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).

"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 Irenaeus makes a very short quotation from
a source unnamed,