Our author speaks of those critics who reject it as 'in very many cases largely influenced by the desire to see in these [Greek: logia] our actual Gospel according to St Matthew' [171:1]. This is true in the same sense in which it is true that those who take opposite views are largely influenced in very many cases by the opposite desire. But such language is only calculated to mislead. By no one is the theory of a collection of discourses more strongly denounced than by Bleek [171:2], who apparently considers that Papias did not here refer to a Greek Gospel at all. 'There is nothing,' he writes, 'in the manner in which Papias expresses himself to justify this supposition; he would certainly have expressed himself as he does, if he meant an historical work like our New Testament Gospels, if he were referring to a writing whose contents were those of our Greek Gospel according to Matthew.' Equally decided too is the language of Hilgenfeld [171:3], who certainly would not be swayed by any bias in this direction.
Indeed this theory is encumbered with the most serious difficulties. In the first place, there is no notice or trace elsewhere of any such 'collection of discourses.' In the next place, all other early writers from Pantænus and Irenæus onwards, who allude to the subject, speak of St Matthew as writing a Gospel, not a mere collection of sayings, in Hebrew. If they derived their information in every case from Papias, it is clear that they found no difficulty in interpreting his language so as to include a narrative: if they did not (as seems more probable, and as our author himself holds [172:1]), then their testimony is all the more important, as of independent witnesses to the existence of a Hebrew St Matthew, which was a narrative, and not a mere collection of discourses.
Nor indeed does the expression itself drive us to any such hypothesis. Hilgenfeld, while applying it to our First Gospel, explains it on grounds which at all events are perfectly tenable. He supposes that Papias mentions only the _sayings_ of Christ, not because St Matthew recorded nothing else, but because he himself was concerned only with these, and St Matthew's Gospel, as distinguished from St Mark's, was the great storehouse of materials for his purpose [172:2]. I do not however think that this is the right explanation. It supposes that only [Greek: logoi] ('discourses' or 'sayings') could be called [Greek: logia] ('oracles'); but usage does not warrant this restriction. Thus we are expressly told that the Scriptures recognized by Ephraem, Patriarch of Antioch (about A.D. 525-545), consisted of 'the Old Testament and the Oracles of the Lord ([Greek: ta kuriaka logia]) and the Preachings of the Apostles' [172:3]. Here we have the very same expression which occurs in Papias; and it is obviously employed as a synonyme for the Gospels. Our author does not mention this close parallel, but he alleges that 'however much the signification [of the expression 'the oracles,' [Greek: ta logia]] became afterwards extended, it was not then at all applied to doings as well as sayings'; and again, that 'there is no linguistic precedent for straining the expression, used at that period, to mean anything beyond a collection of sayings of Jesus which were oracular or divine [173:1].' This objection, if it has any force, must involve one or both of these two assumptions; _first_, that books which were regarded as Scripture could not at this early date be called oracles, unless they were occupied entirely with divine sayings; _secondly_, that the Gospel of St Matthew in particular could not at this time be regarded as Scripture. Both assumptions alike are contradicted by facts.