Papias and Clement and Mark's Two Gospels Terence Y. Mullins Vigiliae Christianae Vol. 30, No. 3 (Sep., 1976), pp. 189-192 (4 pages)

With the publication of the letter by Clement of Alexandria which Morton Smith discovered in the back of an early book/ the witness of Papias to Mark's Gospel has been somewhat clarified. I have shown that Papias, in the phrase where he actually defends Mark's writing, does not defend Mark against the charge of not writing an orderly account, but defends him against the charge that he should not have written "a few things as he remembered them".2 And this has to mean that he did not write many things from memory.

Furthermore, the opening statement of Papias' testimony to Mark's Gospel may be interpreted as saying that Mark translated what Peter wrote. Putting this interpretation of the opening statement together with the necessary interpretation of Papias' defense of Mark produced an interpretation of Papias as saying that Mark translated what Peter had written and then, later, added a few things to that translation.3

That was as far as I could go at the time. It was obvious that one of the two Marcan writings which Papias was talking about would probably correspond to Mark's Gospel as we now have it. But which one? There were two possible interpretations. Papias might have been saying that Mark had added remembered material to his original translation and thereby produced his generally accepted Gospel. This would give us the following three documents on the basis of Papias' testimony: Peter's document, an Ur-Mark translation of Peter's document by Mark, and the final Gospel of Mark. In this case, the "remembered" material to which there had been objection would be part of the Gospel of Mark as we know it. And, if Papias' account is correct, these additions might be identifiable; and identifying the additions would enable us to isolate the original Marcan translation.

On the other hand, Papias could be saying that Mark's Gospel is the original translation and that there existed in his day an expanded version by Mark himself which contained the questionable additions of what he had remembered.

At the time that I published there was not much evidence on either side to help one choose between the two possibilities. And there seemed little likelihood that additional evidence would appear. But the publication of Smith's book seems to indicate that the second interpretation is the correct one.

I am not, of course, trying to demonstrate that the second Gospel actually is a translation of an Aramaic original manuscript by Peter. I am trying to find out what Papias was saying, not evaluate his testimony. If Smith is right and there did exist two editions of Mark by the same author, one as we know it and one with the additions indicated in Smith's discovery, then the testimony of Papias must be interpreted as giving an account similar to Clement's. There are the following points of agreement between the interpretation of Papias' evidence which I gave in my article and the account given by Clement in Smith's book:

1. Mark wrote an account of Christ's doings. 
2. The account was not a complete one.
3. Mark later added material to this first account. 
4. The additions included sayings. 
5. There was nothing wrong with what he did. 
6. Peter wrote something which in some way underlay Mark's writing.

And there is the implicit suggestion in both Papias and Clement that the expanded version had given rise to objections.

There are the following non-contradictory differences between the two:

1. Papias says that Mark was Peter's translator; Clement does not but indicates that Peter was the authority for both of Mark's writings. 
2. Clement indicates Rome as the place where Mark wrote his first account and Alexandria as the place where he wrote the second. 
3. Clement indicates that Mark wrote his first account during Peter's lifetime and the second account after Peter's death.

The following points represent the places where Papias and Clement are farthest apart:

1. Clement says that Mark first account was a selective one; Papias indicates that Mark translated Peter's writing
2. Papias says that additions were added as Mark remembered them; Clement says that Mark had his own notes and Peter's to guide him in making additions.  Clement's word for "notes" however is μνήματα and this raises the possibility that Papias's ἀπεμνημόνευσεν may have been a "remembering"   based in some way on μνήματα.

The resemblences between the two accounts are not so great as to suggest literary dependence between them.  Yet the resemblences are suffiently significant to suggest that they were derived from a common source.  Since both Papias' presbyter and Clement himself seem to have had access to an expanded gospel of Mark the account of its composition probably accompanied that writing, either as oral or as written tradition ...

Such things do not disprove the evidence for Mark's authorship of additional material.  But they do suggest strongly that if Mark was indeed the author both of the Gospel and of the additions, then Peter's hand in the writing of the Gospel was stronger than we have hitherto suspected.  Mark after Peter's death may have the same style but he certainly tends to caricature his earlier work.  In any case the interpretation of Papias' account does not rest on proof that Mark wrote the additions given by Clement.  What we can say at this point is that both Papias and Clement thought that Mark wrote an early Gospel account and then added to it later.