Here’s the link to this article written by Bart Ehrman.

March 2, 2023

I have begun to discuss the evidence provided by the early church father Papias that Mark was actually written by Mark.  He appears to be the first source to say so.  Does he?  And if so, is he right?

Here’s how I begin to discuss these matters in my book Jesus Before the Gospels (edited a bit here).

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Papias is often taken as evidence that at least two of the Gospels, Matthew and Mark, were called by those names already several decades after they were in circulation.

Papias was a Christian author who is normally thought to have been writing around 120 or 130 CE.  His major work was a five-volume discussion of the teachings of Jesus, called Exposition of the Sayings of the Lord. [1] It is much to be regretted that we no longer have this book.   We don’t know exactly why later scribes chose not to copy it, but it is commonly thought that the book was either uninspiring, naïve, or theologically questionable.  Later church fathers who talk about Papias and his book are not overly enthusiastic.  The “father of church history,” the fourth-century Eusebius of Caesarea, indicates that, in his opinion, Papias was “a man of exceedingly small intelligence” (Church History, 3.39).

Our only access to Papias and his views are in quotations of his book in later church fathers, starting with the important author Irenaeus around 185 CE, and including Eusebius himself.  Some of these quotations are fascinating and have been the subject of intense investigation among critical scholars for a very long time.  Of relevance to us here is what he says both about the Gospels and about the connection that he claims to have had to eyewitnesses to the life of Jesus.

In one of the most famous passages quoted by Eusebius, Papias indicates that instead of reading about Jesus and his disciples in books, he preferred hearing a “living voice.”   He explains that whenever knowledgeable people came to visit his church, he talked with them to ask what they knew.  Specifically he spoke with people who had been “companions” of those whom he calls “elders” who had earlier been associates with the disciples of Jesus.   And so Papias is not himself an eyewitness to Jesus’ life and does not know eyewitnesses.   Writing many years later (as much as a century after Jesus’ death), he indicates that he knew people who knew people who knew people who were with Jesus during his life.  So it’s not like having firsthand information, or anything close to it.  But it’s extremely interesting and enough to make a scholar sit up and take notice.

Richard Bauckham [In his book Jesus and the Eyewitnesses] is especially enthusiastic about Papias’s testimony, in part because he believes that Papias encountered these people long before he was writing, possibly as early as 80 CE, that is, during the time when the Gospels themselves were being composed [Papias himself, as you can probably guess, says nothing of the sort].  Bauckham does not ask whether Papias’ memory of encounters he had many decades earlier was accurate.  But as that is our interest here, it will be important to raise the questions ourselves.

Two passages from Papias are especially important, as Bauckham and others have taken them to be solid evidence that the Gospels were already given their names during the first century.  At first glance, one can see why they might think so.  Papias mentions Gospels written both by Mark and by Matthew.   His comments deserve to be quoted here in full.  First on a Gospel written by Mark.:

This is what the elder used to say, “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.  And so Mark did nothing wrong by writing some of the matters as he remembered them.  For he was intent on just one purpose: not to leave out anything that he heard or to include any falsehood among them.”  (Eusebius, Church History, 3. 39)

Thus, according to Papias, someone named Mark was Peter’s interpreter or translator (from Aramaic?) and he wrote down what Peter had to say about Jesus’ words and deeds.  He did not, however, produce an orderly composition.  Still, he did record everything he ever heard Peter say and he did so with scrupulous accuracy.  We will see that these claims are highly problematic, but first consider what Papias says also about a Gospel by Matthew:

And so Matthew composed the sayings in the Hebrew tongue, and each one interpreted [Or: translated] them to the best of his ability.  (Eusebius, Church History, 3. 39)

There are numerous reasons for questioning whether these passages – as quoted by Eusebius — provide us solid evidence that the New Testament Gospels were given their names in the late first or early second century.

First, it is somewhat curious and certainly interesting that Eusebius chose not to include any quotations from Papias about Luke or John.  Why would that be?  Were Papias’s views about these two books not significant?  Were they unusual?  Were they contrary to Eusebius’s own views?  We’ll never know.

Second, it is important to stress that in none of the surviving quotations of Papias does he actually quote either Matthew or Mark.  That is to say, he does not give a teaching of Jesus, or a summary of something he did, and then indicate that he found it in one of these Gospels.  That is unfortunate, because it means that we have no way of knowing for certain that when he refers to a Gospel written by Mark he has in mind the Gospel that we now today call the Gospel of Mark.  In fact there are reasons for doubting it, as I will show in my next post.

[1] See the Introduction and the collection of all the fragments of Papias that I give in The Apostolic Fathers, vol. 2 pp. 85-118.

Here’s the link to this article written by Bart Ehrman.

March 1, 2023

Did Mark write Mark?   A couple of weeks ago I did an eight-lecture course on the Gospel of Mark for my separate (unrelated to the blog) venture, a series of courses on “How Historians Read the Bible” (the courses are available on my website: www.bartehrman.com).  It was a blast.  One of the things I loved about doing it was that I was able to read and reread scholarship on Mark and I learned some things I had long wondered about, and re-learned other things that I used to know.

One of the things I had to think seriously about for the first time in some years was the question of why church fathers in the second century (but when?) began claiming that our second Gospel was written by John Mark, allegedly a secretary for the apostle Peter.  That took me straight back to the question of the reliability of an early Christian writer named Papias (writing around 120 or 130 CE?).

Papias gets used all the time as proof that Mark wrote Mark.  Conservative Christian scholars cite him on the point as “gospel truth.”  But for the past 30 years I’ve found the evidence unconvincing.  I’ve written about the issue briefly on the blog before, but I decided to look up my lengthiest discussion of the matter in my book Jesus Before the Gospels (HarperOne, 2016) and lo and behold, I made some points there that I didn’t remember!

I thought it would be worthwhile to present that discussion here.  It tries to show why Papias’ witness is so problematic for establishing the authorship of both Mark and Matthew, the only two Gospels he mentions in the snippets of his writings we still have.  This will take three posts.

In this one I give the backdrop to the testimony of Papias.

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The Gospel writers are all anonymous.  None of them gives us any concrete information about their identity.  So when did they come to be known as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John?   We might begin by considering the earliest references to the books, which occur in a group of authors who were writing, for the most part, immediately after the New Testament period.   These are the so-called “Apostolic Fathers.”  That term is not meant to indicate that these authors themselves were apostles, but that, in scholarly opinion starting hundreds of years ago (though no longer), they were companions of the apostles.   Theirs are among our earliest non-canonical writings.[1]

In the various Apostolic Fathers there are numerous quotations of the Gospels of the New Testament, especially Matthew and Luke.   What is striking about these quotations is that in none of them does any of these authors ascribe a name to the books they are quoting.  Isn’t that a bit odd?   If they wanted to assign “authority” to the quotation, why wouldn’t they indicate who wrote it?

Almost certainly the first apostolic father is the book of 1 Clement, a letter from the church of Rome to the church of Corinth written around 95 CE (and so, before some of the last books of the New Testament) and traditionally claimed to have been composed by the third bishop of Rome, Clement.   Scholars today widely reject that claim, but for our purposes here it does not much matter.   Just to give an example of how the Gospels are generally treated in the Apostolic Fathers, I quote one passage from 1 Clement:

We should especially remember the words the Lord Jesus spoke when teaching about gentleness and patience.  For he said: “Show mercy, that you may be shown mercy; forgive, that it may be forgiven you.  As you do, so it will be done to you; as you give, so it will be given to you; as you judge, so you will be judged; as you show kindness, so will kindness be shown to you; the amount you dispense will be the amount you receive.” (1 Clement 13:1-2)

This is an interesting passage, and fairly typical, because it conflates a number of passages from the Gospels, containing lines from Matthew 5:7; 6:14-15; 7:1-2, 12; Luke 6:31, and 36-38.   But the author does not name the Gospels he has taken the texts from, and certainly doesn’t attribute them to eyewitnesses.  Instead, he simply indicates that this is something that Jesus said.

The same is true of other Apostolic Fathers.   In chapter one of the intriguing book known as the Didache, which contains a set of ethical and practical instructions to the Christian churches, the anonymous writer quotes from Mark 12, Matthew 5 and 7; and Luke 8.  But he never names these Gospels.  Later he cites the Lord’s prayer, virtually as it is found in Matthew 6; again he does not indicate his source.

So too, as a third example, Ignatius of Antioch clearly knows Matthew’s story of the star of Bethlehem (Ignatius, Ephesians 19) and Matthew’s story of Jesus’ baptism which was undergone “in order to fulfill all righteousness” (Smyrneans 1).  But he doesn’t mention that the account was written by Matthew.   Similarly, Polycarp of Smyrna quotes Matthew chapters 5, 7, and 26 and Luke 6, but he never names a Gospel.

This is true of all of our references to the Gospels prior to the end of the second century.   The Gospels are known, read, and cited as authorities.  But they are never named or associated with an eyewitness to the life of Jesus.  There is one possible exception:  the fragmentary references to the Gospels of Matthew and Mark in the writings of the church father, Papias.

[1] For a translation of their writings, with introductions, see Bart D. Ehrman, The Apostolic Fathers, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.:  Harvard University Press, 2003).  I have used this translation for all my quotations.