the mystical theology of valentin weigel - DataSpace at Princeton ...

this spirit of unwelcome insubordination and a suitable offering to the head of the Roman
Church (“Donum Papa dignum” 486 ).
Whereas Cochlaeus believed the Constitutions to be a genuine work (or at least
gave no indication in his prefatory dedication to Pope Paul that there were any doubts to
be had), Cochlaeus acknowledges that his schismatic opponents claim the document is a
forgery (“confictam”), but attempts a form of damage control in putting together the
compilation. Cochlaeus declares that the doubters are wrong, but he hopes to strengthen
his case for the authenticity of the Constitutions by showing its continuity with other
Apostolic writings (“adiungere ei quaedam ex antiquißimis Apostolorum discipulis
testimonia, his Apostolorum constitutionibus conformia”) by appending excerpts from
Dionysius and two other Apostolic authors, Polycarp and Ignatius. The grouping of those
three figures is not an unusual one, since many printed editions of Dionysius included the
letters of Polycarp and Ignatius. Unfortunately, in an irony that Valla, Erasmus and
Luther might all have relished, Cochlaeus’ text in fact offers up three inauthentic
documents to the Pope himself under the cover of a text that claimed to adduce venerable
apostolic writings meant to strengthen the Pope’s natural and necessary authority: both
the Constitutions and the Dionysian writings were produced by later authors posing as
Apostolic ones, and the letter of Ignatius that Cochlaeus picked happens to be inauthentic
as well. 487 Nevertheless, Cochlaeus considers his compilation to be timely—appearing as
486 Cochlaeus, 4v.
487 Ignatius did write letters, but not all of them are genuine, on the basis that they were not cited by others
until 6 th century. It is not known who wrote the spurious letters, or when. Rev. Alexander Roberts and
James Donaldson, The Ante-Nicene Fathers: Translations of the Writings of the Fathers down to A.D. 325,
ed. A. Cleveland Coxe, Vol. 1 (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1985). When the first Greek edition
was published in 1557, doubts were raised about the authenticity of the letters, but it was only the
publication of the 1623 edition of the letters that definitely declared some of the letters to be spurious (105).
For the letter exerpted by Cochlaeus, “there is an enumeration of various Church officers, who were
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