Ignatius was not alone in preferring oral tradition over written books. A few years later a bishop from Asia Minor named Papias remarked that although the evangelist Mark had done nothing wrong in writing down the sayings of the Lord, he preferred what Andrew or Peter or Philip, the apostles, had said. “For I did not suppose that information from books would help me so much as the word of a living and surviving voice.” But as the decades rolled by oral tradition became more diffuse and less reliable, and written texts began to gain acceptance. Already in the second century the letters of Paul
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