Papias’s appeal to the ‘living and lasting voice’ over books

[Extract] If book-learning is the mark of an intellectual, then it may be unsettling to learn that the earliest commentator of the Jesus tradition in five volumes no less, Papias of Hierapolis, claimed that what comes from books is not as beneficial to him as what comes from a “living and lasting voice.” His seemingly anti-intellectual attitude has attracted considerable attention,¹ and even condemnation,² from scholars and theologians. Yet attitudes toward the written word were complex in Greco-Roman antiquity, even among the most educated. In line with scholars such as Heinrich Karpp,³ Loveday Alexander,⁴ and Jaap Mansfeld,⁵ I hold that the best way to make sense of Papias’s statement is to look at how the notion of the “living voice” functioned in antiquity. All of these scholars—and the considerable primary sources they cite—understand the “living voice” to refer to personal, oral instruction from a teacher, which was regarded as superior to mere book learning, and they hold that Papias extended the “living voice” concept to cover oral tradition. My position is somewhat more nuanced: the “living voice” in Papias retains its conventional meaning as direct, personal, oral instruction, and that it is his augmentation of the phrase with “lasting” that enables Papias to broaden its application to oral tradition, both direct and indirect, via respected teachers.