Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Does Papias say that Matthew and Mark wrote our Matthew and Mark?
[00:00:06] By Bart Ehrman in my previous two posts, I showed why Papias is not a reliable source when it comes to the authorship of Matthew and Mark.
[00:00:16] If you haven't read these posts and you're personally inclined to think that his testimony about Matthew and Mark is accurate, then I suggest that you read them the post, that is before reading this one.
[00:00:26] In this post I want to argue that what he actually says about Matthew and Mark is not true of our Matthew and Mark. And so either he is talking about other gospels that he knows about or has heard about called Matthew and Mark that do not correspond to our Matthew and Mark, or he simply is wrong.
[00:00:46] I'll reverse the order in which his comments are given and deal with Matthew First.
[00:00:50] In the quotation of the 4th century historian Eusebius, we read this and this is what Papias says about Matthew.
[00:00:59] And so Matthew composed the sayings in the Hebrew tongue and each one interpreted or translated them to the best of his ability.
[00:01:10] The problems here are obvious.
[00:01:12] Our Gospel of Matthew is not simply a collection of the sayings of Jesus, and it was not written in Hebrew.
[00:01:18] Matthew, of course, does contain some of Jesus teachings, as do all of our early Gospels, both inside and outside the New Testament.
[00:01:26] But it is much more than that. In fact, the sayings of Jesus do not make up even the majority of the Gospel. Not even close.
[00:01:34] No one would describe Matthew principally as a collection of sayings.
[00:01:39] And Matthew was not written in Hebrew, despite the widespread tradition or legend in the early church that it was possibly starting with Papias. Matthew must have been composed in Greek.
[00:01:51] There are lots of reasons for thinking so, but I'll give you just two Mark's Gospel was the source for the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.
[00:02:00] Mark must have been written in Greek originally. Linguists have shown this.
[00:02:04] In any event, Matthew and Luke must have used a Greek version as the source for so many of their stories, because in many, many places they agree word for word with Mark precisely in the Greek.
[00:02:15] If one or both of them was composing in Aramaic or were copying stories from an Aramaic source, and cop it by translating it themselves in Greek, they couldn't be word for word the same.
[00:02:27] So take any two English translations of a French or Russian novel, say Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina, and see if you repeatedly have entire sentences that are word for word the same.
[00:02:40] The second reason is closely related.
[00:02:43] Matthew and Luke agree in passages in Greek that are not from Mark but must have come from the Q source itself originally written in Greek, since if it was written in Aramaic, again, they wouldn't agree verbatim in giving it Matthew was written in Greek.
[00:03:00] There's not much debate about this among scholars, and it's also not simply a collection of Jesus sayings. It's not, therefore, the gospel that Papias is referring to. Or if he is referring to our Matthew, he simply doesn't know what he's talking about, possibly because he's been misled by someone else that he's heard or read.
[00:03:21] Now, I'm not sure which option is better.
[00:03:23] Most recently, I've preferred the former option. He's referring to some other book, a collection of Jesus sayings allegedly written by Matthew in Hebrew. But possibly the other is right.
[00:03:34] Remember, this is the only reference to a gospel being written by Matthew prior to Irenaeus in 180 CE.
[00:03:42] Given the enormous problems posed by what Papias says, I don't think it can be used as evidence that our Matthew was written by Matthew.
[00:03:51] So to repeat, either Papias is talking about something else, or if he is talking about our Matthew, he is no more reliable than he is when he says that Judas Iscariot's head bloated up so much that it would not fit into a streak that a wagon could easily pass through.
[00:04:09] The other of Papias comments refers to Mark.
[00:04:13] So if he's not talking about our Matthew, is he talking about our Mark? Here's what he When Mark was the interpreter or translator 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, not arranging, as it were, an orderly composition of the Lord's sayings.
[00:04:45] And so Mark did nothing wrong by writing some of the matters as he remembered them. For he was intent on just one purpose, to leave out nothing that he had heard, or to include any falsehood among them.
[00:04:59] One could imagine that Papias here is indeed talking about our Mark. If so, he's defending it against charges that it is disorganized, not in order, not an orderly composition.
[00:05:11] And one thing that he says simply cannot be true if Mark was intent in particular to leave out nothing that he heard in all of his time with Peter, as Peter proclaimed the things that Jesus said and did.
[00:05:23] Well, that simply can't be said of our Gospel of Mark. This gospel is remarkably sparse.
[00:05:30] You can read the whole thing aloud in about two hours Mark spent all those years with Peter and all he heard about Jesus was two hours worth of material.
[00:05:40] Or Peter, after being with Jesus for three years, only spoke about two hours worth of events and sayings.
[00:05:47] Either Papias has a different gospel in mind and later storytellers latched onto his claim and suggested that what is now the second gospel was the one he was referring to, or he's referring to our Gospel of Mark and he cannot be trusted to give a correct version of how it came to be.
[00:06:05] There are other reasons for thinking so.
[00:06:08] Of all the books and articles that I've read about Mark in the past 30 years, and of all the scholars of Mark that I've known and talked with, I can't think of a single one who thinks that Mark's Gospel is in fact a Greek transcript of Peter's teaching in Aramaic.
[00:06:22] It is in fact a Greek composition that records traditions that have been circulating wildly on the oral level for decades.
[00:06:32] I should add that despite attempts by interpreters over many years, there is absolutely nothing in Mark's Gospel that would make you think it was an account based on Peter's testimony. In particular, scholars who have wanted to credit Papias point have simply dug through Mark's account to find evidence for what they wanted to believe in the first place.
[00:06:53] If you weren't looking for that evidence, you certainly wouldn't notice it, principally because it's not there.
[00:07:01] So here's the short story.
[00:07:03] Papias is not reliable evidence concerning who wrote the Gospels. He never mentions Luke or John. Or rather perhaps it's better to say that what he did say about Luke and John was not quoted by Eusebius. And one might wonder why that would be. Were his comments so outlandish that even Eusebius couldn't buy them?
[00:07:23] It's hard for me to think of any other reason, unless maybe that what he said was banal and simply not very interesting. Now remember Eusebius. One comment about Papias talents was that he was a man of exceedingly little intelligence.
[00:07:38] The first account of the authors of the Gospels as a result is the comment made by Irenaeus in 180 CE.
[00:07:45] Prior to that, so far as we know, our Gospels were circulating anonymously.
