With this agrees also the internal evidence, as it seems to emerge from a comparison of the erroneous tendencies implied by his work, on the one hand, and, on the other, the Epistles of Ignarius and Polycarp, which fall about a.d. 115. The af- finities with Polycarp, whom Irenaeus makes Papias' comrade at one time, are specially strik-
ing—
' Let US therefore so aerre Him [Christ] witii fear and all due reverence, even as He Himself gave injunctions, and the Apostles who brought us the Gospel, and the prophets who pro- claimed beforehand the coming of oar Lord. . . . For every one who shall not confess that Jesus Christ is come in the fle^ is antichrist [cf. 1 Jn 42f.] ; and whosoever shall not confess the testimony of the Cross, is of the devil ; and whosoever shaD per- versely interpret the Oracles of the Lord (u^fMi^-r. fi Tuiyi^iL rn x^iU-S) to his own lusts, and say that there is neither resurrec- tion nor judgment, that man is the firstborn of Satan. Where- fore let us leave behind the vanity of the many [" vain and empty talk and the error of the many," ch. 2] and false teach- ings, and mm unto the message which was deUvered unto us from the beginning. . . .' (chs. 6-7). Here we get the idea of safety in close adherence to the injunctions (i»T»>.a.O of Christ
* Thus he, unlike most others, does not need to deacribe Papias as ' bishop of Hierapolis."
and ffis AposUes, or ' the message which was delivered by them ' from the beginning,' in contrast to ' false teachings ' by which ' the many ' were apt, in love of emptj" talk, to be led into error, especially through perverse interpretations of 'the Oracles of the Lori' The motive of such misinterpretation was Docetic denial of the reality of Christ's human body and of the signifi- cance of bodily seli-conlrol in the Christian, since "there is neither resurrection nor judgment.' This comes out more clearly in Ignatius, for instance in the warning, ' Keep your flesh as a temple of God,' in his letter to Philadelphia, which lay less than 50 miles from Hierapolis, on the main road to the coast. This letter affords marked parallels to the situation im- plied in Papias' preface. Its central idea is that Christ Himself is the Christian's standard, his law of thought and conduct («ar« ;t«rrtu,i6.e», ch. viii. ; cf. ' ha\Tng Christ as law,' x-^-ztituA; , ad Rmn. inscr-X and that all exegesis, even of the Scriptures, is to be tested bj- this criterion. Only Ignatius and Papias apply the supreme test differently. The former appeals straight to the notorious central facts of Christ's life and of Christian experi- ence: 'His CroK and Death and Besnrrection, and the faith that is through Him ' (ch. 8). Papias essa> s the detailed task of supplying a standard exegesis of the Lord's own Great Sa\ 'mgs, in virtue of his ^>ecial contact with authentic Apostolic tradition in Asia. The d&erence turns not only on the fact that the two men represent different types of Christian attitude, but also on their respective local traditions and opportunities ; and it does not point to any real difference in date between their writings.
The milder tone used by Papia< towards the errors in question (wliich are largely similar, as we see from Polycarp, ■vrho is a link between I^atins and Papias), as compared with both Ignatius and Polycarp, is against the norion of a considerably later date for his Exposition. Indeed, it is hard, in the absence of any reference by Eusebius to Papias as engaged, like Ignatitis, in refuting any deadly heresy, to believe that Papias was writing after Ignarius' polemic had sharpened, as it must have done, the Asian Churches' sense of the gravity of Dooetism in Christianity. Its prevalence may, indeed, have led Papia< to lay special emphasis on the realistic aspect of the noillennium — a feature in
I which he was followed by Irenaeus and others, to Eusebius' keen regret. But his attitude to gnosis
I seems less severe than we should expect after A.D.
! 115.*
i 3. Gospels known to Papias. — We have seen that
: Papias knew our Matthew and Mark. Eusebitis teUs us that he also used proof texts from 1 John, probably, e.g., the anri-Docetic 1 Jn 4^ cited by Polycarp as above ; and this certainly suggests knowledge of the Fourth Gospel, of which there
! seem also to be traces in the fragments of Papias' Ex- position as known to us (cf. also Westcott, Canon (1889), p. 71, n. 2). Even the order in which he refers to Apostles by name in his preface is that of Jn 1^^, while his reference to Christ as the Truth,
i and, as such, the Fountainhead of Di\-ine precepts
: (fvToXcu), points the same way. Probably, however, he used the Johannine Gospel only as a secondary sotirce of exegesis for the standard Mattha-an coUecrion of ' the Oracles ' — as, in fact, a ' book.' and so less ' helpful ' than direct oral tradirion. In the Argumentum to Johns Gospel in a 9th cent. MS., we read : ' The Gospel of John was revealed and given to the Churches. . . ., even as Papias of Hierapolis, a dear disciple of John, has related in his five books.' His knowledge of Luke's Gospel is probable both in itself (cf. Lightfoot, Essays on Supernatural Religion, p. 186) and in relation to a seeming knowledge of Acts, sho^vn by his tradi- tional amplification of the end of Judas as given in Ac 1'*'-, which he apparently tried to harmonize with Matthew's account. But no doubt he pre- ferred to cite Mt. where he cotild, as being to him a work of direct Apostolic authorship, while Luke's Gospel was not even, like Mark's, only one remove from an Apostle's ^vitness.