He's one of the earliest extrabiblical sources who comments on Christianity, he addresses some significant issues, and many people think (probably correctly) that he had met the apostle John. But he's also highly controversial, in a lot of contexts, and there are widespread disagreements about how to interpret him. You can access an archive of our posts about Papias here.
What I want to focus on in this post is a good way to think about Papias in an important context in which he's often brought up, the authorship of the gospels (and related issues, like the origins of the gospels more broadly). He's often treated as if he's an isolated figure in the context of gospel authorship. He'll sometimes be referred to, wrongly, as the only individual who named any gospel authors before Irenaeus did so. (See here for a correction of that mistake.) People will try to undermine his credibility by various means, suggesting that we therefore don't have any reliable sources on gospel authorship in the earliest generations of Christianity, that he doesn't cause much of a problem for the hypothesis of the original anonymity of the gospels, etc. But Papias is connected to other sources in this context:
- He names a predecessor he got at least some of his information on gospel authorship from, a man he refers to as "the elder" (in Eusebius, Church History 3:39:15).
- The reason why people like Eusebius could quote Papias is that he wrote some material that was still extant in later generations. And the best explanation for why he wrote about gospel authorship is that he thought his audience was interested in the subject.
So, although Papias is just one individual, he relied on at least one earlier source on issues of gospel authorship (the elder), and he wrote about gospel authorship for an audience he probably thought was interested in the subject. Interest in and information about the authorship of the gospels (and other matters pertaining to the origins of the gospels) predate Papias and are present in some of Papias' contemporaries, not just Papias. It's helpful to think of him in connection with those other sources, the elder and the audience for whom Papias wrote.
