We’re told that the gospels (at least some of them) are eyewitness accounts of the life of Jesus and are therefore reliable history. Let’s explore part of that claim: How do we know Mark wrote the gospel of Mark? How do we know Mark recorded the observations of Peter, an eyewitness?
The short answer is because Papias said so. Papias was a second-century bishop who documented the oral history from the early church.
Jesus probably died in 30 CE, Mark was written around 70, and Papias documented Mark as the author in 120 (these dates are all estimates). That’s a fifty-year gap illuminated only by the unknown person(s) of unknown reliability interviewed by Papias.
But how do we know what Papias said? We don’t have the original of Papias, nor do we have a copy. Instead, we have Church History by Eusebius, which claims to quote Papias and was written in 320.
And how do we know what Eusebius said? The oldest Greek copies of his book are from the tenth century, though there is a Syriac translation from 462.
Count the successive people on whom is balanced the claim “Mark wrote the gospel of Mark, which documents an eyewitness account”: (1) Peter was an eyewitness and (2) Mark was his journalist, and (3) someone told this to (4) Papias, who wrote a book, which was preserved by (5) copyist(s), and (6) Eusebius transcribed parts of that, and (7) more copyist(s) translated Eusebius to give us our oldest manuscript copy. And the oldest piece of evidence we can put our hands on was written four centuries after Mark was written. That’s an exceedingly tenuous chain.
The sequence of people could have been longer still; we simply don’t know. The gospel of Mark is thought to have been written in Syria, and no one knows how long the chain of hearsay was from that author to Papias, who lived in western Asia Minor. No one knows how many copyists separated Papias from Eusebius or Eusebius from our oldest copies.
It gets worse. Eusebius didn’t think much of Papias as a historian and said he “seems to have been a man of very small intelligence, to judge from his books.” Evaluate the quality of Papias’s scholarship for yourself: he said Judas lived on after a failed attempt at hanging and had a head swollen so large he couldn’t pass down a street wide enough for a hay wagon. Who knows if this version of the demise of Judas is more reliable than the accounts in Matthew and Acts (which also conflict), but it’s special pleading to dismiss Papias when he’s embarrassing but hold on to his explanation of gospel authorship.
As if the tenuousness of Papias’s account wasn’t bad enough, even Eusebius is considered unreliable by modern scholars.
The problem is similar for the other gospels. We find our familiar assignment of gospel titles in Against Heresies by Irenaeus (c. 180), but our oldest copy of that book is a Latin translation from the tenth century. Tertullian also lists the four traditional authors in his Against Marcion (c. 208). Our oldest copy of that work is from the eleventh century.
If we don’t know who wrote the gospels, the claim that they were written by eyewitnesses fails, and this can no longer be an argument for New Testament reliability.
Continue to chapter 42.
Image credit: Rembrandt via Wikimedia
Notes
“[Papias] seems to have been a man of very small intelligence”: Eusebius, Church History, (book III, chapter 39), http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/250103.htm.
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