A few years ago an extensive new study of the early Christian author Papias was published by Stephen Carlson titled Papias of Hierapolis Exposition of Dominical Oracles: The Fragments, Testimonia, and Reception of a Second-Century Commentator (Oxford University Press, 2021). I finally got ahold of a copy and can here attest that it is refreshingly good. I don’t agree with Carlson on every point but he is competent and cautious, and whether you agree with him or not, his scholarship is valuable to the point of essential. Which is what all good scholarship should strive to be. Here I will highlight some of the most noteworthy items in this monograph as relates to questions I explore in my work. But there is a lot more to this book. It is erudite and thorough. Anyone interested in any aspect of Papias and his surviving fragments (including the mistaken ones!) will need to consult it.

Dating Papias

One question everyone wants answered is when Papias lived and wrote, which we have no clear data on. At most we can say it was before Irenaeus (c. 180 AD) as he quotes and refers to him, but how long before no source really says. For example, Irenaeus implies Papias wrote before the death of Polycarp, which would put his publication at least before 155 AD. But we don’t have that information from Papias himself, and Christians were notoriously unreliable in relating the history of their own movement (see How To Fabricate History and the works of Vinzent at al.).

Claims that Papias knew the Apostles (and John in particular) don’t hold up to scrutiny—they appear to be urban legends, the product of telephone games and pious enthusiasms (see Did Polycarp Meet John the Apostle?). It is often assumed he wrote after Mark and Matthew but before Luke and John, but that may be an erroneous inference—he might in fact have been commenting on the entire fourfold Gospel of the Anti-Marcionite edition of the New Testament (see my discussion of Papias in relation to Q Theory and my discussion of the dating of that edition in Three Things to Know about New Testament Manuscripts), which would place his work after 144 AD (if that is when the Marcionite edition came out, and not when Marcion was expelled from the church) or after 138 AD (if that is closer to the time his edition came out), and not the “95–110” AD that over-enthusiastic Christians want his floruit to be, or even the “around 130 AD” that most scholars settle on out of mere compromise.

Carlson notes that “Irenaeus commended Papias as a hearer of John and a comrade of Polycarp” (p. 1) but “the identity of this John has been long disputed” ever since Eusebius cited, as evidence against it being the Apostle, that Papias had denied having met any Apostle in the preface to his five-volume Exposition of Dominical Oracles (after having realized he was too gullible in his trusting Irenaeus on this before: pp. 34–35; on the translation of the title of Papias’s book, see Carlson, pp. 35–40). Eusebius then says Papias met people who “knew” the Apostles, but even that is ambiguous. The English of the ANF edition translates this as “their friends” but that’s not in the Greek. The Greek says those “of knowledge,” which can mean those who “had knowledge of” the Apostles or even just they themselves “were well known” people. The phrase para tôn ekeinois gnôrimôn is ambiguous as to the sense of gnôrimôn, which can mean acquaintance or pupil (though usually only when the teacher is stated in the genitive, and here it is not). But it can also mean simply “those who were famous,” i.e. well-known people, those of renown or good reputation, or those “who knew” about the Apostles (those “in the know,” as in acquainted with their legends, not necessarily with the Apostles themselves).

Eusebius might have been intentionally ambiguous about this, or indeed even intending to preserve the ambiguity of his source, for want of any clarity on the point himself. Because we can see that Eusebius quotes Papias here, who is just as ambiguous. Translating directly and faithfully from the Greek of Papias, he wrote “whenever someone came who closely followed the elders” (εἰ δέ που καὶ παρηκολουθηκώς τις τοῖς πρεσβυτέροις ἔλθοι) “I asked about the elders’ stories” (τοὺς τῶν πρεσnυτέρων ἀνέκρινον λόγους), not “I asked the elders for their stories,” meaning (as Eusebius observed) Papias never met any of these “elders” (much less “the Apostle John”), but rather, he sought hearsay about what they said. The ANF translation renders this as “a follower of the elders,” but scholars have long noted the Greek is ambiguous in what sense they “followed” them.

The word parêkolouthêkôs is the same as in Luke 1:3, where it does not mean direct acquaintance but acquaintance with traditions. I think it is notable that Papias chose to use this word here, not “student” or “acquaintance” or “hearer” or any other word that would clearly have signaled these people he interrogated actually met the elders. Rather, he chose a word that means simply “attended closely, understood, traced accurately,” which could simply mean they did what he did: hunted down legends and tales of the elders, which they are (he believes) faithfully passing on to him. Papias is thus describing not just hearsay, but double or triple hearsay. So we can’t even date him by these remarks. We can’t tell what his chronological distance was from the original Apostles. And notice the telephone game already happening: Papias said parêkolouthêkôs and Eusebius changed that in his own retelling to gnôrimôn, a word still ambiguous but sounding more like acquaintance than the word Papias chose. The legend is growing right before our eyes.

Indeed, after distinguishing John the Apostle from the second century John the Elder, I think Eusebius mistakenly infers Papias said he at least met the latter. But his own quotation of Papias does not say that, and Eusebius himself seems to be aware that he is pushing his evidence too far on the point, claiming Papias “says that he was himself a hearer of Aristion and the presbyter John,” even though he did not say that and in fact said he only talked to people who knew things about them. Hence Eusebius follows that assertion with the qualifying remark, “At least he mentions them frequently by name, and gives their traditions in his writings” so “let it be said that these things are not useless to us,” i.e. Eusebius admits Papias never actually said he met Aristion or John the Elder, but is just assuming he did because he preserves their traditions by name and was (presumably) their contemporary. And we cannot discern whether these guys being “disciples of the disciples” is true, or a lie they told to Papias, or an embellishment Papias spun into existence on his own (the way Irenaeus did). So even this remains a tenuous thread to date by.

That they were, nevertheless, contemporaries of Papias would be implied by Papias referring to them in the present tense, rather than the past tense that he refers to the Apostles and their generation by, suggesting Aristion and the Elder were still around when Papias was collecting his information—or that Papias believed they were. And though the extant text has Papias call these two men “Disciples of the Lord,” he must have been using that term very loosely, as even Eusebius admits neither can have been actual disciples but were from a later generation. I think more likely is what Carlson notes to be possible: that the text may have become corrupted in or before the 4th century. Carlson cites as possibilities (pp. 140–41; cf. p. 167) that Papias originally wrote “who were their disciples,” i.e. of the Apostles previously listed (the word kuriou spuriously replacing toutôn) or “who were disciples of the disciples of the Lord” (the repetition of “disciple” being dropped), both common kinds of transmission error.

So even Eusebius can adduce no evidence Papias knew even those guys, much less the Apostles—just like Irenaeus falsely claims for Polycarp (see my discussion in Why You Should Not Believe the Apostle John Wrote the Last Gospel). Irenaeus is also Eusebius’s only source for the false legend that Papias also sat at the feet of John the Apostle—so you might see a trend here. Ireneaus is prone to telephoning such legends into existence. Likewise when Eusebius says Papias related (not heard) a miraculous story “from the daughters of Philip” again the Greek is vague as to whether this means directly from them, or “from them” as in a tradition said to originate with them. And here we are not shown the actual words of Papias, either, just what Eusebius is interpreting him to have said.

That all appears to be, in fact, a second century legend (Eusebius also finds the tale of these daughters in a late second century episcopal letter full of pious legends). Eusebius believes Papias lived or was born in the time of these legendary daughters (ὡς δὲ κατὰ τοὺς αὐτοὺς ὁ Παπίας γενόμενος), but Eusebius actually thus avoids saying he met them (merely claiming instead that they were contemporaries) and does not actually say Papias himself said they were alive then. And again, we don’t hear any of this from Papias. Similar telephone-gaming occurs in Jerome, who garbles all of this and claims “Irenaeus” was “a man of apostolic times” (Irenaeus was nowhere near apostolic times) who wrote in the late first century (he wrote in the late second century) and was “a disciple of Papias” (in fact, Irenaeus said he was once a student of Polycarp, whom he claims once knew Papias), illustrating how easy it was to compress stages of historical time (pp. 159–60) and suddenly, honest to God, Abraham Lincoln is having a beer with Albert Einstein.

Nevertheless, despite admitting that the claim Papias met the Apostle John is dubious, Carlson still leans almost entirely on that claim to conclude Papias most likely dates from the time of Trajan (98–117 AD). This is even a non sequitur from his own premise, since the sources say Papias became famous after this (p. 137, 149, 173), and so Papias’s book must post-date Trajan, even if this testimony to their timing were believable. And as I just explained, it is not so much. The advantage of a scholar being wrong yet honest about it is that a reader can at once see from what they themselves say that their inference is invalid, from their own stated evidence. That’s the difference between merely being wrong, and being incompetent or an apologist, where the faulty inference gets hidden by misstating or exaggerating the reliability of its premises. Carlson has no good argument for dating Papias so early. And we can tell that from his own presentation of the data. This does mean you need to read works like this critically and not gullibly. But that’s true of every work, of any quality. Here at least he is being straight with you.

A far weaker reason Carlson gives for this conclusion is that we have no mention of Papias discussing the Gospel of John, “therefore” he must predate it (though dating John is even more vexing). But as I’ve noted before, we don’t actually know this. Papias may in fact have originated or related many of the legends Eusebius tells for the authors of all the Gospels, including the Gospel of John. Eusebius tells these stories without attribution, and only happens to quote Papias on Mark and Matthew at the end as an afterthought to add to what he has already said. So we actually can’t tell whether Papias did not also say things about Luke and John. He just happened to be quoted on Mark and Matthew.

It is impossible to prove but also worth noting that the Aristion that Papias got things from is also a leading suspect in authoring the Long Ending of Mark, as originally part of a now-lost commentary on the fourfold Gospel (there is a question of multiple similarly-named persons around the same time: see my discussion in Hitler Homer Bible Christ), which would place Papias around the same time as the fourfold Gospel, and thus with knowledge of it. Indeed, he may have his stories about the Gospel authors, whether directly or indirectly, from that commentary of Aristion, and Eusebius might simply not be attributing those stories because he found them repeated in multiple sources, and only quotes or attributes something when it is unusual, or found in only one author, or the precise wording is important. Carlson frequently admits that material in chapters of Eusebius and Irenaeus could be from Papias, merely unattributed. And we simply can’t rule that out here.

In any case, since we do not have the complete text of Papias and no one says he didn’t also discuss the Gospels of Luke and John, we actually do not have any secure premise that he didn’t. Moreover, even if he didn’t, that does not mean it wasn’t circulating by then (there is no reason he would omnisciently know every book around or even care to comment on them all or even had a story to relate for every one), so we cannot securely date him by such a silence anyway—even if we could prove he was silent on this. And we can’t. So there really is just no way to get an early date for Papias. We can’t really tell when he wrote, other than that it was sometime in the first half of the second century (a common vexation in this field).

Relying on Papias

Carlson is not entirely gullible. When he discusses the only mention of Papias by Irenaeus—where Irenaeus desperately needs to create an authority for his insistence that Jesus really did say there would be grape clusters as big as houses in the new world—Carlson admits “scholars today are rightly skeptical of this attribution to Jesus” (p. 19). In other words, someone is lying. Was it the Apostle John, to whom Irenaeus credits the report? Was it the “elders who saw” John say it, to whom Irenaeus credits its transmission? Or did none of this happen, and someone lied even about being the Apostle John or an elder having heard him? Or is Irenaeus over-enthusiastically “assuming” some source actually heard the Apostle say this?

Or indeed does Irenaeus really mean (regardless of what he explicitly says) that this “John” said it in a work of fan fiction (like some lost Gospel of Acts of John)? Could this really be from, say, a lost section of the Egerton redaction of the Gospel of John? Our redaction of John claims plural authors, likewise in the supporting forgery of 1 John, and only legend had it that they were citing the testimony of this “John.” But that’s not actually stated in the text. So is Irenaeus also simply assuming some now-lost Gospel or Acts of John was written by elders relying on the Apostle John and therefore “John” said all this? We’ve seen how these kinds of telephone games were a fashionable problem in early Christian storytelling.

We’ve seen Irenaeus fabricate this claim for Polycarp and Papias, so we have no reason to believe any of his sources “actually saw John” (at all, much less as saying this weird thing about brobdingnagian grapes). Irenaeus is both a wantonly gullible author and a man of dubious honesty. And odds are, he’s fibbing about his sources actually being second hand. Probably they are just another hearsay tradent like Polycarp and Papias, relaying rumors that they “insist” the Apostle John “said” when in fact there was never any reason to believe that and it never happened. Indeed Carlson also admits “one may question” even Polycarp’s “actual relationship to the apostle John” (p. 20). I’ve shown it’s not credible at all (indeed Polycarp’s Letter to Florinus claiming this is likely another pious forgery of which Christians were so fond then).

A second problem with relying on Papias comes from disentangling what he said from what his reporters said. Carlson devotes a lot of detailed attention to this and comes up with, for example, a plausible case that the infamous death narrative for Judas credited to Papias has been embellished in the telling and that Papias only wrote that “Judas walked around as a great example of impiety, having become so bloated in the flesh that he could not pass where a wagon easily can” (p. 56). Which is already enough to signal Papias’s gullibility. But all the ensuing nonsense stands a chance of not coming from him but later embellishers. I was not aware of this before. One could argue against Carlson on this point (his case is not slam-dunk). But it comes from a survey of new manuscripts and other information you might not find elsewhere, so you have to engage with Carlson’s survey of the evidence. Another example of Carlson finding lost data of interest is when he locates a medieval citation of Papias discoursing on angelology and demonology that you won’t find in the usual collections of fragments, which adds more insight into what kind of book Papias wrote (pp. 56–59), also further illuminating how much of a gullible superstitious weirdo Papias was.

Overall, Carlson does what no one really had properly done before: dig into the actual contexts of fragments and quotations and paraphrases and references to reanalyze their meaning, reliability, and intent. And he doesn’t just make assertions but presents all the best arguments pro and con any conclusion so you can judge his reasoning for yourself. And indeed the result can change how you understand what Papias did or didn’t say. Though the overall outcome is the same: Papias is not a reliable historian but a gullible repeater of rumors and urban legends who had no credible sources for anything he said. And yet his book influenced all subsequent Christian writers and historians, who essentially just believed him on anything they liked, and called him an idiot only when it came to things they didn’t like. But the latter assessment is clearly the correct one: he was not a genius, he was not a critical thinker, he was not a researcher, he was not even really a historian so much as an armchair tabloid reporter. Papias was a victim of methodological gullibility and superstitious fantastical thinking.

Papias is the ancient equivalent of the modern Kent Hovind, Ken Ham, Josh McDowell, or other unreliable Christian fundamentalists: prone to just believing whatever he heard or wants to be true; really questioning, researching, testing, or investigating nothing; and possibly willing to piously fudge or exaggerate. He’s like the Christian plumber who tells you about the pit of hell discovered by Russian miners or the coverup that NASA found a day missing in the global calendar proving Joshua stopped the sun, or that he personally met the Wandering Jew who told him about his conversations with Jesus over a beer. Tall tales like Craig Keener spent two whole volumes gullibly believing just last decade. Or that your average preacher fabricates every Sunday. Relying on Papias for the history of Christianity is like relying on Answers in Genesis for paleology.

But an effect of all this is that Carlson makes a good case for understanding Papias’s Exposition of Dominical Oracles as a commentary on Old Testament and Apocryphal prophecies foretelling the affairs of Jesus, which in turn only occasioned him digressing on such matters as where we hear of those affairs (e.g. the Gospels) or necessary background assumptions (e.g. that Genesis described angels impregnating women to produce the demons Jesus battles thousands of years later) or the fulfillment of prophecy after Jesus (and thus of the sayings and prophecies of Jesus). So he was mining his sources for tales about what the first generation of believers and witnesses said about all those things, because Papias believed urban legends more reliable than textbooks. This is why Papias discoursed on the fate of Judas or the gigantic grapes in the afterlife, linking both to pre-Christian Jewish prophecies and thus explicating the latter through the former, essentially revealing the “secret” Christian meaning of Old Testament passages. Which may alter how you understand what Papias thought he was doing, and what really was in his five lost volumes.

Concluding Remarks

Carlson’s study is the best treatment of all the references to and from Papias yet in print. Thorough, up to date, often insightful, and only occasionally gullible. It is all essential reading even where you might disagree with it, but especially where it’s convincing. Because beyond the points I have already made, Carlson’s study also helps answer diverse questions, such as why Papias’s treatise was not preserved and only barely ever explicitly cited or quoted: he was declared a heretic for his chiliastic theologies, which evidently his five volumes were rife with. This entangled him in the wrong side of resurrection doctrine and soteriology. It was thus not generally desirable to say you were using him as a source (explaining why a lot may be coming from him under generic phrases like “they say” or “it is said”), and naming him occurred only when he was being directly quoted or the merits of something he said challenged or discussed. The heretical nature of his text also disinclined Christian librarians to continue to copy it.

Even though a lot of Papias’s text may have been inoffensive or even useful, the mere fact that it was associated with damnable heresies was sufficient to effectively blacklist it. Which also cast his believed trustworthiness in doubt, but more importantly, no one wanted to be caught “preserving” heretical books even for orthodox reasons—a motive that was not held in much esteem amidst medieval hostility to even a hint of aiding heresy. Magnifying this decision would be the fact that likely a lot of his attempts at interpreting scripture, even when not suspected of heresy, had become unpopular or obsolete, clashing with more fashionable views of the post-Constantinian era. So it became heretical and unpopular. Papias’s book was thus lost, probably already by the 6th century if not earlier. Jerome is the last person to mention it still being extant, and no one after him credibly indicates they saw a copy themselves. All later mentions or even quotations of it were through intermediaries like Eusebius, or even Jerome, who also never used Papias but only replicated what Eusebius said about him and his work.

Carlson’s Papias of Hierapolis Exposition of Dominical Oracles also sports an extensive bibliography, a subject index, an author index, and a scripture and ancient sources index. Combined with his complete survey of all the enumerated and analyzed evidence, this is now the definitive resource for understanding this lost early Christian author, whether to argue or agree with.