other · 130 · Hierapolis
Papias was bishop of Hierapolis in Phrygia and, on his own account, a collector. He says he did not think what came out of books would profit him as much as what came from a living and abiding voice, so wherever anyone arrived who had followed the elders he asked what Andrew or Peter or Philip or Thomas or James or John or Matthew had said — and what Aristion and the elder John were saying still, in the present tense. That sentence is the load-bearing one twice over. It is the earliest external statement about the making of a gospel: the elder said Mark, having become Peter's interpreter, wrote down accurately but not in order what he remembered, and Matthew composed the sayings in the Hebrew tongue. And by naming John twice — once among the dead apostles, once among the living elders — it is the origin of the two-Johns problem that this dataset carries as an identity cluster. Eusebius, who preserves him, also calls him a man of very small intelligence, judging him by his literal millennium; that is Eusebius's verdict on Papias's eschatology and not a fact about him. Two events already in this dataset rest on his testimony, mark_gospel and barsabbas_poison, and both of them happened before he was born.
To write down what he had been able to get from people who had heard the elders, before there was no one left to ask.
Five books lost, a handful of quoted paragraphs kept, and the earliest external account anyone has of how the gospels were made.