Papias is one of the early church figures often made out to have been more influential than he actually was, often blamed for originating or popularizing ideas that are opposed by the people doing the blaming. Others will blame Paul, Irenaeus, Eusebius, or whoever else. But Papias is one of the individuals most often brought up. Supposedly, he originated the traditional gospel authorship attributions or is said to have had a major role in popularizing the attributions or the gospels themselves, for example. In addition to being blamed for allegedly originating or popularizing supposedly bad things, he's often dismissed as too unintelligent to be reliable, too discredited by false claims that he made, and so on.
I've written a lot in response to such criticisms of Papias:
whether he was a disciple of John the son of Zebedee,
whether he had that relationship with some other John instead,
Papias' influence on gospel authorship attributions,
his alleged gullibility,
his material on Judas' death, etc. There are many other posts in our archives on such issues, such as the ones included
here, in my collection of links addressing skeptical myths about the church fathers. What I want to do in the remainder of this post is discuss another line of evidence that can be cited against objections like the ones mentioned above.
