apostolicfathers0201clem - Carmel Apologetics

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LETTER OF THE SMYRN^ANS. 625
nothing ;
but the name at least was common in these parts at this time
(ill. p. 399).
Hilgenfeld, while maintaining the genuineness of the document as a whole, condemns
as a later interpolation the short passage § 6 ^7' yap koI aSvvaTov .
7 ewl
\riarr]P rpixovre's. He has succeeded in convincing Keim (pp. 94, 165); though,
as Keim places the rest of the document a century later than the events, such an
interpolation from his point of view is wholly insignificant. The genuineness of
these few lines is not a matter of much real moment in itself; but the arbitrary
procedure, which deals with inconvenient passages in this way, deserves a passing
notice.
Hilgenfeld makes two fundamental assumptions; (i) That this Letter of the
Smyrnceans is a Quartodeciman document; (2)
That the Quartodecimans kept the
14th Nisan, not as the anniversary of the Crucifixion, but as the anniversary of the
Last Supper. As connected herewith, he maintains that the ' great sabbath ' mentioned
in the Smyrnisan Letter is not a sabbath at all in the usual acceptance of the
word, but the First Day of Unleavened Bread, i.e. the 15th Nisan, as the great
festival of the Jews, irrespectively of the day of the week. Thus he finds an
exact coincidence between the day of Christ's passion and the day of Polycarp's
martyrdom.
But neither according to his early view of the date (a.d. 166), nor according to
his later view (a.d. 156), does the 15th Nisan fall on a Saturday. Hence the mention
of the irapaaKevr] as the day of his apprehension is a difficulty. In his earliest
treatment of this question Hilgenfeld met the difficulty by explaining wapacrKevy) as
the Preparation for (the day before) the feast {Paschastreit p. 245 sq, i860). After
adopting the date a.d. 156, I find him translating it 'Friday' {Zeitschr. f. IViss. Tlieol.
XVII. p. 336, 1874). This, I suppose, must be from inadvertence, for he still treats
the passage as genuine. But later {Zeitschr. f. Wiss. Theol. xx. p. 143, 1877; comp.
XXII. p. 153, 1879) he discovers that it is spurious. His grounds are the following
:
(i) Eusebius does not recognize
it. But Eusebius in this part is paraphrasing and
sometimes abridging the document; and, though his paraphrase is for the most part
very full, yet as this passage consists mainly of the writer's reflexions and comments
on the event, and adds next to nothing in the way of incident (only the one sentence
Tij Trapaa-Kevrj . . .6Tr\ui') he might well have ignored , it, as he has ignored considerable
portions of §§ i, 2. (2) He considers that some confusion is introduced into the
narrative, and that the parallelisms with Christ's passion are illogical. But the words
do not imply that Herodes himself came with the police, so that there is no inconsistency
with the after narrative. His name is introduced here simply because the one
parallelism, the betrayal by members of his own household, suggests the other, the
identity of name in one of the persecutors. Any inexactness or wresting that there
may be in the parallels is at least as natural in the original writer as in any subsequent
forger.
Altogether we may say; (i) That this passage is conceived entirely in the spirit
of the rest of the letter; (2) That, as a later insertion, it is motiveless and quite unaccountable
; (3) That, as other parts of this document are imitated in the Letter of
the Churches of Vienne and Lyons (see above, p. 615), so there appear to be reminiscences
of this passage likewise in the same document. Thus the word /cXTjpos
applied to martyrdom is found there more than once (§§ 10, -26, 48), and the idea of the
IGN. I.
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