Papa was in many ways a remarkable character. A man of considerable learning both in Persian and Syriac literature, and of some power of statesmanship,[1] he was able to see that it was time for the unorganized episcopacy that had hitherto been the government of the Church of the East, to give place to an ordered subordination of all the bishops to one archbishop or catholicos; and he apparently bent all his energies to securing the acceptance of this change by his colleagues. Though temporarily defeated, he succeeded in his aim. The catholicate was established. The man who did most to hinder it in Papa's day succeeded unchallenged to the primacy whose establishment he had endeavoured to defeat; and the fact that Papa's work has existed ever since in Papa's Church, shows how thoroughly he gauged the disposition and needs of his people.
If, however, his aims were lofty and statesmanlike, it appears that he lacked tact in executing them. The facts of history show him to have been ambitious, if not personally, at least for his see; probably overbearing and oppressive as a ruler, and certainly of a passionate and hot-tempered disposition.
All the circumstances in his day, in the West as well as in the East, were promoting the growth of metropolitical and patriarchal jurisdictions. Rome, Antioch, Alexandria, were each of them drawing the provinces round them under their
- ↑ If we identify Papa, as seems least difficult on the whole, with the oppressive Bishop of Aphraat's Fourteenth Mimra, he was also a man of very fine presence. In any case, a man who held his bishopric for more than three times the ordinary period, must have had some unusual physical qualities.
Bar-Hebræus calls him learned in Syriac. One must own that we do not know in what Syriac books he could have been learned (except the Diatessaron), at a period when even Aphraat was still unwritten.
