Parrot Polycarp

Thursday, June 3, 2021

Bishop Polycarp of Smyrna was a mere middle man. Polycarp stuck slavishly to Paul. Polycarp demonstrated little to no originality. For the most part, he just parroted whatever the Apostle Paul once said. When he wrote his pastoral epistle to the Church in Philippi, Bishop Polycarp essentially cut and pasted. He could have saved himself a lot of time by simply re-gifting a copy of one of Paul’s old epistles. 

Am I fabricating or exaggerating? If you do not believe me or simply want to see if I am exaggerating a bit, go online to EarlyChristianWritings.com and find the Epistle of Polycarp under the Church Fathers tab. Feel free to let me know what you find there.  

Why do I bother to inform you of this, you ask? Well, because Polycarp’s parroting of Paul demonstrates an extremely high view of Paul’s authority. It shows that Polycarp considered Paul’s writing to be indisputably binding and unquestionably authoritative. Within one generation of their production, Paul’s epistles were considered scripture on par with the Old Testament scripture. Bishop Polycarp considered Paul’s pastoral epistles to be the very Word of God, so he treated them as such. He copied them slavishly and transmitted them exactly.

Safe to say that Polycarp had an MO, a modus operandi. The sacred writ is to be treated as sacred writ. You must stick to it. You quote it. You defer to it. You teach others to do the same. And you must never, ever alter it. It is never to be violated nor compromised. 

Bishop Polycarp must have harped on that point. “You have been entrusted with the Word of Truth, my disciples. Pass it along faithfully and without deviance.” I can imagine Polycarp said something much like that. Alright then, you get it; don’t you? Polycarp was a parrot.

Polycarp’s parroting MO was very probably passed along to his underlings and after-lings (if I may coin a word). I think that is entirely safe to assume. And if it is so, they might have been similarly jealous for the doctrines that they received, since the scriptures and their derivative doctrines cannot be separated.

Therefore, if one of Polycarp’s after-lings claims a received doctrine to be true, perhaps we should be hesitant to think that it is not true.

One of Polycarp’s after-lings was a Greek guy named Irenaeus. Irenaeus became a Bishop himself, the Bishop of Lyons. Irenaeus believed in the Rapture and says so in his book Against Heresies, Book Five, Chapter 29, paragraph 1, in the penultimate sentence. You can find that online at EarlyChristianWritings.com, as well.

If Irenaeus learned the doctrine of the Rapture from Polycarp, you should know that Polycarp also knew John the Beloved/Elder — the narrator of Revelation. Polycarp knew him personally. The train of transmission was from John the Elder to Bishop Polycarp to Bishop Irenaeus. That is a very short train of transmission. And the implications of that are worth mulling over. Perhaps we should not be too quick to dismiss the Rapture as ridiculous.