Why Are So Many Early Christian Works Lost? (9 of 9)

Papias wrote five books. Hegesippus wrote five books. Between them that is ten volumes by two men writing closer to the apostles than almost anyone else whose name we know.

Not one survives. What we have is a few pages of quotation, mostly copied by a bishop two centuries later who was making a different argument.

Understanding why has a direct effect on how much weight the surviving evidence can carry.

How Were Ancient Books Actually Preserved?

By being copied, repeatedly, by hand, at cost.

There was no storage. A book existed only as long as somebody kept making new copies, and copying was slow and expensive. Papyrus does not last indefinitely in most climates. A work that stopped being copied stopped existing within a few generations, regardless of how good it was.

That single fact drives most of what follows. Survival was not a judgment on quality. It was a function of whether a work kept finding people willing to pay to reproduce it.

Why Did Some Works Stop Being Copied?

Because their audience went away, and audiences went away for ordinary reasons.

A work addressed to a controversy loses its readers when the controversy ends. A work in Greek loses readers in a western church steadily shifting to Latin. A work by an author who came to be regarded as eccentric loses its place on the shelf.

Papias is the clearest case of the last. He expected a literal thousand-year earthly kingdom. As that expectation fell out of favour, so did he. Eusebius calls him a man of very small intelligence and says later writers followed him only because of his antiquity. A man described that way by the most influential historian in the church is not going to be recopied often.

So the loss of Papias is not mysterious. His theology went out of fashion and his books went with it.

Did Persecution Destroy Christian Books?

Yes, and one persecution in particular.

The Diocletianic persecution at the beginning of the fourth century included orders to surrender and burn Christian writings. That produced its own internal crisis afterward, over what to do about clergy who had handed books over, which tells you the confiscations were real and widespread.

How much was permanently lost is impossible to quantify. Copies existed in many places and destruction in one city did not erase a text. But it fell on the generation immediately before Eusebius, and it fell hardest on churches that had the older material.

Which Works Would We Most Want Back?

The list is short and painful.

Papias, for what he actually said about Mark, Matthew, and the John he claimed to have heard from. Hegesippus, for the travel record and the succession lists compiled by someone who went and looked. Quadratus, whose defence of Christianity to the emperor survives in a single sentence. The letter of Polycrates in full rather than as excerpt.

There is a second category too. Marcion’s own writing is entirely lost, so everything known about the first attempt at a Christian canon comes from the people who opposed it. That is a serious limitation on a genuinely important episode, and it should be stated whenever the subject comes up.

How Do Lost Works Affect What We Can Know?

It concentrates it, and concentration is the risk.

When ten books shrink to a page of quotation, what survives is what a later editor found worth extracting. That is a selection made on someone else’s criteria, and it is not random. Eusebius kept the material that bore on apostolic succession, Gospel origins, and orthodoxy, because those were his subjects.

So the second century reaches us pre-sorted. The questions that interested Eusebius are relatively well documented. The questions that did not interest him are dark, and we cannot always tell which is which.

That is the reason for the habit this series keeps returning to. Citing a claim as what Eusebius reports Papias saying, rather than as what Papias said, records the shape of the evidence in the sentence itself.

Does Any of This Threaten the New Testament?

No, and the contrast is the point.

The books that became the New Testament are in the opposite situation from Papias. They were copied constantly, across a wide geography, in many languages, from very early on, which is why they survive in thousands of manuscripts and why textual scholars can compare witnesses at all.

Papias vanished because almost nobody was copying him. The Gospels survive because almost everybody was. The same mechanism explains both outcomes.

What the losses do affect is the history around the New Testament, the second-century record of what happened to the people in it. That record is thin, filtered, and dependent on a small number of channels. Saying so is not conceding anything. It is describing the evidence accurately, which is the only way to use it well.

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

Footnotes2

1. That everything known about Marcion comes from his opponents is a limitation worth repeating in any discussion of the canon. We have his position only as summarised by people arguing against it, which is the least reliable form in which a position can reach us.
2. The internal crisis over clergy who surrendered books during the persecution generated a lasting dispute in North Africa about whether their ministry remained valid. That the question mattered so much is indirect evidence of how seriously the confiscations were taken at the time.

Sources

Eusebius of Caesarea, Ecclesiastical History, especially 3.39 for Papias and the judgment on him, 4.3 for Quadratus, and 8.2 for the order to destroy the scriptures under Diocletian. Free in full at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library.

Where the sourcing stops: the account of copying economics and the reasons works fell out of circulation is standard background in the study of ancient book culture rather than a claim from a single named source. The comparison between the survival of Papias and the survival of the Gospels is my own framing of a common observation.