Papias' Logia: Stedman on Galatians

Saturday, March 15, 2008

Stedman on Galatians

Galatians comes to grips with the question of what real Christian life is like. The answer can be characterized by one word, "liberty." The Christian is called to liberty in Jesus Christ. The cry of this epistle is that Christians might discover the liberty of the sons of God in accordance with all that God has planned for man in the way of freedom and enjoyment. Its aim is freedom of our human spirits to the utmost extent, restrained only as necessary for us to exist in harmony with the design of God. Therefore, this letter has been called the "Bill of Rights of the Christian Life," or the "Magna Carta of Christian Liberty," the "Emancipation Proclamation" from all forms of legalism and bondage in the Christian experience. - Ray Stedman

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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.