As a very rough approximation, we
may place their birth about A.D. 30, and their death about A.D. 100-110.
(3) Papias is called by Irenaeus a 'companion' of Polycarp, whose life
(as we saw) extended from A.D. 69 to A.D. 155 [150:1]. The word admits a
certain latitude as regards date, though it suggests something
approaching to equality in age. But on the whole the notices affecting
his relations to Polycarp suggest that he was rather the older man of
the two. At all events Eusebius discusses him immediately after Ignatius
and Quadratus and Clement, _i.e._ in connection with the fathers who
flourished in the reign of Trajan or before; while the notice of
Polycarp is deferred till a much later point in the history, where it
occurs in close proximity with Justin Martyr [150:2]. This arrangement
indicates at all events that Eusebius had no knowledge of his having
been martyred at the same time with Polycarp, or indeed of his surviving
to so late a date. Otherwise he would naturally have inserted his
account of him in this place. If it is necessary to put the result of
these incidental notices in any definite form, we may say that Papias
was probably born about A.D. 60-70.

But his work was evidently written at a much later date. He speaks of
his personal intercourse with the elders, as a thing of the remote past
[150:3]. He did not write till false interpretations of the Evangelical
records had had time to increase and multiply. We should probably not be
wrong if we deferred its publication till the years A.D. 130-140, or
even later. Our author places it at least as late as the middle of the
second century [150:4].

The opinions of a Christian writer who lived and wrote at this early
date, and had conversed with these first disciples, are not without
importance, even though his own mental calibre may have been small. But
the speculations of the Tuebingen school have invested them with a
fictitious interest. Was he, or was he not, as these critics affirm, a
Judaic Christian of strongly Ebionite tendencies? The arguments which
have been urged in defence of this position are as follows:--

1. In the first place we are reminded that he was a millennarian. The
Chiliastic teaching of his work is the subject of severe comment with
Eusebius, who accuses him of misinterpreting figurative sayings in the
Apostolic writings and assigning to them a literal sense. This tendency
appears also in the one passage which Irenaeus quotes from