Da Israele al mondo. Trasformazioni di un tema escatologico nel I-II secolo d.C. (Iren. haer. V 33, 3-4 = Papia fr. 1 Norelli)

Beyond overly one-sided interpretations concerning the close connections between eschatological views such as those addressed in this paper and the armed opposition of part of Judaism against Rome, what emerges, even in texts of Judaism that have often been interpreted as carrying somewhat ‘universalistic’ demands, is that the centrality of Israel and/or Jerusalem and/or its Temple represents the element in which the expectations of deliverance of divine intervention foreseen for the end of time coalesce. The conceptions of Jesus, the apostles and therefore the so-called ‘presbyters’ were thus to converge equally at this same point. The figure of Papias, in this process, will certainly have played a role with a partial or relative disentanglement of these same instances from an exclusively ‘Israel-’ or ‘Judeo/Jewish-centric’ perspective, although what we can deduce from texts attributed to Papias cannot be assessed in an entirely unambiguous way. Irenaeus’ perspective in transmitting Papias’ fragment 1, on the other hand, is completely marked by a systematization in a primarily polemical (anti-Marcionite and anti-gnostic) perspective and, at the same time, in a strongly confirmatory view concerning two of the pillars of his soteriological vision: the close connection between Yhwh and Jesus and the mystery of Christ crucified as the center and focal point of the action of the incarnate son and of the whole economy tending toward the salvation of the created world and, therefore, also of the righteous who died before the advent of Jesus.