TTWSYF asked about doubt on how much contact between the church fathers and the Apostles there could have been : I can't locate at present the Quote I was thinking of, but will return if I do and Post it, but meanwhile.
This one bit I found, and copied, I can't remember from where or who wrote it ! :
" The length and detail of this passage make it virtually irresistible for critics to bypass the layers of embedded discourse and treat this comment about the Gospels of Mark and Mathew as if they were a self-contained block of a tradition. It is not. The elder’s comment about Mark was presumably uttered not out of the blue but within some larger discourse context. This context is lost to us. Indeed, what the elder said is not by any means intact, but extracted, edited, and embedded by Papias into a different context of his own creation. Furthermore, Papias’s presentation of these remarks also does not come down to us intact, but only as preserved by Eusebius—and Eusebius’s agenda is different from Papias’s. Eusebius too extracted, edited, and embedded this statement into a context of his own making. We have to be cautious in interpreting it. As one scholar put it, “Papias says only what Eusebius wants him to say.” As a result, the most famous statement in antiquity about the origins of Mark and Matthew is a joint production of three different people, living at three different times, with three different purposes: the elder, Papias, and Eusebius. All of them have contributed to this passage in their different ways, and all of them had different purposes for discussing their writings. If we are to make sense of this, we will have do what scholars of fragmentary works have long known. We must deal with the fundamental issue of context."
This is another : Richard Bauckham (Jesus and the Eyewitnesses):
Many scholars have been unable to believe that Aristion and John the Elder had been personal disciples of Jesus, usually either because these scholars have understood Papias to be speaking of a time after the death of “the elders” and so presumably beyond the lifetime of Jesus’ contemporaries, or because they have not sufficiently distinguished the time about which Papias is writing from the time at which he is writing. Once we recognize that, at the time to which he refers, most of the disciples of Jesus had died but two were still alive and were among the prominent Christian teachers in Asia, we can see that the time about which he writes must be late in the first century. There is nothing in the least improbable about this."