furnishes also a large collection of Syriac fragments, in which passages taken from the 7 Vossian epistles are declared to have the force of canons in the church.
II. We possess also a multitude of Acts of the martyrdom of St. Ignatius, which, if we could accept them, would supply very particular accounts of his life and death. Of these Ussher published 3 in whole or part: one in Lat. from two related MSS.; another in Lat. from the Cottonian library; a third in Gk. from a MS. at Oxford. The Bollandists published a Latin martyrdom in the Acta SS. for Feb. 1; Cotelerius a Gk. one by Symeon Metaphrastes. Ruinart, and afterwards Jacobson (Pat. Ap. ii.), printed a Gk. MS. from the Colbertine collection (MS, Colb.); J. S. Assemani found a Syriac one which may be the same as that partly printed by Cureton (i.). Aucher, and afterwards Petermann (p. 496), published an Armenian one. Dressel printed a Gk. version of the 10th cent. (MS. Vat.). The 9 are reducible to 5, possessing each a certain independence. But of these MS. Colb. and MS. Vat. are by far the most valuable, being completely independent, while the remaining versions are mixtures of these two.
MS. Colb. (see Zahn, ii. p. 301) relates the condemnation of Ignatius by Trajan in Antioch, and incorporates the Ep. to the Romans. This MS. bears marks of interpolation, and its chief value lies in its incorporation of the Ep. to the Romans. The other epistles the author of the MS. has not read carefully. We conclude that this martyrdom, written in the 4th cent., assumed its present form after the first half of the 5th.
MS. Vat. (Zahn, ii. 307) omits all judicial proceedings in Antioch. Ignatius is sent for by Trajan to Rome, as a teacher dangerous to the state; an argument takes place before the senate between the emperor and the saint; the lions kill him, but leave the body untouched, and it remains as a sacred deposit at Rome. Thus MS. Vat. seems to have arisen on the basis of an account of the journey and death of the saint, extant at the end of the 4th cent. On the whole, the martyrdoms are late and untrustworthy compositions, wholly useless as materials for determining the question of the epistles; we are thrown back on Eusebius.
III. Eusebius in the Chronicle (ed. Schöne, ii. 152, I58, 162) omits (contrary to his custom) the durations of the episcopates of Antioch. We can, therefore, place Ignatius's death any time between Ab. 2123, Traj. 10, and 2132, Traj. 19. In H. E. iii. 22, Eusebius, in a general way, makes the episcopates of Symeon and Ignatius contemporary with the first years of Trajan and the last of St. John and (iii. 36) with Polycarp and Papias. We may date his epistles, journey, and death in any year from 105; to 117. Funk fixes it at 107.
In 1878 Harnack published a tract (Die Zeit des Ign. Leipz.) impugning the tradition that Ignatius was martyred under Trajan. The argument rests upon the acts of the martyrdom being proved by Zahn, with the general assent of all his critics, to be untrustworthy; the date of the saint's death thus resting wholly on the testimony of Eusebius, who shews that he had no data except the untrustworthy information of Julius Africanus (Harnack, pp. 66 sqq.). But it is very improbable that Eusebius had no tradition save through Africanus, or the latter no tradition save four names.
The theory of Volkmar; which the author of Supernatural Religion (i. 268) regarded as "demonstrated," was that the martyrdom of Ignatius happened not in Rome but in Antioch, upon Dec. 20, 115 (on which day his feast was kept), in consequence of the excitement produced by an earthquake a week previously; but it is now known from the ancient Syriac Menologion, published by Wright (Journ. Sac. Lit. Jan. 1866, p. 45), that the feast was originally kept not upon Dec. 20, but upon Oct. 17. (Zahn, i. 33, and Lightfoot, ii. 352, note §, are to be corrected in accordance with this discovery.)
The other details in the martyrdoms and elsewhere are but expansions from hints supposed to be found in the letters, of which we find an instance in the long dialogue between Ignatius and Trajan upon the name Θεοφόρος. There is no reason to suspect the genuineness of this addition to the saint's name. It is given untranslated in the 4th cent. Syriac version. The interpolator found it in his copy, for it stands in all his epistles except that to Polycarp and in all the MSS. of the shorter translation, both Greek and Latin. The 4th-cent. writers, regarding it as a title of honour, do not quote it; in the 6th it came to be regarded as a name.
The tradition that Ignatius was martyred at Rome can be traced higher than the records of Eusebius and Origen. The designation of world-famed, which Eusebius gives him, shews the general tradition; and the words of Origen are to the same effect. The testimony of Irenaeus which Eusebius adduces as perfectly agreeing with the tradition known to him, dates but 70 years after the fact. True, these expressions come from writers who knew the epistles; but the mere existence of the epistles at such a date, even if they were spurious, would be sufficient proof of the existence of the tradition; and it is impossible that such a story should have arisen so soon after Trajan, if it had contradicted known facts or prevalent customs of his reign.
Eusebius clearly wrote with the collection of letters before him, and knew of no other collection besides the 7 he mentions. These he arranges according to place and time of writing, gives his quotation from Romans as out of "the Epistles," and cites Irenaeus's quotation from Ignatius, as proof of that writer's knowledge of them, although Irenaeus did not mention the author's name.
IV. The gradual presentation of the various Ignatian documents to the modern world is related in the introduction to Cureton's Corpus Ignatianum and is briefly as follows. Late in the 15th and in the beginning of the 16th cents. 12 epistles, purporting to be by Ignatius, were given to the world, first in Latin translations, then in the original Greek, together with three others manifestly spurious, which existed in Latin alone. The epistles which bear non-Eusebian titles were soon suspected of spuriousness, and it was proved that the text of the Eusebian, as then known, was
