Note 5 — Chapter VII · GOSPEL-MAKING

Eusebius, scandalized by such testimony, pronounced Papias a man of small understanding. But he is the first Christian authority as to the history of the gospels; and the very fact that he set less store by them than by oral tradition is evidence that he had no reason for thinking them more authoritative than the matter that reached him by word of mouth. It may be that he knew only Greek, and that he could not read for himself the Aramaic logia, concerning which he says that “every one interpreted them for himself as he was able.” From the logia and the proto-Mark to the first two synoptics the evolution can only be guessed. No one now claims that we possess the original documents even in translation. Matthew as it stands is admittedly not a translation; and Dr. Conybeare, who idly alleges that I pay no heed to the order of priority of the gospels, and insists chronically on the general priority of Mark, avows that “Mark, the main source of the first and third evangelists, is himself no original writer, but a compiler, who pieces together and edits earlier documents in which his predecessors had written down popular traditions of the miracles and passion of Jesus.”5 And he predicates in one part “four stages of documentary development.”6 How in this state of things the existing Mark can be proved to be the main source of Matthew and Luke is not and cannot be explained. Mark too is admittedly not a translation from Aramaic; but some of his sources may have been.