In the Quest for the Historical Jesus: The Evidence from Papias?

As I mentioned earlier, the traditional Church’s view is that the authors of the New Testament Gospels are Mark (the interpreter of St. Peter), Luke (the companion of St. Paul), and two apostles: Matthew the tax collector, and John the son of Zebedee. However, this is not what critical scholars think today. The Gospels circulated for decades without the ascribed authorship. Both internal and external evidence goes against the traditional view. Despite that, there are still a lot of Christians who hold that these people really were the authors of the Gospels. In arguing their case, they rely heavily on the bishop of Hierapolis (Asia Minor/ Turkey) named Papias (c. 60 – 130 AD). They believe that he provides a crucial external attestation for the authorship of Mark’s and Matthew’s Gospell! For example, one Croatian blog run by Catholic apologists lists Papias as the crucial witness to the authorship of the two gospels mentioned above. In their opinion, Papias is important because (among other things) he was a disciple of the apostle John (see the Post Scriptum bellow). So, we are talking about second-generation Christian who personally knew one of Jesus’ closest disciples – something that historians would really like to have concerning the authorship of the Gospels. However, I do not think that this is the case. In my opinion, the link between Papias’ testimony and the Biblical Gospels is extremely weak. Why do I think that? But, more importantly, what does Papias tells us about Mark and Matthew?

PAPIAS AS AN EARLY WITNESS FOR THE AUTHORSHIP OF MATTHEW AND JOHN?

Bishop Papias is an enigmatic figure who, somewhere between 110 and 140 CE, wrote a five-volume work called “Expositions of the Sayings of the Lord”. Unfortunately, his work no longer survives. Everything we know about the work comes from partial quotations of it by later church authors. One of those authors was bishop Eusebius who, writing 200 years after Papias, quotes several passages from his “Expositions”. Important for our case here is what Papias had written about Mark and Matthew as authors of the Gospels.

  1. Papias about Mark?
    • This is what the elder used to say, ‘when Mark was the interpreter of Peter he wrote down accurately everything that he recalled of the Lord’s words and deeds – but not in order. For he neither heard the Lord nor accompanied him; but later, as I indicated, he accompanied Peter, who used to adapt his teachings for the needs at hand, nor arranging, as it were, an orderly composition of the Lord’s sayings. And so Mark did nothing wrong by writing some of the matters as he remembered them. For he was intent on just one purpose: not to leave out anything that he heard or to include any falsehood among them.”
  2. Papias about Matthew?
    1. And so Matthew composed the sayings in the Hebrew tongue, and each one interpreted them to the best of his ability.

What do we make of these claims? Conservative scholars (e.g. Richard Bauckham) take Papias’ claims as prima facie evidence for the early external and reliable attestation for the authorship of Matthew’s and Mark’s gospel. However, I think that we shouldn’t jump to conclusions without carefully checking our sources. First and foremost, where did Papias get his information? What’s his source of information? Did he get it from the apostle John himself? That would be great! Unfortunately, he didn’t! In fact, Papias claims that he got his information from a group of people he calls “the elders” who had known some of the disciples. So, we are here dealing with third or even fourth-hand information. Moreover, specific things he says about Matthew and Mark simply are not true for “our” Matthew and Mark. For example, Papias asserts that Matthew composed the sayings in the Hebrew tongue, but we know for a fact that our Gospel of Matthew was originally written in Greek, not Hebrew! Similarly, our Gospel of Matthew isn’t just a collection of sayings, it’s a full-blown narrative of Jesus’ life that includes both his sayings and deeds. With regard to Mark, Papias claims that he wrote down “Lord’s words and deeds, but not in order”. But, our “Mark” is a narrative of “Lord’s words and deeds” in chronological order. It follows the path of Jesus’ life from the moment he got baptized at the Jordan river to his death and resurrection. Papias also asserts that Mark’s principal goal was to write down everything he heard from Peter about Jesus. There is simply no way that can be true. The Gospel of Mark takes about two hours to read out loud. Peter had spent months with Jesus. Certainly, Peter had more than two hours of information about Jesus’ deeds and sayings. Furthermore, every other thing Papias asserts about the earliest years of Christianity seems to be wrong. In other words, scholars have almost uniformly rejected just about everything else that Papias is recorded to have said in the surviving references to his work. Take for instance his explanation of Judas’ death (see: here). Clearly, it’s a highly mythologized account that has little to zero historical reliability. Conservative scholars like to quote Papias when he apparently supports the views they like such as that Mark was Peter’s secretary and that he wrote the Gospel of Mark or that apostle Matthew wrote the Gospel of Matthew. In other words, they trust him when he confirms their already made views, and don’t trust him when he doesn’t. But this is not the proper way to do history.

I don’t think that just because Papias mentions Matthew and Mark we can conclude that he is really refering to the Gospels of Mark and Matthew that we have in the Bible today. To prove that, one has to do a careful analysis of the information at hand. In my opinnion, there are enough reasons to doubt that Papias was refering to “our” Mark and Matthew.

  1. Papias lived several decades after the New Testament Gospels were writen in the area of the Roman Empire where these Gospels weren’t originaly composed.
  2. He explicitly says that his source of information weren’t the apostles themselves, but mysterious group called “elders” that we know nothing about. Allegedly, “elders” knew some apostles!
  3. Every other information he gave about the earliest years of Christianity (e.g. death of Judas) has zero to little historical value. These information belong to the realm of myth and legend.
  4. Finally, the most important thing: detailed information he gives about Mark and Matthew are in clear contradiction with the known facts about our Gospel of Mark and Matthew. In other words, when his claims can be cchecked, he appears to be wrong.

Consequently, I don’t think that Papias can be counted as an example of an early external attestation for the traditional authorship of the New Testament Gospels. The first time we get the four people (Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John) connected as authors of the Gospels dates at the end of the 2nd century (Irenaeus, and the Muratorian fragment). That’s approximately 80 – 100 years after the Gospels were originally written!

P. S. Was Papias really a student of the apostle John?

A couple of years ago I got really interested in this question. I even spoke with dr. Stephen C. Carlson (Australian Catholic University). He is the world’s foremost expert on Papias and the author of an excellent study on Papias published just last year (see: here). Carlson seriously doubts the historicity of the connection between Papias and the apostle John, and I’m inclined to agree with him. The only independent evidence comes from bishop Irenaeus who (writing at the end of the 2nd century) describes Papias as ὁ Ἰωάννου μὲν ἀκουστής, Πολυκάρπου δὲ ἑταῖρος γεγονώς (“a hearer of John, and colleague of Polycarp“). Both nouns (ἀκουστής, and ἑταῖρος) have broad meanings, but it seems likely that Irenaeus has a teacher-disciple relationship in mind. So, he seems to be saying that Papias and Polycarp were fellow students of John – though not necessarily together or at the same time. It is also clear that Irenaeus considers this John to be a “disciple of the Lord”, the evangelist, and the seer of Revelation. Scholarship since the third century has been rightly skeptical about the equating of the author of the Gospel and the author of the Apocalypse (“The Book of Revelation”), so there appears to be at a minimum some confusion in Irenaeus’s understanding of this John. Complicating the matter is that there are two Johns in Papias that are “disciples of the Lord,” but we don’t really have the evidence to relate these Johns with any confidence to the various writings under the name of John. At any rate, we have to evaluate Irenaeus’s statement in light of his stress on his own apostolic pedigree as he combats his theological opponents. Confronted with other “heretical” Christians, Irenaeus’ main issue was to prove that the Church he belongs to is the only legitimate Christian group that follows the genuine teachings of Jesus and his apostles. One way to do that was to emphasize apostolic continuity (from Jesus through apostles to bishops). So, in saying that bishop Papias was a “hearer” of the apostle John, Irenaeus has a clear axe to grind! He wants to show the close historical connection between the apostles who followed Jesus and the bishops who are running the Church.

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