Can history really be destroyed?
Would otherwise moral authorities participate in such destruction?
Can we believe there is accuracy in historical documents pertaining to the early Christian church?
This is the story of one man and his efforts to tell the Truth, the Whole Truth and
how his work was lost (deliberately).
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BACKGROUND: The city of Hierapolis was situated near Laodicea and Colossae in the Lycus River valley of Phrygia. Today the city is known as Pamukkale, Turkey. Papias was the bishop during the reign of Emperor Trajan (98–117 CE)
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Among the very earliest followers of The Way (Akolouthontes He Hodos) of Jesus were two distinct branches (competing practices) divided along the lines of—as historically it had always divided—Gentiles and Jews.
Paul’s early converts were primarily Gentiles (Goyim). This branch of Christian community exercised none of the taboos, legal restrictions, or authoritarian dietary caveats which their Jewish counterparts considered ‘normal’ and mandatory. Birds of a feather, as always, flocked into separate ‘togethers’ (brotherhood.)
In Hierapolis (today’s Turkey) of Asia Minor, a preponderance of Jews committed to Jesus accumulated. Their practice was oral transmission of sacred teachings. Word of mouth transmission by the Jewish apostles to their disciples undoubtedly inspired the words of
John 21: 25:
“And there are also many other things which Jesus (Yeshua) did, which if they were written in detail, I suppose that even the world itself would not contain the books that would be written.”
Did you catch the point? “. . . IF THEY WERE WRITTEN . . . “
They were NOT.
The convention of the Jewish Christians was still oral. As a direct consequence of this non-literary habit, details were lost over time. If John 21:25 is not hyperbole, more was lost than preserved!
Enter our hero Papius ( episkopis or ‘bishop’) of Hierapolis.
Papius didn’t have much regard for the writings of the 1st century because what he read did not seem to match the rich details of what he heard first hand.
If he wanted the job done right—he had to do it himself by interviewing those closest in time and proximity to the living Jesus as well as his Apostles (presbyters or Elders.)
Here is his explanation of what he set out to do:
“But I shall not be unwilling to put down, along with my interpretations, whatsoever instructions I received with care at any time from the elders, and stored up with care in my memory, assuring you at the same time of their truth. For I did not, like the multitude, take pleasure in those who spoke much, but in those who taught the truth; nor in those who related strange commandments, but in those who rehearsed the commandments given by the Lord to faith, and proceeding from truth itself. If, then, anyone who had attended on the elders came, I asked minutely after their sayings, –– what Andrew or Peter said, or what was said by Philip, or by Thomas, or by James, or by John, or by Matthew, or by any other of the Lord’s disciples: which things Aristion and the [elder] John, the disciples of the Lord, say. For I imagined that what was to be got from books was not so profitable to me as what came from the living and abiding voice.”
Papias set to work collecting the oral traditions of the apostolic community. He arranged them into a five-volume work called An Exposition of the Sayings of the Master. As the Torah was arranged in Five Volumes, so too did Papias arrange his works.
Apparently, his sources were believers from within the communities who had studied at the feet of the apostles. Whenever these believers in Yeshua (Jesus) were passing through the region of Hierapolis, Papias quizzed them for information, stories, adages, traditions, and (especially) sayings of the Master.
In addition to information gleaned from travelers, Papias may have heard the apostle John firsthand. It is possible that Papias had briefly known the venerable Apostle John near the end of his lifetime.
Philip and two of his daughters had relocated to Hierapolis. Philip’s two daughters were still alive in the days of bishop Papias, and he knew them personally and gathered lore from them. (Acts 21:9 tells us that Philip the evangelist had “four virgin daughters who were prophetesses.” In the book of Acts, Paul and company stayed with them briefly at their home in Caesarea.)
Papias refers to the original generation of the Apostles as “the elders.” (Presbyters)
Does he mention the ‘Apostle’ Paul? No, he does not!
Why not?
Paul did not fit the criteria Papias spelled out because he was seeking the traditions and teachings of those who had known the Master firsthand!
Interestingly, Papias makes special mention of two otherwise unknown disciples of Yeshua (Jesus) who were apparently still alive in his day: Aristion and an apostle known as John the Elder. John the Elder is not John the son of Zebedee, but another disciple with the same first name. Papias himself carefully indicates that he merely heard their teachings second hand from disciples of theirs that traveled to Hierapolis.
As can be seen and deduced, Papius was a diligent, careful, and strict investigator.
We might well ask why this Bishop of Hieropolis held such a distinction between the Gospel written) accounts and the oral versions. When Papias wrote that “what was to be got from books was not so profitable to me as what came from the living and abiding voice,” he was not discrediting the written Gospels. Instead, He was simply saying that the oral tradition was vaster and more meaningful to him because it came with explanations.
You could not ask questions and seek clarification of a book, but you could of a living person.
Papius gives details we cannot acquire anyplace else about authors of the Gospels.
For example, Papias relates that John Mark was the author of the Gospel of Mark, and he tells us about the circumstances in Rome that prompted its writing:
“Mark having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately whatsoever he remembered. It was not, however, in exact order that he related the sayings or deeds of [Messiah]. For he neither heard the Lord nor accompanied Him. But afterward, as I said, he accompanied Peter, who accommodated his instructions to the necessities [of his hearers], but with no intention of giving a regular narrative of the Lord’s sayings. Wherefore Mark made no mistake in thus writing some things as he remembered them. For of one thing he took especial care, not to omit anything he had heard, and not put anything fictitious into the statements.”
Papias attributes the composition of a Hebrew gospel to the disciple Matthew.
He says, “Matthew put together the oracles [of the Master] in the Hebrew language, and each one interpreted them [into Greek] as best he could.”
Papias possessed material that would make a good sequel to the book of Acts. He relates a tale of how a dead man was raised to life in Hierapolis during Philip’s day. He narrates an episode about how the disciple Joseph Barsabbas (Acts 1:23) was once compelled to drink poison but miraculously suffered no ill effect. He preserves tradition and fantastical anecdotes about the traitor Judas and his fate. He passes on otherwise unknown teachings of Yeshua.
The finest example of his work is an intriguing midrash on Genesis 27:28–29 that he purports to be an authentic teaching of Yeshua. Papias captured a wealth of lore about Yeshua, his first followers, and those early communities of Jewish believers not recorded elsewhere.
Why has the five volume investigation of Papius been lost to history?
Remember, his community was Jewish Christianity and not Gentile. The church fathers found little of interest in the thoroughly Jewish work of Papias. Instead, they found teachings and traditions that sounded foreign to their ears and that contradicted church doctrines. Papius’ work sounded too “Jewish.”
Historically and politically, the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. drove a wedge between Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians. The nationalistic rebels in Judaism had brought about the invasion by the Roman armies into Palestine. Gentiles distanced themselves and began publicly marginalizing Jews in every way. This feeling became a big part of early Catholic sentiment.
When the first official Catholic historian, Eusebius wrote his Ecclesiastical History of the Christian church, he was compelled to draw upon much of Papius’ testimony while belittling the man whenever convenient to dismiss teachings the Catholic hierarchy now regarded as unorthodox.
Though he employs some of the traditions he found in Exposition of the Sayings of the Master, he complains that Papias set down:
“… strange parables and instructions of the Savior, and some other things of a more fabulous nature. Amongst these he says that there will be a millennium after the resurrection of the dead, when the personal reign of Christ will be established on this earth.”
Did you catch that?
The official view of the Early Church was that the Thousand Year Reign of Christ was not a literal belief. It was just some strange and fabulous oral tradition passed along by Jews in Asia Minor!
By the age of Eusebius, the belief in a literal, thousand-year reign of the Messiah Yeshua on earth was considered to be Jewish “foolishness.” By then, churchmen had spiritualized and allegorized the prophecies of the messianic era. Most Christians no longer believed in a literal messianic kingdom on earth.
Eusebius was frustrated that Papias interpreted things literally, and accused him of “misunderstanding the apostolic accounts, not perceiving that the things said by them were spoken mystically in figurative language.” Accordingly, Eusebius referred to Papias as “a man of small mental capacity.” This slight was Eusebius’s way of dismissing the material contained in Papias’s five volumes. Papuis works were rich in Jewish tradition and rabbinic methods of exegesis, it appeared to the Gentile Christian Eusebius like gibberish.
The other church leaders viewed the material with equal suspicion. For that reason, the book was not copied and preserved like other writings of the early church fathers.
In fact, any existing copies of Papius’ works may well have been burned as not “upbuilding the faith.”