"I have carefully compared the two editions, and am very well satisfied
upon that comparison that the larger are an interpolation of the
smaller, and not the smaller an epitome or abridgment of the larger. I
desire no better evidence in a thing of this nature.... But whether the
smaller themselves are the genuine writings of Ignatius, Bishop of
Antioch, is a question that has been much disputed, and has employed the
pens of the ablest critics. And whatever positiveness some may have
shown on either side, I must own I have found it a very difficult
question" ("Credibility," pt. 2, vol. ii., p. 153). The Syriac version
was then, of course, unknown. Professor Norton, the learned Christian
defender of the Gospels, says: "The seven shorter epistles, the
genuineness of which is contended for, come to us in bad company....
There is, as it seems to me, no reasonable doubt that the seven shorter
epistles ascribed to Ignatius are equally, with all the rest,
fabrications of a date long subsequent to his time." "I doubt whether
any book, in its general tone of sentiment and language, ever betrayed
itself as a forgery more clearly than do these pretended epistles of
Ignatius" ("Genuineness of the Gospels," vol. i., pp. 350 and 353, ed.
1847).

"What, then, is the position of the so-called Ignatian epistles? Towards
the end of the second century Irenæus makes a very short quotation from
a source unnamed, which Eusebius, in the fourth century, finds in an
epistle attributed to Ignatius. Origen, in the third century, quotes a
few words, which he ascribes to Ignatius, although without definite
reference to any particular epistle; and, in the fourth century,
Eusebius mentions seven epistles ascribed to Ignatius. There is no other
evidence. There are, however, fifteen epistles extant, all of which are
attributed to Ignatius, of all of which, with the exception of three,
which are only known in a Latin version, we possess both Greek and Latin