Papias and Earliest Gospel Traditions

In the first 2-3 centuries of the Christian religion, we observe astonishing creative diversity. As this essay reveals, this diversity characterized the movement(s) from the beginning, even in the the initial decades of Christian story-telling. When we read Papias (preserved in fragmentary form in Eusebius, EH 3.39), we find a messy description of earliest cultic "gospel" traditions. Circa 100 C.E., he composed a (since lost) five-book work titled Guide to the Master’s Sayings. Assuming his achieved prominence within nascent Christian communities even to undertake such a project and have it survive and quoted for centuries, we may surmise that Papias’s proximal acquaintance with these early story-telling communities began quite a bit prior to his published work, that is, in the late first century. 

He claims oral tradition as his preferred source for the work, namely, from his primary informant, the famed John the Elder (likely author of the Apocalypse of the New Testament), who was at that time an aged man but not himself a recognized eyewitness to the historical Jesus. Papias thus had none of the originary apostles as his source for the work. Papias complains about many poor, verbose, or otherwise spurious sources, many of which apparently circulating in written form indeed that early. So, Papias claims to be passing along third-hand stories by traditional succession:

• Jesus → Disciples → Elders → Papias → Guide to the Master’s Sayings 
• Jesus → Peter → Mark → canonical Mark → Papias → Guide to the Master’s Sayings
• (sources) → Aristion → (written gospel narratives) → Guide to the Master’s Sayings
• Jesus → Matthew → Logia (Aramaic) → (bad Greek translation) → Guide to the Master’s Sayings

Papias claimed to have a decided preference for the (presumed more authoritative) oral apostolic traditions, those passed on to him via the next generation of elders, over written sources. Eusebius, in his dubious attempt at composing a history of earliest Christianity, discredited almost the entirety of Papias’s five books, excluding them as reliable source content for his famous history, the first attempt at historiography regarding Christian origins. Eusebius described three kinds of content in Papias’s books:

1. Bizarre sayings
2. Bizarre parables
3. Legends and Myths

Eusebius also presumably found much of Papias’s Guide to have been misaligned with 4th-century orthodoxy and thus offensive to his Rome-sanctioned project. As such, he described Papias as an “unintelligent man,” which is quite a claim given how early and centralized Papias was to the compositional hististories of the gospel tradition. We may surmise from this a few salient observations:

• The spirit of the earliest tradition was chock full of myth-making. We may safely recognize that the “recipe” (i.e., bizarre sayings and parables, along with mythic tales) identified by Eusebius, was typical of these inceptive “gospel” traditions generally, given that Papias likely followed Mark’s lead, as did the rest. While this was the assessment of a 4th-century historiographer, we may find it telling that nearly the entirety of the tales and stories compiled by Papias naturally struck Eusebius as illegitimate and inventive, despite being right from the “spigot” of earliest apostolic storytelling in social context, as it were.
• Peter himself, as perhaps the top early cult teacher, appears to have been centrally complicit in the myth-making origins of the religion, given the inventive, Hellenist-mythic character of Mark. Mark, as creative writer and mythogrpher, augmented these tales with his own literary license, contra Papias, composing heavily mimetic storytelling vis-a-vis Homer. Peter’s companion mythographer, therefore, appears to have been a person of great interest in determining the generic qualities of subsequent gospels, certainly those most signified in the early "gospel" tradition.
• Much of this earliest myth-making did not survive the hegemonic filtration of orthodoxy; the diverse mythopoeic inception of the religion undermined (even embarrassed) the high claims of Rome-sanctioned orthodoxy in the fourth and fifth centuries. 

Papias knew of several poor Greek translation attempts related to Matthew’s Aramaic Logia. We may assume that he chose what he considered to be the best of those to which he had physical access to be one of his sources for the Guide. He appeared to signify Mark for its apostolic / cultic authority-line through Peter, and he valued Matthew’s Logia for its presumed preferable story sequencing. Given that we now observe clear source dependency in canonical Matthew with prior Mark, we may deduce that canonical Matthew was a later Greek composite of a poor(er) translation of the Logia and Mark, though likely more or less true to the sequence given in the Logia, and, as such, titled "Gospel according to Matthew" (as bearing that Matthean legacy). Of the canonical Gospels, therefore, Papias at 100 C.E. knew only of Mark. Such findings push the terminus a quo of canonical Matthew out to 100 C.E. or even later, given that by the time of Papias, it had either not existed or not had become recognized as such. Indeed, I am not the first to note that this bare observation pushes the composition dates for John and Luke out past 110 as well. Beyond Mark's legend-laden work, Papias knew of diverse oral stories, Aristion’s narratives, and several poor Greek translations of Matthew’s Logia. I would not tend to see Matthew’s Aramaic Logia as merely “conjectural”; Papias could not likely have gotten away with the comment that “several (‘each’ seems to imply more than two) translated it to the best of their ability,” had such a document never existed behind those (perceived "botched," and thus highly divergent) translation attempts known to Papias and the broader communities.

Luke apparently applied many of these same sources, mimetically following Mark and Matthew and, in their respective creative spirits, artfully forged his own work. He likely had access to two or more bad Greek translations of Matthew’s Logia, given the “synoptic” content of canonical Luke and his claim to proper storyboard sequencing and awareness of several prior (less sequentially accurate) “gospel” narrative texts, thus comporting with Papias’ sentiments, indicating more broadly accepted sentiments regarding the value-claims of Greek translations of Matthew’s Logia among early 2nd-Century communities.

A critical reading of Papias provides us with an eye-opening interior look at the earliest cultic story-telling "factory" of myth production, texts bubbling up in all directions, and early cultic tradents prolific in their diverse inventive enterprise. We may also note the conspicuous absences here and throughout the entire range of early Christian texts of any historiological argumentation or effort to authenticate these cultic tall tales. Early converts apparently did not require such efforts at authentication; as with other urban cults throughout the Hellenistic East, mere belief sufficed. In truth, where one finds such bodies of "knowledge" not grounded in objective reality, social agreement presents an unlikely outcome.

--------------

Connect with Dr. Miller on Facebook.

Dr. Miller, author of Resurrection and Reception in Early Christianity (Routledge, 2015), is a humanistic critic of contemporary religion and a trans-disciplinary research scholar exploring the cultural and literary nexus between classical antiquity and the social origins of earliest Christianity. His published work focuses on the mythological roots of the New Testament Gospel portraitures of Jesus, the sacralized founding emblem of the Christian religion.