Who Was Papias and What Did He Write? (2 of 9)

Almost everything traditionally said about how the Gospels of Mark and Matthew came to be traces back to one man, writing in the first half of the second century, whose books no longer exist.

That is a striking amount of weight on a thin beam. It is worth knowing exactly how thin.

Who Was Papias?

A bishop of Hierapolis in Phrygia, in what is now western Turkey, active in the early second century.

He wrote a work in five books, usually called an exposition of the sayings of the Lord. All five are lost. What survives is a set of fragments quoted by later writers, chiefly Irenaeus and Eusebius.

He is early. That is his main asset. He is writing within living memory of people who had known the apostolic generation, and he says so explicitly.

What Did Papias Say About the Gospel of Mark?

That Mark became Peter’s interpreter and wrote down accurately what he remembered of Peter’s preaching, though not in order.

This is the origin of the entire tradition connecting Mark’s Gospel to Peter. Every later writer who repeats it is downstream of Papias.

The qualification about order is part of the original claim, not a later concession, and it has shaped discussion of Mark’s structure ever since. Papias is not claiming Mark produced a sequenced biography. He is claiming Mark preserved accurate recollections in an arrangement that was not chronological.

The claim also fits something outside itself. First Peter closes with greetings from Babylon, widely understood as code for Rome, and mentions Mark. Tradition and text point at the same arrangement from opposite directions, which is the kind of convergence that gives a tradition weight.

What Did Papias Say About the Gospel of Matthew?

That Matthew collected the oracles, the logia, in the Hebrew dialect.

This one is genuinely murky, and the confidence with which it gets quoted is not warranted.

The traditional reading is that Matthew wrote a Gospel in Hebrew or Aramaic which was later translated into the Greek Matthew we have. The difficulty is that Greek Matthew does not read like a translation. It shows signs of Greek composition, including its handling of Greek sources.

A serious alternative takes logia to mean a collection of sayings rather than a narrative Gospel, which would make Papias a witness to a source behind the Gospel rather than to the Gospel itself. That reading has implications well beyond Matthew, since it would make Papias an early external notice of something like the sayings material standing behind the Synoptic overlap.

What Papias meant is an open question. It has been argued a long time and it has not been settled.

Why Did Papias Prefer the Living Voice to Books?

Because he said he did, and the remark tells you what kind of writer he was.

Papias explains in his preface that he did not take as much pleasure in those who had a great deal to say as in those who taught the truth, and that he preferred what came from a living and abiding voice to what came out of books.

That preference is often read as a charming detail. It is more than that. It means his method was collecting oral report, which is why he is early and vivid and also why he is uneven. He is transmitting what he was told, and he tells you that is what he is doing.

Why Did Eusebius Call Papias Unintelligent?

Because Papias expected a literal thousand-year kingdom on earth and Eusebius did not.

The judgment is theological, not historical. Eusebius describes Papias as a man of very small intelligence, and the reason he gives is the millenarian material, which Eusebius considered a misunderstanding of apostolic teaching passed on to later writers who followed Papias on account of his antiquity.

That is worth registering carefully. Eusebius is our main channel for Papias and he openly disliked him. He preserved the parts he found useful and disparaged the man. A hostile transmitter is not necessarily an inaccurate one, but the selection is not neutral.

Did Papias Know the Apostle John?

Irenaeus says he heard John. Eusebius says he did not, and reads Papias’s own preface against Irenaeus.

The dispute matters more than it looks. Eusebius argues that Papias’s preface distinguishes two figures, the apostle John and a separate John the elder, and that Papias claims to have received material from the second rather than the first.

Whether that reading is right has been debated ever since. What it produced is the John the elder problem, which runs through every discussion of who wrote the Johannine literature. That entire conversation originates in how to read one sentence in a lost book, quoted by a man who disliked its author.

That is the honest state of it. A great deal of later argument stands on a fragment.

Part of a series on the ancient witnesses behind what we know about the early church. See the overview of the witnesses.

Footnotes2

1. The convergence between Papias on Mark and the greeting in 1 Peter 5:13 is the strongest thing the Mark tradition has going for it. Neither depends on the other, and they agree on an arrangement neither had reason to invent.
2. Eusebius's low opinion of Papias is a useful reminder that ancient compilers were not neutral archivists. He kept what served his purposes and told his readers what to think of the man he was keeping. We are reading Papias through an editor who is arguing with him.

Sources

Papias, fragments preserved in Eusebius of Caesarea, Ecclesiastical History 3.39, and in Irenaeus, Against Heresies 5.33. Supports the Mark and Matthew claims, the preference for the living voice, the Eusebian judgment on his intelligence, and the John the elder dispute. Free in full at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Also collected in The Apostolic Fathers.

Where the sourcing stops: the assessment that the logia question remains open is a description of a long-running scholarly conversation rather than a position I am attributing to one scholar. The observation that a hostile transmitter shapes what survives is my own.