A secondary source is still a source of information, and not all secondary sources are completely invalid.
Just labeling everything that Papias, Iraeneus and Clement of Alexandria did as, "subjective speculation" doesn't make it so.
And when all of the secondary sources point in one direction, and you cannot provide me with any evidence to the contrary, then you are free to draw whatever conclusions you want to draw from that.
Assuming that all Christians merely converted to, and fundamentally accepted; all Gospels as being written by whomever they were told wrote them, with no ounce of critical thought, does not make it so. Some early Christians may have had this point of view, but Papias provably did not, and there were other early scholars which did not accept these writings "as is" without any amount of critical thought.
Do you guys really believe that skepticism is a recent invention?
Just labeling everything that Papias, Iraeneus and Clement of Alexandria did as, "subjective speculation" doesn't make it so.
And when all of the secondary sources point in one direction, and you cannot provide me with any evidence to the contrary, then you are free to draw whatever conclusions you want to draw from that.
Assuming that all Christians merely converted to, and fundamentally accepted; all Gospels as being written by whomever they were told wrote them, with no ounce of critical thought, does not make it so. Some early Christians may have had this point of view, but Papias provably did not, and there were other early scholars which did not accept these writings "as is" without any amount of critical thought.
Do you guys really believe that skepticism is a recent invention?
