Page:Dictionary of Christian Biography and Literature (1911).djvu/820

 true that Papias did not use our present Gospels, we believe that he was the first to harmonize them, and to proclaim the principle that no apparent disagreement between them affects their substantial truth. Remembering the solicitude Papias here displays to clear the Gospels from all suspicion of error, and the recognition of inspired authority implied in the title λόγια, we cannot admit the inference which has been drawn from the last sentence of the fragment, that Papias attached little value to the Gospels as compared with the viva voce traditions he could himself attest; and we endorse Lightfoot's explanation, that it was the Gnostic apocryphal writings which Papias found useless in his attempts to illustrate the Gospel narrative accepted by the church.

As we have seen, the extant fragments of Papias do not mention the Gospels of SS. Luke or John by name. Eusebius says, however, that Papias uses testimonies from St. John's first epistle. There is therefore very strong presumption that Papias was acquainted with the Gospel, a presumption strengthened by the fact that the list of the apostles in the fragment of the preface contains names in the order in which they occur in St. John's Gospel, placing Andrew before Peter, and includes some such as Thomas and Philip, who outside that Gospel have little prominence in the Gospel record, and that it gives to our Lord the Johannine title, the Truth. Irenaeus (v. 36) has preserved a fragment containing an express recognition of St. John's Gospel; and though Irenaeus only gives it as a saying of the elders, Lightfoot (Contemp. Rev., u.s.) has given convincing reasons for thinking that Papias is his authority, a conclusion which Harnack accepts as highly probable. An argument prefixed to a Vatican (9th cent.) MS. of St. John's Gospel quotes a saying of Papias about that Gospel and speaks of Papias as having been John's amanuensis. On the latter statement, see Lightfoot, u.s. p. 854; but the evidence seems good enough to induce us to believe that the work of Papias contained some notices of St. John's Gospel which Eusebius has not thought it worth while to mention. Papias belonged to Asia Minor, where the Fourth Gospel according to all tradition was written, and where its authority was earliest recognized; and he is described by Irenaeus as a companion of Polycarp, of whose use of St. John's Gospel we cannot doubt. Eusebius does not mention that Papias used the Apocalypse; but we learn that he did from other trustworthy authorities, and on the subject of Chiliasm Papias held views most distasteful to Eusebius. We learn from Irenaeus (v. 33) that Papias, in his fourth book, told, on the authority of "the Elder" [John], how our Lord had said that "the days will come when there shall be vines having 10,000 stems, and on each stem 10,000 branches, and on each branch 10,000 shoots, and on each shoot 10,000 clusters, and in each cluster 10,000 grapes, and each grape when pressed shall give 25 measures of wine. And when any of the saints shall take hold of a cluster, another shall cry out, I am a better cluster, take me, and bless the Lord through me." The story tells of similar predictions concerning other productions of the earth, and relates how the traitor Judas expressed his unbelief and was rebuked by our Lord. The ultimate original of this story of Papias was a Jewish apocryphal book made known by Ceriani, ''Monumenta Sac. et Profan.'', in 1866. See the Apocalypse of Baruch, c. 29, in Fritzsche, ''Libri Apoc. Vet. Test.'' p. 666. To this, and possibly other similar stories, Eusebius no doubt refers when he says that Papias had related certain strange parables and teachings of the Saviour and other things of a fabulous character. Amongst these Eusebius quotes the doctrine that after the resurrection the kingdom of Christ would be exhibited for a thousand years in a sensible form on. this earth; and he considers that things spoken mystically by the apostles had wrongly been understood literally by Papias, who "was a man of very poor understanding as his writings shew." The common text of Eusebius elsewhere (iii. 26) calls him a very learned man, deeply versed in the Holy Scriptures; but the weight of evidence is against the genuineness of the clause containing this encomium, which probably expresses later church opinion.

Eusebius tells nothing as to Papias's use of St. Paul's Epistles, and, though the silence of Eusebius alone would not go far, Papias may have found no occasion to mention them in a work on the gospel history. In looking for traditions of our Lord's life, Papias would naturally inquire after the testimony of those who had seen Him in the flesh. The very gratuitous inference from the assumed fact that Papias does not quote St. Paul, that he must have been Ebionite and anti-Pauline, is negatived by the fact that, as Eusebius testifies, he used St. Peter's Epistle, a work the teaching of which, as all critics allow, is completely Pauline. If the silence of Eusebius as to the use by Papias of St. John's Gospel and St. Paul's Epistles affords any presumption, it is that Papias gave no indication that his opinion about the undisputed books differed from that which, in the time of Eusebius, was received as unquestioned truth. For Eusebius thought meanly of Papias and, if he had known him to have held wrong opinions about the Canon, would have been likely to have mentioned it in disparagement of his authority in support of Chiliasm.

Eusebius says that Papias tells a story of a woman accused before our Lord of many sins, a story also to be found in the Gospel according to the Hebrews. There is a reasonable probability that this story may be that of the woman taken in adultery, now found in the common text of St. John's Gospel. Eusebius does not say that Papias took this story from the Gospel according to the Hebrews, and the presumption is that Papias gave it as known to him by oral tradition and not from a written source. If so, Papias need have had no direct knowledge of the Gospel according to the Hebrews. Papias has a story about Justus Barsabas having taken a cup of poison without injury. If Papias's copy of St. Mark contained the disputed verses at the end, this story might appropriately have been told to illustrate the verse, "If they drink any deadly thing it shall not hurt them," a promise instances of the fulfilment of which are very rare, whether in history or legend. A story of the kind is told