Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

DCHindley wrote:
... now that I have had the opportunity to "analyze" most of the "authentic" [Ignatian] letters, both short and long forms, the more it seems they are not authentic, but pseudepigrapha.

Whether he (or she) was doing so to promote a stronger position for bishops and perhaps a patriarchal POV, as proposed by Elaine Pagels, I am not so convinced.

What I think is that the author is the same for both short & long Greek editions, or rather short and long winded versions if you will, the longer edition being later than the shorter. There might be a common source between them, and if so, it may have been written in Syriac. I also divine that the author was a great admirer of the populist bishop Epiphanius, so date these at the earliest around, or a little after, Epiphanius' time.

I was struck by comments you made in an earlier post -

DCHindley wrote:
The Idolization of the Virginity of Mary, and the details that are otherwise found in accounts of martyrdoms that seem to date to the 3rd century (this is off the top of my thinly haired head), I'd date them to at least the age of Africanus (the one cited by Eusebius, not the one who wrote the work that commented on his brilliant, if he must say so, reconstruction of Homer), unless you are willing to posit a date of composition for the Protoevangelium of James in the 2nd century (I'm not). Candida Moss puts such romanticized martyrdom accounts to the 4th century or even later.

----------- http://www.earlywritings.com/forum/view ... 810#p40810

Damn,

Was just about to upload Ignatius to the Smyrnaeans but realized in my "haste" (I think I started these things in Sept 2015 and last left this one off in November) I forgot to do the analysis on chapters 1.1 & 1.2.

Ignatius to the Philadelphians is also about 1/3 to 1/2 done, but the analysis part of the process is pure hell. Later ...

DCH

Well, I for one am glad you are still doing this. Well done. I have used your current files several times already.

Couldn't sleep, so finished up Smyrnaeans.
Definitely Krazy!

DCH

Thanks, David.

Thanks. Good work!

This will probably be the last analysis of an Ignatian epistle that I will try to post.

There is one more epistle that has a long and a short form, the letter of Mary of Cassobelae to Ignatius (IΓNATIΩI MAΡIA EK KAΣΣOBOΛΩN). It is almost always dissed as clearly apocryphal, so I could not find English translations of both forms, although I do have the shorter & longer Greek texts.

The kind of thing I do requires that I at least have English translations before I try to sort out how the Greek texts relate to them (keywords, constructions, etc., often repeated endlessly).

Update, I was wrong about short and long forms of the correspondence between Maria Cassobelae and Iggy. The letter of Mary to Iggy is in both the genuinae and the interpolatae files, both of them exact in wording, so perhaps this work shows up in whatever served as the basis for these files, which I always thought was Migne.

See below ...
DCH

Awesome, David. I have the complete set now, all stored safely away in my "sources" folder. Thanks!

Ben C. Smith wrote:Awesome, David. I have the complete set now, all stored safely away in my "sources" folder. Thanks!

Ditto! Muchas gracias, David!

I had made a few posts in the thread Apelles and the Gospel of John that dealt with Allen Brent's treatment of Ruis-Camps proposal that the majority of the letters of the Ignatian corpus of the middle (shorter Greek) recension, were spurious:

http://www.earlywritings.com/forum/view ... 006#p47866

Where the majority of critics think that the middle (shorter Greek) recension of the Ignatian letters contains seven genuine letters, Ruis-Camps thinks that an editor of the middle recension had available to him four genuine letters (Romans, Ephesians, Magnesians & Trallians), to which he pseudonymously authored three others in his name (Philadelphian, Smyrneans, and to Polycarp) based on passages from Ephesians & Magnesians mixed with ideas of his own. The editor also interpolated his own ideas into the authentic Ephesians, Magnesians and Trallians. Only the letter to the Romans is likely free of, or at least contains very few of, the editors' interpolations.

"The passages that are the work of the forger are those that advocate a church order centred on a single bishop, with a presbyteral council and deacons." [Allen Brent Ignatius of Antioch: A Martyr Bishop and the origin of Episcopacy, p.101, spelling his]

When I tried to look at the matter closer, I realized that much of his argument had to do with passages from Polycarp's letter to the Philippians and the relationship of these interpolated letters of the middle (short Greek) recension to the lost Didascalia and the extant Apostolic Constitutions, proposed mistakes by Eusebius regarding apostolic succession. I soon became bogged down in the details.

Critics have long observed a connection between the longer (long Greek) recension of the Ignatian corpus and the Apostolic Constitutions, leading some 19th century critics to believe that the two corpuses were created by the same author.

To confuse matter even more, the original Didascalia did not survive in Greek (except for a few citations by much later Greek church fathers) but do survive in a Syriac version (no way to tell how close it is to the original) and maybe to a degree in an Ethiopic one.

As it is now supposed that the Apostolic Constitutions was preceeded by the Didascalia, which was an expansion of the Teaching of the 12 Apostles (i.e., the Didache), I think I can dispose of that idea of common authorship of the longer (long Greek) recension and the Apostolic Constitutions as, hmmm, "quaint".

Add to this the fact that the letter of Polycarp to the Philippians is preserved almost exclusively with manuscripts of the longer (long Greek) recension of Ignatius, not the shorter, plus the fact that several of the late chapters are only preserved in Latin, plus the fact that the surviving Greek text is partly lost. Almost all speculate that the forger of the spurious Ignatians also interpolated Polycarp's Philippians, but I feel like we are comparing apples (middle recension) to oranges (Polycarp's Philippians and the longer recension of the Ignatian corpus).

So, then, a good deal of the speculation of the five advocates of the spuriousness of all or part of the middle (short Greek) recension rests upon a shaky foundation.

I just today bought an e-copy of Roger Parvus' A New Look at the Letters of Ignatius of Antioch and other Apellian Writings (2008), and I am finding the book rather well researched and makes several good points and observations, although I have a few reservations. However, I am not very far into it quite yet (about 15+ pages). I will post more on this in future, as it dovetails a bit into the issue of which of the Ignatian letters might be genuine (if any) and/or interpolated.

Now that I have all the properly Ignatian letters "analyzed" it would be nice to be able to use them. In the meantime I had to create a file containing the Greek & Latin text (from a Bibleworks user generated database) and English (from ANF volume 1) of Polycarp's Philippians, which is attached, broken down by chapter sections rather than by sense units (breaking down Ignatian letters by sense units were a breeze compared to Polycarp), so I am settling with that for now.
DCH