Apomnēmoneumata

From a defense of Christianity addressed to the emperor Antoninus Pius, written around the year 155.¹

And on the day called Sunday, all who live in cities or in the country gather together to one place, and the memoirs (ἀπομνημονεύματα, apomnēmoneumata) of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read, as long as time permits. Then, when the reader has ceased, the one who presides verbally instructs and exhorts to the imitation (μίμησις, mimēsis) of these good things. Then we all rise together and pray, and when our prayer is ended, bread and wine and water are brought, and the one who presides offers prayers and thanksgivings (εὐχαριστίας, eucharistiai) according to his ability, and the people assent, saying Amen. And there is a distribution to each, and a participation (μετάληψις, metalēpsis) of that over which thanks have been given, and to those who are absent a portion is sent by the deacons.

It is a passage almost everyone reads quickly. There is a Sunday gathering. There is a reading of texts. There is preaching. There is communion. The cadence of the modern church-goer takes over, and the mind moves on.

But notice what the Greek is doing.

The memoirs are not merely books. Apomnēmoneumata is an established ancient term for the genre of remembered teachings of a master, written down by disciples — Xenophon’s Memorabilia of Socrates is the canonical case. Justin is naming a specific literary form whose purpose is to preserve a master’s voice for the formation of those who come after. The text is meant not simply to stand in for the master but to conduct the master’s voice.

The imitation is not what we now mean by imitation. Modern English imitation is external resemblance, performance, copy. The degradation has gone far enough, in our own moment, that we have picked up a new word for the bottom of it — slop — for what imitation becomes when even the work of resemblance has been mechanized. The Greek runs the other direction. Mimēsis is participation through enactment. When Plato in Republic X warns against mimetic exposure, he is not warning that audiences will imitate behavior; he is warning that what is enacted in a performance enters the audience and becomes them.

The audience does not watch. The audience is changed.

Exhortation to the mimēsis of these good things, then, does not mean be inspired by these good examples. It means: become what has just been read aloud.

The thanksgivings — eucharistiai — eventually become the name of the rite. Here the noun has not yet hardened into that name; it still points at the act of giving thanks rather than at its result. And what is distributed is not a sign of the body but a participation — metalēpsis — in what the thanksgiving has consecrated. The portion sent to those who are absent is not a token. It is not a reminder. It is, in the assumptions of the room, the same thing.

What is being described, then, is not a service in the modern sense. It is a coordinated practice in which a written text channels the voice of a teacher whose body is no longer in the room; in which the listeners are made participants in what they hear by means of their imitative enactment of it; in which bread becomes the body of the crucified one; and in which a portion of that body can be carried across a city without ceasing to be it. The room operates on assumptions about how presence travels and how voice transmits and how a community is held together that we do not, by default, hold.

We have to recover what those assumptions were. They were not exotic. They were the working assumptions of an ancient world that was about to invent something new with them.

By the time Justin writes this, in the middle of the second century, the community he is describing has done something no one would have predicted.

It has constituted itself across an empire. It runs from Rome to Antioch, with communities reaching as far west as Gaul, and is in correspondence with itself. It survives episodic persecution. It is taken seriously enough that a philosophically literate convert can write a defense of it to the Roman emperor and expect a hearing — a hundred and twenty years after the death of its founder.

The conditions under which it had had to invent itself are worth marking precisely. The Jerusalem community scattered after the stoning of Stephen, within the first years of the movement. The Temple, the central religious institution of the people from whom this community had come, was destroyed in 70. There was no center to return to. By the time the Pauline letters are circulating in the 50s and 60s, the apostolate is already operating as correspondence — Paul writes to Corinth and Galatia and Rome because he cannot be in those cities. The letter is the workaround for a community that cannot share a room.

And the witnesses were dying. The first generation, those who had walked alongside Jesus and listened to him in the same air, was substantially gone by the end of the century. The opening of the first letter of John is precise about what was being lost: what we have heard, what we have looked at, what our hands have touched. The hand does epistemic work that, by 100, no hand could be asked to do anymore.

The community faced both crises at once. It had no place. It had no living witnesses. It invented the gospel-text as a channel that could do, across time and across space, what bodies in shared rooms had been doing before. The text would be where the teacher’s voice continued to arrive. The text would hold the dispersed community together as a single thing. The text would be the substrate on which formation continued to occur. This is what Justin’s Sunday gathering is. The reading aloud is the channel; the mimēsis is the participation; the meal is the shared body that the room cannot otherwise produce because the body is not in the room.

It worked. Whatever was happening in those gatherings was happening in enough of them, over enough decades, to produce a transimperial network that the empire would eventually have to come to terms with rather than the other way around. The first solution was not foolish.

But the solution carried its own problem inside it.

Authority had always been mediated. There was no point at which it had not been; even Paul in the 50s was working through letters because direct presence was already insufficient. The mediation is not the crisis. The crisis is what happens to mediation as it outgrows itself.

By the second century there were too many texts. Some were in agreement and some were not. Some were claimed to be from apostles and some from disciples of apostles and some from sources no one could identify. The four gospels that would eventually constitute the canon circulated alongside others — texts named after Thomas, Peter, the Hebrews — that came from various points across the period. There were letters attributed to Paul that Paul did not write. There were revelations. There was no agreed mechanism for adjudicating among them, because the mechanism that had worked in the previous generation — go ask someone who heard from someone who was there — was nearly out of links in its chain.

Papias of Hierapolis is, in our sources, the figure most clearly caught in the moment when the older method was failing. He wrote in around 130 a five-volume work called Expositions of the Sayings of the Lord (Λογίων Κυριακῶν Ἐξηγήσεις). The work itself has not survived; we have it only in fragments quoted by later writers. The longest and most important fragment is preserved by Eusebius of Caesarea two centuries later, in the Ecclesiastical History.² Read it slowly:

I shall not hesitate to put down for you, along with my interpretations, whatsoever things I have at any time learned carefully from the elders (πρεσβύτεροι, presbyteroi) and carefully remembered, guaranteeing their truth. For I did not, like the multitude, take pleasure in those who speak much, but in those who teach the truth; not in those who relate strange commandments, but in those who deliver the commandments given by the Lord to faith, and proceeding from truth itself. If, then, any one came who had been a follower of the elders, I questioned him about the discourses of the elders — what Andrew or Peter said, or what Philip or Thomas or James or John or Matthew or any other of the disciples of the Lord said, and what things Aristion and the presbyter John, the disciples of the Lord, say. For I did not think that what was to be gotten from books would profit me as much as what came from the living and abiding voice (ζώσης φωνῆς καὶ μενούσης, zōsēs phōnēs kai menousēs).

The passage is doing several things at once. It is methodological — Papias is explaining how he gathered his material, and the method is not what the books-and-libraries scholarship of his moment would expect. He went to people. He asked them what they had heard. He sat with anyone he could find who had heard anyone who had heard. He preferred this method, explicitly, to consulting the books that were already accumulating around him.

Zōsa phōnē — what speech is when it is breathed by a body that is in the room with the listener.

The phrase that has stuck — the living and abiding voice — is the older grammar’s name for itself. Zōsa phōnē is technical; menousa is what holds, what abides, what continues. Papias is not naive about the difference between living voice and textual record. He is precisely tracking the difference, naming the thing that is being lost, and trying — in 130, very late — to extend its life by another generation through fieldwork.

He is not isolated. He is taken seriously by his contemporaries. Irenaeus, writing later in the second century, cites him as an authority. The five volumes of the Expositions circulate. The struggle Papias is engaged in is not the struggle of an eccentric. It is the struggle of a literate, well-positioned bishop trying to hold open a method that has worked for a hundred years and is about to stop working. The struggle has duration. The system has not yet tipped over.

We are inside the window.

The window closes, and what comes next is worth attending to carefully, because it is a particular shape that authority crises take when they resolve.

The crisis is not resolved by recovering the living voice. The living voice cannot be recovered; the bodies are gone and no amount of fieldwork will produce more of them. What replaces the older method is not a refinement of the older method. It is something else — a new system built out of different primitives. There is the slowly forming canon, which fixes a small set of texts as authoritative and excludes others. There is the regula fidei, the rule of faith, a proto-creedal summary against which any reading can be checked. There is episcopal succession, which traces the personal authority of bishops back through laying-on of hands to apostolic origin. There is the careful cataloguing of heresy, which names the readings the authoritative system is specifically not transmitting. There is the elaborated sacramental life, in which ritual rather than text alone carries the channel of presence. None of these existed in the early-second-century form when Papias was working. By the time Eusebius is writing, in the 320s, they all exist.

And from inside that consolidated system, Papias looks different than he had looked to his contemporaries.

Here is Eusebius, on Papias, two centuries after Papias’s death:³

The same writer also gives other accounts, which he says he received through unwritten tradition: certain strange parables and teachings of the Savior, and some other more mythical things (μυθικώτερα, mythikōtera). Among these he says that there will be a period of some thousand years after the resurrection of the dead, and that the kingdom of Christ will be set up in material form on this very earth. I suppose that he got these ideas from a misinterpretation of the apostolic accounts, not understanding that the things said by them were spoken mystically and in figures (μυστικῶς εἰρημένα ἐν ὑποδείγμασι, mystikōs eirēmena en hypodeigmasi). For he appears to have been of very small intelligence (σφόδρα σμικρὸς ὢν τὸν νοῦν, sphodra smikros ōn ton noun), to judge from his own statements. Yet it was due to him that so many of the Church Fathers after him adopted a like opinion, urging in their own support the antiquity of the man — as, for instance, Irenaeus, and whoever else may have proclaimed similar views.

There are several things to notice. Eusebius is genuinely puzzled. Papias is the cause of so many later writers, including Irenaeus, holding views Eusebius regards as wrong. Eusebius cannot simply ignore him. The explanatory move he makes is to declare that Papias misunderstood the apostolic accounts, not perceiving that the things said by them were spoken mystically and in figures. The new system has produced its own hermeneutic — a way of reading in which the texts yield the right doctrines when read with sufficient interpretive sophistication, and any literal reading that yields wrong doctrines must therefore be the failure of the reader. Papias read literally. The new system reads mystically. The difference is registered as a difference of intelligence.

Sphodra smikros ōn ton noun. Of very small intelligence. The man is not just wrong. He is deficient.

This is doing real structural work. The new system has to explain why someone like Papias — whose method had been the natural method of the previous generation, who was respected by his contemporaries, whose work had been influential enough to shape later writers — is not, in the new terms, a real authority. The explanation that arrives is cognitive deficiency. That is what the records will preserve.

I do not want to pile too much on this single passage. Eusebius is not a villain; he is a careful historian working from inside a consolidated system that he largely did not invent. But the shape of the move he makes is worth marking, because it is a shape that recurs at other moments when one infrastructure of authority replaces another.

The figure caught between, the figure who tried to extend the old method past its natural end, gets retrospectively rewritten as someone who was always a little slow.

The vocabulary of the dismissal updates with the era. Eusebius reaches for sphodra smikros ōn ton noun — small intelligence, slow understanding. We, in our own moment, might reach for his approach didn’t scale. The function is the same. The new system’s confidence in itself depends, partially, on this rewriting. It is not enough that the old method failed. The people who tried to hold it have to be remembered as having failed too, on their own terms, by their own deficiency.

The new system was not, in the end, what Papias would have recognized as a recovery of what he was trying to preserve. It was a different thing. It made different assumptions. It had different working primitives. It produced thirteen centuries of medieval Christendom, the gothic cathedral, the eucharistic theology of Aquinas, the practices of pilgrimage and relic and saint that organized European life until the printing press began, slowly, to undo them. None of that was implied by anything in the Expositions. It was a tipping over into the new, after the old method had failed, and the new took its own shape that no one in 130 could have anticipated.

I have been returning to these passages over the last few months in something between curiosity and unease. Something is happening to our own practices of writing and reading that I do not yet know how to name, and I am not, today, going to try to name it. I notice only that the documents are stranger than they look; that they reward slow reading; that the figures inside them — Justin in his Sunday room, Papias in the doorways of the people he interviewed, Eusebius two centuries on with his careful dismissals — are all doing something that is not quite what the smoothed translations suggest. I notice that they were inside a window they could not see the edges of, and that whatever the new thing was that came after them, it was not the thing they had been trying to preserve. I notice that I find these texts newly difficult to read calmly. I do not know what that means. I am writing it down.