IGNATIUS
IGNATIUS
597
hypothesis of the transference of his remains from Rome to Antioch.
2. MSS and YSS of the Epistles.— The words of Polycarp's Epistle to the Philippians (xiii. 2) are the earliest evidence of a collection of Ignatius' letters : * The letters of Ignatius which were sent to us by him, and others as many as we had by us, we send unto you, according as ye gave charge ; the which are subjoined to this letter ; from which ye will be able to gain great advantage. For they comprise faith and endurance and every kind of edification, which pertaineth unto our Lord.' Eusebius (HE iii. 36) apparently knows of a col- lection of seven of Ignatius' letters, with Poly- carp's Letter to the Pliilippians, which is identical with our present group of letters, even down to the order in which the Epistles are given : Eph., Magn., Trail., Rom., Philad., Polyc, Smyrn., and Poly- carp's Philippians.
This original collection of letters fell into the hands of a forger, who made interpolations in the text of the authentic Epistles and also manu- factured six additional letters — Mary of Cassobola (there is a Cilician town called Castabala, possibly the same as Cassobola) to Ignatius, Ignatius to Mary of Cassobola, to tlie Tarsians, to the Philip- pians, to the Antiochenes, and to Hero the Deacon. We have thus an Ignatian collection of thirteen letters. The identihcation of the forger with the unknown compiler of the Apostolic Constitutions is a theory highly favoured by Funk. He regards him as having been a Syrian Christian of the beginning of tlie 5th cent., probably belonging to an Apollinarist order, and he even finds in his work points of con- tact with Theodore of Mopsuestia (Pair, apostol. opera, ii. pp. ix-xiii, and Kirchengeschichtl. Ab- handlungen, ii. [Paderborn, 1899], pp. 347-359).
Three other spurious letters of Ignatius may be passed over quickly — one supposed to be addressed to the Blessed Virgin Mary, Avith the Virgin's reply, and two addressed to the Apostle John. The oldest witness to these three Latin letters is Denis of Chartreux (t 1471); the oldest MS of them dates from the 12th century. These Epistles are usually regarded as forgeries of Latin prove- nance and of the Middle Ages.
In 1845, Cureton published Eph., Magn., and Bom. in a Syriac version, which comprises the three authentic Epistles in an abridged form. Cureton put forward the hypothesis that the Syriac text represents all tliat is authentically Ignatian, and that consequently Trail., Philacl., Polyc, and Smyrn. are spurious compositions. This theory was accepted for some time by quite a number of critics, but it has now been abandoned : the three Syriac letters are nothing more nor less than an abridgment of the three Greek Epistles. (These apocryphal texts may be found in the editions of Zahn, Lightfoot, and Funk.)
We may now turn our undivided attention to the Greek collection of the seven authentic letters.
The authenticity of these Epistles was for long a matter of keen controversy. At first only the Latin collection comprising the Epistles to the Apostle John and the Virgin Mary, or the three apocryphal letters published in Paris in 1495, were known. Three years later (1498) Leffevre d'Etaples published in Latin the collection comprising the thirteen spurious or interpolated letters, the Greek text of which Avas printed at Dillingen in 1557. This collection was speedily recognized to be un- authentic, but, though the Magdeburg Centuri- ators repudiated the thirteen letters en bloc, Bar- onius and Bellarmin defended them en hloc. The Protestant Scultetus, in his Mechdlae theologiae patrum syntagma (Neustadt, 1609) was of opinion that only the seven letters attested by Eusebius were authentic. In 1646 Vossius published the
authentic Greek text of six of the seven letters, the Greek text of the seventh — the Letter to the Romans — being published by Ruinart in 1689. But it was a long time before the authenticity of these seven letters was generally accepted. It would be useless to retrace the historj^ of this pain- ful controversy with its tedious conllict of confes- sional (Saumaise, Blondel, Daill6)or pseudo-critical (Baur, Hilgenfeld, Lipsius) prejudices, which was finally terminated by Zahn's Ignatius von Anti- ochien (Gotha, 1873) and F. X. Ynnk's Die Echtheit der ignatianischen Briefe (Tubingen, 1883). E. Bruston's objections and conjectures (/g'nace d'An- tioche) were never taken seriously, nor were those of D. Volter (Die ignatianischen Briefe, Tubingen, 1892). See, however, M. Rackl, Christologie des heiligen Ignatius von Antiochien, Freiburg i. B., 1914, pp. 11-86.
A reply to the difficulties raised by the opponents of the authenticity of the letters will be found in J. Reville's Les Origines de V episcopal (pp. 442-81) and in E. Hennecke's Handbuch zu den neatest. ApoTcryphen(^\iMm.%&i\, 1904, p. 191 f.). Difficulties naturally exist, writes R. Knopf, but they are not to be weighed against ' the uninventible form of these writings, the originality of the man which seems to speak forth from the pulsing lines, and the wealth of personal references which entwine the letters ' (Das nachapostolische Zeitalter, Tiibingen, 1905, p. 37 ; cf. O. Stahlin, Christl. griech. Litt., Munich, 1914, p. 975).
The seven Epistles of Ignatius are attested, as we have said, first by the Epistle of Polycarp, and then, at the beginning of the 4th cent., by Eusebius. Between these two witnesses we may insert Irenjeus (adv. Haer. V. xxviii. 4), who does not name Ignatius but cites his Letter to the Romans : ' Quemadmodum quidam de nostris dixit, propter martyrium in Deum adiudicatus ad bestias, " quoniam frumentum sum Christi et per dentes bestiarum molor ut mundus panis inveniar."' Harnack thinks that Clement of Alexandria is so closely dependent on Ignatius that he must have read him (cf. Pacdag. I. vi. 38, II. viii. 63, Excerpt. Theod. 74 with Trail, viii. 1, Eph. xvii. 1, xix. 2) ; so also Origen (de Oral. 20 = Pom. iii. 3 ; Hoin. vi. in Luc. = Eph. xix. 1; in Cant. Cantic. prolog. = Bom. vii. 2). Harnack ignores all doubtful wit- nesses like Melito, Athenagoras, Theophilus, Ter- tullian, the Lyons Martyrs, and the Acts of St. Perpetua. We shall pass over all attestations later than Eusebius (see Harnack, Die Ueberlieferung der altchristl. Litteratur, Leipzig, 1893, pp. 79-86).