The Fragments of Papias.—There cannot be any very serious differences of opinion as to the approxi- mate time at which Papias put forth the work from which some few fragments have been preserved to us. He had conversed with men of an older gene- ration than his own who could give first-hand information as to what the oral teaching of several of the apostles was (Euseb. ΜῈ iii. 39). ITrenzeus (adv. Her. ν. 33.4) seems to have been mistaken in supposing that he had himself seen and heard John the Evangelist (Euseb. U.c.); but he may have been a contemporary, if not an actual hearer, of Aristion and ‘the Elder John,’ ‘disciples of the Lord’ (ib.). He must therefore have been born before, most likely some few years before, the end of the 1st cent. The time when he had oppor- tunities of collecting the information referred to may probably have been several years before he wrote the work of which Eusebius has given us an account, largely in Papias’ own words. But at latest the publication of this work cannot have fallen much after A.D. 150, and may more reason- ably be supposed to have taken place somewhat earlier. When, further, we consider the character of his work, we can have no hesitation in saying that his testimony (so far as its general effect is concerned) is to be connected with the first half of the century.
The title itself of his work, Aoylwy κυριακῶν ἐξηγήσεις, ‘Expositions of Dominical Oracles,’ is interesting and important. In view of those habits of thought of the time upon which we have already commented, we may best take ‘ Dominical Oracles’ to mean passages of Our Lord’s teaching. These, as is clear from his own language in the portion of his prologue preserved to us by Eusebius, Papias took from some documentary source or sources; but for the illustration of them he availed himself of all that he had been able to glean from independent tradition. As Harnack observes, ‘he distinguishes the matter orally delivered, even so far as it con- tained portions of evangelical history, in a marked manner from the matter which he expounds’ (Chronol. i. 690, n. 1). This fact, then, that written records supplied the basis for his com- ment, or the pegs on which he hung the more or less trustworthy additional narratives or state- ments that he had collected, lends special interest to the inquiry whether he knew and used our Gospels or any of them.
We need not hesitate to claim his account, which he gives on the authority of ‘the Elder’—appar- ently, from the context in Eusebius, the Elder John—of the composition of a Gospel by Mark, as referring to a work at least substantially the same as our Second Gospel. It has been urged, indeed, that the observation contained in this fragment,
Biography), on the ground of this passage as well | whether it is the Elder’s or Papias’ own, that Mark as of features in the work which they think point | did not arrange his matter ‘in order,’ is not ap- to an early age, suppose it to have been composed | propriate to our Mark, which is not less orderly in
534 NEW TESTAMENT CANON point of arrangement than the other Gospels. But this objection seems clearly unsubstantial,
and is now generally admitted to be so. The criticism implied in Papias’ words may have been simply a fanciful and mistaken one. Or, again, Mark's arrangement may have been assumed to be wrong wherever it differed from that of either our First or (see below) our Fourth Gospel, which are connected with the names of those who were followers of the Lord during His earthly life, which Mark was not. Some comparison of this kind seems to be implied in the words of Papias’ frag- ment itself. (See, further, art. MARK, p. 244). The questions as to the right interpretation of the fragment of Papias (i).) on a writing by Matthew are more serious. Critics of more than_one school have seen in the words, Ματθαῖος μὲν οὖν τὰ λόγια cuveypdvaro, a description of a Collection of Dis- courses and Sayings which has (it may be) been em- bodied in our First Gospel, but which was in many respects a different work. Against this view it has been urged that λόγια does not mean ‘discourses,’ but ‘oracles,’ and that in the NT itself it is applied to the OT. These arguments, however, somewhat miss their mark. For it does not seem likely that the term should have been applied to a writing of the NT as such, so early as the time of Papias, and still less of his informant, if this, as is prob- able, was the same ‘Elder’ whom he reports in the case of Mark’s work. Nor could ra λόγια in that sense have been suitably used of a single writing, though it would be natural as a descrip- tion of the Lord’s teaching. The statement, how- ever, which we are considering consists only of one brief sentence ; we do not know what the con- text may have been. And whatever inferences it may be fair to draw from Papias’ expressions as to the history of the composition of our First Gospel, we may gather that, at least when he wrote, a work existed which was generally recognized as a Greek representative of a Hebrew writing by the Apostle Matthew. And it is hard to imagine that this could have been any other work than that which a generation later, or less, was certainly known in the Church, as it is still, as the Gospel acc. to Mt. A substitution of one book for another could not have been effected in so short a time. (Comp. Harnack, Chronol. i. p. 693). See, further, art. MATTHEW (GOSPEL OF).