'Episcopacy was the burning question of the day; and the sides of the combatants in the Ignatian controversy were already predetermined for them by their attitude towards this question. Every allowance should be made for their following their prepossessions, where the evidence seemed so evenly balanced. On the one hand, external testimony was so strongly in favour of the genuineness of certain Ignatian letters; on the other hand, the only Ignatian letters known were burdened with difficulties. At the very eve of Ussher's revelation, a fierce literary war broke out on this very subject of Episcopacy—evoked by the religious and political troubles of the times.'
On the one side were Hall's (Bishop of Exeter) 'Episcopacy by Divine Right asserted' (1639), and 'An Humble Remonstrance' on behalf of Liturgy and Episcopacy (1641); Ussher's 'The original of Bishops and Metropolitans,' and Jeremy Taylor's 'Of the Sacred Order and Offices of Episcopacy' (1642); on the other, the five Presbyterian ministers whose initials composed the monstrous name Smectymnuus,[71] issued their 'Answer to the Book entituled an Humble Remonstrance' (1641), and Milton, in his short treatise 'Of Prelatical Episcopacy' (1641), fulminated with 'fiery eloquence and reckless invective' against Ussher.
'Had God,' wrote Milton, 'intended that we should have sought any part of useful instruction from Ignatius, doubtless He would not have so ill-provided for our knowledge as to send him to our hands in this broken and disjointed plight; and if He intended no such thing, we do injuriously in thinking to taste better the pure evangelic manna by seasoning our mouths with the tainted scraps and fragments from an unknown table, and searching among the verminous and polluted rags dropped overworn from the toiling shoulders of Time, with these deformedly to quilt and interlace the entire, the spotless, and undecaying robe of Truth. What impiety,' he added, 'the confronting and paralleling the sacred verity of St. Paul with the offals and sweepings of antiquity, that met as accidently and absurdly as Epicurus his atoms to patch up a Leucippean Ignatius.'
'Out of his own mouth,' says Bishop Lightfoot, 'he was soon convicted.' The "better provision for knowledge" came full soon. To the critical genius of Ussher belongs the honour of restoring the true Ignatius. Ussher observed that the quotations from this Father in three English writers, Robert (Grosseteste) of Lincoln (c. 1250), John Tyssington (c. 1381), and William Wodeford (c. 1396), agreed—not with texts hitherto known (the Greek and Latin of the 'long' Recension), but—with the quotations in Eusebius and Theodoret. He concluded that somewhere in the libraries of England he ought to find MSS. of a version corresponding to this earlier text of Ignatius: and he discovered two—(1.) Caiensis 395 [L1], a MS. given to Gonville and Cains College, Cambridge, in 1444 by Walter Crome; and (2.) Montacutianus [L2], a parchment from the library of Bishop Montague or Montacute, of Norwich. Of the first a transcript was made for Archbishop Ussher, and is still in the library of Dublin University (D.3.II), and is dated 20 June, 1631. It is full of inaccuracies, arising sometimes from indifference to spelling on the part of the transcriber, or to carelessness and inattention, but most frequently from ignorance of the numerous and perplexing contractions. The second has disappeared, probably on the day when Parliament ordered the Archbishop's books to be seized and confiscated (1643). Bishop Lightfoot has in part restored it by drawing attention to the collation of this Montacute MS., which occurs between the lines or in the margin of the Dublin transcript of the Caius MS. Archbishop Ussher's examination of the Latin version, thus discovered, induced in his mind a suspicion that Bishop Grosseteste was himself the translator. A marginal note, for example, betrayed the nationality of its author; 'Incus est instrumentum fabri; dicitur Anglice anfeld [anvil].' Who so likely to have had the ability to translate from a Greek version as Robert Grosseteste, one of the very few Greek scholars of his age? Evidence is not wanting that the Ignatian Epistles were imported from Greece, and translated under the Bishop's direction by one or other of the Greek scholars who were with him: and it is significant, in connection with this point, that Tyssington and Wodeford belonged to the Franciscan Convent at Oxford to which Grosseteste left his books.
The result of Ussher's discovery was to determine, that this Latin translation—valuable for critical purposes on account of its extreme literalness[72]—represented the Ignatius known to the Fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries. The Greek text still remained unknown, and Ussher attempted to restore it from the 'long' recension by the aid of his newly discovered Latin version. This he did by bringing the former as nearly as possible into conformity with the latter. Ussher's book appeared in 1644. It was marred by one blot. Eusebius had mentioned seven Epistles, but Ussher—deceived by a mistake on the part of St. Jerome—exscinded the Epistle to Polycarp, and condemned it as spurious. Two years later, Isaac Voss published the Greek of six Epistles from a Florentine MS., the Epistle to the Romans having disappeared from the copy; and this omission was finally rectified in 1689 by Ruinart. From the middle of the seventeenth century disputants ceased to trouble themselves about the 'long' form. Controversy, presently to be noted, raged about the Vossian letters, Daillé (1666) attacking them, Pearson defending them.
It is a great leap to the year 1845, but not till then did a new era dawn upon the questions at issue. It was in that year that Cureton published the 'Antient Syriac Version of the Epistles of St. Ignatius to St. Polycarp, the Ephesians, and the Romans.' This version was discovered in two MSS. at the British Museum, and contained the Epistles named in a shorter form than either of the Greek or Latin texts.[73] Cureton's contention was that he had discovered the genuine Ignatius, and that the remaining four Epistles of the Vossian collection, as well as the additional portions of these three, were forgeries. Cureton was opposed by Dr. Wordsworth, the late Bishop of Lincoln, then Canon of Westminster, and defended by Bunsen. There followed quickly the Vindiciæ Ignatianæ (1846) and Corpus Ignatianum (1849), in which Cureton was considered to have not only refuted his adversary, but also to have presented arguments which rallied to his standard Ritschl, Lipsius, Pressensé, Ewald, Milman, and Böhringer. Opposition to Cureton's view was not, however, wanting. The Orientalists, Petermann and Merx, united with the Conservative critical school, represented by Denzinger and Uhlhorn, in preferring the Vossian collection; while the Tübingen school (Baur and Hilgenfeld) opposed itself to Ignatian letters, short, middle, or long, as utterly subversive of their theories of the growth of the Canon, and of the history of the Early Church. The Bishop of Durham was himself, at that time on Cureton's side, 'led captive' (as he says) 'for a time by the tyranny of this dominant force.' We can but record the change in his opinions, and leave to the reader to follow, in the Bishop's own pages, the reasons which induced him to abandon a method and decline results that would not stand the test of a searching criticism. Independent investigation of the phenomena of the Armenian version and of the Syriac fragments led him to regard the 'short' or Curetonian recension as an abridgment or mutilation, rather than the nucleus, of the 'middle' or Vossian form; and Zahn's monograph, Ignatius von Antiochien(1873), never yet answered, dealt a fatal blow at the claims of the Curetonian letters. Since then Lipsius has been convinced by Merx; Renan and Harnack are agreed; and most scholars will come to the conclusion, that through the Bishop of Durham's own serious investigation of the diction and style of the 'short' form, 'the last sparks of its waning life have been extinguished.' The collection was directed by no doctrinal, Eutychian or Monophysite, motive, nor composed (as Hefele suggested) in support of moral aim or monastic piety. It is simply a 'loose and perfunctory curtailment of the middle form, neither epitome nor extract, but something between the two,' and to be dated about the year a. d. 400 or somewhat earlier.
The ground having been thus cleared from the accretions of the 'long' form and the mutilations of the 'short,' the Bishop of Durham considers in the next place the genuineness of the seven Epistles known to Eusebius, and preserved to us not only in the original Greek, but also in Latin and other translations. It is a bitter reflection, that discussion on this subject was (and—in a less degree—is still) evoked, not so much by critical and textual variations and difficulties, as by the exigencies of party spirit and theological animosity. A dreary, if necessary, page of ecclesiastical history has to be studied, when French Protestant and English Puritan turned passionately against the discovery of Ussher and Voss. It is small comfort to the charitably minded to be told that, had no Daillé attacked[74] the Ignatian letters, Pearson would not have stepped forward as their champion.
The consideration of the genuineness of the Seven Epistles falls naturally under the head of external and internal evidence.
The Bishop gives his conclusion on the external evidence in the following words:—
'(1.) No Christian writings of the second century, very few writings of antiquity, whether Christian or pagan, are so well authenticated as the Epistles of Ignatius. If the Epistle of Polycarp be accepted as genuine, the authentication is perfect. (2.) The main ground of objection against the genuineness of the Epistle of Polycarp is its authentication of the Ignatian Epistles. Otherwise there is every reason to believe that it would have passed unquestioned. (3.) The Epistle of Polycarp itself is exceptionally well authenticated by the testimony of his disciple Irenæus. (4.) All attempts to explain the phenomena of the Epistle of Polycarp, as forged or interpolated to give colour to the Ignatian Epistles, have signally failed.'