Papias is primarily of interest to us as the last link in a chain of oral tradition going back to the Apostles, and for the information—difficult as it sometimes is to interpret—which he preserved about Peter and Mark, Matthew, Philip, and the Elder John. We are profoundly thankful for his curiosity and for his belief ‘that things out of the books did not profit me so much as the utterances of a voice which liveth and abideth’, even if some of the oral traditions which he wrote down appear to us legendary, e.g. the report attributed to John, the disciple of the Lord, of the Lord's teaching on the material delights of Paradise, and the account which Papias gives of the death of Judas.