The very early date, and the consequent genuineness of these Epistles are thus the legitimate conclusion from the study of the internal as well as external evidences. That date is placed by the Bishop of Durham between a. d. 100-118 in the time of Trajan. Wieseler had placed the date of the martyrdom (upon which depends the date of the letters) as early as a. d. 107, Harnack as late as a. d. 138; and the latter still prefers to place them and the Epistle of Polycarp after the year a. d. 130. The earlier date reached by the Bishop of Durham is to him 'a mere possibility which is highly improbable, because it is not supported by any word in the Epistle, and because it rests only upon a late and very problematic witness (Eusebius).' Dr. Harnack's present view is, in all essentials, the same as that which he previously held. He has had the advantage—which he courteously acknowledges—of examining Bishop Lightfoot's 'painstaking consideration' of his views held in 1878; but nevertheless he considers that the Bishop's method of considering the whole question is 'not the proper' one—that his 'admittedly profound learning has contributed little or nothing to the main question,' and that 'he has not rightly comprehended the problem.'[85] Yet the ordinary reader, who examines Dr. Harnack's re-statement of some of his views, will feel that to ask the Bishop of Durham to re-examine them will be but to ask him to slay afresh the slain. Dr. Harnack still clings, for example, to his view, that Polycarp is attacking the Docetism of Marcion; a view which, if sound, would convince the writer of an anachronism; because in pretending to write between a. d. 100 and 118 he has introduced a heresiarch not then notorious. But his view has been shown by Bishop Lightfoot to be fallacious; and all that Dr. Harnack can now answer is to repeat his preference for his own interpretation of two passages adduced in the argument.
From the amenities of this battlefield of friendly criticism we turn for a few concluding remarks to the second and shorter life—that of Polycarp—which these monumental volumes discuss.
In point of method and treatment, the consideration of the history and writings of this saint of the early Church follows the same lines, as those followed in the case of St. Ignatius. First, the biography proper. Next, one of those collections of passages and documents which render these volumes so remarkable. In seventy pages the student will find a corpus of original extracts embellished with notes explanatory and critical—Such as Imperial acts and ordinances relating to or affecting Christianity; Acts and notices of martyrdoms. Passages from heathen writers, containing notices of the Christians; Passages from Christian writers illustrating the points at issue—most helpful to him in apprehending not only the history of the persecutions, but also the relations between the Church and the Empire, in the reigns of Hadrian (a. d. 117-38), Antoninus Pius (a. d. 138-61), and Marcus Aurelius (a. d. 161-80). Then come in successive order the examination of the MSS and Versions, a collection of quotations and references, the consideration of the genuineness of the 'Epistle of Polycarp' and of the 'Letter to the Smyrnæans,' closed by a discussion upon the date of the Martyrdom.
The Church of Christ owes a great debt to Polycarp:—
'In him one single link connected the earthly life of Christ with the close of the second century, though five or six generations had intervened. St. John, Polycarp, Irenæus—this was the succession which guaranteed the continuity of the evangelical record and of the Apostolic teaching. The long life of St. John, followed by the long life of Polycarp, had secured this result. What the Church towards the close of the second century was—how full was its teaching—how complete its canon—how adequate its organization—how wise its extension—we know well enough from Irenæus' extant work. But the intervening period had been disturbed by feverish speculation and grave anxieties on all sides. Polycarp saw teacher after teacher spring up, each introducing some fresh system, and each professing to teach the true Gospel. Menander, Cerinthus, Carpocrates, Saturninus, Basilides, Cerdon, Valentinus, Marcion—all these flourished during his lifetime, and all taught after he had grown up to manhood. Against all such innovations of doctrine and practice there lay the appeal to Polycarp's personal knowledge. With what feelings he regarded such teachers we may learn not only from his own epistle (§ 7), but from the sayings recorded by Irenæus, "O good God, for what times hast Thou kept me, I recognize the firstborn of Satan." He was eminently fitted, too, by his personal qualities to fulfil this function as a depositary of tradition.... Polycarp's mind was essentially unoriginative. It had no creative power. His Epistle is largely made up of quotations from the Evangelical and Apostolic writings, from Clement of Rome, from the Epistles of Ignatius.... A stedfast, stubborn adherence to the lessons of his youth and early manhood, an unrelaxing, unwavering hold of "the word that was delivered to him from the beginning"—this, so far as we can read the man from his own utterances or from the notices of others, was the characteristic of Polycarp. His religious convictions were seen to be "founded," as Ignatius had said long before (Polyc. 1) "on an immovable rock." He was not dismayed by the plausibilities of false teachers, but "stood firm as an anvil under the hammer's stroke." (ib. 3).'
The Church has ever claimed for her Saint not so much the reverence paid to the martyr, or the deference due to the ruler, or the teachableness powerful in the writer, as the attention obligatory to an 'elder.' Why? We may give the reason in the Bishop's words:
'While the oral tradition of the Lord's life and of the Apostolic teaching was still fresh, the believers of succeeding generations not unnaturally appealed to it for confirmation against the many counterfeits of the Gospel which offered themselves for acceptance. The authorities for this tradition were "the Elders." To the testimony of these Elders appeal was made by Papias in the first, and by Irenæus in the second generation after the Apostles. With Papias the Elders were those who themselves had seen the Lord, or had been eye-witnesses of the Apostolic history: with Irenæus the term included likewise persons who, like Papias himself, had been acquainted with these eye-witnesses. And among these Polycarp held the foremost place.'
The existing letter to the Philippians is now recognized as a genuine work of the Saint; and this on the testimony of internal evidence, quite as much as on the direct testimony of Irenæus, his own disciple. The arbitrary method of a Daillé, the interpolation-theory of Ritschl, and the wholesale rejection of the Epistle by Schwegler, Zeller, and Hilgenfeld, have ceased to command attention or demand refutation. The Epistle is too closely confined to the letters and martyrdom of Ignatius to warrant our looking for much refutation in it of existing error; but the spirit and counsel of the 'elder' is truly there warning against false and hypocritical brethren, and impelling his readers to turn unto the word delivered unto them from the beginning.
Never was Christian counsel and sturdy faith more needed than in the period covered by the lifetime of Polycarp. The Bishop of Durham describes it as 'the most tumultuous period in the religious history of the world'; and in connection with the Bishop of Smyrna he notes that 'a chief arena of the struggle between creeds and cults was Asia Minor.' If in the earlier part of the second century (a. d. 112) Pliny, in his celebrated letter to Trajan,[86] deplored what Polycarp may have witnessed—on the one hand, heathen temples deserted and heathen sacrifices starved as to their victims; on the other, young and old, man and woman, patrician and peasant, bond and free, attracted to and mastered by a 'superstition' which affected alike the city and the village, the nobleman's mansion and the herdsman's hut, yet the splendid successes of Christianity did not blind either saint or philosopher. 'A veritable Pagan propaganda,' as Renan calls it, also set in in the second century; and when Polycarp died, it was at its height. Everywhere was it supported by the reigning emperors. 'The political and truly Roman instincts of Trajan were not more friendly to it than the archæological tastes, the cosmopolitan interests, and the theological levity of Hadrian. From their immediate successors, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius, it received even more solid and efficient support.'
Smyrna, the see of Bishop Polycarp, was fully exposed to the influences of this reviving Paganism. The rhetorician, Aristides—true type of the Pagan charlatan who summoned to his aid in subjugating a superstitious people the mysterious and occult powers with which astrology and dreams, auguries and witchcrafts, invested their possessors—was himself a frequent dweller in Smyrna. Often must he have heard of and despised the man branded by the titles, 'the teacher of Asia, the father of the Christians, the puller-down of our gods, who teacheth numbers not to sacrifice nor worship'[87] which—like the inscription over his crucified Lord—did unconsciously proclaim the very and only truth. Twice did the city of Smyrna, during Polycarp's prime, receive fresh honours and privileges for her devotion to the worship of Imperial deities. The religious guild of the temples of the Augusti celebrated here their festivals with exceptional splendour; the 'theologians' and 'choristers,' who owed their existence and affluence to the magnificence of a Hadrian, not only saluted him as their 'god,' their 'saviour and founder,' but by senatorial decree established games—the Olympia Hadrianea—grotesquely pompous in titular magnificence. Naturally this affected the well-being of the infant Church of Christ in Smyrna; but that Church was assailed from another quarter, and by the sharpened weapons, not of a scornful superiority, but of fanatical hatred. The Jews were both numerous and powerful in Smyrna, and two cruel episodes in their late national history accentuated their fury against the Christians wherever they met with them. The first was the destruction of Jerusalem (a. d. 70). The fugitives from Palestine, who found refuge in Smyrna with their fellow-countrymen already settled there, found sympathy also—save from one class, the Christians. Compassion these last could feel for men whose best blood had welled over the courts of the Temple, whose dearest and nearest had perhaps perished in Jerusalem, that 'cage of furious madmen, a city of howling wild beasts and of cannibals—a hell' (Renan); but they knew to be true what a Titus had acknowledged, that 'the hand of God' was in the victory of Rome. They saw in the downfall of the Holy City the retribution of the Heavenly Father for the crucifixion of the Messiah; and sorrow with the sorrow of the weeping patriots of Israel they could not and would not. Their refusal was the signal for a determination to seize every opportunity of revenge; and the second episode, to which we have alluded, is connected with a specially furious outburst of maddened passion against Christians on the part of the Jews. Hadrian, fifty years after the fall of Jerusalem, had resolved upon rearing on its ruins the city of Ælia Capitolina. Then flashed forth the rebellion of the Jew Bar-cochba (a. d. 132-4). The 'Son of the Star,' supported by his standard-bearer, Akiba, the greatest of the Rabbins, measured his strength with Rome. With mouth breathing forth flames,[88] he inspired his partisans with confidence, and his enemies with terror. Flung back, disappointed, and slain at Bither, the 'Son of a Lie,' as his disappointed countrymen had found him to their cost and re-named him, had yet found opportunities of inflicting terrible tortures and agonizing deaths upon those Christians in Palestine, who had dared to reject his Messianic claims, and refused to blaspheme Christ. And the spirit of vengeance spread from the Holy Land to the provinces. Twenty years after the death of the rebel leader, the Jews of Smyrna—probably to Polycarp 'a synagogue of Satan,' as in earlier times St. John his master had described