In pagan usage, logion was used interchangeably with chresmos (χρησμός) and other such terms in reference to oracles, the pronouncements of the gods obtained usually through divination.
[5] Papias of Hierapolis composed around AD 100 a work, now lost, entitled Exegesis of the Dominical Logia, which Eusebius quotes as an authority on the origins of the Gospels of Mark and Matthew.
Soon afterwards, a new theory of the Synoptic problem emerged, the two-source hypothesis, positing that the double tradition in Matthew and Luke derived from a lost document containing mostly sayings of Jesus.
Holtzmann's defense of this theory, which has dominated scholarship ever since, seized upon Schleiermacher's thesis and argued that Papias was attesting a Logienquelle (logia-source), which he designated Λ (lambda).
When later scholars abandoned the evidence of Papias as an argument, this hypothetical source came to be more neutrally designated as Q (for Quelle), but the reinterpretation of the word logia already had firmly taken hold in scholarship.
[5][8][9] Modern scholars are divided on what Papias actually meant, especially with regard to the logia he ascribes to Matthew, and what underlying historical facts this testimony alludes to.
Still others hold that whatever lost work Matthew allegedly wrote—whether a collection of sayings, the Gospel according to the Hebrews, or a prototype of canonical Matthew—was composed in Semitic but translated freely into Greek by others.
Later finds shed more light on the work, now identified as the Gospel of Thomas condemned by several Church Fathers, which is a series of sayings attributed to Jesus, many found nowhere else, with no narrative framework.