Papias☦

Substantially right, and Eusebius got there first. Papias's own preface (quoted by Eusebius, Church History 3.39) says he collected what "the elders" reported: what Andrew, Peter☦, Philip, Thomas, James☦, John or Matthew had said, and what Aristion and John the Elder, disciples of the Lord, were saying. Eusebius – no fool with a source in hand – pointed out that this lists two Johns and puts the apostles at one remove: Papias heard followers of the apostles, not (on the natural reading) the apostles themselves. Irenaeus's "hearer of John, companion of Polycarp☦" is best read as pious escalation, and modern scholarship largely sides with Eusebius's reading against Irenaeus's. Conceded without a fight.

But run the arithmetic on the concession. On the deflated, sceptical reading, a man writing around 100–110 in Asia Minor personally interrogated travelling disciples of named apostles, and knew two men – Aristion and John the Elder – described as disciples of the Lord who were still alive and talking during his information-gathering. That is a two-link chain from Papias to Jesus☦'s circle, running through named individuals in named towns, published while people who could contradict it lived. The page's own preferred reconstruction has first-hand followers of Jesus surviving into the 90s and Papias collecting from their circles – which is not what the tradition of an invented celestial being looks like. It is what a young movement's living memory looks like, complete with a fussy collector complaining about which links he trusts.

The "preferred hearsay over books" point inverts what Papias says. His famous line – "I did not think that information from books would profit me as much as a living and surviving voice" – is not a preference for rumour; it is the standard method-statement of ancient historiography (Polybius and Galen say the same), stated because written gospels already existed and Papias wanted to check them against people. The remark is, incidentally, evidence that written accounts were in circulation early enough for Papias to be sniffy about them.

Correct on the linguistics, and this is the mainstream critical position: canonical Matthew is a Greek composition using Mark and the Septuagint, not a translation from Hebrew. Papias's remark ("Matthew compiled the logia in the Hebrew dialect, and each translated them as he was able") therefore does not describe canonical Matthew – either Papias meant some other collection, or hebraïdi dialektō means "in a Jewish style," or he was simply wrong. Every critical introduction to the New Testament says roughly this. The gospel titles being later attachments (conventionally dated to the second century, with Irenaeus our first witness to all four names together) is likewise standard scholarship, discussed at length on this site's Gospels page.

Two things follow, neither of them mythicist. First: Papias erring about a book's language is evidence about Papias's reliability on literary history, and scholarship duly treats his literary notices with caution – while noting that his other famous notice, Mark as Peter's interpreter writing "accurately but not in order," is defensible and is debated on its merits. Second, and more important: whatever Papias got wrong, his testimony shows that by c. 100–130 there existed written gospels attributed to first-generation figures, oral tradition still flowing through named channels, and a bishop in Asia Minor for whom Jesus's circle – Andrew, Peter, Philip, the daughters of Philip living in his own city – were recent people one gathered facts about, not a myth under construction. Papias is a poor proof-text and a stubborn witness: too early, too networked, and too banally concerned with sourcing to fit a world where Jesus had not existed a century before.