In this nutshell series on the Apostolic Fathers, I now come to the intriguing, mysterious, and controversial figure of Papias (pronounced:  PAY-pee-us), writing sometime in the early second century.  We don’t have his writings, only quotations of them in later church fathers; but he has become an object of attention because he appears to verify at a very early date that Matthew the tax collector really was the author of the Matthew and Mark, the companion of Peter, really did compose the Gospel of Mark.

Are those claims certain or even probable?  Before addressing the issue, here, in this post, I’ll provide a nutshell overview of Papias himself and his most famous work, excerpted from the Introduction from my book The Apostolic Fathers, vol. 2 (Harvard University Press, 2003).

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Papias is first referred to by Irenaeus, and then by Eusebius, as an important figure in the early Christian movement of the second century (Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. 5.33.4; Eusebius, Eccl. Hist. 3.39).  Tradition holds that he personally knew the disciple John, the son of Zebedee, and that he was a companion of Polycarp (Fragments 1, 3).  Later legend indicates that he in fact was John’s amanuensis, to whom he dictated his Gospel (see Fragments 15, 16).

He was the bishop of Hieropolis in Phyrgia (Asia Minor), presumably when Polycarp was bishop of Smyrna further to the west.  It is impossible to know his exact dates; they are traditionally given as 60-130 CE.  His most famous work, the five-volume Expositions of the Sayings of the Lord, has been plausibly dated anywhere from 110 to 140 CE.

In part the dating depends on the reliability of the reports that he was an eyewitness to John the son of Zebedee, which would make him an adult sometime near the end of the first century.  The surviving fragments of his own work, however, do not indicate that he knew any of the disciples, but only their followers, who related to him the things the apostles had said, including the oral traditions of the sayings of Jesus.  He may well have written his Expositions, then, into the third or fourth decade of the second century.

 

Although this work no longer survives intact, it did prove influential in early proto-orthodox circles of Christianity.   The character, contents, and function of the work are debated still among scholars. Was this a collection of all the teachings of Jesus that Papias could track down from both written and oral sources?   Or was it principally a “commentary” on these teachings?  Did it include a collection of, or a commentary on, his deeds as well?   Could Papias have meant it to supplant the written Gospels already in circulation?

However one answers these questions, it should be clear from the surviving fragments that the book contained the following noteworthy materials: (a) several millenarian sayings of Jesus that discussed in fantastic detail the utopian state that would exist on earth once the Kingdom arrived; (b) references to stories about Jesus known from other sources (e.g., an account similar to the story of the woman taken in adultery, which was later added in a different form to manuscripts of the Fourth Gospel); (c) traditions about the authors of the Gospels in circulation: Mark as the interpreter of Peter; Matthew as the collector of the sayings of Jesus in Hebrew (Aramaic?); (d) legends providing the gory details, not found in the canonical accounts, of the ignominious fate of the betrayer, Judas; and (e) references to miracles wrought by Jesus’ followers after his death.

One of the most striking claims that Papias makes in his work is that when trying to uncover details concerning the life and teachings of Jesus, he much preferred the “living voice” of companions of the apostles to stories “that came out of books” (Fragment 3).   This may embody the view typical among ancient writers (not shared by scholars who study antiquity), that live testimony that can be queried and cross-examined is superior to accounts entombed in writing.

Later authors maintained that Papias exerted (undue) influence on theologians such as Irenaeus, in his teaching that there would be a literal 1000-year reign of Christ, accompanied by a real, tangible, physical utopia here on earth.  Eusebius in particular did not think highly of Papias or his writings, except insofar as he provided a kind of link between the burgeoning orthodox community of believers and the apostles themselves.  But in a rare castigation of one of his own proto-orthodox forebears, Eusebius, perhaps due to Papias’s convictions about the literal earthly millenium, calls him a “man of exceedingly small intelligence” (Eccl. Hist. 3.39).