Papias of Hierapolis

Papias Of Hierapolis

Papias (Greek: Παπίας) (writing in the first third of the 2nd century) was a bishop of the early Church. Eusebius of Caesarea calls him "Bishop of Hierapolis" (modern Pamukkale, Turkey) which is 22 km from Laodicea and near Colossae (see Col. 4:12-13), in the Lycus river valley in Phrygia, Asia Minor, not to be confused with the Hierapolis of Syria.

He wrote extensively about the Christian Oral Tradition. The Interpretations of the Sayings of the Lord (his word for "sayings" is logia) in five books, would have been a prime early authority in the exegesis of the sayings of Jesus, some of which are recorded in the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke, however the book has not survived and is known only through fragments quoted in later writers, with approval in Irenaeus's Against Heresies and later by Eusebius in Ecclesiastical History, the earliest surviving history of the early Church.

Papias describes his way of gathering information:

I will not hesitate to add also for you to my interpretations what I formerly learned with care from the Presbyters and have carefully stored in memory, giving assurance of its truth. For I did not take pleasure as the many do in those who speak much, but in those who teach what is true, nor in those who relate foreign precepts, but in those who relate the precepts which were given by the Lord to the faith and came down from the Truth itself. And also if any follower of the Presbyters happened to come, I would inquire for the sayings of the Presbyters, what Andrew said, or what Peter said, or what Philip or what Thomas or James or what John or Matthew or any other of the Lord's disciples, and for the things which other of the Lord's disciples, and for the things which Aristion and the Presbyter John, the disciples of the Lord, were saying. For I considered that I should not get so much advantage from matter in books as from the voice which yet lives and remains.

Thus Papias reports he heard things that came from an unwritten, oral tradition of the Presbyters, a "sayings" or logia tradition that had been passed from Jesus to such of the apostles and disciples as he mentions in the fragmentary quote. The scholar Helmut Koester considers him the earliest surviving witness of this tradition.

Eusebius held Papias in low esteem, perhaps because of his work's influence in perpetuating, through Irenaeus and others, belief in a millennial reign of Christ upon earth, that would soon usher in a new Golden Age. Eusebius calls Papias 'a man of small mental capacity who mistook the figurative language of apostolic traditions'. Whether this was so to any degree is difficult to judge without the text available. However, Papias's millennialism (according to Anastasius of Sinai, along with Clement of Alexandria and Ammonius he understood the Six Days (Hexaemeron) and the account of Paradise as referring mystically to Christ and His Church) was nearer in spirit to the actual Christianity of the sub-apostolic age, especially in western Anatolia (e.g., Montanism), than Eusebius realized.