Midget-Sasquatch...Here are some quotes of Papias' interpretation of Revelation, ch. 12 (with some notes of my own):
"And Papias spoke in the following manner in his treatises: 'Heaven did not endure his earthly intentions, because it is impossible for light to communicate with darkness [this dualism sounds quite Johannine imho, N.B.]. He fell to the earth, here to live; and when mankind came here, where he was, he did not permit them to live in natural passions; on the contrary, he led them astray into many evils. But Michael and his legions, who are guardians of the world, were helping mankind, as Daniel learned; they gave laws and made the prophets wise [this view of the Law is quite non-Marcion, otoh, N.B.]. And all this was war against the dragon, who was setting stumbling blocks for men. Then their battle extended into heaven, to Christ himself. Yet Christ came; and the Law, which was impossible for anyone else, he fulfilled in his body [Christ as the living Torah is a notion found in Jewish-Christianity, and Logos as Torah in Philo of Alexandria, and similar to the Johannine view of Jesus as the descent of the Logos, N.B.], according to the apostle [which apostle?, N.B.]. He defeated sin and condemned Satan, and through his death he spread abroad his righteousness over all [this is somewhat Johannine in its understanding of Jesus' work and Passion, cf. John 12:31-32, 46-47, 16:11, 33, N.B.]. As this occurred, the victory of Michael and his legions, the guardians of mankind, become complete, and the dragon could resist no more, because the death of Christ exposed him to ridicule and threw him to earth, concerning which Christ said, "I was seeing Satan fallen from heaven like a lightning bolt" ' [Luke 10:18; here apparently, Papias interprets the Lukan logion in light of John]." (Andrew of Caesarea, On the Apocalypse, on Revelation 12:7-9).
"But Papias says, word for word: 'Some of them,' -- obviously meaning those which once were holy, -- 'he assigned to rule over the orderly arrangement of the earth, and commissioned them to rule well.' And next he says: 'But as it turned out, their administration [taxin] came to nothing [the wording here is rather similar to the Greek text of 1 Enoch, N.B.]. And the great dragon, the ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, was cast out; the deceiver of the whole world was cast down to the earth along with his angels' " (Andrew of Caesarea, On the Apocalypse, 34.12).
Irenaeus also gives a "tradition of the elders" that probably originated in Papias, which discusses the number 666. The only thing Irenaeus says about his source is that it attests 666, and not 616:
"Now such as being the state of the case, and since this number is found in all the good and old copies, and the very men who had seen John with their own eyes testify to it, and reason teaches us that the number of the name of the Beast, according to the reckoning of the Greeks, is 666.... Some, though I do not know how, have erred, following a particular reading, and have taken liberties with the middle number of the name, subtracting the value of fifty and chossing to have only one ten instead of six" (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 5.30.1).
gumby....It is not true that all early Christians were gnostic, or even proto-gnostic. Some strains of Jewish-Christianity understood Jesus as a prophet born through the ordinary course of human generation whose role was to correctly interpret and fulfill the Torah. What is meant by the label "gnostic" anyway? There were different gnostic systems of thought which embraced different christologies and soterologies (i.e. who Christ was and what kind of salvation he brought). Are we thinking of the very elaborate Valentinian system, or popular Marcionism, or something else entirely? Proto-gnostic is useful to describing some of the early or less overtly gnostic literature (such as the Pauline correspondence, the Johannine writings, Ignatius, the Gospel of Thomas, etc.) which have latent dualism, docetism, or other features that appear in full-blown second-century Gnosticism while lacking other essential features (such as a Demiurgical understanding of creation and matter, a system of aeons and archons, emphasis of gnosis over pistis, etc.). But even here the terms are vague...
metatron....John, ch. 6 is also very striking...
