Papias' writing dates from about 100 years after Jesus died. Unfortunately, what he actually wrote has not survived. All we have are quotations in other works which refer to his "Expositions of the Sayings of the Lord" which is allegedly a collection of things Papias heard said by the companions of elders who claimed to have known the first disciples. We can illustrate the chain of information thus:
Jesus → Apostles → Elders → Companions of the elders → Papias → Writings which reference Papias → Us
Basically, we are getting 5th hand information.
So Papias is not a direct witness to what the apostles of Jesus were saying (far from it). That is an important point because it is claimed by some Apologists that the so-called "testimony" Papias provides is evidence that the second Gospel of the NT was written by Mark, the companion of Peter, and that the first Gospel was written by Matthew, the disciple of Jesus. If these claims were true, they would be highly significant. (See 2 and 3 below).
The main problem with Papias however is that he provides information that no one believes - not even Christian Apologists. He wrote about alleged sayings of Jesus that no one believes Jesus said and he gives an account of Judas' death that no one believes. (See 4 below).
So, Apologists will believe that Papias is reliable about some things (e.g. about Matthew and Mark) even though his writings are not reliable, because they want some of what he says to be true. When Papias tells them something they don’t want to hear, they choose not to believe him. Credulity has taken precedence over scholarship.
2 Papias on Matthew
According to the 4th century historian Eusebius:
And this is what [Papias] says about Matthew: “And so Matthew composed the sayings in the Hebrew tongue, and each one interpreted them to the best of his ability.”
The two issues here are (a) the Gospel of Matthew in our Bibles is not just a collection of the sayings of Jesus, and (b) it was not written in Hebrew. The gospel of Matthew must have been written in Greek because Mark’s Gospel was the source for the Gospels of Matthew and Luke and we know Mark was originally written in Greek. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke must have used a Greek source because in many places they agree precisely, word-for-word, with the Gospel for Mark in the Greek. Also, the Gospels of Matthew and Luke agree with passages that have come from the "Q" source, which was originally written in Greek.
So Papias is either referring to a different document or if he is referring to "our" Gospel of Matthew, then he doesn't know what he's talking about and is being just as reliable as he was when he said that Judas Iscariot’s head bloated up so much that it would not fit into a street that a wagon could easily pass through.
3 Papias on Mark
The other of Papias’s comments refers to Mark. If he’s not talking about our Matthew, is he talking about our Mark? Here’s what he is reported to have said...
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: to leave out nothing that he heard or to include any falsehood among them.
One could imagine that Papias here is indeed talking about "our" Mark; if so, he’s defending it against charges that it is "not an orderly composition". Something here simply cannot be true. If Mark's intention was “to leave out nothing that he heard” in all of his time with Peter, that can’t be said of "our" Gospel of Mark which is actually quite sparse. If Mark spent all those years with Peter there would be a lot more material about Jesus.
So maybe Papias is referring to a different Gospel and later storytellers latched onto his claim and suggested that what is now the second Gospel was the one he was referring to. Or he is referring to "our" Gospel of Mark and is giving a false version of how it came to be. In any case, there are no scholars who believe that Mark’s Gospel is a Greek transcript of Peter’s Aramaic preaching. mark's Gospel is a Greek composition that records oral traditions which had been circulating for decades.
So to summarise: Papias does not provide reliable evidence concerning who wrote the Gospels. He never mentions Luke or John, or if he did, Eusebius doesn't mention it. Therefore, the first assignment of author's names to Gospels is the comment made by Irenaeus in 180 AD. Prior to that, the Gospels were circulating anonymously.
4 Papias on Jesus
Papers gives two traditions connected with the Gospel accounts of Jesus and no one considers these to be realistic. The first is an alleged saying Jesus:
Thus the elders who saw John, the disciple of the Lord, remembered hearing him say how the Lord used to teach about those times, saying: "The days are coming when vines will come forth, each with ten thousand boughs; and on a single bough will be ten thousand branches.
And indeed, on a single branch will be ten thousand shoots and on every shoot ten thousand clusters; and in every cluster will be ten thousand grapes, and every grape, when pressed, will yield twenty-five measures of wine. And when any of the saints grabs hold of a cluster, another will cry out, ‘I am better, take me; bless the Lord through me.’
So too a grain of wheat will produce ten thousand heads and every head will have ten thousand grains and every grain will yield ten pounds of pure, exceptionally fine flour. So too the remaining fruits and seeds and vegetation will produce in similar proportions. And all the animals who eat this food drawn from the earth will come to be at peace and harmony with one another, yielding in complete submission to humans.”
It's an interesting claim but no one thinks Jesus taught it. Therefore, Papias’s sources for the words of Jesus are unreliable, to say the least.
The second tradition is even more interesting. It explains how Judas died. Here’s what Papias tells us, based on his sources:
But Judas went about in this world as a great model of impiety. He became so bloated in the flesh that he could not pass through a place that was easily wide enough for a wagon – not even his swollen head could fit. They say that his eyelids swelled to such an extent that he could not see the light at all; and a doctor could not see his eyes even with an optical device, so deeply sunken they were in the surrounding flesh. And his genitals became more disgusting and larger than anyone’s; simply by relieving himself, to his wanton shame, he emitted pus and worms that flowed through his entire body.
And they say that after he suffered numerous torments and punishments, he died on his own land, and that land has been, until now, desolate and uninhabited because of the stench. Indeed, even to this day no one can pass by the place without holding their nose. This was how great an outpouring he made from his flesh on the ground.
No one believes this either!
5 From Justin to Irenaeus
We know that the Gospels are quoted by various Christian authors up to the end of the second century, but these authors never identify the gospels as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. One example is Justin, around 150-60 AD, who explicitly refers to the books as “Memoirs of the Apostles,” but does not tell us which apostles. This is in Rome, the capital of the Empire, and the location of the most influential Christian church at the time. Thirty years after Justin, another Roman Church Father - Irenaeus - does identify the Gospels by name. He is the first to do so.
Irenaeus is best known for his work “Against the Heresies,” written around 185 AD and it still survives today. It is an attack on Gnosticism and was one of our principal sources of information about Gnostic religion until the discovery of the Gnostic library near Nag Hammed in 1945.
Irenaeus considered the views of the Gnostics to be absurd, contradictory, and dangerous e.g. they claimed that the Saviour was two beings, a human Jesus and a divine Christ. Irenaeus refers to the Gospel of Basilides which stated that since Christ was a divine being, he could not actually be a human and could not actually suffer and goes on to argue that Jesus wasn't crucified. Baselines explains that Jesus performed a miracle at the execution site by changing his form to that of Simon of Cyrene, and transforming Simon of Cyrene to look like Jesus. As a result, the Romans crucified the wrong man. While Simon was hanging on the cross, Jesus stood to the side, laughing.
In Irenaeus' opinion, there were only four Gospels that were authoritative and it is during Irenaeus' lifetime that they are attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
6 The Muratorian Fragment
In section 5 (above) we see that between the time of Justin, in Rome around 160 AD and Irenaeus in 185 AD, the Gospels had begun to be known as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
We also have other evidence in the form of a fragment of Latin text (translated from Greek) discovered in the 18th century. This manuscript dates from the 7th or 8th century, but when was it originally written? No one can be sure but the majority opinion dates it to the end of the second century which is the time of Irenaeus, and it is believed it came from Rome (based on some of the references in the text). Some scholars argue it was written in the 4th century but they are in a minority.
7 The Naming of the Gospels
Is there a single explanation which covers all of the available evidence? Bart Ehrman thinks there is, and explains it as follows.
Given all of the evidence above, especially the dating of the Muratorian fragment and the writings of Irenaeus, it seems that after Justin, but before Irenaeus, an edition of the four Gospels was published in Rome. An unknown compiler of this edition decided to assign the names of apostles to give the writing some authority. And so he indicated in his version that these were Gospels “according to Matthew,” “according to Mark,” “according to Luke,” and “according to John.”
This is the version that became popular in Rome as it was circulated and copied. And so, in the Roman church, the four Gospels became known by their by their now familiar names. It was simply accepted that these books really were by the authors to whom they were ascribed. This idea influenced Irenaeus during his time in Rome, and became his standard view and hence it became the standard view of all Christendom, thanks to the influence of the Roman church.
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