Christian Texts and History • Re: Further evidence that Ignatius faced old deniers of the historicity of Jesus

Hey Joseph,

Glad to see you back!

I think what Giuseppe has in mind is this passage in The Epistle to the Tarsians:

Chapter III.—The true doctrine respecting Christ.

Mindful of him, do ye by all means know that Jesus the Lord was truly born of Mary,
being made of a woman; and was as truly crucified. For, says he, 'God forbid that I should
glory, save in the cross of the Lord Jesus' (Gal. vi. 14). And He really suffered, and died, and rose
again. (ANF vol 1)

The problem is, this is preserved (I believe) only in Latin, and there is no Greek recension, longer or shorter, to compare it to. Most of the others have Greek equivalents in either the shorter or the longer Greek recensions, or both.

This suggests that, at the time that this pseudepigrapha was written, in Latin, someone was claiming that Jesus the Lord was not born by a woman, even Mary, or that Jesus did not really die under Pontius Pilate. This sounds like a response to Marcion claiming Jesus had no material human body and Docetists who claimed his death was just an illusion. I do not recall off the top of my head whether Marcion also claimed that Jesus had only appeared to suffer on the cross. This would then not be a sign that there was doubt about the timing and main characters of the story, but whether it was just an illusionary or a real death.

DCH

Tarsians does survive in Greek. Pseudo-Ignatius is presenting an Arian christology in opposition to Nicea. See Ignatius and the Arian controversy.

Andrew Criddle

It's starting to come back to me now. You had posted about a scholar who had made a bold proposal about the genuineness of most of the letters, here:
viewtopic.php?p=47806#p47806
There was a very deep discussion about sources, too. I had completely let it pass out of mind.

I was looking for my G-E comparative files on the Ignatian epistles, to see if they had the kind of passage I was thinking of (turned out to be from To the Tarsians), but they were only done if an epistle had both a middle and a longer Greek recension. I was looking at how the longer recension had used and/or modified the middle recension, or vice versa. Except for one or possibly two, I did not save "working" copies of the "spurious" epistles of Pseudo-Ignatius, at least in Greek. If I were to get into the vocabulary differences and theological allusions, or connections to the Apostolic Constitutions, or the Arian movement, then I would do so.

I had forgot all about Pseudo-Ignatius, although I am aware (now at least) that he is sometimes accused of having interpolated the middle recension letters that have a longer recension version. There is a difference between the two recensions, for sure, but most of the differences are expansions, quotes from NT & Greek OT, and theological statements of which I was not especially interested in at the time. This was around 2013 or something.

Thanks for straightening me out there.

DCH

Statistics: Posted by DCHindley — Wed Mar 27, 2024 4:59 pm

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