Papias' Logia: Angels Baseball

Tuesday, April 08, 2008

Angels Baseball

I'm not much of a baseball fan. The season is too long. The game is a little slow. I don't live in a "baseball" town, even though there is a pro team here. I wasn't very good at hitting when I was in Little League. I could go on, but why?

If I had a favorite team it would be the Angels. When I was kid, we would go to a couple of games a year at the "Big A". I even remember going to a "Freeway series" game at Dodger Stadium, and having some guy give me a hard time about wearing an Angels jacket. But back then they were called the California Angels. Then they changed to the Anaheim Angels, which I think was the most appropriate name for them. But then new owners changed the name - I still will not call them the LA Angels, even though I think the owners are doing a pretty good job. They were better as the Anahiem Angels, or even the California Angels.

But this article on USA Today caught my eye:
http://www.usatoday.com/sports/baseball/dailypitch/2008-04-08-angels-streak_N.htm

1 comment:

Nichol said...: I just have 3 words for you...
Lets Go Dodgers!!!; 8:04 PM

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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.