Papias' Logia: Bible Story

Wednesday, September 08, 2010

Bible Story

Ed Clowney -
"There are great stories in the Bible ... but it is possible to know Bible stories, yet miss THE Bible story. The Bible has a story Line. lf we forget the story line ... we cut the heart out of the Bible. Sunday school stories are then tol...d as tamer versions of the Sunday comics, where Samson substitutes as Superman. David...becomes a Hebrew version of Jack the Giant Killer. No, David is not a brave little boy who is't afraid of the big bad giant. he is the Lord's Anointed..God chose David as a king in order to prepare the way for David's Great Son, our Deliverer and Champion..

If we ever tell a particular Bible story without putting it into the Bible story (about Christ), we actually change the meaning of the particular event for us. It becomes a moralistic exhortation to 'try harder' rather than a call to live... by faith in the work of Christ. There is, in the end, only two ways to read the Bible: is it basicallv about me or basicallv about Jesus? In other words. is it basically about what I must do, or basically about what He has done? If I read David and Goliath as basically giving me an example, then the story is really about me. I must summon up the faith and courage to fight the giants in my life. But if I read David and Goliath as basically showing me salvation through Jesus, then the story is really about Him. Until I see that Jesus fought the real giants (sin, law, death) for me, I will never have the courage to be able to fight ordinary giants in life (suffering, disappointment. failure, criticism. hardship). The Bible is not a collection of 'Aesop's Fables", it is not a book of virtues. It is a story about how God saves us."

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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.