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Sunday, August 04, 2024

What if Papias wasn't referring to the canonical gospels?

It's become popular to argue that when Papias attributed some documents to Mark and Matthew, he wasn't referring to the canonical gospels we have today. Here's a response I recently wrote to that objection in a YouTube thread:

It's sometimes suggested that Papias was referring to a document by Mark other than our gospel of Mark, but the evidence against that view is stronger than the evidence for it. Papias refers to how Mark wrote "whatsoever he remembered of the things said or done by Christ" (in Eusebius, Church History, 3:39:15). Since our gospel of Mark seems unlikely to include everything Peter (Mark's primary source) reported about what Jesus said or did, it's suggested that Papias must have been referring to something other than our gospel of Mark. But people often have qualifiers in mind that they don't spell out, and Papias likely had an unspoken qualifier in mind. He probably was referring to Mark's writing everything that came to mind in a particular context, namely what he remembered at a particular time when he was writing regarding a particular context he wanted to cover in his gospel. Interpreting Papias in that sort of qualified way is less natural than taking his comment without any qualification, but the alternative creates more problems than it solves. Under the alternative, involving two documents attributed to Mark, you have to assume that there was a second document attributed to him, which is a more complicated scenario. And that second document has to have been attributed to Mark under circumstances highly similar to those associated with canonical Mark (writing about Jesus' words and actions with Peter as the primary source). Furthermore, this alleged second document attributed to Mark is supposed to have been prominent enough to have been mentioned by Papias' source ("the elder") and to have been discussed by Papias, yet it isn't mentioned by other sources. It would be surprising for such a prominent document to go unmentioned by so many sources. Somebody could try to get around some of these problems by proposing that later sources are just repeating what they found in Papias, so that the similarities between Papias' Markan document and what's reported about our gospel of Mark resulted from those later sources' dependence on Papias. But that sort of widespread dependence on Papias is unlikely for multiple reasons (e.g., how seldom anybody mentions Papias in the earliest centuries, how some of the early comments on Mark differ from Papias, the unlikelihood that people who had more access to Papias' writings and context than we do didn't recognize that he was referring to a different document). Proposing that later sources were dependent on Papias in that way just exchanges one set of problems for another. So, though there's some advantage to hypothesizing about a second document attributed to Mark, the disadvantages of that hypothesis are weightier. It's more likely that Papias is referring to our gospel of Mark.

With the document attributed to Matthew, however, a scenario involving a second document is more plausible. Unlike the situation with Mark, we do have widespread reports outside of Papias of a Hebrew document composed by Matthew.

Whatever documents we think Papias was referring to, there's no reasonable way to deny that his comments support the traditional gospel authorship attributions to some extent. Even if he was referring to a document other than what we have in our New Testament both times (an unlikely scenario), he's offering corroboration that Mark and Matthew were literate or had the ability and interest to have others write for them, that they had an interest in writing the sort of material in question, and that they did write such material. All of that increases the plausibility of their having authored the documents we have today. It's not as though Mark and Matthew would only have been capable of writing one document. Just as Paul apparently wrote a letter to the Corinthians that we don't have today (1 Corinthians 5:9), yet that doesn't prevent us from concluding that he also wrote 1 and 2 Corinthians, Mark and Matthew could have written documents we don't have today, yet have also written the documents we have that are attributed to them. Why would Eusebius focus on the lesser-known documents, then? Since so many of Eusebius' citations of Papias are about lesser-known traditions he commented on (about Judas' death, about premillennialism, etc.), it would be plausible that Eusebius also cited some of Papias' comments of that nature related to Mark and Matthew. As I said above, I think it's unlikely that the comments of Papias cited by Eusebius are about documents other than the canonical gospels in both contexts. But even if we were to assume for the sake of argument that Eusebius was citing comments on non-canonical documents both times, it would still make sense to think Mark and Matthew also wrote the documents attributed to them that we have today.

And there's a lot of evidence for the traditional gospel authorship attributions that Timothy Paul Jones doesn't discuss in the video above, including the testimony of a lot of sources other than Papias who likewise predate Irenaeus. For an overview of that evidence, do a Google search for "Triablogue, The Best And Earliest Evidence For Gospel Authorship".

Here's a link to that Triablogue post.

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