ART. III.—An Ancient Syriac Version of the Epistles of St. Ignatius to St. Polycarp, the Ephesians, and the Romans: together with Extracts from his Epistles, collected from the Writings of Severus of Antioch, Timotheus of Alexandria, and others, edited with an English Translation, and Notes. Also the Greek Text of these three Epistles, corrected according to the Authority of the Syriac Version. By WILLIAM CURETON, M.A. London: Rivingtons. Berlin: Asher & Co.

THIS is a very interesting and important publication. Its history is briefly as follows. In the years 1838 and 1839, the Rev. Henry Tattam, Archdeacon of Bedford, encouraged by the example of Lord Prudhoe, visited_the monastery of Deipara in the desert of Scete, or Nitria, in Egypt, about eighty miles to the north-west of Cairo, in quest of ancient MSS'., and succeeded in making the acquisition of several of considerable value; to which Lord Prudhoe, we believe, with great liberality added those MSS. which had previously been discovered in the same monastery by his lordship. In 1842, the Trustees of the British Museum, aided by the bounty of the Government, very judiciously and opportunely despatched Mr. Tattam on a second expedition to the same monastery. And it is due to Lord Prudhoe's enterprise, and to Archdeacon Tattam's zealous energy, and to the assistance rendered him by the Trustees and the Government, that a collection of Syriac MSS., some of them of very great antiquity, and amounting on the whole, we understand, to about 250 volumes, is now safely lodged in our National Museum.

The laborious task of examining and methodizing these valuable MS. materials, which arrived in England in a very confused condition, has fallen on the Rev. William Cureton of the British Museum, who appears to have discharged this duty with great zeal and assiduity.

Mr. Cureton, also, has found leisure to transcribe and to translate a very interesting relic of Syriac literature, contained in this recently acquired collection, and he has presented it to

1 Which appear to have been partially known to Assemanni, and are referred to by him in his Bibliotheca Orientalis. See Professor Lee's Preface to his translation of the Theophania of Eusebius, p. ix. We are not aware whether Assemanni's mention of them led to Lord Prudhoe's researches in the Nitrian monastery.

the public, accompanied with notes, and extracts from Syriac MSS. derived from the same source. We speak of the volume now before us, entitled “ The Ancient Syriac Version of the Epistles of St. Ignatius to St. Polycarp, the Ephesians, and the Romans, together with Extracts from his Epistles, collected from the Writings of Severus of Antioch, Timotheus of Alexandria, and others."

Many circumstances concur to render the discovery of this Syriac version a matter of the highest literary and theological importance. The character of St. Ignatius himself, and the circumstances of his life, are such as to ensure it the most

respectful attention. Ignatius was the disciple of St. John, and the fellow-student of Polycarp, and the next successor but one of St. Peter in the see of Antioch, to which he was consecrated by the hands of Apostles. In the summer of the year A. D. 1163, after a long presidency of the church of Antioch, he was condemned to death in that city by the Emperor Trajan, for his unflinching adherence to the faith, and was sent by him, in the custody of ten soldiers, by a circuitous route through Seleucia, Smyrna, Troas, Neapolis, Philippi, across Macedonia and Epirus to Epidamnus, thence to Rhegium, Puteoli, Ostia, and finally to Rome, where he suffered martyrdom, being torn in pieces by wild beasts in the Colosseum at the great festival of the Saturnalia, on the 20th of December, in the year of our Lord 116. As Mr. Cureton well expresses it:

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Among all the venerable Fathers of the Christian Church, of whom any remains have come down to us, there is none whose writings are more interesting and more important than the holy Martyr St. Ignatius. Himself the disciple and companion of the Apostle St. John, he drew the waters of Eternal Life from the stream nearest to their source, and heard the words of Truth from the lips of that Beloved Disciple who listened as he leaned upon the bosom of HIM who is Truth itself. As Bishop of the Church of Antioch, where the believers were first called Christians, he fed the flock committed to his charge faithfully; and when he was brought before kings and rulers for Christ's sake and the Gospel's, he fearlessly and boldly confessed the Lord Jesus, and sealed his confession with his blood. Every word, therefore, which this holy Martyr has written will naturally be most interesting, and will have a value in the estimation of Christians, secondary only to that of the Sacred Scriptures themselves.

2 These will be found narrated by Cave, Lives of the Fathers, p. 176-198. Evans, R. W., Biography of the Early Church, p. 52-71.

3 We follow Bp. Pearson here. See his Dissertation on the Year of the Martyrdom of St. Ignatius, p. 509, ed. Jacobson. The Acta Martyrii, ibid. p. 534, give A. D. 107. See also Mr. Cureton, p. 108. The Mus. Brit. Cod. Add. 14, 643, gives A. D. 107 or 108.

"That he wrote several letters to various churches, on his way to Rome to suffer martyrdom for the Faith, is a fact than which none is better attested."-Preface, p. i.

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Eusebius A. D. 330, and St. Jerome A.D. 392, state that he wrote four Epistles from Smyrna, while he was abiding with his fellow-disciple, Polycarp, then bishop of that city, one to the Ephesian Church, one to the Magnesian, one to the Trallian, one to the Roman; and that when he arrived at Troas, he wrote three more, one to the Philadelphians, one to the Smyrnæans, one to Polycarp. These seven Epistles thus mentioned by Eusebius, were all written within a few weeks of each other, when Ignatius was on his way to martyrdom at Rome.

But there are other circumstances which give additional interest to this version. First, its language, Syriac, or Aramaic, was the vernacular tongue of a large portion of the inhabitants of Antioch, and of the district of which it was the metropolis, and indeed of the whole of Palestine; and we have, therefore, in Mr. Cureton's volume, a representation of the words of Ignatius, if they be his genuine expressions, in the familiar dialect of a numerous class of the members of his own Church.

Besides, this Syriac translation is rendered more interesting by the fact of our being already in possession of epistles claiming to be from the pen of Ignatius, which have long been regarded by theologians as documents of paramount importance, on account of the distinct and emphatic terms in which they speak concerning certain great questions of Christian doctrine and discipline.

How, then, it will be asked, are they affected by this recent discovery? Is their claim, which we have specified, weakened or strengthened by it? This is a question of very great moment, and we propose to examine it in the following pages.

The history of the Epistles' now commonly attributed to Ignatius is familiar to many of our readers, but for the sake of perspicuity we must be permitted briefly to recount it.

In the year 1495, three Epistles written in Latin, and bearing his name, were published at Paris, one addressed to the blessed Virgin, and two to the Apostle St. John. In 1498, eleven other Epistles, also in Latin, were printed at the same place. In 1536, these two editions were incorporated into one, in a volume published at Cologne, and another Epistle, also in Latin,

Eccl. Hist. iii. 36. S. Hieron. de Viris Illustribus, § 16.

5 See Pearson, Vindiciæ, p. 3, seqq. Natalis Alexand. Hist. Eccl. iv. 535-560. Harles' Fabricius, vii. 41. Jacobson's Patres Apostolici, p. xxiii., seqq. Cureton, P. xxiii.

was added; and thus the world now possessed fifteen Latin Epistles bearing the name of Ignatius. In 1557, appeared the first edition of any Epistles, purporting to be his in Greek. It was published at Dillingen, by Valentine Paceus, from an Augsburg MS.; and in 1559, a similar edition was printed at Zurich, from a MS. of a private individual, Caspar a Nydpryck. Both these editions contained twelve Greek Epistles, and these twelve were found to correspond with twelve of the fifteen Latin previously published. But there still remained three Latin letters, of which no Greek original was then found, or has ever been found to this day.

Such was the condition of the Ignatian Epistles at the era of the Reformation, 300 years ago. What then was the influence of these letters on the great theological questions agitated at that period? Very inconsiderable. It was confessed, almost in all quarters, that they contained many things liable to grave suspicion, and some which were wholly irreconcilable with the character of Ignatius, and with the age in which he lived. It was acknowledged at the same time, that there was much in them that was admirable mixed with baser stuff-Toλλà μὲν ἐσθλὰ μεμιγμένα, πολλὰ δὲ λυγρά-They were an enigma which perplexed the most sagacious critics; and as no criterion was at hand for distinguishing the genuine material from the spurious, twelve letters which bore the name of a primitive bishop and martyr had, and could have, but very little weight in the discussion of those important articles of Christian faith and practice then debated in the Church.

But early in the seventeenth century a new era arose in the history of the Ignatian Epistles. In 1623, Nicolas Vedelius, having observed that Eusebius, who composed his Ecclesiastical History not much more than 200 years after the martyrdom of Ignatius, had stated (as we have above said), that Ignatius wrote seven Epistles on his way from Antioch to Rome, and had specified the titles of those Epistles, and that these assertions were corroborated by St. Jerome, was thence led to infer that, among the fifteen attributed to him, the seven alone which bore the titles mentioned by Eusebius, were really from the pen of the martyr. This hypothesis was confirmed by the fact, that none of the three which existed only in Latin were of the number of the seven; and that all the seven were found both in Latin and in Greek.

Still, however, according to what we have already intimated, there remained even in these seven, as they then stood,

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A. D. 330. Cave, Historia Literaria, p. 178. Historia Ecclesiastica, iii. 37.

many passages which could not be reconciled with the character and age of Ignatius. It was now left for divines and critics of our own country to carry on the work which had been successfully commenced upon the continent. The erudite and enlightened primate of Ireland, Archbishop Ussher, was the first to perceive that certain passages had been quoted as from Ignatius by English theologians living in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; and he was thence led to believe that MSS. of his Epistles might be found in this country. His conjecture was a happy one: in a short time after he had enounced it, two MSS. were discovered in England, one in the library of Caius College', Cambridge, another in that of Dr. Richard Montague, Bishop of Norwich. Both these MSS. were in Latin, and upon examination, both were found to exhibit the seven Epistles specified by Eusebius, but in a much shorter form than in either the Greek or Latin hitherto published. It was also observed that all the passages cited from Ignatius by the earliest Christian writers were found in substance in this newly discovered abbreviated Latin version of the seven Epistles; and those passages which had appeared to the best critics to be inconsistent with the age of Ignatius were not found in it: hence Archbishop Ussher was induced to make a second conjecture, namely, that this abbreviated Latin recension exhibited the Epistles in the form in which they had come from the hand of the martyr, and he expressed his hope that a Greek MS. would be found corresponding with this shorter Latin one, and he was prepared to recognise in that Greek MS., whenever it should be discovered, the genuine words of Ignatius.

In the mean time he published, from the edition of Paceus, the Greek text, corrected and abbreviated by the Latin version, in an edition which appeared at Oxford in 1644-an eventful period-it being the year after that in which a bill for extirpating Episcopacy had passed both houses of Parliament, and in which the solemn League and Covenant had been taken by the Lords and Commons, and assembly of Divines, and the very year in which his brother Primate, Archbishop Laud, was beheaded.

The Irish Primate's hopes were soon realized. At this very time, the celebrated Isaac Vossius obtained permission from the Grand Duke of Tuscany, to examine the MSS. in the Medicean library at Florence, and found among them a Greek MS. containing six of the seven Epistles mentioned by Eusebius; and on comparing this Greek MS. with Ussher's two Latin MSS.,