Papias' Logia

Tuesday, March 21, 2006

New post.

I haven't posted here for awhile.

I have read several books since my last post. Let's see, I read:

The White Plague by Frank Herbert - Pretty good. Fiction. A guy loses his family to an IRA bomb, then bioengineers a virus that only kills woman - so that the world can feel his pain. A little slow in parts, but it made me say "UH!" a couple of times.

Spies Among us by Ira Winkler - Pretty good. I had read an account of his getting into an office for penetration testing, and was hoping that the book was going to have alot more stories like that, but it didn't.

I then read Churches That Abuse by Ron Enroth. This book is almost 15 years old, but it seems as fresh today as back in 1992. Recommended reading!

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About my namesake...

Papias wrote in the first half of the second century and was one of the early leaders of the Christian church. Church historian Eusebius calls him the "Bishop of Hierapolis" (modern Pamukkale, Turkey) which is 22 kilometers from Laodicea near Colossae (see Colossians 4:13).

His “Interpretations of the Sayings of the Lord” (his word for "sayings" is "logia") in five books, would have been a prime early authority in the exegesis of the sayings of Jesus. His treatise, however, has utterly disappeared, and is known only through fragments quoted by later writers, with approval by Irenaeus in "Against Heresies", and later with scorn by Eusebius of Caesarea in "Ecclesiastical History."

Eusebius calls Papias "a man of small mental capacity" (Hist. Eccl. 3.39.13), who mistook the figurative language of apostolic traditions. Whether this was so is difficult to judge without the text available; it is thought that perhaps Eusebius objected to Papias' premillenialism (chiliasm), which by the fourth century had been supplanted by the common church doctrine of amillennialism.

It was thought that Papias was "a hearer of John, and companion of Polycarp, a man of old time." According to another tradition, Papias shared in the martyrdom of Polycarp, (c. AD 155). Eusebius, who places him with Clement and Ignatius under the reign of Trajan, suggests that he wrote about AD 115. In all likelihood, he wrote his treatise in the first quarter of the second century. What remains today are only fragments of his Treatise quoted in the writings of Irenaeus and Eusebius.