The Date of Papias' Writings

[00:00:00]So far, we have concluded that Papias was indeed referencing the canonical Gospel of Matthew and that he placed it first among the Gospels. This information is helpful in dating Matthew, but just how early does Papias allow us to place Matthew in the timeline? Well, to answer that question, we must determine where Papias himself falls in the timeline. Now, mainstream scholarship sometimes tries to date Papias as late as 135 AD, which although early, would not make his knowledge of Matthew's Gospel early enough to necessarily indicate a first-century date.

[00:00:42]The main argument for dating Papias to 135 AD comes from a statement by the fifth-century Christian historian Philip of Side.

[00:00:52]Philip claims that Papias issued an apologetic to the Roman Emperor Hadrian, wherein he claimed that people who Jesus had raised from the dead were still alive during Hadrian's reign. Now, Hadrian was emperor from 117 AD to 138 AD. So, the assumption is that if Philip is correct, then Papias had to be writing during that time. Of course, there are several problems here. The first is that even if we were to accept Philip's statement at face value, since Hadrian's reign began in 117 AD, Papias could have been writing closer to 117 than to 138.

[00:01:37]There's no reason for assuming that Papias had to be writing towards the end of Hadrian's reign. But second, and much more seriously, as we shall see, there are good reasons in Eusebius for dating Papias's writings much earlier, perhaps as early as the end of the first century.

[00:01:57]Eusebius was writing almost 100 years earlier than Philip of Side after all, and as a general rule, historians prefer earlier testimonies to later ones.

[00:02:08]Lastly, Philip of Side is an extremely unreliable source, and it is plausible that he is depending on Eusebius for his information about Papias, while unfortunately confusing some of Eusebius' statements. As Robert Gundry explains, the only hard evidence in favor of a late date comes in a statement of Philip of Side, who makes Papias refer to the reign of Hadrian.

[00:02:37]But, we have good reasons to distrust Philip's statement. He is notoriously unreliable, and wrote approximately a century later than Eusebius did.

[00:02:48]Comparison of Philip's statement with Eusebius' favors that Philip depended on Eusebius, but garbled the information he got.

[00:02:58]Eusebius mentions a Christian writer named Quadratus, who addressed an apology to Hadrian, the very emperor during whose reign Philip puts Papias' writings. The claim of Quadratus that some of the people Jesus healed and raised from the dead have lived up to his own day sounds something like the claim of Papias to have gotten information about the Lord's commands from the living and a biding voice of the elders and other disciples of the Lord. More strikingly, however, when Philip quotes, the phraseology sounds more like Eusebius' quotations of Quadratus than of Papias. In other words, it looks as though Philip transferred what Quadratus wrote over to Papias.

[00:03:47]Thus, just as Eusebius associates Quadratus with Hadrian's reign, and quotes Quadratus as referring to people raised from the dead by Jesus and still living. So, Philip associates Papias with Hadrian's reign and writes that Papias referred to people raised from the dead by Jesus and still living.

[00:04:09]So, if we place Philip to the side, pun intended, and consider what Eusebius tells us about the time of Papias's writing, we get a date much earlier than 135 AD.

[00:04:22]Eusebius discusses Papias in the third book of his Ecclesiastical History, but this work seems to be limited to the time prior to the close of Emperor Trajan's reign, meaning that Papias's writings would need to be written within that time period. As Robert Yarbrough argues, Eusebius classes Papias with the young Polycarp, Ignatius, and even Clement. That is, with those who were the immediate successors to the apostles.

[00:04:54]Nowhere in book three of Eusebius's history, in which Papias is treated, does he discuss matters later than Trajan's reign. In fact, book four opens with the 12th reign of Trajan. Without question, Papias is viewed as flourishing before 109.

[00:05:14]Yarbrough further points out that Eusebius offers a list of early Christians, seemingly in chronological order, which places Papias after the Apostle John, but prior to Polycarp or Ignatius, suggesting that Papias was writing earlier than either of them. As he explains, Eusebius's Chronicon furnishes a second and related clue for dating Papias. Eusebius places the aged Apostle John, Papias, Polycarp, and Ignatius in that order in the same entry. Next to this entry, Eusebius has, as part of his running table of dates, the year 100. With this entry, he concludes his treatment of the 1st century.

[00:06:04]Unquestionably, Eusebius here links Papias with the Apostle John as a church leader at the close of the 1st century and as a contemporary of Ignatius and the young Polycarp.

[00:06:19]And as a further point, it is noteworthy that neither Irenaeus nor Eusebius ever cite Papias in their criticisms of Gnosticism despite a strong propensity for both of them to do this when prominent church figures spoke out against Gnosticism.

[00:06:37]This suggests that Papias was writing prior to the prominence of Gnosticism during the early and mid-2nd century, suggesting a 1st century date for his writings. Again, Yarborough says, "Another clue in dating Papias is that neither Irenaeus nor Eusebius adduces Papias as an anti-Gnostic witness." Now, when Irenaeus is able to cite earlier authorities, especially biblical writers, against his ideological opponents, he gladly does so. Eusebius's penchant for quoting copious portions of earlier works is well known.

[00:07:16]Yet for all the vehement opposition of these two against the early Gnostics, it appears that neither turns to Papias for support in his arguments. The most obvious explanation for this is that Papias said nothing about the Gnostics whose teachings Irenaeus and Eusebius were trying to refute. That is, Papias wrote far too early for such Gnostics to be of concern. Speaking of Irenaeus, he refers to Papias in his own writings as an ancient man, which doesn't make much sense if Papias were writing in 135, only 40 or 50 years before Irenaeus himself was writing. It makes far better sense if Papias was writing at the end of the 1st century, which would place him 70 to 80 years prior to Irenaeus.

[00:08:10]While still not exactly ancient in the literal sense of the word, Irenaeus routinely uses the term ancient to refer to the apostolic era. And again, this would indicate that he believed that Papias was writing near the time of the apostles, namely in the 1st century.

[00:08:29]All of these considerations push me towards dating Papias's writings to sometime in the late 90s AD or the first few years of the 2nd century at the very latest. As Stephen Carlson says, Irenaeus commended Papias as a hearer of John and a comrade of Polycarp. This puts Papias at the beginning of the 2nd century, and it makes Papias's comments about the writings of Mark and Matthew the earliest external evidence we have for the Gospels. This very antiquity is the main reason for the intense amount of scholarly interest in him. F. David Farnell adds, "If Papias wrote around AD 95 to 110, then the information that he imparts reaches well back into the 1st century and is an invaluable source of information regarding the Gospels."

[00:09:28]To summarize all of that, Philip of Side provides very tenuous grounds for dating Papias's writings as late as 135 AD. By contrast, Eusebius provides far better grounds for thinking that Papias was writing on the cusp of the 2nd century, if not the very end of the 1st. And Eusebius's dating of Papias's writings is indirectly corroborated by Irenaeus's witness.