Papias

early Christian writer and bishop

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History

Papias (flourished 2nd century) was a bishop of Hierapolis, in Phrygia (now in Turkey), and one of the Apostolic Fathers. His work Explanation of the Sayings of the Lord, although extant only in fragments, provides important apostolic oral source accounts of the history of primitive Christianity and of the origins of the Gospels.

According to the 2nd-century theologian St. Irenaeus, Papias had known the Apostle John. The 4th-century church historian Eusebius of Caesarea critically records that Papias derived his material not only from St. John the Apostle but also from John the Presbyter, through whose influence he had infected early patristic theologians with a false Judeo-Greek millenarianism, the apocalyptic teaching that Christ would reappear to transform the world into a 1,000-year era of universal peace, and had implicated Christ in fantastic parables. Eusebius’s antipathy to Papias consequently led him to severely edit the latter’s text and preserve only short excerpts.

Papias’s interpretation of the Gospels was used by Eastern and Western Christian theologians down to the early 4th century.