Revisiting the True Lost Gospel of Peter: Invented Title?

A question I had about the Gospel of Peter is, why was it accredited to Mark's name at all? He was Peter's scribe, and Peter was far more prominent that him. My guess is, based on how Mark is significantly paralleled but not exactly the same with Peter's "rough outline" in Acts, he was named because Mark is the author of that Gospel, and Peter was just the highest source he learned from. Peter did not and would not have styled it that way.

Back in the post revisiting the internal evidence for Peter's influence, I cited how Bart Ehrman pointed out the early church father from around AD 100 said that was true. But Papias had a nasty habit of writing off theological embellishments (Ehrman's examples blew my mind). Perhaps Papias first invented this lie, and then later, the church was honest and gave it the title because of the reasoning above. 

"If all the early church did was assign names to the Gospel documents in order to invest them with greater authority, it seems they would have chosen authors who occupied more significant roles among Jesus' inner circle.

"This point can be illustrated rather vividly using Mark's Gospel as the example. In the Ehrman model, one picks an author to enhance the stature of a work whose real author is unknown. So you can pick anyone to fill in the knowledge gap. In the case of Mark, early in the church Mark was understood to be the author who drew on Peter's preaching. Now let's consider Mark's credentials according to Acts [the great history of the church's earliest origins; verses 15:37-40]. (1) He failed to make it successfully through the first missionary journey and went home to Mama. (2) He caused a rift between Paul and Barnabas before the second missionary journey. These are hardly credentials to enhance a work's credibility. On the other side is Peter, a well-known and highly regarded early apostle. Now you have a choice to select between Mark and Peter an author to enhance the credibility of the work. Whom would you choose? Peter is the natural choice. He has far more credentials to enhance the work. Yet the tradition selects Mark. The tradition must know something to make this choice. The alternative model cannot really explain it."  (1)

So first, this just displaces the problem. Why did Papias create this lie about Mark? Someone wanting to invent bold theology, like Judas being severely punished for betraying Jesus and the blessings from the Lord being unbelievably abundant (2) would probably not come up with this.

Also, this places suspicion on the invention of other Gospels. I am confident that if church theology would falsely title a Gospel with John, they would do the same with Peter. Not only were both in Jesus's inner trio, John was a significant hero besides Peter (Acts 3:4-22). If other traditions were invented, surely they would stick to naming Peter. 

It could be argued here that maybe, say, the early church knew the real Mark was with Peter, and so Papias's invention isn't significantly embarrassing, and someone just invented John. Then, at the time names were being attached to Gospels, no one could tell that the church's stories were legend. I'm not really interested in the plausibility of other non-Christian explanations like that one. I rely on other proof elsewhere, although I think naming Mark invites suspicion toward the claim that the early church lied and invented tradition.

Something else that came to mind was the fact that there are other forged gospels from the first millennium, like under the name Philip, Mary, Nicodemus, and Thomas. Maybe this shows inventors could just invent less credible names. But the obvious response is that this wasn't the early, orthodox church's circumstances. 

Citations:

1. Andreas J. Kostenberger, Darrell L. Bock, and Josh D. Chatraw, Truth in a Culture of Doubt: Engaging Skeptical Challenges to the Bible B&H Publishing Group: Nashville, TN. 2014), 136.

2. Bart Ehrman, Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene: The Followers of Jesus in History and Legend (Oxford University Press: Oxford, NY. 2006), 9-10.