And this is what Eusebius makes of the passage: “ Here it is worthy of observation how he twice enumerates the name of John. The former of these he reckons along with Peter and James and Matthew and the rest of the Apostles, plainly indicating the Evan- gelist ; and the other John after an interval he ranks with others outside the number of the Apostles, having put Aristion before him, and he plainly names him ‘an elder (πρεσβύτερον)᾽; so that the truth of their story is hereby demonstrated who have said that two persons in Asia have had the same name, and there are two tombs in Ephesus and each is called John’s to this day.”"! Eusebius had a theological interest in putting this construction on the passage. He disliked the Chiliasm of the Apocalypse, and he was glad to find a second John to whom he could ascribe its authorship. And he has certainly perverted the passage. Papias is here defining the plan of his work. His method was (1) to quote a logion of Jesus, (2) to interpret it, and (3) to illustrate it by any story which he had gleaned from oral tradition. Such stories he derived from two sources. One was their followers’ reports of what they had heard from the lips of “the elders,” i.e., as Papias used the term, the Apostles. These reports he “searched” for suitable illustrations. But he was not wholly dependent on hearsay. Two of the men who had been with Jesus were still alive in the earlier years of Papias—Aristion, not an Elder or Apostle but a disciple of the Lord, and the Elder John; and he enjoyed the advantage of hearing their living voices, and he “would search” their discourses for the material he required. The transition from “had said (etwev)”’ to ‘‘say (λέγουσιν),᾽ though ignored by Eusebius, is significant and explains the double mention of St. John. Papias had derived his knowledge of St. John’s teach- ing from two sources: (1) from the reports of men who had com- panied with him and the other Apostles while they still tarried at Jerusalem, and (2) from his own lips after his settlement at Ephesus, where, Irenzeus says,2 Papias had been one of his “hearers”’. 6 πρεσβύτερος Ἰωάννης must mean “the Apostle John,” since the Apostles have just been called “the Elders”’ (τοῖς πρεσβυτέροις), and it is impossible that the term should bear different meanings within the compass of a single sentence. In his phrase “from the Truth itself (am αὐτῆς τῆς adnfeias)”? Papias echoes 3 John 12, and this renders it more than likely that he called St. John 6
1 Eusebius probably had this story from Dionysius of Alexandria (cf. H.E. vii. 25). It means simply that in the fourth century there were two rival sites for St. John’s burial-place.
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