the least reference to them; and they are now, by common consent, set
aside as forgeries, which were at various dates, and to serve special
purposes, put forth under the name of the celebrated Bishop of Antioch.
But, after the question has been thus simplified, it still remains
sufficiently complex. Of the seven epistles which are acknowledged by
Eusebius" ("Eccles. Hist," bk. iii., chap. 36), we possess two Greek
recensions, a shorter and a longer. "It is plain that one or other of
these exhibits a corrupt text; and scholars have, for the most part,
agreed to accept the shorter form as representing the genuine letters of
Ignatius.... But although the shorter form of the Ignatian letters had
been generally accepted in preference to the longer, there was still a
pretty prevalent opinion among scholars that even it could not be
regarded as absolutely free from interpolations, or as of undoubted
authenticity.... Upon the whole, however, the shorter recension was,
until recently, accepted without much opposition ... as exhibiting the
genuine form of the epistles of Ignatius. But a totally different aspect
was given to the question by the discovery of a Syriac version of three
of these epistles among the MSS. procured from the monastery of St. Mary
Deipara, in the desert of Nitria, in Egypt [between 1838 and 1842]....
On these being deposited in the British Museum, the late Dr. Cureton,
who then had charge of the Syriac department, discovered among them,
first, the epistle to Polycarp, and then again the same epistle, with
those to the Ephesians and to the Romans, in two other volumes of
manuscripts" ("Apostolic Fathers," pp. 139-142). Dr. Cureton gave it as
his opinion that the Syriac letters are "the only true and genuine
letters of the venerable Bishop of Antioch that have either come down to
our times or were ever known in the earliest ages of the Christian
Church" ("Corpus Ignatianum," ed. 1849, as quoted in the "Apostolic
Fathers," p. 142).