apostolicfathers0201clem - Carmel Apologetics

MANUSCRIPTS AND VERSIONS.
THIS branch of the subject need not detain us long. It has no such
close and immediate connexion with the literary transmission, and
therefore with the question of integrity and genuineness of Polycarp's
Epistle, as in the case of the Ignatian letters. Moreover in most of
the MSS the Epistle of Polycarp is appended to the Ignatian letters, and
these MSS have been already described.
We have seen that, as originally written and despatched to the
Philippians, it stood before the Seven Epistles of Ignatius, which were
subjoined (vTroTiTay/xevai)
as a sort of appendix (see above, pp. 336, 444,
and III.
p. 348). This position
it does not occupy in any extant
Greek ms. It does indeed occur in some mss in connexion with the
Ignatian letters ;
but the circumstances are such as to deprive the fact
of any value.
In the first place it is not found in connexion with the seven genuine
epistles, but only with the thirteen interpolated and spurious letters.
In the next place, it is
placed not before, but after these letters, in those
Greek mss in which the combination is found. Thirdly and lastly,
it is
not so combined in all our Greek mss, but only in one particular
group, of which the parent ms, Vaticanus 859, is extant and belongs to
the nth or 12th century (see above, p. in sq). This group has no
claim to represent a very early stage in the transmission of the documents
which it contains. On the contrary
it has many corruptions of text,
and it fuses together the Epistles of Polycarp and Barnabas into one.
On the other hand Polycarp's Epistle is
wanting in two most important
extant mss of these Ignatian letters— the only two which are independent