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

The real Gospels of Matthew and Mark, my hypothesis

Addition 180204: I regard this theory as improbable – I just need the theory to be formulated

There are a lot of theories of how the synoptic Gospels (Mark, Matthew, and Luke) were written and how they relate to each other. The academics proposing those theories are making a lot of text analyses, comparing Greek language with the language of certain centuries in the Antiquities. I have no competence to contest anything of that, but I can make a simple skip-the-academics-go-to-the-sources operation and propose some theories of my own that nobody else seem to have conjured up. If my theory is good, somebody really has, but I haven't discovered it yet. If my theory is bad, then nobody will ever accept my theory for being crack-pot balderdash.

Nevertheless: the source I'm boldly invoking is Papias of Hierapolis, speaking through the citation of Eusebius the Christian historian:

[John] The Elder used to say: Mark, in his capacity as Peter’s interpreter, wrote down accurately as many things as he recalled from memory—though not in an ordered form—of the things either said or done by the Lord. For he neither heard the Lord nor accompanied him, but later, as I said, Peter, who used to give his teachings in the form of chreiai, but had no intention of providing an ordered arrangement of the logia of the Lord. Consequently Mark did nothing wrong when he wrote down some individual items just as he related them from memory. For he made it his one concern not to omit anything he had heard or to falsify anything.

Naïve interpretation (according to wikipedia on chreia): John Mark wrote a list of logia like the Gospel of Thomas, of the form followers asks, Jesus answers, or Jesus says, without context in either case. Mark wrote the logia in the order that he remembered them, and he wrote them down remembering Simon Kaifas (Peter) speeches. If this text is to be taken for true, then John Mark didn't write the Gospel of Mark, at the very best he wrote fragments that later was extended and reordered to become the "Gospel of Mark".

Furthermore Papias writes:

Therefore Matthew put the logia in an ordered arrangement in the Hebrew language, but each person interpreted them as best he could.

The only clear thing here is that Matthew also wrote something like the Gospel of Thomas, but his logia were 1. written in some order, possibly chronological, or perhaps alphabethical, 2. wrote them in the Hebrew language. Scholars use to assume that Matthew wrote in Greek, but I think this is unwarranted, given that Eusebius's citation of Papias is correct, and that Papias correctly relates to truthful sources that know what they speak about.

My bold addition to this scheme is that Papias himself either collated the "modern" Gospel of Mark or the "modern" Gospel of Matthew, or both. He wrote a (now lost) five book comment on the Gospels according to later sources. He also interviewed a lot of elders, including the daughters of Philip. It is reasonable to believe that he collated the original Gospels of Matthew and Mark with the stories of his interviewed persons, so as to bring the original Gospels in chronological order and make reasonable interpretations of the chreiai and the logia. This constituted what was initially called the "Memoirs of the Apostles", but which later came to develop to the synoptic Gospels.