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Papias of Hierapolis
The bishop who collected the ' oracles of the Lord' and whose fragments preserve the earliest testimony about the authorship of the Gospels.
Papias was bishop of Hierapolis in Phrygia, in Asia Minor. Irenaeus describes him as “a hearer of John and companion of Polycarp,” though Eusebius, who had reservations about Papias' millenarian views, disputed the reliability of that testimony.
Around AD 130, Papias wrote a five-volume work titled Exposition of the Oracles of the Lord (Logiōn kyriakōn exēgēsis). The work is lost, but fragments survive in quotations by Irenaeus, Eusebius, and others.
The Fragments
The surviving fragments are brief but historically significant. The most famous is the testimony about the Gospels of Mark and Matthew: “Mark, having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately whatsoever he remembered… Matthew collected the oracles in the Hebrew language, and each interpreted them as best he could” (Eusebius, EH 3.39.15–16).
This is the earliest external testimony about the authorship of the first two Gospels. It is not without difficulties — modern scholars have debated what “Hebrew” means here, and whether Papias is referring to the Gospel of Matthew as we have it — but it is a crucial data point.
Papias and the Apostolic Tradition
Papias preferred oral tradition over written sources: “I did not think that I would get so much profit from the contents of books as from the utterances of a living and abiding voice” (Eusebius, EH 3.39.4). This is a striking attitude in a world where the Gospels we're already circulating, and it reminds us that the transition from oral to written authority was gradual.
Papias died around AD 130, traditionally as a martyr. His work was highly regarded in the early church, though it was not ultimately included in the canon.
“ I did not think that I would get so much profit from the contents of books as from the utterances of a living and abiding voice.”
Papias, as quoted in Eusebius, EH 3.39.4Sources
- Papias, Fragments, trans. Michael W. Holmes, in The Apostolic Fathers, 3rd ed. (Baker Academic, 2007).
- Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.39.
- Irenaeus, Against Heresies 5.33.4.
- Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 2nd ed. (Eerdmans, 2017), 12–38.