Note 1 — Chapter VII · GOSPEL-MAKING

According to the tradition preserved through Papias (d. circa 165), from “John the presbyter,” who is not pretended to have been John the Apostle, the first gospels were those of Mark, the “interpreter” of Peter, who set down in no chronological order the “sayings and doings” of the Lord as he had gathered them from Peter; and of Matthew, who wrote the logia or sayings “in the Hebrew dialect”1—presumably Aramaic. This, the earliest written tradition concerning the matter embodied in the gospels, is preserved to us from Papias’ lost “Exposition of the Dominical2 Oracles” (Λογίων κυριακῶν) by Eusebius. For his own part, Papias professed to set more store by what he received from Aristion and the Presbyter John and other disciples of the Lord than by anything “out of books.” And it chances that he gave out as a Dominical Oracle3 thus certificated a crude picture of millennial marvels which is actually taken from either the Apocalypse of Baruch, which here imitated the Book of Enoch, or from an older source.4 Concerning this utterance of the Lord, further, Papias narrated a conversation between Jesus and Judas, in which the latter figures as a freethinker, expressing disbelief in the prediction.