St. Papias of Hierapolis
The Living Voice
From the surviving fragments of his five books
A hearer of the elders
Editor's note
Papias was bishop of Hierapolis in Phrygia, the same town where, two generations earlier, the Apostle Philip had been crucified. Irenaeus describes him as 'a hearer of John, and a companion of Polycarp,' an old man who had known the men who had known the apostles. He wrote, somewhere between 110 and 130, a five-volume work in Greek under the title Expositions of the Oracles of the Lord. The work is lost, but fragments large and small were preserved by Eusebius and Irenaeus, and through them the Church possesses some of the earliest reflections on the Gospels outside the New Testament.
In the preface to his books Papias explained why he had set himself to collect not only the written accounts but the oral testimony of those who had walked with the apostles. He would inquire, when an elder came to visit, what Andrew had said, or Peter, or Philip, or Thomas, or James, or John, or Matthew, or any other of the Lord's disciples. He preferred, he said, 'a living and abiding voice' to books, because the truth of the matter could be felt only in the company of one who had handled it.
What Matthew and Mark did
Editor's note
Two of the fragments preserved by Eusebius from Papias are the earliest external accounts of the writing of the Gospels of Matthew and Mark. They are short and matter-of-fact, and they have weighed in every patristic and modern discussion of the Gospels since.
Of Mark, Papias reports that the evangelist had been the interpreter of Peter, and that he wrote down accurately, though not in order, the things which Peter remembered of the words and deeds of the Lord, taking care to put nothing in falsely and to omit nothing of what he had heard.
Of Matthew, Papias says only this: that he composed the oracles in the Hebrew tongue, and each one translated them as best he could.
The blessed kingdom
Editor's note
The fifth and last book of the Expositions, Eusebius and Irenaeus tell us, treated of the age to come. Papias preserved, through the elders who had known John, an oral tradition of the Lord's teaching on the abundance of the resurrection life. The fragments are vivid and have been read in different ways: as a literal millenarianism, as a parable in the mode of the prophet Isaiah, or as a piece of Jewish-Christian piety. The Orthodox tradition has not received them dogmatically but keeps them as the witness of one of the earliest hearers.
Papias said, the elders relate, that the days were coming in which vines would grow, each with ten thousand shoots, and on each shoot ten thousand branches, and on each branch ten thousand twigs, and on each twig ten thousand clusters, and on each cluster ten thousand grapes, and each grape, when pressed, would give twenty-five measures of wine. And when one of the saints had laid hold of a cluster, another cluster would cry out, 'I am better, take me, bless the Lord through me.'