apostolicfathers0201clem - Carmel Apologetics

DATE OF THE MARTYRDOM.
^1
position more firmly. He himself accepts a.d. i66 as the date of the
martyrdom, believing that he can claim the authority of Eusebius for
this year, while in the Aristidean chronology he is found for the most
part agreeing with Masson. His processes have been criticized by
Lipsius in yahrb. f. Protest. Theol. 1878, p. 751 sq; and Wieseler has
made a reply to Lipsius in Studien Kritiken ti. 1880, p. 141 sq. The
thorough sifting which the question has thus undergone is a guarantee
of the results.
Wieseler is
obliged to confess that Waddington rightly
dates the
proconsulship of a Julianus in a.d. 145, 146; but he supposes that
there was a second Julianus proconsul some years later (p. 65). He
cannot deny that there was one Heliodorus prefect of Egypt about
A.D. 140, but he supposes that Aristides refers to another bearing the
same name and office some years later (p. 66). He is willing to allow
that Statius Quadratus was proconsul, as Waddington insists, some
years before a.d. 166, but he supposes that another Quadratus
held the
proconsulate in that year (p. 69)' He is
prepared to admit that the
Severus, of whom we read elsewhere, was proconsul about the time
which Waddington assigns to him : but he postulates another Severus
likewise proconsul some years later (p. 72). Of this second Julianus,
this second Quadratus, this second Severus— all proconsuls of Asia like
their namesakes— or of this second Heliodorus — prefect of Egypt like
the first— there is no record in history or in the monuments hitherto
discovered. A theory which requires all these duplicates stands selfcondemned.
Moreover the old historical difficulties which beset Masson's
chronology remain unsolved. Thus the date of the plague
still stands
in the way. Aristides says that the plague came at the close of his
malady ;
but the chronology of Masson and of Wieseler places it many
years before the close (see above, p. 665). Wieseler, so far as I have
observed, does not address himself to this subject at alP. Yet it is a
fatal flaw in his reckoning. Again the difficulty in reference to the
^
Somewhat perversely he urges that,
because some Mss and authorities read
Sr/WTtos and Tartos for ^Ta,Tio%, the
word ought to be left out altogether, as
in the Moscow MS, holding that the Quadratus
of Polycarp's martyrdom was not a
Statius (p. 69). Keim also (p. 148) argues
in the same way. Yet it
ought to
be evident that all these corrupt readings
are so many witnesses not to the absence
IGN. I,
but to the presence of the name '
Statius '
in the original text.
^ In a later investigation however (p.
103), relating to a wholly different matter,
he refers to the passage of Aristides {Op.
I. p. 504), as evidence that a six months'
plague desolated
Asia Minor about a.d.
170, 171. Thus he is
ready to produce a
duplicate plague, just as he produced duplicate
proconsuls and a duplicate prefect.
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