Learning Christ

2. Issues in Ignatian Scholarship

52 2 Issues In IgnatIan scholarshIp Because God has revealed himself and redeemed humanity in and through a historical economy, the true theologian will want to make use of every legitimate means of access to that reality. Sifting through the mountains of accumulated textual, linguistic, and historical research into early Christianity, while developing a hermeneutic that will enable one to bring this research into a fruitful dialogue with the wisdom of the ancients and medievals, may be a laborious task, but it is indispensable to the theological endeavor in our day. Each age makes its own contribution to the advancement of human knowledge and thus “necessarily poses new questions to the Christian tradition.”1 An attempt to sidestep these questions by divorcing theology from history would be disastrous. Anyone who doubts the value of historical-critical research into the Bible and early Christianity ought to look into what has been accomplished in the case of Ignatius of Antioch. For the better part of church history, from the fourth century to the early seventeenth, the letters of Ignatius circulated primarily in a heavily interpolated “long recension ” and were accompanied by six forged letters. After three centuries of manuscript discoveries and debate, during which the “middle” and “short” recensions were published, scholars of the late nineteenth century , led by Theodor Zahn and J. B. Lightfoot, arrived at a consensus that affirms the authenticity of seven (and only seven) letters, identifies the middle recension as that which most nearly approximates their original 1. Francis Martin, The Feminist Question: Feminist Theology in the Light of Christian Tradition (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1994), 174. Issues In IgnatIan scholarshIp 53 Greek text, and reaffirms Ignatius of Antioch’s identity as a historical figure of the early second century.2 This Lightfoot-Zahn consensus has been challenged several times, including very recently, but appears to be more securely founded than ever.3 Accordingly, it forms a working presupposition of the present volume. Textual criticism of Ignatius’s letters, building on the foundation of Lightfoot’s magisterial work, has continued to advance over the past 125 years with the discovery of a previously unknown Arabic version and of a fifth-century papyrus codex that contains most of Smyrnaeans in the Greek middle recension. Our understanding of Ignatius’s Greek usage has been aided, not only by advances in Greek lexicography as such, but by a vast body of new information about the historical context and cultural-religious milieu in which he lived and wrote. This textual, lexical, and historical research has in turn served as the groundwork for hundreds of valuable studies of aspects of Ignatius’s thought. It is no exaggeration to say that the vast majority of what we know about Ignatius and his letters has been learned over the last four centuries, and that this is largely the fruit of the historicalcritical method.4 Obviously, none of this means that we should accept the views of modern Ignatian scholarship uncritically. I have begun to engage this scholarship appreciatively but critically in chapter 1 and will continue to do so throughout the volume. The present chapter will take up three major issues that require extensive treatment before we move ahead with our theological interpretation of the letters. The first of these concerns Ignatius’s epistolary style, which in my opinion has been significantly underestimated and misunderstood, contributing to a general undervaluation of his ability as a theologian. The second issue is Ignatius’s 2. Theodor Zahn, Ignatius von Antiochien (Gotha: Perthes, 1873); Lightfoot, Ignatius, Polycarp. 3. For summaries and able refutations of the most prominent forgery theories proffered since the time of Lightfoot, see Hammond Bammel, “Ignatian Problems,” 62–79; William R. Schoedel, “Are the Letters of Ignatius of Antioch Authentic?” Religious Studies Review 6 (1980): 196–201; and Brent, Ignatius of Antioch, 95–143. Recently Roger Parvus has argued that the letters were written in the middle of the second century by a follower of Apelles, the erstwhile disciple of Marcion, and then heavily reworked by a “proto-Catholic” editor/interpolator (A New Look at the Letters of Ignatius of Antioch and Other Apellean Writings [Bloomington, Ind.: iUniverse, 2008]). Parvus ’s methodology is arbitrary in the extreme. First, any phrases, words, or parts of words that do not fit Apellean doctrine are assigned to the editor/interpolator. Then, wherever it is difficult to explain why the editor/interpolator would have made such an addition to the text, Parvus simply describes it as a “clumsy” insertion...