Papias of Hierapolis

Papias was bishop of Hierapolis, a hot-springs city in the Lycus valley of Phrygia, about ten miles from Colossae and roughly the same from Laodicea. He was born around AD 60 and died around 130. Nearly everything he wrote is lost.

What he did was go looking. Papias wrote five books called An Exposition of the Sayings of the Lord, and in the preface he explained his method: whenever anyone came through who had followed the elders, he would ask what Andrew or Peter or Philip or Thomas or James or John or Matthew had said. "For I did not think that what was to be gotten from books would profit me as much as what came from the living and abiding voice."

That is a first-generation historian's instinct, written down while men who had heard the apostles were still alive to be interviewed.

Two of his surviving fragments carry more weight than almost anything else from the second century. On Mark, quoting an elder: Mark became Peter's interpreter and wrote down accurately, though not in order, everything he remembered of what the Lord said and did; he made no mistake, because his one concern was to leave out nothing he had heard and to state nothing falsely. On Matthew: he compiled the sayings in the Hebrew language, and each man translated them as he was able.

Those two reports are the earliest testimony we have about how two of the Gospels came to be written. Every modern discussion of Gospel origins still has to reckon with them.

Irenaeus, who grew up in the same region, calls Papias "a hearer of John and a companion of Polycarp, a man of the old time." Eusebius, writing two centuries later, was less impressed. Papias expected a literal thousand-year reign of Christ on a renewed earth, and Eusebius, who disliked that view, dismissed him as a man of very small intelligence while still copying his words down. Because Eusebius copied them, we have them.

The books themselves vanished sometime in the Middle Ages. A few libraries in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries may still have held a copy; if so, no one has found it. What survives is roughly a dozen quotations scattered through Irenaeus, Eusebius, and later writers.

He is said to have died at Hierapolis around 130, and a late notice calls him a martyr, but that source is centuries removed and its dating does not fit. The honest record is that we do not know how he died.

What Papias leaves is a habit more than a book. He did not want secondhand religion. He wanted to find the men who had been in the room.

Sources: Eusebius, Church History III.39; Irenaeus, Against Heresies V.33; J. B. Lightfoot, Essays on the Work Entitled Supernatural Religion and The Apostolic Fathers; Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. 2.