Apostolic Fatherswriter
Who he was
- A treatise on the Explanation of the Sayings of the Lord in five books, written ca. 130, but now no longer extant.
- The excerpts of Papias, in essence, were commentaries on some of the Lord Christ’s sayings, in a fine presentation of the oral tradition.
- His work is of great value since it contains the oral teaching of the disciples of the Apostles.
- In the few remaining fragments of the work of Papias which Eusebius has preserved for us, evidence can be found to attest the canonicity of the Gospel of St. Mark.
What he wrote
- Eusebius ridiculed him because he defended the belief in the millennium.
- Eusebius said that, “He is responsible for the fact that so many ecclesiastical writers after him held the same opinion relying on his antiquity, as, for instance, Irenaeus and whoever else seems to have held the same ideas.”