ARISTION, Saint. - A disciple of the Lord. Papias, in the preface to his Exposition of the Oracles of the Lord, says that he wishes to hand down what he had heard and learned from the "presbyters" (Eusebius, Hist. eccl. III, 39, 3) or from the hearers of the "presbyters" (39, 4), and that he had therefore made inquiries about what the "disciples of the Lord" (the apostles) had said and about what A. and the "presbyter" John, disciples of the Lord, say.
The problem of A. is closely bound up with the famous question of the "presbyter" John. Papias takes an interest in the oral doctrine of the Church, both because the living voice is for him superior to books (39, 4) and because of the needs of the anti-Gnostic polemic (39, 3). He therefore lists the guarantors of oral tradition in the Church in three groups: 1) presbyters, 2) hearers of the presbyters whom he had occasion to hear, and 3) the disciples of the Lord, A. and the "presbyter" John. According to the context, A. and the "presbyter" John must have been direct disciples of the Lord who were still alive in the times of Papias. The system of oral tradition in Papias: apostles, presbyters, hearers of the presbyters, and alongside them "the disciples of the Lord" (A. and the "presbyter" John), suggests analogies in the transmission of oral tradition among the Jews. On the one hand there is the series of the first transmitters (the "presbyters" probably correspond to the Abhith, cf. Hebr. 11, 2) and alongside them stand the witnesses ('edut) who confirm the truth of the oral tradition (on witnesses in the Jewish tradition cf. Jos. Ranft, Der Ursprung des katholischen Traditionsprinzips, Würzburg 1931, p. 15 ff.). Accepting thus the point of view of Irenaeus and not that of Eusebius regarding the text of Papias, A. would be a disciple of Jesus and not a "presbyter" of the series of transmitters, a contemporary of the "presbyter" John in Asia Minor.
In the Constitutiones apostolorum, VII, 46, 8 a certain Ariston (not Ariston) is mentioned as the first bishop of Smyrna, whereas according to Irenaeus (Adv. Haer., III, 3, 4) and Eusebius (Hist. eccl. III, 36, 1), Polycarp was the first bishop of Smyrna. The author of this chapter knew Eusebius, with whom he distinguishes two Johns in Ephesus (46, 7), and saw, with Eusebius, in A. a "presbyter" who therefore becomes for him a bishop; but the attribution of Smyrna as the residence of Ariston is perhaps not an invention.
Papias often (Eusebius, op. cit., III, 39, 7) mentioned in his work the "traditions" heard from A. concerning the discourses of the Lord. The Armenian ms. 229 (10th cent.) of Egmizan (photographic reproduction by F. Mader, Paris 1920; cf. also Eb. Nestle-E. v. Dobschütz, Einführung in das Neue Testament, pl. 19) attributes the conclusion of the Gospel of Mark (16, 9-20) to the presbyter Ariston (the name as in Constit. apostol., VII, 46, 8), perhaps on the basis of the mention of the miracle of the poisonous drink (Mc. 16, 18), which, as a miracle of Joseph Barsabbas "the Just," was recounted by Papias and which, by a manuscript of Rufinus's Historia eccl., is attributed to A. (cf. F. X. Funk, Patres apostolici, I, Tübingen 1901, p. 353 n). This is the conjecture of a scholar, who sees with Eusebius in A. a "presbyter" and not a disciple of Jesus. Against this conjecture cf. B. H. Streeter, The Four Gospels, London 1936, p. 344 ff. Th. Zahn attributes to A., besides Mc. 16, 14-16, the pericope of the adulteress in Io. 8, 1-11, while J. Chapman, basing himself on analogies with Mc. 16, 9-20, makes A. the author also of the epistle to the Hebrews.
Since A. does not appear in the New Testament, the Greeks did not include him in the list of the 70 disciples of Jesus; but the Latins (cf. St. Jerome, De viris illustr., 18) regard him as such in the Roman Martyrology, which, basing itself on the apocryphal Acts of Barnabas, makes him a bishop of Salamis in Cyprus and fixes his death (and feast) on 22 February.
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Erik Peterson