It occurred to me that one reason great scholars of the past
appear far smarter than they were is because generations of subsequent scholars
have ironed out their work and added layers of supposed depth. A large part of
this is the assumption that when a scholar contradicts himself, the solution is
never that he changed his mind, or forgot what he had said possibly decades
earlier, and certainly not that he made a mistake. Instead, the
"apparent" contradiction is reconciled. So a taana's words accrete the
clever insights of amoraim and geonim
who lived hundreds of years later, rishonim who lived a thousand years later,
and continues to have depth added by current achronim. These centuries of
accreted cleverness contribute to the perceived greatness of the taana, who is
assumed to have meant all the things that later scholars attribute to him. All
of these insights are seen to reflect the scholarship and intellect of the
taana, and he appears far more brilliant than he may have been.
So too with amoraim, geonim, etc., but each epoch of scholars has a
couple of centuries less worth of clever commentary than the one before it. The
older a source is, the more commentary and clever reconciliations is has
accreted. So the older the source, the greater it seems, and we have a seeming confirmation
of yeridos hadoros.
