According to the tradition preserved through Papias (d. circa 165), from "John the presbyter," who is not pretended to have been John the Apostle, the first gospels were those of Mark, the "interpreter" of Peter, who set down in no chronological order the "sayings and doings" of the Lord as he had gathered them from Peter; and of Matthew, who wrote the logia or sayings "in the Hebrew dialect" [369]--presumably Aramaic. This, the earliest written tradition concerning the matter embodied in the gospels, is preserved to us from Papias' lost "Exposition of the Dominical [370] Oracles" (Logiôn kyriakôn) by Eusebius. For his own part, Papias professed to set more store by what he received from Aristion and the Presbyter John and other disciples of the Lord than by anything "out of books." And it chances that he gave out as a Dominical Oracle [371] thus certificated a crude picture of millennial marvels which is actually taken from either the Apocalypse of Baruch, which here imitated the Book of Enoch, or from an older source. [372] Concerning this utterance of the Lord, further, Papias narrated a conversation between Jesus and Judas, in which the latter figures as a freethinker, expressing disbelief in the prediction. Eusebius, scandalized by such testimony, pronounced Papias a man of small understanding. But he is the first Christian authority as to the history of the gospels; and the very fact that he set less store by them than by oral tradition is evidence that he had no reason for thinking them more authoritative than the matter that reached him by word of mouth. It may be that he knew only Greek, and that he could not read for himself the Aramaic logia, concerning which he says that "every one interpreted them for himself as he was able." From the logia and the proto-Mark to the first two synoptics the evolution can only be guessed. No one now claims that we possess the original documents even in translation. Matthew as it stands is admittedly not a translation; and Dr. Conybeare, who idly alleges that I pay no heed to the order of priority of the gospels, and insists chronically on the general priority of Mark, avows that "Mark, the main source of the first and third evangelists, is himself no original writer, but a compiler, who pieces together and edits earlier documents in which his predecessors had written down popular traditions of the miracles and passion of Jesus." [373] And he predicates in one part "four stages of documentary development." [374] How in this state of things the existing Mark can be proved to be the main source of Matthew and Luke is not and cannot be explained. Mark too is admittedly not a translation from Aramaic; but some of his sources may have been.