Papias the Gospel Bibliographer?

This article makes the case that Papias read Jesus books within the sociocultural milieu of the early Second Sophistic, and, as such, he read them as discrete units within a bibliographic landscape. The argument is made in two parts. First, the genre of Papias's major work, the Exposition of Dominical Oracles, is defined by its title as an exegetical treatise (ἐξήγησις). This is corroborated by parallels in Galen, Clement of Alexandria, and later Papian reception. Second, Papias is shown to exhibit the following literary habits common in the Second Sophistic: the appeal to the living voice, the use of biographical anecdotes for textual interpretation, the concern for multilingualism, and the envisaging of books within a framework of textual geography. These habits are prevalent in the writings of Aulus Gellius, Galen, and Apuleius, and Papias practices them in the service of interpreting the Jesus tradition drawn from books that would be later known as the gospels. Thus, in the first quarter of the second century, Christians in Asia Minor were already furnished with the grammar with which to describe a twofold, threefold, or even fourfold gospel collection.