THE LOGIA

"This is the Logia, the testament of those who were there, a record of their memories in His presence. These parchments come to us as from the font, from his mouth to your ears, uncorrupted and with no change or amendment. Let no man doubt the source!" - Papias of Hieropolis, p.38

Saint Papias was a Christian pioneer who lived around the turn of the first century, an early bishop who interacted with earwitnesses to Jesus of Nazareth possibly including the apostle John. Papias is thought to have preserved their accounts of the man-god in a written record he called The Logia, a first collection of the words and deeds of Jesus. Likely scribed in his hand on scrolls of papyrus or parchment, Papias' documents would have contained much of what the nineteenth-century German theologians called "the source," the earliest and therefore most accurate record of Jesus.

Only tiny fragments of Papias' writings are known to have survived, but the tantalizing possibility that his written accounts of Jesus might still exist allows for literary conjecture. If such a collection were found, it would represent the earliest Christian data, the least modified and hence clearest reflection of the peasant become Saviour, quite different from and superior to the record we now have (the New Testament). In the new novel He Can See Heaven, J.B. Keats depicts the tumultuous search for Papias' scrolls and the profound ramifications of its discovery.

Really? Could older and more accurate records of Jesus still exist? Was Papias for real?