Papias' Logia: The Pastor - Eugene Peterson

Monday, April 09, 2012

The Pastor - Eugene Peterson

Just finished reading "The Pastor" by Eugene Peterson, and I give it a 4.5 out of 5. Basically a memoir of his experiences that molded him and made him into a Pastor as a vocation.
He didn't realize that he was being shaped into being a pastor, not having good examples of one growing up in Montana. He goes off to university to become a theologin/scholar, but keeps getting indications that he is called to do more. Looking back, he realizes he was prepared for the work all along. But his models were not pastors. They were his mother, the storyteller, and his father, the butcher.

This gave me some hope, of someday being a pastor. Maybe God is not through with me yet.

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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.