on which Eusebius lays to his charge; and the value of his
testimony on this point is seriously diminished thereby.

It will have been noticed that in the above extract Papias professes to
derive the traditions of 'the elders,' with which he illustrated his
expositions, from two different sources. He refers _first_, to those
sayings which he had heard from their own lips, and _secondly_, to those
which he had collected at second-hand from their immediate followers.
What class of persons he intends to include under the designation of
'elders' he makes clear by the names which follow. The category would
include not only Apostles like Andrew and Peter, but also other personal
disciples of Christ, such as Aristion and the second John. In other
words, the term with him is a synonyme for the Fathers of the Church in
the first generation. This meaning is entirely accordant with the usage
of the same title elsewhere. Thus Irenaeus employs it to describe the
generation to which Papias himself belonged [145:1]. Thus again, in the
next age, Irenaeus in turn is so designated by Hippolytus [145:2]. And,
when we descend as low as Eusebius, we find him using the term so as to
include even writers later than Irenaeus, who nevertheless, from their
comparative antiquity, were to him and his generation authorities as
regards the traditions and usages of the Church [145:3]. Nor indeed did
Papias himself invent this usage. In the Epistle to the Hebrews for
instance, we read that 'the elders obtained a good report' [145:4];
where the meaning is defined by the list which follows, including Old
Testament worthies from Abel to 'Samuel and the prophets.' Thus this
sense of 'elders' in early Christian writers corresponds very nearly to
our own usage of 'fathers,' when we speak of the Fathers of the Church,
the Fathers of the Reformation, the Pilgrim Fathers, and the like.

Thus employed therefore, the term 'presbyters' or 'elders' denotes not
office, but authority and antiquity [146:1]. It is equivalent to 'the
ancient' or 'primitive worthies' [146:2]. But at its last occurrence in
the extract of Papias, where it is applied to the second John, this is
apparently not the case. Here it seems to be an official title,
designating a member of the order of the presbyterate. Though modern
critics have stumbled over this two-fold sense of the word [Greek:
presbuteros] in the same context, it would create no difficulty to the
contemporaries of Papias, to