard view of P52. I have two more questions for you:

1. While you have not made explicit where the foundation of this opinion, I am assuming it is from (a) Irenaeus' statement about the fourfold canon in Against the Heresies c. 180 and (b) the third century Church Fathers who claim that Tatian mixed the four gospels to make the Diatessaron. Is this correct?

If this is true I would like to ask you if Irenaeus' claims about the pre-history of this gospel of John BEFORE Irenaeus.

2. if Irenaeus is correct we would expect Polycarp to use canonical John. However if it could be demonstrated that Polycarp used the so-called Diatessaron (which I think anyone can by merely comparing Polycarp's two gospel citations in his letter to the Diatessaron) wouldn't that open the possibility that the so-called Diatessaron wasn't entirely created by Tatian but had a life going back to the time of Polycarp and Justin (which Tatian likely claimed anyway especially with regards to Justin i.e. does anyone really believe that Tatian didn't claim that he preserved Justin's original gospel)?

I have difficulty accepting any claim which is wholly based on the testimony of Irenaeus. After all there were other contemporaries in Rome in the late second century who claimed to be devoted students of Polycarp and had very different claims about what his teachings were (Florinus of Rome for instance whose beliefs have come to light in the new version of Agapius at Roger Pearse's site).

Florinus was a Valentinian. The Valentinian concept of John was surely interconnected with the Diatessaron. A number of studies have demonstrated the Acts of John utilized the Diatessaron (see Connolly the Diatessaron in the Syriac Acts of John). So given Polycarp's use of the Diatessaron (which anyone can see again if they did 'assume' Irenaeus' understanding of Polycarp instead of Florinus') and a rival Johannine culture in the second century which employed the Diatessaron how can we be so sure that the Johannine material found in P52 wasn't part of Gospel of John which contained a blending of material from Matthew, Mark and Luke as the existing Arabic Diatessaron demonstrates?

Isn't it possible that it just come down to a pre-existent mindset of the part of most scholars to gravitate to what is familiar?

Now I have to be polite on these forums because I have a habit of getting kicked off these groups. My real tendency is to want to lash out at the representative of the normative scholarly view of anything but I learned that it is counter-productive (although for a moment at least you feel very good).

The real question I have is why is Irenaeus such a good witness? Seriously. The fact that all the Church Fathers had to listen to him doesn't mean anything. Origen responded to Celsus' charges almost a century after they were originally made (more than a century according to the date that Origen thinks Celsus wrote i.e. c 138 CE). This doesn't mean that Origen that Celsus was a good witness. He was a good witness because he was widely influential among the highest ranks of Roman society. This is why Origen had to respond to his views.

The same was true with Irenaeus.

If Patristic scholars had any sense of history (maybe they do but it conveniently seems to shut off when discussing their Fathers) they would realize what an important shadow Commodus cast on the later 'Antonine Emperors' or 'Severine Emperors.' All of them wanted to maintain or embellish a connection on the Antontine period in the second century as it legitimized their rule.

So here we have Irenaeus acknowledging his lofty position in the court of Commodus, perhaps the worst and most wicked Emperor in the long history of wicked Emperors of Rome and he is the one authority that our entire world view of early Christianity is based. At the very least he is the filter or the editor through which information from a previous period finally makes its way to us

Seriously this is so stupid I can't possibly explain it to my friends and associates outside of this field of study.

If Commodus was the ancient equivalent of Adolf Hitler, and I think the comparison is fair, Irenaeus was Josef Goebbels. I know it sounds unfair. At most we can modify the statement to say the equivalent of Josef Goebbels of early Christianity working in the cabinet of the ancient equivalent of Adolf Hitler.

I mean this man who is perhaps the most influential person in the history of Christianity doing in the court of a despotic butcher?

And the scholars just shrug their shoulders and say, 'but Irenaeus says' or worse yet don't even bother to quote Irenaeus and take over his arguments as if they came down from heaven (you know the way the four gospels he edited are explained as all coming through the same divine wind!).

My God, this devil Irenaeus had nothing to do with God. Wake up people! A saint can't advance up the ranks of the government bureaucracy. Only an evil person could have flourished in an evil age. Only an evil agenda could have advanced in a period ruled by evil. Irenaeus' testimony is worse than useless, it is evil.