An Etymological Dictionary of the German Language/Annotated/Pfaffe
Pfaffe, masculine, ‘priest, parson,’ from Middle High German pfaffe, Old High German pfaffo, masculine, ‘priest’; corresponding to Low German and Dutch pape, ‘priest’; the common primary form is păpo. The Middle Latin term is clericus. The usual assumption that the word is derived from Latin pâpa, which was in the Western Church a respectful term applied to bishops and a title of the Pope, does not account for the fact that the term means ‘priest’ in all the Teutonic dialects of Middle Europea, and therefore must be decidedly rejected. In the Greek Church a distinction was made between πάπας, ‘pope,’ and παπᾶς, ‘clericus minor’; with the latter sense the German cognates are connected. It would also be remarkable if the p of a Latin word introduced into German at the period of the Roman conversion had undergone permutation (compare Priester, predigen, and Propst). The Greek word (possibly in the vocat. form παπᾶ?) may have been widely diffused throughout Germany even in the 6th century; it was introduced perhaps at a somewhat later period than Kirche, as might be inferred from the absence of the word păpa, ‘priest,’ in Anglo-Saxon and English. Here too we have a trace of the influence of the Greek Church on the Teutons; yet we cannot determine which tribe adopted Greek παπᾶς as păpa in its vocabulary and passed on the term (the meaning of Gothic papa in the Milan Calendar is obscure). It found its way even into Old Icelandic, in which pape, however, was strangely enough used by the Irish anchorites found in Iceland by the Northmen when they colonised the island. With regard to Latin pâpa see Papst.