spurious.  They bear in themselves indubitable proofs of being the production of a later age than that in which Ignatius lived.  Neither Eusebius nor Jerome makes the least reference to them; and they are now, by common consent, set aside as forgeries, which were at various dates, and to serve special purposes, put forth under the name of the celebrated Bishop of Antioch.  But, after the question has been thus simplified, it still remains sufficiently complex.  Of the seven epistles which are acknowledged by Eusebius” ("Eccles.  Hist,” bk. iii., chap. 36), we possess two Greek recensions, a shorter and a longer.  “It is plain that one or other of these exhibits a corrupt text; and scholars have, for the most part, agreed to accept the shorter form as representing the genuine letters of Ignatius....  But although the shorter form of the Ignatian letters had been generally accepted in preference to the longer, there was still a pretty prevalent opinion among scholars that even it could not be regarded as absolutely free from interpolations, or as of undoubted authenticity....  Upon the whole, however, the shorter recension was, until recently, accepted without much opposition ... as exhibiting the genuine form of the epistles of Ignatius.  But a totally different aspect was given to the question by the discovery of a Syriac version of three of these epistles among the MSS. procured from the monastery of St. Mary Deipara, in the desert of Nitria, in Egypt [between 1838 and 1842]....  On these being deposited in the British Museum, the late Dr. Cureton, who then had charge of the Syriac department, discovered among them, first, the epistle to Polycarp, and then again the same epistle, with those to the Ephesians and to the Romans, in two other volumes of manuscripts” ("Apostolic Fathers,” pp. 139-142).  Dr. Cureton gave it as his opinion that the Syriac letters are “the only true and genuine letters of the venerable Bishop of Antioch that have either come down to our times or were ever known in the earliest ages of the Christian Church” ("Corpus Ignatianum,” ed. 1849, as quoted in the “Apostolic Fathers,” p. 142).

“I have carefully compared the two editions, and am very well satisfied upon that comparison that the larger are an interpolation of the smaller, and not the smaller an epitome or abridgment of the larger.  I desire no better evidence in a thing of this nature....  But whether the smaller themselves are the genuine writings of Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, is a question that has been much disputed, and has employed the pens of the ablest critics.  And whatever positiveness some may have shown on either side, I must own I have found it a very difficult question” ("Credibility,” pt. 2, vol. ii., p. 153).  The Syriac version was then, of course, unknown.  Professor Norton, the learned Christian defender of the Gospels, says:  “The seven shorter epistles, the genuineness of which is contended for, come to us in bad company....  There is, as it seems to me, no reasonable doubt that the seven shorter epistles ascribed to Ignatius are equally, with all the rest, fabrications of a date long subsequent to his time.”  “I doubt whether any book, in its general tone of sentiment and language, ever betrayed itself as a forgery more clearly than do these pretended epistles of Ignatius” ("Genuineness of the Gospels,” vol. i., pp. 350 and 353, ed. 1847).