The testimony of Papias remains an enigma that can only be solved--if ever it is solved--by close and detailed investigations.

I am bound in candour to say that, so far as I can see myself at present, I am inclined to agree with the author of 'Supernatural Religion' against his critics [Endnote 159:1], that the works to which Papias alludes cannot be our present Gospels in their present form.
What amount of significance this may have for the enquiry before us is a further question.

Papias is repeating what he had heard from the Presbyter John, which would seem to take us up to the very fountainhead of evangelical composition.

But such a statement does not preclude the possibility of subsequent changes in the documents to which it refers.

The difficulties and restrictions of local communication must have made it hard for an individual to trace all the phases of literary activity in a society so widely spread as the Christian, even if it had come within the purpose of the writer or his informant to state the whole, and not merely the essential part, of what he knew..