Everybody who's interested in the authorship of John would like to know what the early church father Papias said about the subject. But alas! We have no unquestionable statement from Papias about who wrote John. Though probably he did say something explicit, this is another illustration of the way that the chances and changes of this mortal life leave us missing a lot of things written in the ancient world. They just don't survive to our time.Here I survey the meager evidence on the question, "What did Papias say about the authorship of the 4th Gospel?" I give one ancient piece of evidence that is pretty direct--that it, it claims to be telling us what Papias actually said. But its reliability is genuinely questionable. And I give two indirect arguments, one (reasonable, but IMO not very strong) from Charles Hill and one (so weak as to be valueless) from Richard Bauckham.
