Papias-wrote-it theories

The following are my own theories: I thought they were needed, because they use the earliest "testimonies" properly, and don't dismiss Church Fathers on flimsy grounds. Also: they accept both the onomastic argument for the Gospels as biographies, and they are based on the Markan Priority theory.

Papias-wrote-it theories

The Gospels are biographies, not pure fiction, according to the onomastic argument. That doesn't imply that everything about the Gospels must then be perfectly true, which appears to be claimed by the inventors of the argument, it just means that there is a historical background wherein the personage refers to people that for the most part were real people, but we must also have a biographer. What indications do we have about a historical biographer on the life of Jesus? We have Papias of Hierapolis, who wrote a commentary on the logions of Matthew and John Mark! According to the history Papias used logia from Matthew and John Mark to write his commentaries. These logia sets were not written down in order, nor did they provide a coherent biography. Matthew wrote his logia set in chronological order, but not as anecdotes, and he wrote them in Hebreew, or more likely in Aramaic. John Mark wrote his logia set in Greek, and he wrote them as short stories that he allegedly recorded from the apostle Peter, but they were not arranged in chronological order. What did then Papias do? He interviewed elders and other persons with indirect knowledge about the Jesus events. Why? Probable answers: 1. he wanted to identify important persons in the Jesus movement, 2. he wanted to establish a context for the logia of Matthew, in order to interpret them, 3. he wanted to establish a chronology and context also for the logia of John Mark.

Papias-Mark theories

To accomplish that, he wrote a sketch of the life of Jesus, and this sketch is the most original proto-Mark. It may have contained Matthew statements that are absent from our Gospel of Mark, but they may also have been absent, because Papias kept the Matthew logia in a separate set. So in essence Papias is the collator of Gospel of Mark, which was called the Memoirs of the Apostles.

Papias-Matthew theories

Papias translated Matthew's logia from Aramaic to Greek that he kept in a series which is now regarded as Q. Papias' list contained more logia than our currently known Q, and this list was the basis for the additions to our Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Now Papias redacted the Gospel of John Mark – which he himself, or someone else wrote/collated – by adding the statements of Q where he saw fit. So in essence Papias is the collator of the Gospel of Matthew from earlier sources.

Papias-Mark-Matthew theory

Papias wrote the Gospel of Mark based on John Mark's logia. That was the first edition of the Memoirs of the Apostles. Next he amended the Gospel of Mark with logia of Matthew that he had translated in a later stage, and that book now constitutes the Gospel of Matthew. That was the second edition of the Memoirs of the Apostles. He used them as short stories to analyse the Logia sets of John Mark and Matthew, with no intent that they should constitute eye-witness accounts.

• Papias and the Gospels, © 6 oct 2012, Richard Bauckham
• The Gospel of Matthew, John the elder, and the Papias tradition: A response to R H Gundry, David C Sim