Resurrection in Papias (and Quadratus)
(avg. read time: 2–3 mins.)
While we have focused to this point on complete works of the Apostolic Fathers, today we are looking at the work of Papias of Hierapolis, which is only extant in fragments today. He wrote the work he was primarily known for—the five books of Expositions of the Sayings of the Lord—in the early second century, or possibly the late first century. Today, the fragments that are most often noted concern the writing of the Gospels according to Mark and Matthew (cited in Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 3.39.14–16). But there are also extant fragments that concern our focus in this series.
Indeed, the earliest witness to a fragment of his work indirectly connects his writing with the matter of resurrection belief. Irenaeus notes expectations of an eschatological feast according to Jesus’s own teachings (in the Last Supper and Luke 14), which necessitates resurrection in the flesh, rather than a setting in some super-celestial and merely spiritual afterlife (Haer. 5.33.1–2). He also cites support from Isaac’s blessing on Jacob and says that it belongs to the times of the kingdom, when the righteous will reign after they rise from the dead (surgentes a mortuis),1 and creation is renewed (5.33.3). He then cites another saying of Jesus not attested in the Gospels about the superabundance of the new creation. For these various things, he cites Papias as attesting to these things, but he only quotes what Papias says in addition (5.33.4).
Subsequently, both Papias and Irenaeus are linked with such expectations and with the claim that this event occurs in a Millennium before the new creation (that is, both were described as chiliasts; Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 3.39.12; Jerome, Vir. ill. 18; Philip of Side[?], fr. 4.6). In these cases, the Millennium and the feast are said to be “after the resurrection [from the dead]” (μετὰ τὴν ἐκ νεκρῶν ἀνάστασιν in Eusebius; post resurrectionem in Jerome).2 Photius likewise described their beliefs in terms of the kingdom of heaven involving the enjoyment of palpable food (Bibliotheca cod. 232; cf. Maximus the Confessor, On the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy 7).
Eusebius also cites him as a witness of something he is said to have learned from “the apostle” Philip’s daughters of a story of a resurrection of a dead person (νεκροῦ ... ἀνάστασιν) in his time (Hist. eccl. 3.39.9).3 He also attests to a miracle about Justus Barsabbas (Acts 1:23) that he drank deadly poison without effect, which correlates with Mark 16:18. As such, he wrote on both temporary resurrections and the eschatological resurrection.
At this point, I should also mention another Apostolic Father from whom we have only a single fragment. Quadratus of Athens was said by Eusebius to have written a discourse to Hadrian (Hist. eccl. 4.3.1), wherein he claims that some of the people Jesus healed were alive in his own day (4.3.2).4 This group of witnesses may or may not have included Lazarus, but Quadratus provides independent confirmation that some of the people who were healed indeed became witnesses known in the earliest days of the church, although their names may not have always been transmitted with the stories.
While Irenaeus originally wrote in Greek, only parts of a Greek text are extant, and this is not one of those parts. The earliest complete text of his work is in Latin.
The Philip with multiple daughters well-known to Christians was not Philip the apostle, but Philip the evangelist who operated in Galilee, Samaria, and the surrounding areas, rather than in Asia (Acts 6:5; 8; 21:8–9). However, this was not an unusual conflation in the early church. According to church tradition, Philip the apostle did operate in Phrygia, among other places, and was martyred in Hierapolis (where a fourth- or fifth-century church was built around a first-century tomb claimed to be Philip’s: “Strata: Philip’s Tomb Discovered—But Not Where Expected,” BAR 38.1 [2012]: 18).