Loading...In my previous two posts I showed why Papias is not a reliable source when it comes to the authorship of Matthew and Mark. If you haven’t read those posts and are personally inclined to think that his testimony about Matthew and Mark are accurate, I suggest you read them (the posts) before reading this one.
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
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Thank you Dr Ehrman. Papias is certainly a fascinating if not altogether helpful individual. Has anyone tried translating Mark’s Gospel into Aramaic if only to rule out that possibility? I know some of Jesus’s sayings that are recorded in the Synoptics do sometimes work better when translated into Aramaic.
Yes, and we actually have a Syriac version for the entire NT (Syriac is a dialect of Aramaic). Some sayings to work better in Aramaic, yes! That’s a clue that they were circulating very early in the oral tradition, still in Israel at least.
Hi Bart.
I really like how you zero in on the obvious fallacies in Papias’ testimony. I have to admit that they are usually not obvious to me being a newbie in critical Bible study. But you make it all very clear.
One thing I find odd is that Papias thinks Mark is not orderly. Surely Mark’s gospel is a Greco-Roman biography. It follows Jesus’ life from his baptism by John the Baptist all the way to his crucifixion. It doesn’t strike me as being Peter’s teaching material.
Thanks for your insights.
Yes, it’s a very interesting comment, and often taken to suggest that Papias was replying to complaints — for example that the sequence of some of the events (or many of them) were put in the wrong place. That would make particulra sense if Papias was fond of John, but unfortnately in our surviving fragments he never mentions or alludes to John, and there’s no real evidence he knew it.
Please carefully consider/respond to my theory:
Matthew wasnt the author of a Gospel, rather a compiler of source material. He gathered Aramaic traditions/sayings (aka “Q” content), translated them into Greek and “*each* interpreted them.” *Each* refers to later writers- namely, the authors of GMatthew and GLuke.
“Mark” mentioned by Papias is the author of the Gospel of Matthew. Papias is defending it against the implicit claims in Luke’s preface. In Luke 1:1–4, Luke distinguishes his account from earlier ones by claiming it
1.**Follows** events from beginning
2.Orderly
3.Carefully/accurately investigated
4.Includes everything
5.Truthful
Papias’s description of Mark seems to respond to these claims point-by-point. He insists Mark 1.**followed** Peter, 3.wrote accurately, 4.omitted nothing, and 5.included no falsehood (precisely the qualities Luke implies earlier accounts lacked.) The one concession Papias makes is Mark’s work wasnt orderly, but excuses this because Peter himself taught in chreiai (plithy-anecdotal-sayings).
Interestingly, these sayings units are where GMatthew/GLuke diverge. Moreover, GMatthew often softens/removes negative portrayals of Peter from GMark. Taken together, Papias may have understood “Matthew” as the compiler of Hebrew sayings (the sources behind Q), while “Mark” was the author of GMatthew, with Papias defending it against Luke’s implied critique of earlier Gospel writers.
Interesting theory. I don’t know what makes it preferable to other theories, and it seems unlikely that one could use Papias as evidence that Mark wrote Matthew.
Thanks for your response! I’m not arguing that Mark actually wrote Matthew, only that Papias believed Mark wrote Matthew. Are there any obvious plot holes in the theory that you’re aware of?
Yes. The hole is that he says Mark wrote Peter’s reflections and that Matthew complied a collection of sayings. No one in the early church connects our Matthew with Mark, and Papias is obviously himself not talking about Mark writing our Matthew since Papias doesn’t know our Matthew; and he doesn’t think Mark compiled the collection of Jesus’ sayingsin hebrew because he says Matthew did.
Is the Macarthur 4 volume series commentary on Matthew a good scholarly source? I’ve recently found it at a second hand bookshop here in NZ and wondering if it would be worth it as commentaries aren’t easy to come by and shipping new copies to NZ can take awhile and cost a lot.
P.s. I purchased the Abingdon commentary on Mark (a suggested reading in your Mark course) and loving it.
It depends what you’re looking for. McArthur was a very conservative evangelical preachers. I don’t know if he considered himself a fundamentalist (maybe ohthers can tell us), but he certainly had views that would have been acceptable to many fundamentalists. If that’s the kind of commentary you’d be interested in, go for it. But it won’t represent the views of critical scholarship.
By the time Papias wrote his passage on Mark, our Mark already existed—of that, there is no doubt.
Which option seems more plausible?
1) Papias is referring to our Mark.
2) Papias is referring to a different ‘Mark’ at a time when our Mark was anonymous. Later, Papias’s Mark disappeared, and our Mark—which had been anonymous—took the name of Papias’s Mark.
I lean toward option 1; I believe it is the one that most easily explains the few data points we have.
The theory of the anonymous gospels is itself weakened by Papias’s testimony. Suppose Papias were actually referring to a gospel different from the one in the New Testament; it would be curious, to say the least, that that specific gospel was not anonymous while the others were.
Regardless of whether it is credible or not, Papias’s testimony clearly indicates that, from at least the beginning of the second century, Christians were labeling texts concerning the life and words of Jesus with the names of specific authors.
Dear professor Ehrman,
To play devils advocate, do any scholars think the Hebrew sayings gospel Papias is referring to could be Q in its original language? Both Matthew and Mark could then be quoting a widely circulated greek translation of it. The possibility seems tantalizing. Or does a linguistic analysis of Q show that it was originally written in Greek? If so, how certain is the conclusion of a linguistic analysis of that kind?
Thank you for another interesting read!
Yes, some have suggested that. The problem is that there’s nothing to suggest the sayings shared by Matthew and Luke were translated from a Semitic language. Also we don’t have any evidence of a Hebrew sayings source otherwise. My guess is that Papias had heard of one, that it was by one of jesus’ followers, and drew the natural conclusion that it must have been in Aramaic then….
In the ancient world the Omne-Trium-Perfectum, everything that comes in threes is perfect, stable, and complete (rock solid), might be the reason that Mark’s gospel uses the number three in the following ways. They include (1) Jesus predicts his death three times, (2) he predicts Peter denying him three times, (3) Jesus prays to God three times to avoid crucifixion, (4) the disciples sleep three times in Gethsemane, (5) Peter denies Jesus three times, (6) at the third hour the crucified Jesus asks why he is forsaken, (7) Jesus is resurrected on the third day, (8) the three top disciples are present at the transfiguration, (9) the three prophets Elijah, Moses, and Jesus are present at the transfiguration so six people total were there and we’re told that happened six days later, (10) Jesus is mocked for claiming to destroy and rebuild the temple in three days, (11) a total of three people are crucified, and (12) there are three people in the empty tomb in the last chapter. An irony here is that Peter, the perfect reliable rock, denies Jesus three times. That suggests Peter’s denial is a literary creation. Do you think Peter’s denial of Jesus is historical?
I really don’t know if it’s historical. It would be hard to make a compelling argument it is, apart from it being in both Mark and John.
Bart, what do you, and scholars generally, think about John 20:10 saying that Peter and John went back to their own homes in Jerusalem? As you know they didn’t have any homes in Jerusalem. Their homes were back in Galilee, and they were just visitors in Judea for the Passover ceremonies. It seems to me that it is just a mistake on the part of the author of John’s gospel.
The Greek text doesn’t actually use the term “homes.” It says that “they went away to their owns” (their own dwellings? their own people? their own community” their own…?)