apostolicfathers0201clem - Carmel Apologetics

584 EPISTLE OF S. POLYCARP.
selves had witnessed. In a third passage (§ 11), towards the close of
the letter, he again compliments them as those 'among whom the blessed
Paul laboured ', adding (if the passage be rightly read and interpreted)
that in the primitive days of the Gospel they were 'his epistles', and
that he ' boasts of them in all the churches ' which had already received
the knowledge of God.
Is there anything suspicious in all this Was it not natural that,
finding himself thus engaged in writing to the Philippian Church, he
should remember that he was doing what a far greater man had done
before, and should institute a comparison humiliating to himself We
have a sufficiendy close parallel in Clement of Rome (§ 47), who in
like manner found himself treading in the footsteps of S. Paul and
rebuking in the Corinthian Church the feuds of his own time, as the
Apostle had rebuked those of a previous generation. But, if there is
nothing suspicious in the thing itself, no exception can be taken on the
ground of the language in which it is expressed. The expressions indeed
are not those which seem to us accurately to express the facts with
regard to S. Paul's Epistles. It is a hyperbole
— though a very natural
— hyperbole to say that he boasts of the Philippians in all the churches.
There is an ambiguity likewise in the plural eVto-ToXas, if the writer
intends only a single letter by it ; whereas,
if he means more than
one, the statement is not explained by the extant canonical epistle.
But, as I have had occasion to remark before in a similar case (see
to have
above, p. 403), such modes of expression are much more likely
been used by the genuine Polycarp, in whose time the Epistles of
S. Paul were not gathered into one volume and stamped with direct
canonical authority, than by a later writer,
with whom the Canon of
the New Testament comprised a well-defined body of writings.
(3) Again the attack upon heretical opinions in § 7 has been assailed
'
as an anachronism ; Every one who confesseth not that Jesus Christ
hath come in the flesh, is Antichrist ;
and whosoever confesseth not the
testimony of the Cross, is of the devil ;
and whosoever perverteth the
oracles of the Lord to (serve)
his own lusts and saith that there is
neither resurrection nor judgment, that man is the first-born of Satan'.
Now Irensus {Haer. iii. 3. 4) tells us that Polycarp on one occasion
accosted Marcion as 'the first-born of Satan' (see above, p. 450)
— the
same expression which is here used. The passage in the epistle therefore,
it is argued, must be an attack on the Docetism of Marcion. But
if so, it is a gross anachronism. The epistle professes to have been
written immediately after Ignatius' martyrdom, say a.d. no, or a.d. 118
at the latest. But Marcion had not yet appeared above the horizon ;