Two separate pieces of evidence, one ancient and one modern, are the whole case for what little can actually be established about who wrote the earliest gospel. The gospel itself names no author anywhere in its text, and the detail some early and later commentators have read as a hidden signature is a single strange verse: at Jesus's arrest, an unnamed young man following him flees naked, leaving his linen garment behind, an episode with no narrative purpose except, on the traditional reading, as the author's own quiet, unclaimed appearance in his own account. The external evidence is a single early testimony: Papias, bishop of Hierapolis in the early second century, as later quoted by the church historian Eusebius, states that Mark, having been Peter's interpreter, wrote down accurately what he remembered of Peter's teaching, though not in order. Modern biblical scholarship treats Papias's testimony as one live possibility rather than settled fact, since it survives only at second hand through Eusebius and reflects that later writer's own interests. What is far more secure, and entirely a modern finding, is Markan priority: nineteenth and twentieth century source-critical scholarship established, from close comparison of shared wording and sequence, that Mark was very likely the earliest gospel written and a direct source for Matthew and Luke, reversing the older assumption that Mark simply abridged Matthew.