[500:2] Phil. iv. 3.
[500:3] No less than five persons are mentioned as having preceded Polycarp in the see of Smyrna, viz., Aristo, Strataeas, another Aristo, Apelles, and Bucolus. See Jacobson's "Patres Apostolici," ii. 564, 565, note. It is not at all probable that he became the senior presbyter long before the middle of the second century. Irenaeus, indeed, tells us that he was constituted bishop of Smyrna by the apostles (lib. iii. c. 3, § 4)—a statement which implies that at least two of the inspired heralds of the gospel were concerned in his designation to the ministry; but as he was still only a boy of nineteen when the last survivor of the twelve died in extreme old age, the words cannot mean that he was actually ordained by those to whom our Lord originally entrusted the organization of the Church. The language was probably designed simply to import that John and perhaps Philip had announced his future eminence when he was yet a child, and that thus, like Timothy, he was invested with the pastoral commission "according to the prophecies" which they had previously delivered. See 1 Tim. i. 18; iv. 14.
[501:1] Sec. 74.
[502:1] Sec. 54.
[502:2] Sec. 44.
[502:3] Sec. 44. All these quotations attest the late date of the Epistle. Tillemont places it in A.D. 97. Eusebius had evidently no doubt as to its late date. See his "History," iii. 16.
[502:4] Sec. 57.
[502:5] For many centuries it was considered lost. At length in the reign of Charles I. a copy of it was discovered appended to a very ancient manuscript containing the Septuagint and Greek Testament—the manuscript now known as the Codex Alexandrinus.
[502:6] Euseb. iii. 16; iv. 23.
[503:1] See the Romish Breviary under the 23d of November, where a number of absurd stories are told concerning him.