[100, only part of which is visible online] [2.] Rius-Camps: The Middle Recension as Forged Hierarchical Expansion.
For Rius-Camps the one genuine letter of Ignatius the martyr that comes down to us substantially from his pen is Romans. Since Romans has a separate tradition in the ...
[101] genuine letters of Ignatius the martyr available to him [i.e., the forger of the rest of the middle recension], Ephesians, Magnesians, and Trallians. From the first two he drew material with which, along with suitable additions of his own, he constructed the wholly forged letters to Philadelphia, Smyrna, and Polycarp. He then placed his interpolations in the original versions of Ephesians and Magnesians, as well as in Trallians, whose original material he did not otherwise use.
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. He is therefore responsible for imposing a hierarchical structure upon an originally more egalitarian church order. Polycarp never met Ignatius and all references to him doing so in the former’s letter to the Philippians are the work of the forger. The one genuine reference to Ignatius is that of a martyr from the past:
"I beseech, therefore, all of you to be obedient to the word of righteousness and to endure with all endurance, which you also have seen before your eyes not only in the blessed Ignatius and Zosimus and Rufus, but also in the remainder of those of your company and in Paul and the remaining apostles. Be persuaded that all these did not run in vain, but in faith and in righteousness, and that they are in the place that they deserve with the Lord with whom they suffered.14"
But this quotation can only with difficulty be so interpreted. Rius-Camps insists that 'which you have also seen before your eyes’ does not bear the obvious sense that they had witnessed Ignatius’ ‘endurance’. He insists that
"The [first] sentence ... distinguishes three classes of witnesses: (a) Ignatius, Zosimus, and Rufus; (b) martyrs of their own, Philippian community; (c) Paul and the other Apostles. Not an ocular vision (the third group excludes it), but a few examples well known to all."
Thus he can conclude that (a) 'are considered outstanding martyrs of other communities of sub-apostolic times'.15
But this conclusion does not follow. The words can equally be read in the sense that they see now what their predecessors saw [102] in the past. Furthermore, Rius-Camps is anxious to claim that this passage shows Ignatius as already martyred so that he can claim that this passage is at variance with a statement occurring later in Polycarp’s letter implying that Ignatius was still alive, in which Polycarp claims that Ignatius had written a letter conjointly with the Philippians, referred to in the present tense, and was therefore still alive.16 Rius-Camps also resurrects the ancient claim that the surviving Latin version has accurately translated a Greek phrase that is tenseless as ‘Ignatius and those who are with him’ rather than simply ‘Ignatius and his companions’, thus making no claim about whether they are alive or dead.
Polycarp is in fact ambiguous in both passages about whether Ignatius has been martyred. He speaks not of Ignatius’ confession and ‘martyrdom’ but of his ‘endurance’, which can be applied to him whether alive or dead. It is important, moreover, to grasp the effect created by Ignatius’ choreographed procession where, as we have seen, as a ‘bearer of a sacred object’ (hagiopboros) in the Christian mystery procession, he rattles his chains and claims that he wears already in his flesh the image or tupos of the suffering Father God by whose blood the Ephesians had been ‘inflamed’.17 He is ‘bound with bonds befitting divinity’.18 Ignatius considers that, in his struggle with his guards, whom he compares with ‘ten leopards’, he has already begun his battle with wild beasts in the arena: ‘I am fighting with wild beasts all the way from Syria to Rome by land and by sea, being bound to ten leopards, that is to say a detachment of soldiers.’19 Already therefore he is expressing his future martyrdom as in the process of realization. Certainly Polycarp, somewhat diffidently, as I shall later argue, in a passage that Rius-Camps would attribute to the interpolator, catches the mood of Ignatius’ procession coming through Smyrna when he hails his entourage as ‘imitations of true love’. The mimesis of the Christian mystery projects the image of the suffering God realized in one who is already seen as a martyr.
Thus we see that there is no real inconsistency, against the Hellenistic background that we have drawn, between these passages such as an ... (Pages 103 & 104 omitted from preview)
[105] We have seen how Ignatius refers to the three orders of bishop, presbyters and deacons as presiding to create images or tupoi. One of these key passages, namely Magn. 6.1, according to one set of manuscripts, reads ‘pre-eminent or presiding in the place of’.25 It should however be emphasized that the expression ‘as an image of’ or ‘in order to create an image of’ is secure in other passages.26
Rius-Camps claims, in the light of such a reading, that the Didascalia is referring to the place where the bishop sits in church as well as where he projects the imagery of God the Father. The typology is well formed and general, and has been broken up and used in a fragmented form by the alleged forger of the middle recension. In the light of my earlier chapters, however, nothing could be further from the truth.
When the Didascalia uses the term tupos it is meant in the sense of an Old Testament type whose fulfilment, as antitype, is to be found in the New Testament and in the life of the Church of the New Covenant: ‘You bishops are therefore today to your people priests, and Levites who minister in the Holy Tent, which is the holy Catholic Church.’27 Clearly the author of the Didascalia in the third century requires us to read the Old Testament passages that deal with the Tabernacle or Tent in the wilderness that was the portable shrine carried around before Solomon’s Temple. The Old Testament deals in great detail with this Tent and with how the cult should be conducted within in it by high priest, priests, and Levites as its authorized ministers.28 As with the epistle to the Hebrews in the New Testament, the writer of the Didascalia invites us to interpret what we read about the Tent of Witness and its cult as a mystical foreshadowing of the events of the New Covenant that were yet to come.
Thus he will claim that the Tent of Witness is ‘a general type of the Church’ when he says that the deacons are to eat at the Church’s expense: ‘as did the Levites who ministered in the Tent of Witness that is a general type of the church’.
[106] If the Levites and their ministry are the type of the future deacons of the New Covenant, then the high priest is a type of the bishop: Tor these are your high-priests, the presbyters are the priests, and the deacons, widows and orphans of the present are the Levites of old.’29 The basic understanding of tupos in the Didascalia is therefore as an Old Testament type: the high priest described in connection with the Tent of Witness has its antitype in the bishop, the presbyters are antitypes of the priests, and the deacons antitypes of the Levites.
Indeed, it is his familiarity with this sense of ‘type’ as part of a kind of allegorical method of exegesis that enables the author of the Didascalia to give scriptural justification to a further order of ministers, namely the deaconesses: ‘Let the deaconess be honoured by you as a type of the Holy Spirit.’30 The Old Testament speaks of the ‘cloud’ in which God leads the Israelites particularly in relation to the Tent of Meeting, since when the cloud stops, the Tent is to be set up, and when the cloud moves on, the Tent is taken up and the Israelites follow. The cloud by day becomes fire by night.31 When the Tent was first set up with its contents and cultus established, ‘The Cloud covered the tent of meeting and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle.’32 The cloud is identified generally with the Holy Spirit in application of New Testament exegesis of the Old Testament, but here the cloud as the Spirit has its antitype in the structure of the Church’s ministry: the cloud or Spirit has become specifically the type of the deaconess. Thus the deaconess too is justified as an antitype of an Old Testament type.
The same exegesis of type/antitype in application to the Tent of Witness will also yield a justification and explanation for the order of widows and indeed of orphans in the Church: ‘And let the widows and orphans be reckoned by you as a type of the altar of incense.’33 Thus in the Tent of Witness, a ‘type of the Church in every detail’, the altar of incense becomes a mystical foreshadowing of the widows and orphans for whose maintenance there is to be a sacrificial giving that is equivalent to the incense offering of the Old Covenant.
[107] But the author of the Didascalia also introduces an Ignatian typology into this pattern of typological exegesis with which he is otherwise happy (as is also the Apostolic Constitutions, which incorporates his work). Despite Rius-Camps’ attempt to make these consistent, I remain unconvinced that the Ignatian typology is introduced with any understanding of its original force, with the authors both of the Didascalia and Apostolic Constitutions remaining happy with it only if it can be understood in the context of an exegesis of type and antitype.
The bishop suddenly ceases to be an antitype of the high priest as its original type but becomes, as in Ignatius, someone who is an image of the Father God: ‘He, acquiring God’s place, let him be honoured by you since as bishop he presides over you as a type of God.’34
Here clearly the author is wrestling with Ignatius’ quite alien concept, which he is taking over but does not know how to interpret with confidence. The bishop is to be paid (‘honoured’), like the other clergy and widows and orphans, but why? Because he is a high priest, but also because he has acquired ‘God’s place’. In this sense he can ‘preside over you as a tupos of God’. Bishops are addressed thus: ‘You then are to your people priests and prophets, and princes and leaders and kings, and mediators between God and his faithful.’35 Thus bishops in God’s place become ‘princes and leaders and kings’.
But we have seen how inadequate an understanding this reveals of the Ignadan iconography, with which the author of the Didascalia clearly does not know how to deal. He does not understand Ignatius’ background in the mystery cults of the Asia Minor of the early second century, nor the sense in which tupos, as we have seen, referred to a divine image carried in procession by a cult leader who sat or stood out pre-eminently as he or she led the procession. Ignatius moreover did not have a view of bishops as kings or monarchs, as reflected in the Didascalia here. The Church was not constituted by the creation of a single monarchical bishop. Rather it was constituted by the three orders in concert, who by their acts and words created images of divine persons in the eucharistic drama of [108] re-enactment displaying the Father-bishop, deacon-Son, and Spirit- filled apostolic council that was the presbyterate.
Similarly too the author of the Didascalia will treat the Ignatian iconography of the presbyters as the apostolic council. As such he follows once again the Didascaliast: ‘Let the presbyters as a tupos of the apostles be the object of your hope.’36 We find also the presbyters described as the ‘crown of the Church’, which reminds us of Ignatius’ ‘spiritually woven crown of your presbyterate’:37
For the presbyters ... let a double portion be allotted to them for the favour of the apostles of Christ, whose place they guard as fellow-counsellors of the bishop, and the crown of the Church.38
The ‘crown’ may refer to the circle of seats for the presbyters set around the bishop’s throne, but clearly here there is no reference to the images of divine beings projecting from the garland-crown of a pagan priest leading a mystery cult, as in Ignatius. The presbyters are not called here an image or tupos of the council of the apostles that evokes the apostles, spirit-filled at the inbreathing of the Johannine Pentecost: the Didascalia has no conception of Ignatius’ original meaning. The significance of the circle, like a crown for this writer, is that the presbyters form a ring or phalanx around the bishop, who sits in Christ’s place, just as the apostles guarded Christ in a circle around him.
Thus Rius-Camps requires that the alleged interpolator who produced the forged seven letters out of the genuine four had a consistently worked out typology of the Church that he derived from the Didascalia. It is that description of church order in terms of the threefold hierarchy that the interpolator requires in order to convert the four genuine letters into the forged seven with their hierarchical additions and claims. But we have seen that there is no consistently worked out model in the Didascalia upon which the forger of the seven letters could draw. There are two conflicting typologies in the Didascalia, one of which the author understands, as does his successor, who in turn incorporated that third-century work into the fourth-century Apostolic Constitutions. The typology [109] that he understood was an exegetical method of deducing antitype from Old Testament type.
But the Ignatian typology of church order that he took over he found almost unintelligible. That typology, as we have shown, was derived from the world of the pagan mystery religions, with its bearing of images in procession in which the priest who led the procession became a proxy for the god. The creation of divine images in a Christian sense was lost on both the author of the Didascalia and the author of the Apostolic Constitutions. Both show an almost ongoing programme of finding circumlocutions for Ignatius' tupos wherever it cannot be identified in the context of an exegetical type/antitype.39
Thus Rius-Camps’ hypothesis that the middle recension of seven letters was created out of the four genuine ones under the influence of the Didascalia fails.
Robert Joly, whilst believing the middle recension to be a forgery, nevertheless rejected Rius-Camps’ argument as to why this should be so.40 ...
14) Polycarp, Phil. 9.1-2; cf. Rius-Camps, The Four Authentic Letters, pp. 87—88.
15) Rius-Camps, The Four Authentic Letters, p. 88 (emphasis in original).
16) Polycarp, Phld. 13.1.
17) Ignatius, Eph. 1.1; 9.2; sec above, Chap. 4 n. 22 and associated text.
18) Ignatius, Smyrn. 11.1; see also Brent, Ignatius and the Second Sophistic, pp. 137-39, 180-83.
19) Ignatius, Rom. 5.1.
25) Rius-Camps, The Four Authentic Letters, pp. 225-26; see also Brent, Ignatius and the Second Sophistic, pp. 25-27, p. 38, for a discussion and identification of the manuscripts.
26) Ignatius, Trall. 3.1; Magn. 6.2.
27) C.A. II.25.7 (39-41) = Didasc. (Connolly), p. 80.19-21.
28) As recorded in Exodus 19, Exodus 25-40, and Numbers 18.
29).CA II.26.3 (20-21) = Didasc. (Connolly), p. 87.14.
30) CA II.26.4.6 (40-41) = Didasc. (Connolly), p. 89.2-3.
31) Exod. 40.34-38; Num. 9.15-17.
32) Exod. 40.34.
33) CA II.26.8 (53-54) = Didasc. (Connolly), p. 89.4-5.
34) Didasc. (Connolly), p. 87.19-89.1.
35) C.A. II.25.7 (44) = Didasc. (Connolly), p. 80.22-23.
36) Didasc. (Connolly), p. 89.3—4.
37) Ignatius, Magn. 13.1.
38) C.A. U.28.4 (10-13) = Didasc. (Connolly), p. 91.3-9.
39) For a more detailed discussion, see A. Brent, 'The Relations between Ignatius of Antioch and the Didascalia Apostoiorum', SecCent 8 (1991), pp. 129-56, as well as Brent, Ignatius and the Second Sophistic, pp. 30-38.
40) Joly, Le dossier, pp. 121-27 comments on Rius-Camps’ book in its original, Spanish version (1977). I have used the later English translation (1980).
I set out this entire section as an educational exercise, as many of the things Brent puts on the lips of Joseph Rius-Camps and/or criticizes him for can be verified by reference to my analysis files available in the thread Ignatz, Krazy Kat or Krazy Editors?
