Bulk would not unnaturally be a great consideration with the early Christians.  The larger work would quickly displace the smaller; it would contain all that the smaller contained with additions no less valuable, and would therefore be eagerly sought by the converts, whose object would be rather fulness of information than the best historical attestation.  The original work would be simply lost, absorbed, in the larger works that grew out of it.

This is the kind of presumption that we have for identifying the Logia of Papias with the second ground document of the first Gospel—­the document, that is, which forms the basis of the double synopsis between the first Gospel and the third.  As a hypothesis the identification of these two documents seems to clear up several points.  It gives a ‘local habitation and a name’ to a document, the separate and independent existence of which there is strong reason to suspect, and it explains how the name of St. Matthew came to be placed at the head of the Gospel without involving too great a breach in the continuity of the tradition.  It should be remembered that Papias is not giving his own statement but that of the Presbyter John, which dates back to a time contemporary with the composition of the Gospel.  On the other hand, by the time of Irenaeus, whose early life ran parallel with the closing years of Papias, the title was undoubtedly given to the Gospel in its present form.  It is therefore as difficult to think that the Gospel had no connection with the Apostle whose name it bears, as it is impossible to regard it as entirely his work.  The Logia hypothesis seems to suggest precisely such an intermediate relation as will satisfy both sides of the problem.

There are, however, still difficulties in the way.  When we attempt to reconstruct the ‘collection of discourses’ the task is very far from being an easy one.  We do indeed find certain groups of discourse in the first Gospel—­such as the Sermon on the Mount ch. v-vii, the commission of the Apostles ch. x, a series of parables ch. xiii, of instructions in ch. xviii, invectives against the Pharisees in ch. xxvi, and long eschatological discourses in ch. xxiv and xxv, which seem at once to give a handle to the theory that the Evangelist has incorporated a work consisting specially of discourses into the main body of the Synoptic narrative.  But the appearance of roundness and completeness which these discourses present is deceptive.  If we are to suppose that the form in which the discourses appear in St. Matthew at all nearly represents their original structure, then how is it that the same discourses are found in the third Gospel in such a state of dispersion?  How is it, for instance, that the parallel passages to the Sermon on the Mount are found in St. Luke scattered over chapters vi, xi, xii, xiii, xiv, xvi, with almost every possible inversion and variety of order?  Again, if the Matthaean sections represent a substantive work, how are we to account for the strange intrusion