I'd Really Rather Go Over Somethign That Pushes The Envelope Than Go Over Things I Answered Decades Ago

I'M SURE DENIS NOBLE would probably not agree with the use to which I will put something he said in an extremely interesting interview he gave to Curt Jaimungal, a scientific podcaster earlier this year but I can't see how my use of it outside of science is wrong.  Science isn't a self-contained activity anymore than history or any other intellectual activity is.  I think it's entirely legitimate for us to listen to what scientists say and draw inferences from it that about things which could not be properly a part of science.  I don't think there's anything illegitimate in what I'm about to do.  I'm as sure of that as I know that I disagree with Denis Noble about natural selection. 

At almost the one hour mark in the video after the host asked about the relationship of holism and the molecular reductionism of neo-Darwinism (Denis Noble is, as I stated the other day, a Darwinist though he has declared the neo-Darwinist synthesis of the mid-20th century to be dead) he made some very interesting points which are relevant to one of the issues in science I've gone over a number of times, the extraordinarily improbable chance of a cell's containing membrane to have come about and come to contain the necessary molecules for life to happen, just happening by random chance in nature.

My somewhat informal transcription of the video leaves out something said by the man conducting the interview which I've noted below.  I won't break into it.  At about 59:25, Denis Noble says

D.N. Let me also say something about holeism.   I know the neo-Darwinists in particular will dismiss me as completely off my head, when I talk about holism. they will think it's all terribly vague.  Actually it's a mathematical necessity.  And this may surprise people, about, let me see, it's 2016, so it's about eight years ago I published a book called "Dance To The Tune Of Life" . . . But I published a book subtitled "Biological Relativity."  . . . Biological relativity is the idea that there is no privileged level of causation within a biological system.  

Now, that is a mathematical necessity for the following reasons.  And I can illustrate it best by how I modeled the heartbeat, oh, over sixty years ago when I was a research student.  I was looking at ion channels in the heart cells,. characterizing those so we could fit equations to characterize their physical properties.  And then you could work out how that influences the overall electrical potential in the heart cell because the heart rhythm is an electrical process.  The voltage on the cell literally goes up and down like that [he makes a hand gesture going up and down].  Now, what I showed there was that you could not explain the rhythm from the molecular elements alone.  If you take those proteins and you put them in a solution with no membrane around them,. in other words, not in a cell, they will not oscillate.  There is no rhythm.  If, therefore, you remove the cell membrane and its electrical potential it doesn't work.  Incidentally, that's also true of mitochondria, our energy factories in our bodies.  If you remove the electrical potential across the membranes the system no longer works. So that's not, itself, a new discovery.  

Now, then, what I came up with is a very simple point, you can fit differential equations, sorry to be technical for a moment.

At this point the host interrupted to tell Denis Noble that he and his typical podcast audience were able to handle the technical content he was about to give. To which Noble said he was delighted.

The point is very simple.  However many details you put into the equations, or the differential equations and the functions used in those equations, you need the boundary conditions.  Otherwise there's no solution to those equations.  Every mathematician knows that.  Where do those boundary conditions come from?   

Well, in a sense the word gives it away, doesn't it.  In the case of a cell it's what the membranes constrain the molecules to do.  Those are the boundary conditions.  

So, a holistic view is simply the enumeration of the boundary conditions in a differential equation model.  So, that's why I call it a mathematical necessity.  And I think that your listeners who would understand the mathematics here, will readily understand when I say that there's no solution to a set of differential equations without the boundary conditions being put in.  Those are the influence from the higher levels of organization.  Because it is those higher levels of organization that constrain what the molecules themselves are doing.

Think of how life must have emerged long ago, in, we don't know exactly where - perhaps in the minute fissures and cracks in thermal vents - who knows?   But until the living system, the networks of interactions which were forming autocatalytic sets, meaning chemical reactions that could continue indefinitely,  until they were enclosed within membranes they would have just dispersed.  So, somehow or another, that constraint, the forming of a membrane around a catalytic set would have been a key element in any form of evolution of what we call life.  So, right from the very beginning the boundary conditions by the structure in which the molecules are to be found are a critical element in determining how they behave.  And so there's nothing terribly surprising in that. The principle of biological relativity is simply that you will always need the boundary conditions as well as the differential equations.  
 

C.J. So, that's extremely interesting, are you making an analogy between the evolution laws and reductionism and the boundary conditions and holism?

D.N. I am saying the boundary conditions are what give the system its whole, yes, that's right.  If what you are referring to as the whole is the structure of the system, then it is that structure that creates the boundary condition.  Cells are packed with structures that do that.  The molecules are not free to move easily from one compartment to another. They're restricted to various compartments.  That is, itself a structural imposition of constraint on the molecules involved.  All I'm saying is all molecules in living systems are constrained in the same kind of ways.  So, yes, if you want to say that holism is the existence of boundary conditions from structure, then I think that's absolutely right.  But, then, you've got to look at the whole to see the structure.

None of it works without a containing membrane and the containing membrane of any living, reproducing organism is extremely complex, it may well have been the most complex structure BEFORE THERE WAS ANY LIVING ORGANISM CONTAINED BY IT.  It, itself would have to have been a part of the whole structure or there would never have been any life.

It was way back in the days that I was enjoying getting into brawls with materialists on the Scienceblogs that I first brought up the problem of the containing membrane that would have had to contain the theoretical first organism of life on Earth which I am fully prepared to believe in though I hold there will never be a way for us to know about live that far back or to have any real idea of what it was like.  I described the necessity of the membrane of the first organism in terms less explicit and detailed than what Denis Noble says though he leaves out the extraordinarily hard to comprehend matter of that first organism dividing successfully, rupturing its membrane and resealing itself, enclosing the internal molecular structures that would result in two living organisms instead of one and a host of other incredibly complex actions. the extreme improbability of which lead me to believe that that could only happen as a result of intelligent intent not found within the organism, itself.  I know that Denis Noble and his colleagues doing some of the most important and fascinating research into these areas of cellular physiology reasonably and probably correctly attribute far mor in the way of intelligent action to individual cells as they can observe them, both as individual organisms and, far more elaborately, as parts of multi-cellular organisms but surely, as Denis Noble says and implies throughout this interview and his talks, that individual molecules not contained within cell membranes and within living organisms exhibit no such intelligence, it could not have been there before there was a living cell to organize that molecular behavior.  

I do think there is an artificial boundary at the same place in physical reality which prevents science from taking that step to considering the possibility of the Creator of life being part of that but I don't think there is anything wrong, at all, with someone taking that step outside of science.  It makes entirely more sense to me than the materialist-atheist-scientistic claims that a mechanistic view of the start of life is a fact and that that removes the necessity of God from any respectable discussion.  They can't even sustain their model within science, as Denis Noble points out at the beginning of the interview, the four basic assumptions of the latest attempt to come up with a reductionist description of evolution have all fallen to recent scientific research.  I don't think trying to make a holistic model of that will be either successful or widely convincing.  They'll have to overcome the materialist-atheist reductionist fever dream that they've put the last nail in the coffin of God.  I do agree with him that Cartesian dualism got it wrong just as those who figure the Creator of the universe, somehow, had nothing to do with the physical creation God created.  The Cartesian-scientific concept of that in terms of humanly created machines was incredibly naive no matter what it motivated in the further effort to come up with such means of controlling stuff and forces.  People are so ready to forget that their metaphors are just metaphors and not real think the mistaken philosophical imaginings of those who favored that ideology has had little to nothing to do with the actual success of science and technology, getting things we wanted and which would achieve our intentions has more to do with that, which accounts for why it is also destroying us and life on Earth.  

Update:  Simps, you really want to accuse me of "candor" in responding to you?   

1 : unreserved, honest, or sincere expression : forthrightness
the candor with which he acknowledged a weakness in his own case—
Aldous Huxley
2 : freedom from prejudice or malice : fairness
… a heavy accusation … from a gentleman of your talents, liberality, and candor.—
Noah Webster

Merriam Webster Online

Not only do you not know how to read, you don't know what words mean.

Dave Holland Quintet - How's Never

 

Dave Holland - bass
Robin Eubanks - trombone
Chris Potter - saxophone
Steve Nelson - vibraphone
Nate Smith - drums
 

It's All A Matter Of What You Choose To Believe No Matter How Much You Pretend It Isn't

Note:  I wrote this piece a couple of days ago but haven't been able to post it until today.

IT'S A BIT of a coincidence that I'm answering a bit of old snark concerning something I wrote a while back, today because it's the same day that I have decided that one of those online atheists I recently respected has feet of clay.  Sabine Hossenfelder's Youtube posted yesterday pushed her climate-change denial, which she addressed in terms of her loss of respect for scientists and, I guess, science.  THAT was the issue that led me to conclude she, herself, is what she criticizes, a scientist who abandons scientific methodology and practice.  Though it was her typical materialist-atheist-scientistically ignorant citation of the scientific research into parapsychology that I addressed in my comment at Youtube.  

It is clear from Hossenfelder's summary dismissal of decades of some of the most methodologically sound and rigorous of published, reviewed and re-reviewed research into forbidden topics that she has never read the literature of that branch of science but has relied on the entirely ideological misrepresentations of it.  That is typical of what she criticizes among scientists who violate the very basis of science for non-scientific, ideological reasons.  It is clear from, especially the lowest of so-called scientists who dismiss that science, in psychology, as well as those in the would-be queen of the sciences, physics, that those who summarily dismiss the published research have never read or seriously considered the long history of rigorous experimental success in demonstrating a list of parapsychological phenomena including those Hossenfelder listed in her summary dismissal of that science.  My thinking is if she can do that so readily, why should I believe her summary dismissal of the more than half a century of scientists publishing predictions of climate change which all of us experience nearly every day.  I was talking to my brother just last month and he was telling me of sitting as a student in the library at the University of Maine at Orono reading a paper that predicted that within a half a century Maine's climate would be approaching that of Virginia's if measures to curb carbon pollution in the atmosphere weren't taken.  Well, that prediction is obviously true in our record-breaking heat of this summer, the year after year of entirely unprecedented weather in Northern New England and the effects it's having on our climate and our gardening.  

But that isn't what I was going to write about until I listened to Hossenfelder's anti-climate-change diatribe, that was another bit of snark regarding the Resurrection of Jesus which I mentioned in a post I did a while back.  First, I capitalize Resurrection because it is a singular event in the history of humanity and life on Earth of the highest religious significance, if you don't like that I can't help you being unhappy about it but I'm not going back on that.  Live with it.

In his book, Living Jesus, in the first chapter in which Luke Timothy Johnson deals with both the question of in what sense Jesus is LIVING and in what sense JESUS is living, after the Resurrection, he says this:

Luke's empty tomb account (24:1-8) is a remarkably complex composition, especially when compared to its parallels in Mark and Matthew.  In Luke, we find no statement concerning a future appearance.  Instead, the women visiting the tomb are told that they are mistaken in their quest.  "Why do you seek the Living One among the dead?" (24:5).  It is clear from this response that Jesus' body is no longer where it had been, but this absence is explained on the basis of his being "the Living One," who cannot be constrained even by death.  The women, however, are given no immediate vision of Jesus as alive.  They are told to "remember" the words he had spoken in his past life concerning his death and resurrection (24:6).  His "absence" then, is pregnant.  The tomb is not entirely empty, Jesus' past life is over, yet it persists in the memory of those who will shortly come to understand that he truly is "the Living One,"  and their every memory of his past will be shaped by that growing realization of who he truly was all along.  

The appearances in Luke 24:15-49 are obviously a node not of Jesus' absence but of his presence to his followers.  He moves about him as he had before - yet, as we have seen, not really as before.  Jesus is not present in the way he had been when he walked and talked with them in Galilee.  His presence to them now is both more powerful and more allusive, more dramatic and more mediated.  Though he is "really" present in his body, that body has a transfigured quality that enables him to be present in different places to different people (24:31-54.)  

I'll back up to say that in the early days of my writing online, when I was reacting to the politically stupid and counter-productive new-atheist fad of the 00's that I was honest in saying I didn't understand what the Resurrection was supposed to be but I thought that those who reported their experience likely had experienced something they took to mean that Jesus had risen from death.  Thinking of something like that as a problem to be understood instead of a mystery to be thought over is a bad habit of thought.  Much of life is such an insoluble mystery but that doesn't make it any less real. Back then I was still under the influence of the historical-critical writer John Dominic Crossan's and others' books which had been the beginning of my late-in-life conversion to the Christianity.   I'd only been culturally part of before my long period of agnosticism.  The habit of agnosticism is a frequently cowardly decision to remain forever in a suspended state of non-decision instead of choosing to believe or disbelieve.  I'll hand it to the new atheists, their dishonesty led to my decision to stop being a coward in these matters.

I will repeat something that set off the snarky comment, that it was the atheist and eminent early computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum who gave me the key to understanding so much about science and human thinking, that everything we take to be known is, in truth, a product of what we choose to believe, that there is no such a thing as knowledge that is not, early or late in its adoption, a product of our choice to actively believe what we are presented with.  It was that honest atheist who taught me to be unafraid of believing as opposed to what could safely be claimed to be known in the milieu of late 20th and early 21st century college-credentialed people.  Along with such honest atheists as Richard Lewontin, I'm entirely unafraid to be influenced by some of what such atheists say, when it makes abundant sense.  

But I can say that it wasn't until I read Luke Timothy Johnson that I really could believe in the Resurrection in the various ways in which it's described in the different Gospels and Epistles and in secondary literature up to and including those who write about it today - in all their seeming contradictions and disagreements.  

Reading and relying on the historical-critical practitioners who, as Johnson has pointed out, come up with their own scientific-historically produced "historical Jesuses" which are mutually inconsistent and contradictory, it would seem that that mock-scientific methodology produces less instead of more clarity.  In practical terms, none of their "Jesuses" is compelling or helpful, many of them are far less plausible than the far more coherent Jesus of the New Testament.   That is a consequence of pretending that historical methodology can produce the kind of consensus that only the most agreed to levels of science can sometimes achieve.  That's true of the highly verifiable field of chemistry, certainly and, to a lesser extent the ever more distant from physical proof branch, physics, but most true of all in mathematics which doesn't deal with physical objects, at all but can produce the most unassailable levels of proof in science.  I think that relationship of the highest level of proof and the fact that mathematical "objects" are not physical is of great significance and a strong refutation of materialism as a respectable ideology.

I believe in the Resurrection of Jesus now but not in any neat packaged description of it, not as merely the resuscitation of his body because that's not what any of the writers in the New Testament said it was.  Jesus had a body after he came to Glory (I think, Johnson is correct, John's Gospel might have used the best descriptive word for it) which was related to his body during his historical lifetime but it was not the same as it had been before.  The widely reported emptiness of his tomb, and we have testimony of that in both later to be considered "Christian" sources and extremely hostile sources rejecting the Resurrection, the Jerusalem establishment, that the tomb was found to be empty, may lead us to believe that the Resurrection body of Jesus included his physical body but I don't think that's something we can generally know.  The Gospels, themselves, say that his presence is through the Spirit and that his physical body needed to be absent before People could experience that.  It would be a phenomenon of which we have no precedent to lead to understanding it.  I choose to believe the evidence of those who experienced the Living Jesus after his death, those who knew him in life and those like Paul who certainly had a profound experience of Jesus as one of his most extreme enemies.  

There are two major and several minor things which led, ultimately, to me rejecting Crossan's presentation of this.  Him violating his own stated standards of judgement in terms of the dating of the sources and the need for agreement among independent sources to sustain any particular article of faith was first and foremost in rejecting his assertions about the corpse and Resurrection of Jesus.

His claim that the body of Jesus wasn't buried in a tomb but was thrown into a common grave to be dug up by wild dogs and eaten is his own invention from the late 20th century, nearly two-thousand years after any possible evidence about that could have been established is one of his chief violations of his stated standards.  His claims are opposed to the burial of Jesus in a tomb, which is multiply and independently attested in both Christian and anti-Christian sources close in time to the death of Jesus.  I'll say that again because it is typical of the revisionism that comes from the historical-critical practitioners.  It is based on exactly no contemporary evidence, whatsoever, it is contradicted by multiple, independent sources in the Scripture as well as that of those hostile to the claims of the Resurrection - as is documented in Matthew's Gospel.*  And that's only one example of where Crossan violates his own stated criteria.

His claim that the Resurrection was a metaphor for the memory of Jesus living on in those who knew him is, as well, attested in absolutely no place in the oldest of Christian literature.  The only claims made about that is that Jesus was and is actually living, in an actual bodily existence but much more than merely that, in every single case.  The widely spread claims about any "Jesus" centered community which held that Jesus was still dead and it was just the experience of his memory that "kept him alive" is evidenced in absolutely nothing but the many centuries after inventions of would-be historical-critical scholars who would seem to never apply historical-critical methods to their own claims and procedures.   

You, of course, don't have to believe those with the closest proximity to Jesus in time and place, either eye-witnesses to the Living Jesus or with first hand knowledge of those who said they did have such direct experience of it, but those are the most credible sources of evidence on which to build any such claims.  I find the various criteria of how we, today experience the Living Jesus which Johnson gives to be quite convincing, along with his descriptions of ways in which the Living Jesus surpasses the abilities of the historical Jesus (before his death) and the reasons that Jesus had to die to lead to his continued presence in history as the Living Jesus.  I find those convincing in ways that I don't find any of the historical-critical "Jesuses" to be convincing or at all helpful or because of that lack in the context in our lives, important.  I don't find Crossan's Jesus to even be very compelling.  I'm currently reading the letters and other writing of the martyred Sr. Ita Ford just now and I can't imagine her being motivated to do what she did for the least among the least in our hemisphere on the basis of Crossan's reconstructed, denatured "Jesus."  

My point is that whether it is the rigorous scientific demonstration of parapsycholgical phenomena or the obvious fact of climate-change or the truth of the Resurrection of Jesus, it comes down to what you choose to believe in the end.  That is true even when, in the case of the controlled, reviewed, published experimental research in the case of parapsychological phenomena, OR IN CLIMATE CHANGE SCIENCE, it is one of the champions of science denying both the extraordinary level of scientific practice followed AND THE TESTIMONY OF OUR OWN EXPERIENCED OBSERVATION.  

I think it's a lot more immediately dangerous for someone with Youtube and other influence to disbelieve the clear and present evidence of climate change than to either believe or disbelieve in the Resurrection of Jesus, at least for all practical political matters.  Though I think for egalitarian democracy, a disbelief in Jesus is as dangerous.

The motives for the determined refusal to look honestly at the more than a century of rigorous scientific research into parapsychology are clearly not scientific or in any way honest.  

Both issues are, actually relevant to the refusal to consider the possibility that the New Testament is reporting the truth of the Resurrection and continued life of the Glorified Jesus out of ideological motives.  In both cases it is a product of materialist-atheist-scientism, only such a refusal to look at the scientific evidence supporting the reality of psychic phenomena is as far from the honest practices of science as could be.  Such denial of strong scientific evidence should, rightly, be condemned.  As should the mixing of ideology with science.  Only when it's the ideology of materialist-atheist-scientism, there is no level of that being inserted into the very literature of science which is deemed impermissible in the mainstream of science.  I also recently listened to a Youtube of one of the most thoroughly ideological of scientists, the new-atheist crank and geneticist Jerry Coyne condemning that practice of mixing ideology with science when there is no one who does that more than he, himself does, not to be noticed doing it because his own ideology has been allowed to dominate the practice and publication of science.  

A consideration of the Resurrection of Jesus may well be held to be something that science is entirely incompetent to judge, since there is no way to scientifically verify or refute the proposition that Jesus is resurrected and lives in a state of Glory/  There is no way to make such a thing fit into the subject matter of science.  But there is an enormous literature of scientific experiment carried out over decades in several of the forbidden topics such as parapsychology.  Experimenters, taking the criticisms made of past experiments into account in further experiments, still showing very statistically significant results and with extensive replications verifying those results in many instances resulting in meta-analyses  showing spectacularly high rates of probability as against chance, in some experimental programs, surpassing some of the most celebrated verifications of modern physics.  I was hardly convinced of that before I went to the bother of looking into it, just as I believed other conventions of the modern common-received "knowledge" of the kind Hossenfelder promotes until I really looked at the claims made within the published literature of the field.  There was a time I bought the theory of natural selection as handed to me in science classes before I ever went to the bother of actually reading Darwin and the subsequent literature of the theory.  Now I can see there is absolutely no observational evidence that there is any such thing nor any that verifies it is the primary or exclusive force in driving evolution.  And the more I looked hard at what was claimed, the more obvious it became to me that it is nothing more than an ideologically supported convention required of those who are held to be respectable in science and outside of it.  The atheist Denis Noble has recently noted how he was encouraged to lie about what he and his fellow scientists are discovering which contradicts the neo-Darwinian synthesis which has dominated biology for the past seventy years, not on the basis of their findings and the consequences of those being false BUT BECAUSE HIS OPPONENTS DON'T LIKE WHATEVER THEOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS CAN BE DRAWN FROM THEM.   Implications that any honest practice of science should not be in the business of considering in the articulation of science.  I think, far from Hossenfelder's claims in her recent Youtubes denying climate change science, it is her own ideology which is the driving force in so much of science and, especially, in that "public understanding of science" which Richard Dawkins, another of the foremost ideologues in neo-Darwinism and neo-eugenics and taboo science-denial, was given an Oxford seat in.  I think a lot of the millionaire-billionaire tech-bro sci-ranger activity of that kind is, actually, the promotion of such ideology which masquerades as science.  

I'd rather be honest than be considered respectable in that milieu.  I'd rather admit what I believe and the bases on which I believe what I do believe.  In the matter of climate change, I read the predictions and I saw those come true in the past fifty years.  In the matter of parapsychology, I read the literature and the mathematical analysis of that and if I want to hold that statistical evidence is a good way to find out the truth of things discernible in no other way, I must accept those.  Along with that I read the "skeptics" and found in every case I looked into, they were liars and hypocrites.  I came to the same conclusion about many of what I formerly took to be bright lights of that ideology the more I looked at what they claimed.   

My belief in the Living Jesus is based on a far different level of belief, though, if that is true then the Resurrection of Jesus is a plausible aspect of that, one which is attested in the best evidence of that available in literature.  I don't care if the likes of Hossenfelder or, on the low end of that, the guy who plays a genius on Brit TV and Youtube, Stephen Fry don't find that respectable.  I can live without their respect and I don't especially want it any more than I would that of James Randi or Jerry Coyne.  Nor do I care about the opinions of the dopes who troll me here except in so far as I can play off of them to write a post that I want to write and have a little fun at their expense.  Everyone has an opinion and, well you know what they say, generally, about those.

* I am not absolutely convinced but I think it's very probable that a good part of Matthew's Gospel, the "sayings" especially, may well be the product of the Matthew named as one of Jesus's Apostle as a number of classical commentators said.  Several of those living within a century of the assumed writing of that Gospel.  Several said that Matthew, aka Levi in Mark and Luke, the tax collector, wrote out the sayings of Jesus in "a dialect of Hebrew" probably in the Aramaic which was certainly Jesus's native language and that the Gospel of Matthew we have is a "translation" of those, almost certainly with expansions and commentary.  That it would be a confessed and despised tax collector among the followers of Jesus who wrote those down is credible in that a tax collector almost certainly was literate and likely was in the habit of writing in the course of their employment.  The modern fashion of claiming that Jesus, Paul, etc. were illiterate - something which the best nearly contemporary evidence of contradicts - is probably least credible in the figure of Levi-Matthew.  And it would be the most natural thing to imagine that a literate follower of Jesus would have written down what they remembered of what he said.  Though the testimony of Papias and Irenaeas that he wrote that in what they certainly meant as contemporary Aramaic and that "others translated as best they could" into Greek, then what has survived has only been the product of one or more of those translators who would make any stylistic discernment of different layers unlikely to impossible.  If Jesus and, or Paul were illiterate their intelligence could only be far higher than it might have been if they had recourse to reading and, especially, writing.  The Epistles considered by scholars to be "authentic" include works of the highest level of genius, Corinthians and, especially Romans, if composed in the mind alone and dictated to a secretary would mark those as among the most brilliant of documents.  I could imagine Paul producing a good draft and having someone with better handwriting making a clear copy for sending but I think Paul probably wrote the original down.   I'll insert something Michael Eric Dyson said nine years ago in regard to the decline of Cornel West:

The ecstasies of the spoken word, when scholarship is at stake, leave the deep reader and the long listener hungry for more. Writing is an often-painful task that can feel like the death of one’s past. Equally discomfiting is seeing one’s present commitments to truths crumble once one begins to tap away at the keyboard or scar the page with ink. Writing demands a different sort of apprenticeship to ideas than does speaking. It beckons one to revisit over an extended, or at least delayed, period the same material and to revise what one thinks. Revision is reading again and again what one writes so that one can think again and again about what one wants to say and in turn determine if better and deeper things can be said.

That would seem, to me, to be especially true of the most extensive of Paul's letters.  As to the startling content of the sayings of Jesus, I doubt those could have come from any but the most astute of minds, their seeming everydayness is a product of the culture that Jesus initiated in which much of the world has lived for the past two-thousand years.  

I can point out that all of those sources making claims about things such as the connection of Matthew to that Gospel and of an original by him in a "dialect of Hebrew" have a far closer proximity to the original than any modern scholar does,  It's probable that actual copies of the original document were available to those making that claim but which have not survived.  

Again, I think it's quite possible that a very early Greek  translator of such a list of sayings may well have fleshed it out with an editing and commentary of Mark's Gospel just as the author of Luke's Gospel may well have included both in the multiple sources overtly consulted by the author "Luke" to produce his works.  I would say the best evidence we have of that identifies both of the authors by name.  I don't know how you can find out more about that given the sources we have to claim to know such things about it but I'm willing to entertain the possibility that those like Papias and Ireanaeus had access to more knowledge of the facts of the matter than have survived in what records we have available.  If that is true the author of Matthew on many points may be, in fact, an eye-witness to Jesus as he was before and, by the testimony we have available to us, after his death.  I don't hold with the fashion of holding up any such evidence to an impossible level of verification which is practiced for no other topic in the study of literature and the relationship with reality in that time frame.   I doubt there is another area of study in which such an impossibly high level of study is applied to, especially one which is so rich in independent sourcing as the study of the New Testament and early Christianity.   While, especially Papias is known only through quotations from his work, he being such an early source and some of the later supposed quotations are questionable, that is the earliest evidence we have on some of those questions, certainly closer to the actual compositions of the Gospels than the often ideologically motivated claims of modern scholars, especially those since the 18th century.