Papias and the Logia

The earliest surviving statement on the origin of the First Gospel is a single sentence of Papias of Hierapolis, preserved at second hand by Eusebius: “Matthew compiled the logia in the Hebrew dialect, and each interpreted them as he was able” (Eusebius, HE 3.39.16). Almost every word of it has been disputed. This file sets out the text, its context in Papias, the ambiguities of logia, “Hebrew dialect,” and “interpreted,” the question of Papias’s reliability, and the parallel notice on Mark.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle and Evangelist)

The Text and Its Context

Papias was bishop of Hierapolis in Phrygia in the first half of the second century, and the author of a five-book work, the Exposition of the Sayings of the Lord (Logiōn Kyriakōn Exēgēsis), now lost except for fragments quoted by later writers, above all Eusebius and Irenaeus. In the most famous fragment Eusebius quotes Papias on the origin of the Gospels of Mark and Matthew. Of Matthew, Papias says — in the Greek Eusebius reproduces — Matthaios men oun Hebraïdi dialektō ta logia synetaxato (or synegrapsato), hērmēneusen d’ auta hōs ēn dynatos hekastos: “Matthew, then, compiled (or composed/arranged) the logia in the Hebrew dialect, and each interpreted (or translated) them as he was able” (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.39.16; trans. McGiffert, NPNF II/1, gives “Matthew put together the oracles [of the Lord] in the Hebrew language, and each one interpreted them as best he could”).

This sentence is the headwater of the entire later tradition that Matthew “wrote in Hebrew.” Every subsequent witness — Irenaeus, Origen, Eusebius himself, Epiphanius, Jerome — stands downstream of it or repeats it. Its weight in the discussion is therefore out of all proportion to its length, and its meaning is correspondingly contested: as Eusebius preserves it, the sentence will bear several quite different readings, and the choice among them shapes the whole Hebrew-Matthew question (see The Semitic Origin Question).

The Ambiguity of ta logia

The first crux is the word logia (λόγια). It can mean “oracles,” “sayings,” or “utterances,” and what Papias intends by it is decisive. The possibilities canvassed in the scholarship include: (1) the sayings of Jesus — a collection of the Lord’s discourses, which would make Papias’s “Matthew” a sayings-document rather than a full Gospel; (2) a complete Gospel — narrative and sayings together, logia used loosely for the whole record of “the things concerning the Lord”; (3) a collection of Old Testament testimonia — “oracles” in the sense of prophetic texts gathered to show their fulfilment in Christ; and (4) on one older view, the same as the title of Papias’s own work (logia kyriaka), the dominical sayings he set out to expound. The title of Papias’s book — an Exposition of the Logia of the Lord — suggests that for Papias logia meant primarily the sayings and deeds of the Lord, which tells slightly against the narrowest “sayings-source only” reading but does not settle the matter (cf. R. Gundry and others who argue logia here means the Gospel as a whole). The word will not by itself decide whether Papias is describing the canonical Gospel, a lost sayings-collection, or something else.

“In the Hebrew Dialect” and “Each Interpreted Them”

The second crux is the phrase Hebraïdi dialektō, “in the Hebrew dialect” or “Hebrew language.” Three readings compete. Most naturally it means that Matthew wrote in a Semitic tongue — Hebrew or, more probably given first-century Palestine, Aramaic (which Greek writers often called “Hebrew”). On this reading Papias attests an original Semitic Matthew later rendered into Greek. A second, influential modern reading, associated above all with Josef Kürzinger, takes dialektos in its rhetorical sense of “style” or “manner of expression” rather than “language,” and reads the clause as saying that Matthew arranged the material “in a Hebrew style” — i.e. in a Semitic rhetorical form — not in the Hebrew language at all (Josef Kürzinger, Papias von Hierapolis und die Evangelien des Neuen Testaments, 1983). A third possibility is that “Hebrew dialect” describes the idiom of a source while the Gospel as we have it is Greek.

The closing clause is equally slippery: hērmēneusen d’ auta hōs ēn dynatos hekastos, “and each interpreted/translated them as he was able.” If hērmēneuō means “translate,” Papias implies that the Semitic original had to be Englished — that is, Hellenized — by many hands, each doing his best; this fits the Semitic-original reading and even hints at why the canonical Greek varies. But hērmēneuō can also mean “interpret” or “expound,” in which case Papias may mean that, because the logia were in a Hebrew style or order, each reader had to make sense of them as best he could. Kürzinger’s reconstruction takes the whole sentence to mean that Matthew arranged the Lord’s words in a Hebraic rhetorical form which each then interpreted as he could — removing the claim of a Semitic-language original entirely. The sentence, in short, is a knot of four uncertain terms, and how it is untied determines what it is taken to prove.

Papias’s Reliability and the Notice on Mark

How much weight the sentence can bear depends partly on Papias himself, and the witnesses divide. Irenaeus calls Papias “a hearer of John and a companion of Polycarp, a man of the primitive church” (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 5.33.4; ANF 1), placing him in the living memory of the apostolic age and lending his testimony great value. Eusebius, by contrast, who preserves the fragment, judges Papias “a man of small mind” (sphodra… smikros ōn ton noun) on the strength of his crude chiliasm (Eusebius, HE 3.39.13; NPNF II/1) — a hostile estimate that has colored the modern debate. Papias himself says he preferred “the living and abiding voice” of those who had known the apostles to what was in books, and reports gathering his information from the elders and from a “John the Elder” alongside John the apostle (Eusebius, HE 3.39.3–4) — a notice that has fed the long debate over the two Johns (see the sibling collection on St. John the Theologian).

The same fragment gives Papias’s parallel notice on the Second Gospel, which controls how the Matthew notice is read: Mark, “having become Peter’s interpreter (hermēneutēs), wrote down accurately, though not in order, all that he remembered of the things said and done by the Lord,” for Mark followed Peter’s needs and “made no mistake” but did not arrange the Lord’s logia in sequence (Eusebius, HE 3.39.15; NPNF II/1). The recurrence of hermēneutēs / hērmēneusen and taxis / synetaxato across the two notices suggests Papias is working with a contrast of order and interpretation — Mark accurate but unordered as Peter’s interpreter, Matthew arranging the logia (in Hebrew, or in a Hebrew manner) — which strengthens the case for reading the Matthew notice in terms of arrangement and rendering rather than as a flat statement that the canonical Gospel was first composed in Hebrew. [Disputed: the meaning of Eusebius, *HE* 3.39.16 is the central crux of Matthean origins. (a) The traditional reading — that Matthew first wrote a Gospel in Hebrew or Aramaic, later translated into Greek — is taken by most of the Fathers (Irenaeus, Origen, Eusebius, Jerome) and by some moderns. (b) Kürzinger (1983) argues *dialektō* means "style" and *hērmēneusen* "interpreted," so that Papias claims only that Matthew composed in a Hebrew *manner*, not the Hebrew *language*. (c) Many modern scholars judge Papias either mistaken or describing a lost source (a sayings-collection or testimonia), since canonical Greek Matthew shows no signs of being a translation (Davies–Allison, *Matthew* ICC I, Introduction). The positions turn on the four disputed terms above and cannot be resolved from the fragment alone.]

References

Eusebius of Caesarea. The Ecclesiastical History 3.39.1–17 (Papias on Mark at 15, on Matthew at 16; Eusebius’s estimate of Papias at 13). Trans. Arthur C. McGiffert. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 1.
Irenaeus of Lyons. Against Heresies 5.33.4 (Papias as hearer of John). Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1.
Kürzinger, Josef. Papias von Hierapolis und die Evangelien des Neuen Testaments. Regensburg: Pustet, 1983.
Holmes, Michael W. The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations (the fragments of Papias). 3rd ed. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007.
Davies, W. D., and Dale C. Allison. Matthew (ICC), Vol. 1, Introduction. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988.