These are all pretty ignorant or naive remarks. They read more like apologetics than attentively critical scholarship.

Mark is anti-Petrine so obviously cannot by any elaborate thesis be what Papias describes (Matthew would be describable that way; not Mark). Everything else Papias says is also impossible (Matthew cannot have originated in Hebrew, etc.). So there is only one sound conclusion: Papias doesn’t know what he’s talking about. And that thesis is well supported by everything else we have from Papias, all of which is ridiculous, yet he believed it, showing he had zero reliability. And we even have his statement of method documenting its unreliability. So that is the only logical conclusion here.

Meanwhile, as to the circulation of the names, that is because all our manuscripts originate from the same edition that named them all (as proved by Trobisch: see Three Things to Know about New Testament Manuscripts, which also explains why the names must have been assigned there, all at once, and not before; in addition to the obvious fact that the names would be explained in-text if they were original, as otherwise they are meaningless and their value, as witness or tradent, is lost for not being documented—whereas it was the norm to publish bible-format tales anonymously, from the ancient Kings literature it emulates to the modern novellas it resembles, like Tobit and Joseph and Aseneth).

So one has to work out or decide when Papias wrote: before (and therefore between 100 and 140 AD), or after that edition (and therefore between 140 and 160 AD).

If before, then the selection of what to name the Gospels in the anti-Marcionite edition we have fragments of was based on Papias, and it wasn’t Papias’s mistake so much as theirs (e.g. the choice to put “Mark” atop our Gospel came later, and Papias had in mind some other Gospel we don’t have, or even was thinking of what we now call Matthew, and repeating an invented legend about it, not reading the name off it).

I am inclined to believe it’s after, and that in fact Papias wove stories about all four Gospels, not just Mark and Matthew. In this theory, the entire chapter in which Eusebius says he relied on Papias is a paraphrase or summary of Papias, and thus the stories Eusebius relates of John and Luke are also from Papias, and he only quotes Papias on Mark and Matthew (and tacks that on as a footnote because he found those statements odd yet worth preserving, and preserving verbatim because Eusebius didn’t know how to interpret them so left that to the reader).

What is your response to Adele Collins who says that it is strange that mark has such a consistent attribution if it circulated anonymously, when other works began as anonymous, and were given different names

It has often been pointed out that many biblical and Jewish works are anonymous, and it has been argued that the anonymity of the Gospels is part of this tradition. It is quite plausible that the author of the second Gospel modeled his work, at least in part, on the narrative books of the Old Testament. The use of this model would explain the lack of any self-reference in the opening of the work itself. It does not compel the conclusion, however, that the Gospel circulated anonymously, that is, without a title that mentioned the author’s name. The issue of authority was a live one from the beginning of the proclamation of the gospel, at least by the time Paul was active in that regard, as his letters show. A number of members of the movement wrote in their own names, for example, Paul; John, the prophet who authored the book of Revelation; and Hermas, who composed the Shepherd of Hermas. Thus, even if the author did not give his work a title, it is likely that whoever copied it and circulated it to other communities in other geographical locations gave it a title that mentioned Mark

Support for this hypothesis is provided by Galen, the philosopher and physician active in the second century. He states that he did not write any of his works for publication, but only for pupils and friends who asked for written works to help them remember what they had heard. Galen, in his book on his own books (De libris propriis liber), says that he did not give any of his works titles, but that, as they began to circulate, the same work was given different titles in varying circumstances. This evidence suggests that, if the second Gospel had circulated without a title, it would have acquired two or more different titles in the course of its early transmission. Such a process, however, does not seem to have occurred.

Adela Yarbro Collins and Harold W. Attridge, Mark: A Commentary on the Gospel of Mark, Hermeneia—a Critical and Historical Commentary on the Bible (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007), 2–3.

Also most critical scholars do in fact agree that Papias attributed the canonical gospel to John Mark.

While the elder John’s presupposition about Peter’s role in the composition history of Mark’s Gospel has been contested by some modern scholars, his attribution of the Gospel to John Mark is generally accepted. Nevertheless, it may have served the elder John’s agenda to vouch for the accuracy of the text by linking it with an authoritative apostolic figure, while blaming its literary defects on Peter’s less reputable assistant Mark.

Kok, Michael. Tax Collector to Gospel Writer. Fortress Press (2023)

Kok briefly expressed his reasons for dissent from Ehrman in particular on his own site

I have a different view of Papias. Eusebius tried to discredit Papias because he did not like his conception of the millennium. Papias’s oracles, in my judgment, were the oral traditions about Jesus’s words and deeds that Matthew put in a satisfactory arrangement in contrast to Mark’s rougher work. This was his judgment of the literary quality of our Gospels of Mark and Matthew. Papias followed the Elder John in attributing the former to Peter indirectly, while Papias was the one to attribute the latter to Matthew directly, possibly due to Matthew’s presence at the toll booth in Matt 9:9.

There are other reasons to explain why Papias described Mark’s gospel in the manner he did

The Elder might have also appraised Mark’s work as a haphazard collection of Peter’s anecdotes. Mark diligently scribbled down Peter’s words in his notebook. He did not have the opportunity to attain the same level of literacy as the educated elites who could have re-shaped his raw materials into a polished literary work. A professional historian compiles the facts into “a series of notes, a body of material as yet with no beauty or continuity. Then, after arranging them into order,” the historian would “give it beauty and enhance it with the charms of expression, figure, and rhythm” (Lucian, How to Write History [Kilburn 61]). The Elder may have noticed that some episodes in Mark’s Gospel were very loosely strung together. This Gospel lacked a suitable introduction. Jesus’s genealogy, birth, and upbringing are not narrated. It ends on a cliffhanger, leaving the reader in suspense about what happened next. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke fill in the gaps at the beginning and ending of Mark’s narrative…The Elder’s unease with Mark’s Gospel is understandable. It appeared incomplete and disorderly from his perspective. He downplayed the Gospel writer’s literary skill, but his emphasis was still on the trustworthiness of the Gospel’s content because it was based on Peter’s public discourses.

Kok, Michael. Four Evangelists and a Heresy Hunter. Self-Publication, 2025

There is actually no statement anywhere in antiquity that John the Elder was a disciple. Everywhere else he is so called to distinguish him from the disciple.

And this is self-evident in Revelation, where he explicitly omits any reference to his being a disciple, even though that would attach tremendous authority he needed for the text. Which essentially proves he couldn’t and thus wasn’t. And this was the most prominent and important John in the NT after the apostle.

The Jonannine Epistles meanwhile have no name of John in them (that was assigned later, outside the letter, when they were bundled with the Gospels), and are self-evident forgeries (see references in OHJ and OPH).

Even Papias is distinguishing him from the Apostle. And for all the reasons stated, appears not to have understood him as a literal disciple either (and even if he did, he’s the only one who did, and this is more readily explained by Papias’s otherwise well demonstrated stupidity).

See Did Polycarp Meet John the Apostle? for more.

Je ne peux malheureusement pas répondre maintenant. Je le ferai peut-être plus tard. Juste pour le moment : le “disbelieving” de l’ensemble du “scholarschip” concernant l’existence de “Jean l’Ancien”, disciple du maître, encore dans les années 80, en réalité jusqu’au début du règne de Trajan, ne repose que sur des présupposés qui prennent pour argent comptant la tradition qui affirme que Jésus de Nazareth s’est choisi des “Apôtres”. Les Apôtres ont été fabriqués, je vous l’ai déjà dit, au moment de l’écriture des Evangiles, pour moi et pour d’autres, au temps d’Ignace d’Antioche, entre 100 et 115 au plus tard.

Because they are everywhere distinguished as later persons not from that generation, all the way to Eusebius, and never by anyone else said to be otherwise. Ariston is attested as a second century author and therefore cannot have been a disciple (that’s biologically impossible). John the Elder refers to the author of Revelation, which was composed in the 90s AD and therefore is not very plausibly a disciple (he would have said he was, as that authority is too great to omit; and the probability of surviving into one’s 90s then was astronomically low, if not zero). Eusebius is correctly well aware of all this.

Even Papias’s splitting of “the disciples of the Lord” from these two indicates this same conclusion. It would be weird to have repeated the phrase “disciples of the Lord” without a designator like “also” if he meant these were two different lists of the same category of people. Hence Carlson and my conclusion that Papias probably wrote “disciples of disciples” and a common instance of inverse dittography resulted in losing the repeated word.

But failing that, Papias has to either mean something broader by it (as he is distinguishing John the Elder from John the Apostle, and no list of Apostles includes anyone named Ariston, nor is a rural Palestinian fringe cultist likely to have a Greek name like that; plus all the data above), or he had to have been duped into mistaking these later authors as disciples (since we know Papias was pretty stupid and easily gulled).

We therefore have no reliable evidence on which to believe these were disciples, and plenty of evidence to positively disbelieve it. The consensus is therefore correct about this.

Qu’est-ce qui vous autorise à dire ” that Ariston and John the Elder” “were not in Jesus’s circle and by no account even alive then” ?

Your methodology of error is typical of people on the wrong side of things, e.g. you ignore and make no response to all the counterevidence I presented, and you blame “all translators” (all translators in the world) for being wrong and you (you alone) for being right, which is possible but suspicious, and warrants questioning whether you are overconfidently imprinting your desires onto the text rather than admitting the deliberate ambiguities in it (which are the real tell).

Case in point: you go on about the “impossibility” of a coordinating conjunction, but that is not “impossible” (it’s actually a contrastive conjunction, and is entirely allowed, indeed recommended, by the literary style of variatio). More importantly, while the present tense of the verb (legousin) suggests (as I note in my article) Papias believed these two guys were still around (Ariston and John the Elder, who all parties agree were not disciples of Jesus and that is what distinguishes them from the John the Apostle and the others listed—as again I note, following Carlson’s apt analysis), the sentence does not say Papias ever spoke to them.

The subordinate clause “what Ariston and John the Elder are saying” is contrasted with the disciples of the Lord the “followers of the elders” told stories of (what these long dead persons “said,” eipen, past tense), distinguishing these subordinated names as those whom “the followers of the elders” also tell stories of regarding what they are saying (present tense).

In other words, there is no grammatical construction here by which Papias says he spoke to or met Ariston and John the Elder. There is only a sentence saying he spoke to “followers of the elders” (never the elders themselves, much less the disciples), and while even that is ambiguous (as I explain in the article), the people who told him what others are saying are these unnamed “followers of the elders,” not the people listed by name. The people listed by name are the people about whom the “followers of the elders” told stories. Ariston and John the Elder are distinguished grammatically only in supposedly still being alive (vis “what the followers of the elders told me they are saying” vs. “what the followers of the elders told me those others had said”). Even that may be false (it expresses a belief, or a negligence of grammatical precision, of Papias, as noted) but that doesn’t matter for the grammar.

So going on about coordinating conjunctions is a moot point. It’s simply a fair way to loosely translate this into English, because English doesn’t have a distinct contrastive conjunction as in Greek. It makes no difference to the sense. Papias is saying he asked “other people” what all these named persons “are saying” or “said,” he is not saying he asked any of these named persons anything. And that’s the case no matter what you call the transition at ha te.

This is well treated by Carlson and leads to his and my agreement that the text has necessarily become corrupted, because the grammar entails “Ariston and the Elder John” are not disciples and therefore τοῦ κυρίου μαθηταὶ must have originally read disciples of the disciples of the Lord or something similar, because the sequence contrasts a list of “who were the disciples of the Lord” that “those who followed the elders” still have things to say about and about what “is said” by those who were not disciples of the Lord but nevertheless important (this most likely being the John who was the believed author of Revelation and the Ariston who is the believed author of an early commentary on the fourfold Gospel). Eusebius was aware of the ambiguity (as I show in the article). And Eusebius spoke better Greek than you or I.

But even if you are incredulous of an obvious dropped duplicative word (a common scribal error), Papias would simply have been wrong that Ariston and John the Elder were “disciples” in any literal sense, because they were not in Jesus’s circle and by no account even alive then. So nothing as to dating can be argued with this (except maybe that Papias was bad at math, but all evidence indicates he was, so denying that’s no escape either).

The Greek relating what “the followers of the elders” told Papias about εἶπεν ἢ τί … ἤ τις ἕτερος τῶν τοῦ κυρίου μαθητῶν ἅ τε Ἀριστίων καὶ ὁ πρεσβύτερος Ἰωάννης … λέγουσιν. So these are things the elders say these men said, and it’s a list of two sets of men, the disciples (including the Apostle John), and these extra guys who (might have been, unlike the disciples) still alive, whom we all know weren’t disciples (so either Papias miswrote that, meant something looser by it, was wrong, or the text was corrupted—the latter being grammatically most likely).

That’s simply the state of things. And there is no way to get around it with moot quibbles about the precise grammar.

Voici ma réponse au premier § de votre réponse.
I’ll just say tl;dr I don’t find anything convincing here. My analysis in the above article supersedes all of this. Papias does not actually say he met Aristion or John, and accordingly even Eusebius is unsure that’s what he meant, and in any event we don’t know their dates anyway (neither was a disciple of Jesus).
 
Manifestement, Monsieur, votre lecture du grec n’est pas suffisamment rigoureuse.
Je vous rappelle ici ce que dit exactement Papias pour présenter ce qu’il a fait :
« (4) εἰ δέ που καὶ παρηκολουθηκώς τις τοῖς πρεσβυτέροις ἔλθοι, τοὺς τῶν πρεσβυτέρων ἀνέκρινον λόγους· τί Ἀνδρέας ἢ τί Πέτρος εἶπεν ἢ τί Φίλιππος ἢ τί Θωμᾶς ἢ Ἰάκωβος ἢ τί Ἰωάννης ἢ Ματθαῖος ἤ τις ἕτερος τῶν τοῦ κυρίου μαθητῶν, ἅ τε Ἀριστίων καὶ ὁ πρεσβύτερος Ἰωάννης, τοῦ κυρίου μαθηταί,   (5) λέγουσιν.
οὐ γὰρ τὰ ἐκ τῶν βιβλίων τοσοῦτόν με ὠφελεῖν ὑπελάμβανον, ὅσον τὰ παρὰ ζώσης φωνῆς καὶ μενούσης. » (Cité par Eusèbe de Césarée, Histoire ecclésiastique, III, 39, 4-5)
Tous les traducteurs font la même erreur, et donc vous-même aussi, ils interprètent τε dans « ἅ τε Ἀριστίων καὶ ὁ πρεσβύτερος Ἰωάννης, τοῦ κυρίου μαθηταί, λέγουσιν » comme un coordonnant, dans le sens de καί, ce qui est grammaticalement impossible ; en effet, si τε était « coordonnant » (« conjonction de coordination », « et » en français, « and » en anglais) le verbe λέγουσιν aurait été au même temps verbal  que les verbes précédents ; Papias aurait écrit : ἢ ἅ Ἀριστίων καὶ ὁ πρεσβύτερος Ἰωάννης, τοῦ κυρίου μαθηταί εἷπον, « ou bien (encore) ce qu’Aristion et Jean l’Ancien, disciple du rabbi / du maître, avaient dit. » En traduisant λέγουσιν, un présent, par « was saying », Carlson ne respecte pas le texte grec, il se trompe et trompe son lecteur, et sans cela, sans aucune explication. Voilà la sort de manque de sérieux que je reproche aux « exégètes », aux spécialistes de la lecture du NT.
La phrase grecque doit être construite comme suit :
  εἰ δέ που, καὶ παρηκολουθηκώς τοῖς πρεσβυτέροις, τις ἔλθοι, τοὺς τῶν πρεσβυτέρων [ἀν]- έκρινον λόγους, τί Ἀνδρέας ἢ τί Πέτρος εἶπεν ἢ τί Φίλιππος ἢ τί Θωμᾶς ἢ Ἰάκωβος ἢ τί Ἰωάννης ἢ Ματθαῖος ἤ τις ἕτερος  τ ῶν τοῦ κυρίου μαθητῶν [εἶπεν], ἀν’ ἅ τε Ἀριστίων καὶ ὁ πρεσβύτερος Ἰωάννης, τοῦ κυρίου μαθηταί,  λέγουσιν.
Παρηκολουθηκώς : le participe parfait exprime l’idée de quelqu’un qui a été « de bout en bout », « constamment » « parfaitement » le compagnon de / dans la compagnie d’un ancien, et cela para, « à ses côtés » ou « à côté » = en un autre lieu, mais en sorte qu’il a les moyens de s’informer sur lui.
J’ai expliqué cette valeur du parfait dans un ouvrage intitulé Les degrés du verbe. Sens et formation du parfait grec ancien, Lang, Berne, ouvrage publié avec les subsides du Fonds National Suisse.
τοὺς τῶν πρεσβυτέρων λόγους = (c’est la même chose que) τί Ἀνδρέας ἢ τί Πέτρος εἶπεν, etc. Si cela n’avait pas été la même chose, Papias aurait  nécessairement écrit : τοὺς τῶν πρεσβυτέρων [ἀν]- έκρινον λόγους, καὶ (et ce que…) τί Ἀνδρέας ἢ τί Πέτρος εἶπεν
τ ῶν τοῦ κυρίου μαθητῶν =  τοῦ κυρίου μαθηταί Les Anciens, André, Pierre (Simon), Philippe, Jacque, Jean, Matthieu ont été des disciples du Maître comme Aristion et Jean ont été les disciples du Maître. Ce Jean, associé à Aristion, a lui aussi été un Ancien ; il a remplacé, à un moment donné, Jean, frère de Jacques, fils de Zébédée, parce que les fils de Zébédée ont été exécutés entre 42 et 44 (août) par Agrippa 1er.
Enfin il faut construire έκρινον … , ἀν’ ἅ τε Ἀριστίων καὶ ὁ πρεσβύτερος Ἰωάννης, τοῦ κυρίου μαθηταί,  λέγουσιν (« j’ai passé au crible (I sifted out) (les propos des Anciens que leurs compagnons m’ont rapportés = λόγους) ἀν’ἅ… en remontant à ce qu’Aristion et Jean l’Ancien me rapportent (au moment où je leur rapporte les propos des autres disciples du Maître, dont Sept Anciens).
Dans un texte dans lequel un auteur explique ce qu’il a fait, un verbe au temps présent renvoie au moment de l’énonciation du texte : le temps dans lequel Papias expose dans un écrit les propos du Maître qu’il a recueillis par l’intermédiaire des compagnons des Anciens, des disciples du Maître est encore le temps pendant lequel il rencontre et peut encore rencontre Aristion et Jean l’Ancien.
L’interprétation rigoureuse de la phrase de Papias citée par Eusèbe permet d’annuler toutes les spéculations sur les dates de Papias à partir de repérages « en l’air ».
Voici donc la traduction que je propose de la phrase que j’ai citée :
« Si à un endroit ou à un autre, à un moment ou à un autre (pou) quelqu’un arrivait (jusqu’à moi), quelqu’un qui avait été, de près ou de loin, un compagnons assidu des Anciens, je passais au crible (passé duratif) ce qu’André ou ce que Simon avaient dit (aoriste à valeur d’antériorité par rapport au moment où les compagnons rapportaient ce qu’ils avaient entendu d’eux), ou ce que Philippe, ou ce que Thomas ou ce que Jacques ou ce que Jean ou ce que Matthieu – ou quelqu’un d’autre des disciples du Maître – (avaient dit), je le passais au crible en remontant à ce qu’Aristion et à ce que Jean l’Ancien me rapportent.
οὐ γὰρ τὰ ἐκ τῶν βιβλίων τοσοῦτόν με ὠφελεῖν ὑπελάμβανον, ὅσον τὰ παρὰ ζώσης φωνῆς καὶ μενούσης. 
« En effet je supposais que ce qui vient des livres ne m’était pas aussi profitable que ce qui vient d’une voix vivante, et qui perdure. »
Autrement dit Papias explique que, pour tester la qualité des propos rapportés par les compagnons des Anciens et autres disciples, ce qu’il entendait de vive voix, de la part d’Aristion et de Jean l’Ancien, était, pour son projet, plus profitable que ce qu’il aurait pu lire dans un ouvrage écrit de témoignages.
 
En Anglais (traduction Google : j’ai corrigé / would came > came /  I would examine  > I examined) :
“If, at any time or place, someone who had been, in any way, a close companion of the Elders, came to me, I examined carefully what they reported from the Elders—what Andrew or Simon had said, or what Philip, Thomas or James, John or Matthew—or anyone else among the Master’s disciples—(had said), (I examined it by) going back to what Aristion and John the Elder actually report (to me).
Indeed, I assumed that what comes from books was not as beneficial to me as what comes from a living voice, which endures.”
 
 Traduction Microsoft :
“If at any place, at any time, any one should come (to me), one who had been, near or far, an assiduous companion of the ancients, I would sift through what Andrew, or what Simon, or what Philip, or what Thomas, or what James, or what John, or what Matthew—or any other of the Master’s disciples—had said, going back to what Aristion and John the Elder report.
Indeed, I supposed that what comes from books was not as profitable to me as what comes from a living voice, which endures. »
 
Carlson a traduit : “But if anyone who had also followed the elders came along, I would examine the words of the elders – what did Andrew our what did Peter say, or what did Philip, or what did Thomas or James, or what did John or Matthew, or any other of the disciples of the Lord – and what Aristion and John the elder, disciples of the Lord, were saying” (p. 141).
also followed : καί ne determine pas ἠκολουθηκώς mais παρά = « même à côté ».
I would examine : je crois qu’il faut traduire I examined tout simplement.
what did Andrew : non pas « ce qu’André dit » ou « disait », mais « ce qu’André avait dit » antérieurement au moment où Papias a interrogé son compagnon. Idem pour les autres « Anciens ».
and what pour ἅ τε est certainement l’erreur la plus grave, qui a induit « were saying » au lieu de « say » (ou mieux : report, actually). Le groupe ἅ τε Ἀριστίων καὶ ὁ πρεσβύτερος Ἰωάννης, τοῦ κυρίου μαθηταί,  λέγουσιν est n’est pas complément du verbe ἀνέκρινον au même niveau que τί … εἶπεν, mais en tant qu’accusatif de relation : « j’évaluais (la valeur de vérité des) propos d’André, « en les mettant en rapport à » « ce qu’Aristion et Jean eux-mêmes rapportent » encore au moment j’écris mon ouvrage.

Votre discussion des dates de Papias, la traduction de Carlson reposent sur le préjugé qu’André, Simon, etc. étaient connu de Papias en tant qu’apôtres. Or la façon dont Papias s’exprimer n’admet aucun doute : pour lui André, Simon, etc. avaient statut d’Anciens, c’est à dire avaient été les membres d’un Conseil d’une Assemblée fondée par les “disciples du Maître” et non du “Seigneur” (Lord!) après la crucifixion, vers 33. Les apôtres ne sont apparus qu’au moment de la rédaction des évangiles de Matthieu, Marc et Luc, entre 100 et 115 (avant la mort d’Ignace d’Antioche).

Vous voudrez bien me pardonner, mais je ne pourrai pas poursuivre longtemps la discussion.

The reason we mostly ignore Catholicism is that the very things you just explained establish that they already lost the argument. So there is no case even to bother rebutting. “Our guy is inspired by God” is such weak tea it is almost immediately self-refuting. It hardly requires rebuttal.

The reason Evangelicals win in the market of rhetoric is that they at least have a text to defend. Liberal Christians, like Catholics, abandoned that, and thus have no defense of their religion left, that differs in any way from what Evangelicals already master (like cosmological and ontological arguments and the like).

See my discussion in What’s the Harm, especially here.

For readers here, André Sauge presents here an elaborate grammatical argument for dating the text of Papias to 100 AD, in agreement with his own books Jésus de Nazareth contre Jésus-Christ (with multiple volumes in one binding on Amazon US).

I’ll just say tl;dr I don’t find anything convincing here. My analysis in the above article supersedes all of this. Papias does not actually say he met Aristion or John, and accordingly even Eusebius is unsure that’s what he meant, and in any event we don’t know their dates anyway (neither was a disciple of Jesus).

And Papias is otherwise clear he asked for stories from people who knew about (supposedly) the disciples, not people who knew Jesus, and we can’t even know that that’s true (anyone could go around claiming to have known a disciple; Papias shows no signs of even knowing how, much less that, he should have confirmed that before just believing it, and Papias is, as I note, not even clear that he means people who “knew” the apostles rather than people of “renown” who claimed to know things about them) which further complicates any reliable dating.

But even if we assume this is true, and Papias really means, people who knew the first apostles (who may not have been calling themselves disciples then), the first generation probably died out mostly by 70 and entirely by 80 AD (1 Clement is a late 60s text), and the second generation would continue to ~140 AD (half of those age 20 in 80 would be dead by 110, but half would last one or more decades beyond, as far as the 140s, when rare stragglers would be in their 80s). And that would be when he spoke to them. Not when he wrote about it. He could have been relying on memory from decades earlier. He likewise could be “drunk uncling” (exaggerating even what he remembered doing or hearing).

So we can’t securely say Papias wrote in 100. And all the evidence suggests (as I note) it had to be decades later (including details such as that Papias gained fame only after the reign of Trajan, which sooner suggests that’s when he published: after Trajan, not before Trajan).

And that’s assuming Papias was lucky and not (as usual) gullible. It is doubtful anyone actually told him they knew the first apostles (he is prone to hyperbole, presumption, and overconfidence, and he never clearly says this either), and it is doubtful that if any did that they were telling him the truth. Since we have no evidence that Papias could even name any of these people or confirm they knew an apostle personally, and the stories he credits to them are all ridiculous, it would be folly to trust any of this in dating his text.