Papias' Logia: Bach's Matthew Passion

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Bach's Matthew Passion

I have been listening to JS Bach's St. Matthew Passion this week, and what a blessing it's been. Now, this is one of my favorite pieces of music, and have listened to it many times before, but something about hearing it during Easter week...I don't know...helps me "feel it".

The recording I'm listening to is not the one pictured. I made copies(don't tell anyone!) . I think I need to figure out which one to buy, and get a pressing. Some folks think that the one pictured here is the best.

That's one of the things about classical music that I need to bone up on: depending on who is playing it or conducting it, the same piece of music can sound totally different.

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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.