John, Papias, Marcion: an Early Anti-Synoptic Reaction

Peter Kirby notes that what is striking in his reconstruction is that it quietly inverts the usual picture of Papias as a slightly naïve proto-catholic harmonizer who “supports” the fourfold gospel collection. If you actually sit with the bits Eusebius quotes and then lay Clement on top of them, you can get almost the opposite: Papias as transmitting a tradition in which Mark is a set of unpublished hypomnēmata, Matthew and Luke are suspect precisely as “gospels with genealogies,” and John and Marcion both represent attempts to solve the problem of those synoptic rewrites.

Start with the literary economy. In the world of Galen and Lucian, there is a sharp conceptual line between hypomnēmata and an ekdosis. Hypomnēmata are notes, aide-mémoires, rough write-ups produced for specific hearers on demand. They are not, in principle, “published openly.” An ekdosis is the public release: the polished book you let escape into the copying ecosystem and then lose control over. Papias’ presbyter says Mark wrote “accurately but not in order,” and excuses the lack of τάξις with the kind of explanation you give for a note-taking transcript of lectures, not a finished bios. He “neither heard the Lord nor followed him,” but later followed Peter, who adapted his teaching “to the needs” of the hearers, “not as an ordered composition of the dominical logia,” so that Mark’s task was essentially to not drop anything and not falsify anything. That is exactly the defense you would expect for an unfinished, utilitarian hypomnēma.

Clement’s fragment as given by Eusebius (HE 6.14) sits perfectly on that. “Those of the gospels having the genealogies were published openly,” προγεγράφθαι in the sense Carlson pressed: written up as public placards, not simply “written earlier.” Mark, by contrast, “had this economy”: while Peter is preaching publicly in Rome, many present beg Mark to produce a written hypomnēma (γραφῆς ὑπόμνημα) of what they had heard, and once he has done so “he gave it to those who had requested it.” When Peter learns of this, “he neither directly prevented nor encouraged it.” In other words: synoptic-style gospels with genealogies belong on the “publicly issued” side of the line; Mark belongs on the side of private notes that happen to have been circulated among a circle of Roman hearers.

Eusebius’ other Mark story in HE 2.15 is already a soft correction of that tradition. There we suddenly hear, “they say” that Peter, having learned “through a revelation of the Spirit” what had happened, was pleased with the zeal of the men and that the work “obtained the sanction of his authority for the purpose of being used in the churches.” That is not the same story as “he neither directly prevented nor encouraged it.” It is the same scene rewritten so that Mark’s hypomnēma is retroactively canonized by the apostolic imprimatur, almost certainly a later, anonymous development that Eusebius attributes to Clement “and with him Papias” at a very general level of “this is the sort of narrative they give about Mark,” not at the line-by-line level. You can feel the apologetic motive: it is not enough, in the emerging canonical framework, that Mark’s text be tolerated; Peter must explicitly approve it for liturgical reading.

If you push back behind that smoothing, you get a simpler and much more interesting pattern. In Papias’ elder (and in Clement’s “earliest presbyters”) the field looks like this:

Mark = hypomnēma; accurate but “not in order”; not ekdosis; circulated to those who begged for a written record of Peter’s preaching; not explicitly approved but also not forbidden by Peter.

Gospels “with genealogies” = Matthew and Luke; these are the ones that are προγεγράφθαι, openly published; they add at least the genealogies (and, by implication, infancy narratives and other material) to Mark’s rough core.

John = composed “last of all,” in full awareness that “the bodily facts had been made clear in the gospels,” urged by friends and borne by the Spirit, as a “spiritual gospel.”

If that is what Papias was transmitting, then the famous line about Matthew writing the logia in Hebrew, “and each interpreted them as he was able,” no longer looks like a simple endorsement of canonical Matthew. It looks like a grudging acknowledgment that someone (or some community) has taken over Markan/Petrine material and re-arranged it in their own way. Larsen and Letteney’s use of hypomnēmata and τάξις fits here: from Papias’ perspective “Matthew” is the person who has taken the raw Markan notes and imposed his own compositional order on them; “Luke” is another such operation. That is not neutral description; it can easily shade into, “good, but not good enough,” just as Kunigunde suggested Papias’ basic sales pitch was: the written gospels are okay, but if you want the real thing, come to my painstakingly collected living traditions.

Once you see Mark as an unpublished hypomnēma on which others have committed a kind of literary trespass, a lot of the rest of the construction falls into place. Matthew and Luke are, from this vantage point, people treating Mark’s text as open-ended ὑπομνήματα, a pool of anecdotes and sayings you are allowed to rework and augment, rather than as a finished βιβλίον. That is exactly the behavior Larsen and Letteney describe, and it resonates with Galen’s annoyance at people who take his lecture notes—never intended for ekdosis—and circulate them under his name.

An “anti-synoptic” reaction, then, is not an anachronistic dislike of parallel columns in a modern synopsis. It is a second-century judgment that the way Matthew and Luke have used Mark is improper: they have pulled an unfinished, privately circulated text into open publication, padded it with genealogies and infancy tales, and passed the whole thing off as the gospel. Against that background, John and Marcion look less like isolated oddballs and more like two different strategies for fixing the same problem.

John, in Clement’s story, is prompted by friends once “the bodily facts” are “made clear in the gospels.” He is aware of “the gospels” as a set, and he knows the genealogical, infancy-heavy synoptics. His way of correcting them is to write a new ekdosis: to take control of the narrative “from above” with a Logos-Christology, to re-order key events (temple cleansing, passion chronology), to omit the genealogies and births entirely, and to undercut specific Matthean and Lukan scenes (“Do not hold on to me” vs. grasping the feet; Jesus knowing exactly what sort of woman is touching him). He shares with Mark the lack of genealogy and infancy and the sense that order matters, but he is not trying to restore Mark; he is composing a “spiritual gospel” that assumes Mark and reacts to Matthew/Luke by overwriting them.

Marcion, on the other hand, is described—even by his enemies—as a “corrector.” Tertullian’s caricature of him “cutting out” necessary parts of the gospels presupposes exactly the sort of operation just sketched: you start with synoptic texts that contain genealogies and other “corruptions” and you try to peel them away to get back to the unadulterated gospel beneath. If you think with Papias that Mark was accurate but unordered hypomnēmata, not published openly, and with Clement that the genealogical gospels are the ones that have been openly εκδοθέντα, Marcion’s project reads like a radical attempt to undo that unauthorized publication and reconstruct the original. Whether he had direct access to a form of Mark or only to Mark-like material embedded in Matthew/Luke is secondary; conceptually, he is operating out of the same dissatisfaction with the “open” synoptics that animates Papias, and perhaps John.

Even the manuscript statistics often cited near the end play into this: in the early papyri, Mark is strikingly underrepresented compared to Matthew and John. Andrew is right that this does not mean ignorance of Mark; it does, however, point to Mark being copied less often as a stand-alone reading gospel. One way to account for that is simple later preference. Another, more in line with the Papias/Clement picture, is that Mark circulated first in limited, hypomnēma-like fashion and remained, even after canonization, a somewhat odd duck: foundational and cited, but not the go-to book a community asks a scribe to copy when it wants a single gospel text for public reading.

Where this proposal really has teeth is in how it reframes Papias. If Papias is preserving a living sense that Mark is unfinished, not publicly released, “accurate but not in order,” and if Clement’s “gospels with genealogies published openly” really does echo that Papian contrast, then Papias is not a naive defender of “our” Matthew and Luke. He is a witness to a period when those genealogical gospels were precisely the questionable texts, and when at least one circle around “the elder John” regarded them as problematic enough to warrant both a new spiritual gospel and a retreat to oral tradition. In that world, Marcion is not an alien intruder; he is one more participant in the same early struggle over what had been done with Mark.