Justified True Belief

(●) He asked the people who had known the apostles how the Gospels came to be written, and wrote down what they told him. + Somewhere in the hills above the Lycus valley, in a spa town that drew visitors from all over the Roman east, a bishop got into the habit of interrogating travellers. Not about the roads or the emperor. He wanted to know whether they had ever sat under anyone who had walked with Andrew, or Peter, or Thomas, or Matthew, and if so, what that person had said the Lord said. Then he wrote it down. His name was Papias, and he put what he collected into five books. Every one of them is lost. What survives of the man would fit on three or four pages, and almost all of it comes to us through the pens of writers who were quoting him in order to argue with him. Yet inside those few pages sits the oldest surviving statement anyone made about where the Gospel of Mark came from, and the oldest about Matthew. Two sentences written around the year 110 are still the first exhibit in every discussion of who wrote the Gospels and how. His dates are thinner than they look. No ancient source records when Papias was born or when he died, and what can be given instead is a floruit, from the Latin floruit, "he flourished": the years a person is known to have been at work, used when the birth and death years are simply not there. Reference books commonly print his life as about 60 to about 130 AD, and both of those figures are reckoning backward from his book and his friends rather than anything anyone wrote down. What is actually fixed is narrower and more interesting: he was a grown man questioning people who had heard the apostles' own hearers, and Eusebius, the church's first historian, names him in the same breath as Ignatius of Antioch and Polycarp of Smyrna.

(●) c. 60 AD: Born, by everyone’s reckoning and nobody’s record, in Hierapolis, a Phrygian spa town the New Testament names once. + Hierapolis sat on a shelf of blinding white rock above the Lycus valley in Phrygia, in what is now south-western Turkey. The rock was the town’s fortune. Hot mineral springs poured out of the hillside and left their lime behind as they cooled, building terrace after terrace of white stone down the slope, which is why the Turkish name for the site today is Pamukkale, "cotton castle." Strabo, the Greek geographer, visited and reported that the water hardened so readily that people ran it along ditches to make fences out of a single stone, and that it dyed wool so well the cheap local dye could pass for royal purple. Strabo also went to look at the Plutonion, a hole in the ground at the foot of a small cliff, ringed by a railing, sacred to the god of the dead. Something invisible came up out of it. Bulls led inside dropped where they stood and were dragged out dead; Strabo threw in sparrows himself and watched them die in the air. Modern measurements have found a dense layer of carbon dioxide seeping from the fault line under the site, which is exactly what you would expect a man in the first century to call a mouth of hell (Strabo, Geography 13.4.14). There were Christians in that town while Paul was still alive. Writing to the church at Colossae, a short distance up the same valley, Paul commends a man named Epaphras: "For I bear him witness that he has worked hard for you and for those in Laodicea and in Hierapolis" (Colossians 4:13). That is the one mention Hierapolis gets in the New Testament, and it puts a congregation there a full generation before Papias. Of his parents, his birth, his schooling, or how he came to believe, not one line survives.

(●) c. 80s and 90s AD: He made a practice of questioning anyone who had followed the apostles’ own hearers. + Think of a local historian in a town that had a war go through it sixty years ago. The veterans themselves are nearly all gone. But their sons are not, and the man who drove the supply truck is not, and so the historian spends years buttonholing them at the post office and asking the same careful questions. That is precisely what Papias did, and he tells us so in his own preface. He calls his sources the elders. The Greek word is presbyteros, "older man," the same word the New Testament uses for the leaders of a congregation; Papias uses it for the first Christian generation, the men who had been with the apostles and could report what they taught. When somebody came through Hierapolis who had followed one of those elders, Papias asked what the elders had said: what Andrew said, or Peter, or Philip, or Thomas, or James, or John, or Matthew, or any other of the Lord’s disciples, and what Aristion and the elder John were saying. That last phrase repays a second look. The first list is in the past tense, what those men said; the second is in the present, what these two are saying. Two of his sources, in other words, were still alive and still talking while he was doing the asking. Of Aristion we know almost nothing beyond what that one sentence tells us, and the elder John has been a puzzle from then until now (T3). But the tenses matter more than the names do, because of the distance they close. The chain from Jesus to Papias runs through two links, and he could name both of them.

(●) c. 95 AD: The prophesying daughters of Philip had settled in his own city, and what they told him went into his book. + Luke records a stop Paul made on his last journey to Jerusalem: "On the next day we departed and came to Caesarea, and we entered the house of Philip the evangelist, who was one of the seven, and stayed with him. He had four unmarried daughters, who prophesied" (Acts 21:8–9). The seven are the men appointed in Acts 6 to see to the daily distribution of food, Stephen among them. Asia remembered that family as its own. Polycrates, bishop of Ephesus at the end of the second century, listed the great Christian graves of the province in a letter to Rome and named "Philip, one of the twelve apostles, who sleeps in Hierapolis, and his two aged virgin daughters, and another daughter who lived in the Holy Spirit and now rests at Ephesus." A writer named Proclus, quoted by Eusebius from a book of debates, put it almost the same way, though he counted differently: four prophetesses, the daughters of Philip, at Hierapolis, with their tomb and their father’s. The title is the one wrinkle. Luke calls him Philip the evangelist and one of the seven; Asia called him one of the Twelve. The simplest reading, and the usual one, is that these are the same man under a grander title, and that the family Papias could visit in his own town was the family of Acts 21. Eusebius says Papias was their contemporary and heard a marvel from them: that in his own time a man had been raised from the dead. He reports a second story too, about Justus, surnamed Barsabbas, the man who stood for the vacant apostleship and lost the lot to Matthias (Acts 1:23). Justus, Papias had been told, drank a deadly poison and came to no harm. Whether these stories are true is a question no one can now settle. What they show beyond doubt, though, is the kind of source Papias trusted: a person in the room, speaking. As for when he sat down with Philip’s daughters, nothing in the record dates the conversation at all. The figure of about 95 is a convention and nothing more, set in the stretch of years when women old enough to have kept house in Caesarea while Paul was a guest could still have been alive to answer a question. The town itself has not quite finished giving up its evidence. In 2011 an Italian excavation under Francesco D’Andria identified a first-century tomb as the burial place of Philip, and it was not where anyone had been looking. It lay outside the octagonal martyrium, the eight-sided memorial church of the kind raised over a martyr’s grave, which generations had assumed held him. The tomb came up instead in a church newly dug out some forty yards off, sitting at its centre, with the pilgrim stairway climbing to its door. No inscription names Philip, so the case rests on the building and the traffic around it, which makes it a strong proposal and not a proof. What is not in doubt is that the hill had been treating that spot as Philip’s grave for a very long time.

(●) c. 100 AD: He was bishop of Hierapolis, and kept company with Polycarp down the road in Smyrna. + Eusebius sets him in a single sentence with the two most famous churchmen of the generation: "And at the same time Papias, bishop of the parish of Hierapolis, became well known, as did also Ignatius, who was chosen bishop of Antioch" (Church History III.36.2), with Polycarp of Smyrna named just before them. The chapter belongs to the reign of Trajan, who ruled from 98 to 117, and that is as close to a date as the office ever gets. No source says when Papias became bishop, who consecrated him, or how long he held the see, which is the old word for a bishop’s chair and for the district that goes with it. Irenaeus, writing about eighty years later, adds the detail that has kept scholars busy ever since: Papias was "a hearer of John and a companion of Polycarp." Smyrna lay a good hundred miles west, down on the Aegean coast at the head of its own long gulf, and Polycarp had listened to John as a young man and would be burned in the Smyrna stadium in his eighties. Two bishops of the same generation, one on the coast and one in the hills, both claiming to have heard the same aged apostle. A bishop of a Phrygian town in the year 100 was not an administrator of anything large. He taught, he presided at the Lord’s Supper, he settled quarrels, he buried people, and he wrote letters. What made this one unusual is that he also kept notes.

(●) c. 110 AD: He published five books explaining the sayings of the Lord, and they are the reason anyone remembers him. + The title was Exposition of the Oracles of the Lord. Both nouns need a word. "Oracles" translates logia, the ordinary Greek for utterances or sayings, the word the New Testament uses for the words God speaks; here it means the sayings of Jesus. An "exposition" is a running commentary: you take the text a phrase at a time and explain what it means, the way a preacher works through a passage on a Sunday morning rather than summarising it. So the five books were a commentary on the words of Jesus, and what made them unlike any other commentary was the material Papias set into them. When a saying needed light, he brought in what he had gathered from the elders: how this Gospel came to be written, what that parable had meant to men who had heard it explained, what the Lord had said about the age to come. Irenaeus, around 180, still knew the work as five books and quotes from the fourth of them. Nothing in the surviving fragments fixes a year. Estimates have run from about 95 to about 130, the later end favoured by an older generation of scholars and the earlier end by much recent work, with somewhere around 110 the common compromise. The honest summary is that the book belongs to the first third of the second century, within living memory of people who had known the apostles, and that the exact decade is not recoverable.

(●) c. 130 AD: He died at a date no one wrote down, and a later chronicler handed him a martyrdom that was not his. + There is no death notice for Papias anywhere in the ancient record. No martyr act, no burial, no successor named in his honour. The figure of about 130 that the handbooks print is not a death date at all. It is simply the latest plausible date for his book, carried over to his life because a man has to stop somewhere. One late source does give him an ending. The Chronicon Paschale, a Greek chronicle compiled in the seventh century, reports a Papias martyred at Pergamum around 163. The trouble is that Pergamum has a famous martyr of roughly that date already: Papylus, who died there with Carpus and Agathonice. Two names a syllable apart, in a list of names, four centuries after the fact. George Salmon, who wrote the article on Papias for Smith and Wace’s Dictionary of Christian Biography, concluded that there is no ground for asserting that Papias lived so late, and that judgment has held. It is a fitting way for him to go out of the record. The man who spent his life running down what people actually said is himself known almost entirely by what other people said about him.

(●) c. 320 AD: Eusebius still had all five books, quoted them at length, and called their author a man of very limited understanding. + Two centuries after Papias put down his pen, Eusebius of Caesarea sat down to write the first history of the church, and he had the five books in front of him. He did not like them. He thought Papias had taken figurative language about the age to come and flattened it into real estate, and he says so: "For he appears to have been of very limited understanding, as one can see from his discourses" (Church History III.39.13). Then, having said it, he copied out the paragraphs anyway: the preface, the list of apostles, the line about the living voice, the whole report on Mark, the sentence on Matthew, the daughters of Philip, the poison, the man raised from the dead. Nearly everything the church now has of Papias was preserved by a historian who considered him a fool and was too good a historian to leave him out. Eusebius even concedes, in the same paragraph as the insult, that a great many church fathers after Papias held the same millennial view, "urging in their own support the antiquity of the man." After that the trail thins. Writers as late as the ninth and tenth centuries still cite him, though whether any of them held the volumes or were working from earlier quotations is impossible to say. No copy has ever surfaced. Of all the lost books of the early church, this is among the two or three that scholars would most like back.

What He Taught

(T1) Mark wrote Peter’s preaching down accurately, but not in the order things happened. + Anyone who has listened to an old man tell the same story for years knows how it goes. He tells it at a funeral one way and at a birthday another way, starting wherever the room needs him to start, and none of the versions is false. But if you wanted a diary out of him you would be disappointed, because he was never keeping one. That is the picture Papias passes on, and he is careful to say it is not his own. The elder said it, and Papias is repeating it. Mark, the elder said, had become Peter’s hermeneutes, his interpreter: the man who turned Peter’s words into the language of the people listening, and perhaps also the man who wrote for him. Mark had not been a follower of Jesus himself and had heard nothing from him directly. What he had was years of hearing Peter preach, and Peter preached to the need in front of him rather than working through a connected life of Christ. So when Mark wrote, he set down what he remembered, accurately but out of sequence. Notice the shape of the report. It is a defense. "Mark committed no error," it insists; his one care was to leave nothing out that he had heard and to state nothing falsely. Somebody, somewhere around the year 100, was already complaining that Mark’s Gospel was disorderly, and the answer given was not that the complaint was wrong but that the disorder was honest. This is the earliest external account of how any Gospel came to be, and it arrives with its sleeves rolled up. It also fits something inside the New Testament itself: Peter, writing from the city he calls Babylon, sends greetings and adds, "and so does Mark, my son" (1 Peter 5:13). Babylon there is Rome, as the early church read it without hesitation, and the two men are together.

(Q) "Mark, having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately, though not in order, whatsoever he remembered of the things said or done by Christ." + Source: Eusebius, Church History III.39.15, quoting Papias (McGiffert translation). The sentence continues: "For he neither heard the Lord nor followed him, but afterward, as I said, he followed Peter, who adapted his teaching to the needs of his hearers, but with no intention of giving a connected account of the Lord’s discourses, so that Mark committed no error while he thus wrote some things as he remembered them. For he was careful of one thing, not to omit any of the things which he had heard, and not to state any of them falsely." Papias introduces the whole passage with the words "This also the presbyter said," so the tradition is at least one step older than his book (T3).

(T2) Matthew put the Lord’s sayings together in the Hebrew tongue, and each man translated them as best he could. + One sentence, fifteen words of Greek, and the library written about it would fill a room. Papias says Matthew composed the logia, the sayings or oracles, "in the Hebrew language," and that everyone then interpreted them as he was able. Take the plain reading first. A tax collector who had followed Jesus wrote up the master’s teaching in the language of Palestine, either Hebrew or the Aramaic that people actually spoke there, and for a while Greek-speaking Christians had to make do with whatever translation they could get. Then the difficulty. The Gospel of Matthew that the church has always had is not a lumpy translation; it is competent Greek, and in the passages it shares with Mark it often reads like Greek built on Greek. So the sentence and the book do not sit together easily, and three honest options have been on the table for a long time. - An earlier collection. Papias is describing something before our Matthew: an Aramaic gathering of sayings, later taken up into the Greek Gospel that kept the apostle’s name. This is the oldest solution and still the most common. - A remark about style, not language. The Greek phrase Hebraidi dialekto can be pressed to mean "in a Hebrew manner," that is, in the arrangement and idiom of Jewish teaching rather than in the Hebrew tongue. Josef Kürzinger argued this at length in the twentieth century. It removes the problem, though most scholars judge that it strains the words. - He was wrong. Papias was reporting what he had been told, some of what he was told was shaky, and this may be a case of it. What survives all three readings is the thing most worth having. By about the year 110 the church was already asking who wrote its books and answering with names, and the name it attached to the first Gospel was Matthew’s. He is an odd choice to invent. A tax collector was a collaborator with Rome and a byword for a crook, the sort of man a congregation would rather forget than claim (Matthew 9:9).

(Q) "So then Matthew wrote the oracles in the Hebrew language, and every one interpreted them as he was able." + Source: Eusebius, Church History III.39.16, quoting Papias (McGiffert translation). Eusebius adds in the same breath that Papias drew on the first letter of John and on the first letter of Peter, and that he told a story about a woman accused of many sins before the Lord, a story Eusebius says was found in the Gospel according to the Hebrews. That last title needs a word: the Gospel according to the Hebrews was a book used by Jewish Christians, and it has not survived, so it is known now only from the quotations writers like Eusebius made of it.

(T3) A living voice is worth more than a book. + You can read the manual, or you can ring up the man who built the machine. Most of us, given the choice and a working phone number, ring the man, because you can ask him a second question and a book will not answer one. That is Papias’ rule, and in the year 100 it was a good deal less eccentric than it sounds now. Books were hand-copied, expensive, and hard to check. The people who had been there were still alive, and a man who wanted to know something could go and ask one of them. Ancient writers said much the same thing about their own trades, and Loveday Alexander has shown how ordinary the preference was: among Greek writers on medicine and craft, ranking the living voice above the written page was a commonplace. Richard Bauckham has built a good deal of his own case on that preface: that the Gospels rest on named eyewitness testimony rather than on anonymous drift. The preface also drops the church’s hardest small puzzle in its lap, and the whole of it turns on one repeated name. Papias names John twice. The first time John stands in a list of apostles, between James and Matthew. The second time he comes after a man called Aristion, outside that list, and is called the elder John. You might reasonably think that a man can be mentioned twice in the same sentence without becoming two men, once among the apostles whose words were reported to Papias and once among the teachers who were still alive and still answering questions. Eusebius pounced on the repetition and concluded there were two men of that name in Asia, and he noted that Ephesus showed two tombs, each called John’s (Church History III.39.5–6). He had a reason to want this. Eusebius was uneasy about the book of Revelation, and a second John gave him somewhere else to put it, as he all but admits in the next sentence. Irenaeus, reading the same preface a century and a half earlier, saw nothing of the kind and called Papias a hearer of John without qualification. Two of the New Testament letters open with exactly the title in dispute: "The elder to the elect lady and her children" (2 John 1:1), "The elder to the beloved Gaius" (3 John 1:1). Whether the writer of those letters is the apostle using a modest title or a second John standing beside him has never been settled, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

(Q) "For I did not think that what was to be gotten from the books would profit me as much as what came from the living and abiding voice." + Source: Eusebius, Church History III.39.4, quoting Papias’ preface (McGiffert translation). The sentence closes his account of how he worked: when a follower of the elders came through Hierapolis, he questioned him about what Andrew, Peter, Philip, Thomas, James, John and Matthew had said, and about what Aristion and the elder John were saying still.

(T4) Christ will reign on this earth, and the ground itself will be made outrageously fruitful. + Here is the strangest thing Papias left behind, and it is worth doing the arithmetic on it. He reported, on the authority of the elders who had heard John, that the Lord used to teach about the coming age like this: vines with ten thousand branches each, and ten thousand twigs on every branch, and ten thousand shoots on every twig, and ten thousand clusters on every shoot, and ten thousand grapes in every cluster. Squeeze one grape and you get twenty-five metretes of wine. A metretes was a liquid measure of roughly nine gallons. So a single grape yields something over two hundred gallons, and the clusters call out to the saints to be picked, each crying that it is the better one and should be taken first. The belief underneath it has a name. Chiliasm, from chilioi, Greek for a thousand, or millennialism in its Latin dress: the conviction that after the resurrection Christ reigns bodily on this earth for a thousand years before the last judgment. It is not a fringe idea and never was. John saw it: "They came to life and reigned with Christ for a thousand years" (Revelation 20:4). Justin Martyr held it, Irenaeus held it, and a great many Christians hold some form of it today. What makes the vine passage odd is not the doctrine but the pedigree. The same image, in almost the same words, appears in a Jewish apocalypse written around Papias’ own lifetime. An apocalypse is a book of visions about the last things, the kind of writing the book of Revelation belongs to, and Jewish authors of those decades produced a good many of them. This one runs: "on each vine there shall be a thousand branches, and each branch shall produce a thousand clusters, and each cluster produce a thousand grapes, and each grape produce a cor of wine" (2 Baruch 29:5, Charles translation). A cor is another of the large liquid measures, so the Jewish writer is heaping up the same impossible abundance with numbers of his own. Whether the saying reached Papias from the Lord through the elders, or reached him from the Jewish hope of his own day and was attached to the Lord on the way, is a question his method gave him no means of deciding.

(Q) "The days will come, in which vines shall grow, each having ten thousand branches, and in each branch ten thousand twigs, and in each true twig ten thousand shoots, and in each one of the shoots ten thousand clusters, and on every one of the clusters ten thousand grapes, and every grape when pressed will give five and twenty metretes of wine." + Source: Irenaeus, Against Heresies V.33.3 (Roberts and Rambaut translation), reporting what the elders who saw John said they had heard from him. Irenaeus names his source in the next paragraph: "these things are borne witness to in writing by Papias, the hearer of John, and a companion of Polycarp, in his fourth book; for there were five books compiled by him." The passage goes on: "And when any one of the saints shall lay hold of a cluster, another shall cry out, 'I am a better cluster, take me; bless the Lord through me.'"

(Q) "But I shall not hesitate also to put down for you along with my interpretations whatsoever things I have at any time learned carefully from the elders and carefully remembered, guaranteeing their truth." + Source: Eusebius, Church History III.39.3, quoting the preface to the Exposition of the Oracles of the Lord (McGiffert translation). He goes on to say what he was not interested in: "For I did not, like the multitude, take pleasure in those that speak much, but in those that teach the truth; not in those that relate strange commandments, but in those that deliver the commandments given by the Lord to faith, and springing from the truth itself." This is the sentence that has kept him in print for nineteen centuries, and it is also the sentence his critics quote against him.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) Irenaeus kept him as a named link in a chain that ran back to the apostles. + Irenaeus became bishop of Lyons in Gaul around 177, and spent his life answering teachers who claimed to possess a secret tradition from Jesus that the ordinary churches had never been given. His reply was always the same and always concrete: name your teachers. The churches can name theirs, and the list is short enough to check. Papias mattered to that argument because he was a name on the list with a date attached. Eusebius quotes Irenaeus calling him "an ancient man who was a hearer of John and a companion of Polycarp," and Irenaeus had himself sat as a boy at the feet of Polycarp, who had sat under John. Four names carry you from Lyons in 180 back to the shore of Galilee, and Papias stands beside Polycarp on the third link. His report that the Gospels were written by particular men doing particular careful work, with their weaknesses admitted, was precisely the kind of testimony Irenaeus wanted on the table: unglamorous, checkable, the opposite of a secret.

(†) Eusebius preserved him by quoting a man he thought was a fool. + There is a lesson in historical method buried in Church History III.39, and it is not the one Eusebius meant to teach. He disapproved of Papias twice over: for the earthly kingdom, which he regarded as a failure to understand figurative language, and for the strange traditions that came with it. He recorded the disapproval in plain words. And then he transcribed the man. The preface, the method, the list of apostles, the living voice, the whole paragraph on Mark, the sentence on Matthew, the daughters of Philip, Justus and the poison. He even points past his own excerpts to the book itself, saying that for the rest of what Papias recorded he refers those who are fond of learning. Every modern discussion of Gospel origins therefore runs through a chapter written by someone trying to explain why its author should not be trusted about anything else. It is worth adding what Eusebius concedes while complaining. Papias’ millennial view spread, he says, because later fathers were impressed by how old the man was, and Irenaeus is named as one of them. A historian who wanted to bury Papias would not have written that sentence.

(†) Modern readers go to him for the oldest answer to the question of where the Gospels came from. + In the nineteenth century, when a school of German critics was dating the Gospels late and treating their traditional authors as pious guesswork, Papias became a battleground. J. B. Lightfoot, the Cambridge scholar and later bishop of Durham, worked through the fragments piece by piece in his Essays on the Work Entitled Supernatural Religion and argued that the early evidence was both earlier and firmer than the critics allowed. The argument has never stopped. Where the question stands now is worth setting out with both sides given their due. Richard Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (2006) treats the preface as the most important surviving window onto how the traditions travelled, and reads Papias as a man doing, in his own idiom, what a careful ancient historian did: going to the eyewitnesses and their hearers by name. Robert Yarbrough and others have pressed the case for dating the work early, near 100, which would put it within reach of people who remembered the apostles. On the other side, plenty of scholars judge the Matthew sentence incompatible with the Gospel the church actually has (T2), and argue that a man who could repeat the story of the swollen Judas is not a witness whose unsupported word settles anything. The measured conclusion is the useful one. Papias does not prove who wrote the Gospels. He proves something narrower and still substantial: that within a few decades of the apostles, in a provincial town with no stake in the argument, Christians were already saying that these books came from named men with traceable connections to Peter and to the Twelve, and were willing to concede awkward things about them, such as a Gospel being out of order.

(†) Where his own rule let him down: the living voice carried legends as faithfully as it carried facts. + The ledger has another column, and Papias himself fills it in. The same practice of writing down what he was told, by people he trusted, gave the church the report on Mark and also gave it this: - The death of Judas. Papias described Judas swollen so grotesquely that he could not pass where a chariot could pass easily, until at last he was crushed by one. Scripture gives two accounts of that death, neither of them this: he hanged himself (Matthew 27:5), and he fell headlong and burst open (Acts 1:18). Papias’ version is a third, and it is the only one that reads like a story told for the horror of it. - The vine. A saying of the Lord about grapes the size of the harvest of a vineyard, which turns out to be circulating in the Jewish literature of his own century (T4). - The marvels. A man raised from the dead and a survived poisoning, both of them at one remove, neither of them checked. It should be said plainly that the millennial hope itself is not the failure. Christians have divided over the thousand years since the second century and divide still, and the position Papias held is held today by people of unquestioned faith. The problem is not the doctrine; it is that he had no way to test a saying, and no apparent wish to find one. He preferred the voice he could hear to the written word he could check, and a voice cannot be laid beside another voice and compared. Luke, a generation before him, had described the other method in his opening sentence: many had already compiled narratives, and he had followed all things closely for some time past in order to write an orderly account "that you may have certainty concerning the things you have been taught" (Luke 1:1–4). In the end the church went Luke’s way. It kept the books, fixed the text, and compared the copies, which is why we can still read Mark and can only read about Papias.