apostolicfathers0201clem - Carmel Apologetics

5-
THE CURETONIAN
LETTERS.
THE genius of Ussher, followed closely by the discovery of Voss,
had narrowed the field of controversy. There was no longer any
serious question about the spuriousness of the Long Recension. The
eccentric advocacy of this recension by Whiston provoked no strenuous
opposition, simply because it won no strenuous adherents. Later
efforts to maintain the same cause fell still-born from the press. The
Vossian letters alone held the ground. From the middle of the seventeenth
century onwards the controversy raged about these. The attack
of Daille (1666) and the defence of Pearson (1672) were the main
incidents in this warfare. Of other combatants it is
unnecessary here
to speak. The whole question will be considered in a subsequent
chapter. I need only add for the present, that most opponents of the
genuineness of the Vossian Epistles were prepared to admit in them
the existence of a genuine substratum, overlaid however with later
additions and interpolations.
But in the year 1845 a new era in the Ignatian controversy
commenced. The existence of a Syriac version of the Epistles of
Ignatius had long been suspected. In the Catalogue of Ebed-Jesu, a
Syrian writer at the close of the thirteenth century, of which a Latin
version had been published by Abraham Ecchellensis (a.d. 1653),
mention is made of Ignatius as an author (Assem. Bibl. Orient, in. i.
p. 16). In another list of books also, belonging to a later Ignatius,
Jacobite Patriarch of Antioch, who resided in Rome at the time of the
reform of the Calendar under Gregory xiii, a version of the Epistles
of Ignatius in Syriac or Chaldee is included (see ib. p. 17 ; comp. 11. p.
229).
A copy of this latter catalogue was brought to England by H.
Saville, the learned editor of S. Chrysostom ;
and the notice naturally
attracted the attention and excited the hopes of Ussher (p. xxvi),