Izmir=Smyrna is a seaside town with a huge bay for ships to find harbor. This is a picture I took as one of the ferries, which Meltem our guide takes to work day by day, glides past the sun as it sinks in the sea.
Through the good efforts of Levent Oral and Tutku tours, there is now a small park and exhibit about Izmir’s most famous martyred native son— Polycarp. Without question Polycarp and Papias, closely associated with Polycarp in Smyrna (=Izmir) are two transitional figures who helped the apostolic tradition survive the passing of the original twelve and other eyewitnesses of Jesus’ and Paul’s ministry. They were both in contact with John the Elder, who is probably the same person as John of Patmos, and was buried near Ephesus in a plot of land now called St. John’s Church. I would argue as well he is the one who preserved and promulgated the fourth Gospel as the testimony of an actual Judean eyewitness of Jesus’ ministry, the Beloved Disciple, who is identified in John 11 and subsequent chapters as Lazarus. Careful study of Polycarp’s one genuine letter shows he cites, alludes to or echoes some 20 of the 27 documents later included in the NT canon (in 367). It is these transitional figures who helped gather our NT documents, edit them, group them– first with a collection of Paul’s letters (see 2 Pet. 3) which was treated as Scripture just as the OT was, and then a collection of the four earliest Gospels, put together in a codex, which led to the labels according to Mark as opposed to according to John etc. You don’t need the label ‘according to…’ unless there are multiple Gospels that were meant to be put together. Here are some pictures from the new Polycarp Park….
The missing pictures in the display are because they are expensive mosaics of Polycarp, and this park is wide open to the street near the Acropolis. My suggestion is take a picture of the new mosaics and post them in the blank spaces.
We saw this in association with the third Global Smyrna meeting in Izmir, which was given in conjunction with the unveiling of the Park, and also the new archaeology museum in izmir. 
I gave the opening lecture for this conference on Papias, but that’s a story for another post.
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