Eusebius describes Papias as saying that someone named Mark wrote down Jesus’s sayings:
ἀλλ᾿ οὐχ ὥσπερ σύνταξιν τῶν κυριακῶν ποιούμενος λογίων
There is a nice parallel Greek-English presentation by Gwatkin:
http://www.katapi.org.uk/EarlyWriters/EarlyCWritersBySource.php?WNo=10
(By coincidence, I own Gwatkin’s copy of Smyth.) Gwatkin’s translation:
“but had no design of giving a connected account of the Lord’s oracles”
My shot at a literal translation would be:
“but not preparing an ordering of the sayings of the lords”
Why is τῶν κυριακῶν plural here? We have a chain of genitives, X of Y of Z, where semantically Y (sayings) should be the only plural. Is there some sort of tendency in this situation to pluralize Z, even when it’s semantically singular?
An early version of the “Mark’s order is messed up” deduction/error. κυριακός is an adjective in agreement with λογίων.
Ah, I see. Thanks!
Sorry, don’t understand what you mean by this.
Eusebius describes Papias here as describing the origin of Mark’s gospel. (Eusebius himself is very clear that it’s a story about Mark the Evangelist). One suspects that the complaint Papias explains away here is exactly the one that others have often noted and complained of (especially Gospel syncretists): The Gospel of Mark does not follow the ordering/arrangement of Matthew/Luke/John.
Now, we can take this story as evidence of another Mark, who also wrote a (sayings) gospel (which we don’t have, and have never had an ounce of direct evidence for), or we can read the story as a plain jane description of Mark’s gospel.
…ἣν περὶ Μάρκου τοῦ τὸ εὐαγγέλιον γεγραφότος ἐκτέθειται διὰ τούτων· „Καὶ τοῦθ’ ὁ πρεσβύτερος ἔλεγεν· Μάρκος μὲν ἑρμηνευτὴς Πέτρου γενόμενος, ὅσα ἐμνημόνευσεν, ἀκριβῶς ἔγραψεν, οὐ μέντοι τάξει, τὰ ὑπὸ τοῦ κυρίου ἢ λεχθέντα ἢ πραχθέντα· οὔτε γὰρ ἤκουσεν τοῦ κυρίου οὔτε παρηκολούθησεν αὐτῷ, ὕστερον δέ, ὡς ἔφην, Πέτρῳ, ὃς πρὸς τὰς χρείας ἐποιεῖτο τὰς διδασκαλίας, ἀλλ’ οὐχ ὥσπερ σύνταξιν τῶν κυριακῶν ποιούμενος λογίων, ὥστε οὐδὲν ἥμαρτεν Μάρκος, οὕτως ἔνια γράψας ὡς ἀπεμνημόνευσεν· ἑνὸς γὰρ ἐποιήσατο πρόνοιαν, τοῦ μηδὲν ὧν ἤκουσεν παραλιπεῖν ἢ ψεύσασθαί τι ἐν αὐτοῖς.“
Personally, everything that Papias is quoted to say about the various gospels (all traditional Christian stuff nowadays: Mark got his Jesus stories from Peter, Matthew was a the Hebrew translator, etc.) strikes me having a post hoc origin, from an age much closer to Eusebius’s own, where an interest in the origin of and concern about differences between the gospels was developing, along with a closer dissection of their contents.