c. 60–130 · 2nd c. · 1 work
Papias of Hierapolis was an Apostolic Father and bishop of Hierapolis in Phrygia, active in the early second century. He is valued chiefly as one of the oldest witnesses to the formation of the Gospel tradition; though little of his work endures, his testimony preserves some of the earliest surviving statements about how the Gospels came to be written.
Almost nothing certain is known of his life. Early tradition describes him as a hearer of John and a companion of Polycarp, a man of an older generation linking the apostolic age to the second century. He devoted himself to gathering oral traditions about the Lord from those who had known the apostles, prizing the living voice above written records.
His one known work, the Exposition of the Sayings of the Lord, was composed in five books and is now lost, surviving only in fragments quoted by later writers such as Eusebius and Irenaeus. These fragments are the source of the famous early notices on the origins of the Gospels of Matthew and Mark.
He is held to have died in the first half of the second century, though no certain account of his death survives. He is venerated as a saint, his memory kept by tradition as a bishop who had heard the apostolic generation.