3. Lastly; in the Apocalyptic message the pride of wealth is sternly condemned in the Laodicean Church: ‘For that thou sayest I am rich and have gotten me riches and have need of nothing, and knowest not that thou art utterly wretched and miserable and beggarly and blind and naked, I counsel thee to buy gold of me refined with fire, that thou mayest have riches[[144]].’ This proud vaunt receives its best illustration from a recent occurrence at Laodicea, to which allusion has already been made. Only a very few years before this date an earthquake had laid the city in ruins. Yet from this catastrophe she rose again with more than her former splendour. |The vaunt of Laodicea.|This however was not her chief title to respect. While other cities, prostrated by a like visitation, had sought relief from the concessions of the Roman senate or the liberality of the emperor’s purse, it was the glory of Laodicea that she alone neither courted nor obtained assistance, but recovered by her own resources. ‘Nullo a nobis remedio,’ says the Roman historian, ‘propriis opibus revaluit[[145]].’ Thus she had asserted a proud independence, to which neither far-famed metropolitan Ephesus, nor old imperial Sardis, nor her prosperous commercial neighbours, Apamea and Cibyra, could lay claim[[146]]. No one would dispute her boast that she ‘had gotten riches and had need of nothing.’
Pride of intellectual wealth.
But is there not a second and subsidiary idea underlying the Apocalyptic rebuke? The pride of intellectual wealth, we may well suspect, was a temptation at Laodicea hardly less strong than the pride of material resources. When St Paul wrote, the theology of the Gospel and the comprehension of the Church were alike endangered by a spirit of intellectual exclusiveness[[147]] in these cities. He warned them against a vain philosophy, against a show of wisdom, against an intrusive mystic speculation, which vainly puffed up the fleshly mind[[148]]. He tacitly contrasted with this false intellectual wealth ‘the riches of the glory of God’s mystery revealed in Christ[[149]],’ the riches of the full assurance of understanding, the genuine treasures of wisdom and knowledge[[150]]. May not the same contrast be discerned in the language of St John? The Laodiceans boast of their enlightenment, but they are blind, and to cure their blindness they must seek eye-salve from the hands of the great Physician. They vaunt their wealth of knowledge, but they are wretched paupers, and must beg the refined gold of the Gospel to relieve their wants[[151]].
This is the last notice in the Apostolic records relating to the Churches in the valley of the Lycus; but during the succeeding ages the Christian communities of this district play a conspicuous part in the struggles and the development of the Church. |The early disciples settle in proconsular Asia|When after the destruction of Jerusalem St John fixed his abode at Ephesus, it would appear that not a few of the oldest surviving members of the Palestinian Church accompanied him into ‘Asia,’ which henceforward became the head-quarters of Apostolic authority. In this body of emigrants Andrew[[152]] and Philip among the Twelve, Aristion and John the presbyter[[153]] among other personal disciples of the Lord, are especially mentioned.
and especially at Hierapolis.
Among the chief settlements of this Christian dispersion was Hierapolis. This fact explains how these Phrygian Churches assumed a prominence in the ecclesiastical history of the second century, for which we are hardly prepared by their antecedents as they appear in connexion with St Paul, and which they failed to maintain in the history of the later Church.
Here at all events was settled Philip of Bethsaida[[154]], the |Philip the Apostle with his daughters.| early friend and fellow-townsman of St John, and the first Apostle who is recorded to have held communication with the Gentiles[[155]]. Here he died and was buried; and here after his decease lived his two virgin daughters, who survived to a very advanced age and thus handed down to the second century the traditions of the earliest days of the Church. A third daughter, who was married, had settled in Ephesus, where her body rested[[156]]. |Their traditions collected by Papias.|It was from the two daughters who resided at Hierapolis, that Papias heard several stories of the first preachers of the Gospel, which he transmitted to posterity in his work[[157]].
This Papias had conversed not only with the daughters of Philip, but also with at least two personal disciples of the Lord, Aristion and John the presbyter. He made it his business to gather traditions respecting the sayings of the Saviour and His Apostles; and he published a work in five books, entitled An Exposition of the Oracles of the Lord, using the information thus collected to illustrate the discourses, and perhaps the doings, of Christ as recorded in the Gospels[[158]]. Among other stories he related, apparently on the authority of these daughters of Philip, how a certain dead man had been restored to life in his own day, and how Justus Barsabas, who is mentioned in the Acts, had drunk a deadly poison and miraculously escaped from any evil effects[[159]].
Life and teaching of Papias.
If we may judge by his name, Papias was a native of Phrygia, probably of Hierapolis[[160]], of which he afterwards became bishop, and must have grown up to youth or early manhood before the close of the first century. He is said to have suffered martyrdom at Pergamum about the year 165; but there is good reason for distrusting this statement, independently of any chronological difficulty which it involves[[161]]. Otherwise |Account of Eusebius.|he must have lived to a very advanced age. Eusebius, to whom chiefly we owe our information respecting him, was repelled by his millennarian views, and describes him as a man of mean intelligence[[162]], accusing him of misunderstanding the Apostolic sayings respecting the kingdom of Christ and thus interpreting in a material sense expressions which were intended to be mystical and symbolical. This disparaging account, though one-sided, was indeed not altogether undeserved, for his love of the marvellous seems to have overpowered his faculty of discrimination. But the adverse verdict of Eusebius must be corrected by the more sympathetic language of Irenæus[[163]], who possibly may have known him personally, and who certainly must have been well acquainted with his reputation and character.