Papias' scholia upon an implicit text

Last month Philip Jenkins did a study on a "meme" (his word) which Papias posted out as an agraphon, a then-unwritten saying of Jesus. Papias collected many of these in his Expositions of the Lord's Oracles. The five-volume book circulated widely among Christian scholars - and a Latin version perhaps floated up and down the Rhine - but it seems not to have entered the actual churches.

With all propaganda, the first question is - why did you do this. The gospels are propaganda: that is, arguably, what "godspell" / "evangel" meant in an Early Roman context. Evan Powell would have us believe that Mark went out to defend Peter. Matthew was similar, but also wanted to claim Mark's overall narrative for a Judaising church. Luke set out to reconcile Mark with Paul.

Papias' Expositions isn't preserved fully, but we own enough to know that it argued its own case. Ancient scholars thought that Papias was a chialist - that he thought the Fin Du Monde was at hand. Eh, maybe. It happens that Papias actually told us what he was doing; and that wasn't it.

Papias never claimed to be a contemporary of events himself. What he claimed to be, was a muhaddith. He met up with the first Christian saints and collected their recollections. He was a contemporary of the first published Gospels, which may or may not be the ones current today.

And he had opinions about some, especially about one ascribed to Saint Mark. Papias reported (famously) from "The Elder" that Mark accurately transcribed Jesus's life but not in the correct order. That Mark was factually-questionable was the consensus in Papias' day can be readily observed in the very fact of "synoptic gospels": whichever came first (which is indeed what we're now calling "Mark"), two other evangelists redid it. And then others did harmonies [UPDATE 4/17, more likely Muqâtil-like exegetical expansions] which show up in Justin Martyr's work and so-called "2 Clement". And Mark isn't as well preserved as these secondary works. And 2 John, in The Elder's name, likely introduces the Gospel of John so pointedly not Mark.

Papias' problem wasn't that he was himself more of a chialist than was Mark or Paul. And - pace Eusebius - it wasn't that Papias was a fool.

Papias' first problem is that he was stepping on the gospels' toes, and vice versa. The Church depended on a body of Scripture. A store of logia not in the canon would have weakened that case. (ALSO 4/16/21: Hegesippus had the same problem.)

Also in Christendom, Paul got out in front of everyone to dismiss that Jesus' oracles even mattered. What mattered for Paul was that Jesus was crucified and thereby expiated all our sins. As a result, the Passion Narrative took precedence over Jesus' message, or messages.

In a parallel history, the Lord's Oracles could have been set down into a book like Isaiah without a narrative structure at all. Something like this did happen, in the form of the Gospel Of Thomas among others; the Epistle of James is a paraenesis on such didascalia. In this case Papias' book would have been readily accepted as a commentary upon such a collection. But Christianity did not become a pre-Islam; it could not so become.

Papias found no audience for his project. His Jesus wasn't the Gospel Jesus, and the oracles were redundant.