All About Ignatius with Timothy Easley

Well, greetings and welcome to the VineLine. My name is James White. It's a blustery, windy, soon-to-be-rainy afternoon here in Phoenix. There's a, well, okay, it's going to be wait till this evening, but we get excited about things like that.

We actually got rain last week. It was so exciting. My solar panels are cleaned off for the first time in like eight months. But anyways, we are coming to you from the big studio because we want, we could have done this in the other studio too, but one of the reasons we made this whole thing was so we could have guests and it wouldn't just be like you're on Zoom or something like that, even though we are on Zoom, but look a little bit different.

And so I have a guest along today. And I should mention before we get started that Rich has gotten things to work here, but the thing is they didn't work before. The thing that always scares me is you get something to work and then you start the program and it will stop working.

That's just, that's how it works with sound systems. That's how it works with everything. So we're just hoping that everything will continue to function the way that it's supposed to function. And so I asked our brother here for a bio, so I'm going to blame him for it.

I did not write it myself. Most of the time people pull my bio off of our website. That's when I find out how out of date it is and stuff like that. I go looking for it, but this should be directly up to date.

Timothy Easley's Background and the Challenge of Ignatian Studies

So we're about to be joined by an eminent church historian. No, that's not in the bio. He didn't put that there. Timothy Easley and his wife, Jen, have four children, live in central New York. And see, that's like living in a place where all taxation is without representation.

Because if you live in New York, then you're just run by New York City. And everybody else out in the country, very conservative place, just have to deal with all the utter insanity that flows out of the city.

They live in central New York, surrounded by a large extended family. Now, if that was said about the Appalachians, then that would be a little bit questionable. But New York, yeah, okay. He has been a pastor for 13 years.

And everybody knows once you get to 14 years, your hair turns gray. And when he isn't preparing sermons, he is likely reading some obscure book for either his dissertation or another episode of his church history and theology podcast.

Which I will try to remember to link for you when I type all this stuff up. As far as he is concerned, in addition to eliminating daylight savings time, he believes the month of March should also be banned.

Now, I'm just reading. I'm reading what's given to me. But Timothy Easley is joining us. He's also hiding from various terrorist groups in a secret location. And very safe, sort of a bunker type thing, isn't it?

Isn't that where you are?

Yeah, well, it might as well be. It's an insulated attic, but close enough.

And someone will undoubtedly take a screenshot of you in your bunker and put Vice President Vance's face on you. Because that's what they have to do with everything. Evidently, that's just a new rule.

I thought it was funny for about three days. It is now just, please, people, can we get a life, do something here?

Well, like every online meme, it always outlives its humor.

Yeah, but this is like, I mean, they're going to be putting his face on dogs and cats and everything else pretty soon. It's gone way, way, way beyond being humorous anymore. So, I don't remember, maybe you can remind me, how did we start chatting about issues relating to Ignatius?

Well, I made several posts about it up on X and was talking about the nature of the difficulties that there was in just producing an episode that's up to date on the current scholarship regarding Ignatius, his letters, and everything else that went on.

And I had kind of cryptically posted a few things, and I think it was the post that I said, I have never seen a manuscript tradition more convoluted than that of Ignatius's letters. And you texted me later on that evening, and you said, all right, unload, what do you got?

I've been seeing you talking about Ignatius, what do you got? And I just sent you a good portion of everything I had. So, what I had been dealing with for six months, I kind of unloaded on you all at once without really giving you an orientation, which, by the way, anyone who's ever going to Ignatian Studies needs an orientation class first.

And that's kind of what we're hoping to help clear up a little bit tonight. So, I handed you all that and talked a little bit about where I was at and said, I'm still working six months of Obsession for a single episode, and that's definitely reached Obsession levels for me.

And I said, about a month later, I was like, you know what, I'm done. I can't do this anymore. It literally is for maybe two episodes sometime this summer, because I'm not even done with the first century yet.

And we've been going for 10 months on that.

Wow, that's a lot of time. So, I remember glancing through all that stuff, and the first thing that crossed my mind was I was looking at dates on articles and stuff like that. And a lot of it was 98 and beyond, basically the last quarter century or so.

And, of course, I graduated seminary in 89. And back then, I have my trusty Apostolic Fathers volume from Lightfoot and Harmer. Got all sorts of wonderful little page points in it here for all my favorite quotes.

And, of course, it has the Greek, and it's got a short...actually, yeah, they include the introduction. This doesn't have Lightfoot's introduction. That is found in the beastly, very much longer rendition here.

In fact, it's funny, I pulled this off the shelf to bring it in here today, and it sort of fell open of its own, because there was a business card stuck in here. And I look at the business card, and I go, pretty sure that was 89 or 90.

And it's inserted at spurious and interpolated epistles in regards to Ignatius. So, in fact, that's the page immediately before the one... You know, I wish I had photocopied, not photocopied this, scanned it, and we could have put it up.

Because this has...well, I'll just...I mean, Rich can't do anything with this. How to go over there? Wait, wait, that would be...there you go.

That looks like a reception table.

You can do something with that, Rich. Hit three, and cut, and three, and go, and it's a button. There you go, you can do this.

You just killed the camera.

No, I did not kill the camera.

That just happened.

Well, you know what? You know what? The lens cover is closed.

Yeah, it just shut itself down.

And why did it do that?

I don't know.

Wait a minute, we pay you the big bucks, okay? All I do is the theology stuff, you're supposed to do everything else. That was working, what, two minutes ago? And, okay, it's open now.

You come in and break things.

I The controls are over there, mister. I'm just sitting here trying to, you know, avoid all the Jesuit plots to mess this whole thing up. And they must have found a way to pay you off. So, anyway, while Rich is playing with that over there, there is on page 234, I assume you have this, right?

Do I have that one? No, this will show you when I went to seminary. This is the Holmes Apostolic Father.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, Holmes is for young kids.

Well, yeah, I mean, I was in kindergarten in 1989, so...

Oh, well, all right, okay, well...

Hold it now.

Okay, this one? Okay, all right, there you go. So, this, if you haven't seen this, I'll scan it for you. This is like the five-volume Lightfoot. But I knew I had seen this, I was trying to find it, and I just found it while we went on the air.

Here is a, this is Eusebius's listing. Then the short form, and then the middle form, with one column for Greek and Latin, one column for Armenian, and one column for Coptic, and long form Greek and Latin.

So, this is useful. But, and that's the whole point, is, what we're talking about is not something that's some new argument, new discussion. Everyone who has, you know, when I, when I first had to work through Ignatius in seminary, and look, I'll be honest, I was already involved in apologetics, and so I recognized the importance of Ignatius's testimony to the, initially to the deity of Christ.

And you said you were in kindergarten in 1989. In 89, the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society did a series in the Watchtower magazine trying to turn all the apostolic fathers into Jehovah's Witnesses. It was horrible.

It was, it was just one of the most amazing twisting of, well, for Ignatius, they only quoted from pseudo-Ignatian materials. They did not quote from anything considered to actually by anybody, whether we're talking short, medium, anything.

They only quoted from pseudo-Ignatian materials. And, you know, they could get away with it back then. There wasn't anything called the Internet. Now, it doesn't work so well for them along those lines.

But I had written a big, long paper. After I graduated from seminary, I became a scholar-in-residence at Grand Canyon, and so I wrote this paper refuting their abuse of Ignatius. So reading about textual history, the manuscripts, and stuff like that, I was probably the only person in my church history class that did any of that, to be honest with you, for obvious reasons.

But still, from that point onward, once you've read Lightfoot, and of course Lightfoot's introduction is a book unto itself, it's huge. After that, it's sort of like, you know, what you want to do, when I taught a class of the Apostolic Fathers, hey, with the students there, I just wanted them to become familiar, to know where these were all coming from, to be able to see the differences.

I mean, there's major differences in quality of the theology, and how biblical theology is, and stuff like that. Between the Shepherd of Hermas and Barnabas, and Ignatius and Clement, there's a big, big difference.

So getting into all the stuff that you've been getting into wasn't really necessary. And I didn't hear anything about these rumblings. And some people say, well, how is that even possible? When I, I'm just giving a side thing, and then we'll start getting into it a little bit more, but when I presented a doctoral program down at Potterston University, Northwestern University now, but back then it used to be known Potterston University in Potterston, South Africa, my doctor of honor had done his Ph .D. under Metzger at Princeton.

And I did the whole presentation of what I wanted to do, what I wanted to dive into, and then once I started getting into it and gathering my sources, lo and behold, something has developed since I graduated from seminary, and since he graduated from seminary, called CBGM.

And it changes everything. And I introduced him to CBGM. Now he's teaching in the area, but that doesn't necessarily mean that, you know, everybody's reading every article that comes out. No one could.

No one could possibly keep up with all the articles that come out in all the various areas in church history or textual criticism or anything else. So anyway, once you start talking about this stuff, I'm sitting here, I'm sort of knocking the rust off of, okay, I remember very clearly attempting at one point to try to find parallels between what's called the genuine epistles, the seven-canon middle recension, and the Latin, and just almost giving up.

It's like, why bother? It's just so massively different. And so I looked at some of the articles you sent, and I was going, okay, what we'll do, when I've got some extra time in the spring, I'll get hold of this guy.

What we'll do is we'll do a dividing line, and we'll sit around, and I'll sort of play devil's advocate, and I'll push back from the Lightfootian perspective. We can explain that in a moment. And, you know, we have some geeks that watch the dividing line, and they'll geek out on it, and they'll think it's great and fine.

And so I still had that in the back of my mind, but it's because it was in the back of my mind that what happened in the debate happened in the debate. And for those who didn't watch it, or don't want to watch it, or recognize it's a completely different topic than the debate was, at the end of the second cross-examination period, with literally 90 seconds, okay, I get the standard Ignatius question.

And what is that? Well, it depends on who you're debating. I've used Ignatius to demonstrate the early provenance of the deity of Christ. There's that section in Ephesians, section 9, there's one physician of flesh and of spirit, true God, true life in death, son of Mary, son of God.

I mean, it's almost Chalcedonian, hypostatic union theology. And I also defended Ignatius in my debate with Dr. Price, different Dr. Price than most people would think of James Price, who put Ignatius back around 150, 180, but I don't think for the reasons that some people do today.

So, I get asked the question, and the big mistake I made was, I figured, 90 seconds, maybe I can make a quick statement, provide a little bit of context, and then get to my main point, which was the texts that are found in the generally accepted rendering of Ignatius, the seven epistles, is an anti-Docetic polemic.

It uses the term, Ta-Dakine, which is, that's where it came from. So he's arguing against people who were saying that Jesus does not have a physical body. And that's what I wanted to get to. But, I felt, because I had been, you know, you made me do that reading, that maybe I should at least try to acknowledge the fact that there are complexities to the readings of almost anything you can ascribe to Ignatius.

Well, that didn't go too well, because halfway through what I was saying, my opponent kicked the plug on the light on his table out. And so, I'm sort of sitting here, and I've just said something about, you know, difficulties with the manuscript tradition.

I look up, and my opponent is under his desk. Okay, so that sort of startled me just a little bit. And then I realized he was plugging the plug back in of the light under the desk. And so I ended up, I'm like, okay, I need to repeat what I just said, but now I've got to hurry up even more.

And I didn't even give much thought of it until he gave his closing statement, where he understood me to be denying that Ignatius existed. I had not denied that Ignatius existed. I said that there are people who would question that, because of how complicated the textual history of Ignatius' epistle are.

And I agree with you. I've never seen any, certainly not in any of the major church fathers, is there any more complicated, divergent, redacted, clearly added to or subtracted from history of the text for anybody?

There's plenty of forgeries, obviously, like the Clementine homilies and all that kind of stuff. But for fully developed, added recensions, coupled together in manuscript traditions with all those forgeries and having still the text of the originals, I'm not aware of one if there is.

I know there's difficulties with, for instance, a good section of Origins. Books are only maintained through Refinis' translations into Latin. And he talks about changing some stuff around and editing some things here and there, but definitely not on this level.

And that's kind of one of the things that was... When I went through seminary, I had a bit of a different experience than you, because I went through not 15 years ago, and this was how I knew to go look into this, because when we went through it, there was just something stuck out with the references to the recension.

I had a really good church history professor, and I don't know if he was familiar with stuff going on, but he made this little side comment kind of stuck in my head. And I've taught through church history multiple times.

I've dealt with Ignatius and all this kind of stuff, but only ever did it the same way that is typical. There's these three recensions, the third one, this and that. We'll explain this in a second. And just made passing reference to it.

And then this past year, when I made up my mind that I was going to go quite exhaustively and slowly through church history, I saw a brick wall of Ignatius about a year in, right when I started the second century.

I was like, you know what? I want to get down to the bottom of that real quick. And yeah, as it turned out, that wasn't real quick, because I found out that Ignatius, as you say, has a manuscript tradition that is more complicated than anything I have run into, certainly.

I don't know of another. It doesn't mean there's not. He maxed out my experience, that's for sure.

The Manuscript Tradition, Recensions, and Dating of Ignatius

Yeah, very much so. And most people who are not familiar with... There are many people known to us in early church history only by secondary sources. So there are people, everything we know about them is from other people quoting works that we don't even possess anymore.

And people don't think about, well, okay, how long later is this person quoting from that person, and how many manuscript generations have been there, and are they quoting it directly, or are they going off the top of their head, are they paraphrasing?

I mean, there's just so many factors that can go into... Anybody who's spent almost any time with Eusebius, the father of church history, knows there's all sorts of questions about how did he do history, and how did he work with manuscripts, and where did he get his information, and there's just all sorts of stuff like that that most people...

I'm just happy to get most people in a church to pick up a book that talks about church history, let alone go to the point where they're going, well, what about the sources, and things like that. And there are parallels between doing New Testament textual history and the early church fathers, except we just have so much more.

I mean, you mentioned origin.

I think that's the thing that really stood out to me, was, I mean, my experience in textual criticism and textual studies and manuscript traditions is all New Testament and Septuagintal studies and things like this.

I've never... We don't run into anything of this magnitude like that, outside of perhaps the Dead Sea version of Jeremiah, for instance. And so you've got big questions there. But as far as... I mean, this is an entire corpus from an entire author that is affected, and nothing else outside of that on that kind of scale.

It just stood out to me so much, I think, because we are enormously spoiled when it comes to New Testament manuscript traditions.

Yeah, there's no two ways about it. So, that resulted in this whole development of this big thing that I'm an Ignatian mythicist and I'm attacking Ignatius and all the rest of this stuff when, in reality, I read from an article that you had originally sent to me, and then someone else sent it to me just recently, I think yesterday, actually.

And, yeah, the date and authenticity of the Ignatian letters and outline of recent discussions and when you read the introduction, it basically says everything that I tried to say with much more detail in just a matter of seconds.

But it specifically says, hey, this is what the conversation is about right now. This is what's going on. So I wasn't making anything up. So we decided to do this so that we could set the record straight and actually help people to understand what's going on with it.

So let's go back to the beginning and let's go, all right, how do we know that a man named Ignatius existed? When did he exist? And where? Okay, so people living today think that we just look up his social security number and the information is just right there in the computer.

And it never ever worked that way. That's not how it functions. So if you're going to prove someone's existence and see I'm approaching this as an apologist. I'm pretty certain that I have quoted Ignatius a few times in debates with Muslims and I've not had anyone challenge me textually on what I said, but I know they could.

And so I have to be thinking about how do you respond to that? Am I being fair? Am I using one standard from my sources, a different standard when I quote Hadith in regards to Muhammad or something like that?

That's what I'm thinking about. And so the reality is, as far as physical evidence, there's nothing in Antioch. My understanding is, off the top of my head, if I recall somewhere around 115, around that time period, there was a massive earthquake and most of Antioch was destroyed, was rebuilt afterwards.

There's no inscriptions. There's no Church of Ignatius. There's nothing like that. His trip all the way from Antioch to Rome, long trip. There's nothing there that you would expect to find. There's nothing in Rome that you'd expect to find.

There's not archaeological stuff, things like that. But that's true of 99 .99999 of all of humanity. So that's not that big a deal. Almost everybody we know anything about is because of some kind of written record that has come down to us, normally, in a fragmentary form, on papyri, whatever else it might be.

So, what he is claimed to have written is our primary evidence of his existence. Problem is, none of that gives us a date. It doesn't say, on the day of our Lord, la-la-la-la-la-la, because that's not how people did stuff back then.

So, when we look at the manuscripts, when we actually look at the manuscripts that we possess, that contain all of, say, the seven epistles, something like that, you're talking the middle of the 11th century.

So you're talking 900 years down the road before we have full manuscripts. And then we have references to Ignatius.

We have older ones in Syriac and so forth as well.

But for the full... They're fragmentary and things like that. But as far as the whole thing, you're talking 900 years down the road, which, again, is not unusual.

Not at all.

And a lot of people go, well, I want something earlier. Well, welcome to history. But, even when we get there, they ain't all saying the same things. And so we've talked about the recensions. Why don't you give us a quick overview of how it's been broken down?

Because I've got to admit, I imagine when these things first started coming to light, it was like, man, how do we even lay this stuff out? It had to have been quite a challenge for people to do it.

Oh, absolutely. I mean, that's something that's been a challenge ever since they started getting published. And, again, we have manuscripts that are from the medieval era and things like this. But it really didn't enter the conversational world until about the 16th century when these things started coming to publish and coming to a more public idea.

Actually, John Calvin actually refers to this in the Institutes and addresses it. And it's one of these quotations that people say, oh, he's super critical about this and stuff. And you've got to remember that in John Calvin's day, the only things getting published are forgeries and long recensions.

So these are things that everyone today rejects. And we'll talk about the recensions here in just a second. But to realize how late it is in history when these things are getting published and then we had to go and work backwards and try to recreate all this in the midst of a whole tangle of forgeries and interpolations and now we have recensions and all this kind of stuff.

Before you go into the recensions, let me make sure people understand what you're just saying. We don't want anybody going, oh, you're just picking on Rome. The Reformation takes place only a matter of decades after the publication of Lorenzo Valla's work on Jerome that began to disassemble the anachronism that had existed for centuries and centuries and centuries.

And people are now starting to recognize there's a lot of this stuff in Gratian's Decretum that are, it's just, it's all forgeries. These people didn't write these things. There's no evidence they wrote these things.

These quotes only appear over the past couple hundred years or they contain all sorts of stuff that could not have possibly been in existence back then. Donation of Constantine, suit of Isidore in the credals.

Most people just don't have any.

Even things like the Clementine homilies. I mean, that's not even until the 16th and 17th centuries as well. They had their influence for 1 ,500 years as something from, well, whenever they were made, whether 2nd, 3rd, 4th century, whatever, and they had their influence along through church history and much like you say with the Donation of Constantine, we can see in multiple papal decrees how much of a foundation it was used and then when Vala proved the Donation of Constantine to be beyond any shadow of a doubt from a far later period and then therefore completely forged, everything that was built on top of that was just kind of hanging up there and it doesn't collapse or fall down and it happened in the middle of the Renaissance.

It happened in the middle of the Reformation and so now you get multiple challenges and, you know, it's quite a thing to witness when that happens in history.

Well, what's the amazing thing to witness is when you really realize between the Donation of Constantine, the suit of Isidore, and the credals and everything else, the papacy was built on a pile of false statements that have been washed away.

Even Rome admits they've been washed away, but the papacy still stands there with its foundation completely gone and people don't even think about it. It is amazing and so that again, for most, let's say non-Catholics that are looking at this, they need to recognize it was a challenging time period and forgeries have been, forgeries are discussed by the early church fathers in their genuine stuff because they existed at that time and people knew they existed at that time.

So the pseudo-Ignatian materials, like I said, the Watchtower used that. Anybody with a big name, pseudo-Milito, you know, Milito Sardis. And that's actually amazing because he was sort of on the oust because of the Quarter Decimal Controversy, but still there was pseudo-Milito, pseudo-Athanasius, and I don't know how many citations attributed to Augustine that Augustine never said that are floating all over the place.

So it's been a major, major part and to ignore that or to pretend it doesn't exist is very, very dangerous.

The Short, Middle, and Long Recensions

So, all right.

We're already halfway and we haven't gotten to the recensions yet.

So let's get to it.

Let me kind of lay it out as fast as I can, okay? So what comes down to us from Lightfoot, the way he put this forward as a model, is that there are three recensions, right? And so for those of you who are not familiar with this, recensions means essentially a collection of letters.

And so Ignatius is an early figure in church history that wrote letters on his way to martyrdom. That is, I think, an indisputable reality. And what comes down to us through history is not just his letters, but his letters and a whole bunch of other stuff.

And all of it's ascribed to him as the Bishop of Antioch in the early 2nd century. And so you have three main recensions that are described and that is, as it was originally, the short Greek, which is now known as the middle recension.

And so that would be, if you go look up on Wikipedia or something like that and you say, you know, I want to see the, you know, what letters did Ignatius write? And it says, well, there's seven epistles, middle recension.

It is the standard one. It is the consensus view since the days of Lightfoot, so late 1800s, that these represent the authentic letters of Ignatius from the early 2nd century, okay? There is a long recension, which is when we say words like interpolated, that just means additions, things added to the letters.

They are longer in some situations. Some of them actually have shorter chapters and remove some stuff, which is really weird. And then, in addition to those longer versions of those seven letters, there's an additional several letters on top of that in the long recension.

And then there's additional medieval ones that are laughable. Things like...

Like the one from Trump?

That's almost as bad. To the Virgin Mary. And, you know, a letter from the Virgin Mary back to him, you know, because that totally happened. So things like that were really easy to deduce, right? Because that's nonsense.

But as we start peeling away, one of the challenges that happened is while this discussion is going on, again, in the early 1800s, there was a large growing consensus that, okay, this shortest Greek that we have, these seven letters, are the authentic ones.

And then all of a sudden, a guy named William Curitan messed up everything by making discovery in a monastery of a three-letter recension in the Syriac, so a whole other language. And this one is complete.

And this one even self-referentiates that these are the three letters of Ignatius and then ends it. And that just threw everyone's minds, you know, for a tizzy. And even Lightfoot, for the first 10, 20 years, if I recall correctly, was supportive of Curitan's thesis that this is actually more likely to be the originals, a shorter version of it.

We have all sorts of historical precedent for people expanding Ignatius's letters. We really don't have any historical precedent for them shortening them. And so initially, Curitan's thesis actually took hold very strongly.

And then Lightfoot came back and kind of 180'd that, made a critical version, or an eclectic version of the middle recension, which most people don't realize. The middle recension that most of us will read is not the middle recension in the manuscripts.

It is something that Lightfoot put together without, in some instances, even footnoting when he took from the Latin or took from the long recension in a couple of instances to piece together a smoothed-out middle recension that for 150 years has gone to be the standard.

Now, there's nothing wrong with eclectic texts. I think there's something wrong with eclectic texts that don't have apparatuses on the bottom that can actually tell us what's going on in the manuscript tradition.

There's actually a movement right now. I was just watching somebody who is working on their dissertation. Actually, they just finished their dissertation on Ignatian epistles and so forth, and they are, one of their first things that they're aiming to do is to establish an exhaustive critical apparatus for Ignatius' letters.

That's how complicated the manuscript tradition is. So, all that to say, what Lightfoot told us, essentially, is that there's a short recension, which has the three letters, the middle recension, which has the seven in Greek, and then the long recension, which has the, depending on how you divvy it all out, the 12 or the 13 letters.

And everyone agrees, and I do too, I don't even think there's anyone seriously in the world that is arguing for the long recension anymore. That one has gone by the wayside significantly. The middle recension is really the focus of a lot of the most recent stuff going on, and the short recension has also made a comeback of maybe this can help us solve some of the issues that we are starting to realize.

So, for 120-some-odd years, the middle recension has played a foregone conclusion as the authentics after Lightfoot, and that really just kind of tells you more about Lightfoot, really, than it does about the middle recension.

His influence was magnificent. I mean, you held up your version of Lightfoot's treatment of this. It is imposing, and I think that's... Oh, it's monumental.

Yeah, the level of scholarship is astonishing.

I think you and I both ran into this. The barrier of entry to Ignatian studies is a great wall of China. It's amazingly huge. And then, once you get into it, you find out that that's just the wall surrounding a mountain, and it just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

And that's why I finally was like, I forget, I'm done, and then you pull me back into this. And so, that's just the basic recension structure. Well, since you mentioned 97 -98, Reinhard Huebner's work in the late 90s was meant to initially challenge this, and then there was a whole bunch of answers back to him and trying to deal with that and so forth.

But again, time kind of shows us something. There have been people over the past 150 years that have raised this question here and that question there, but it usually dies out in 10 years. It's usually one or two scholars here that raise an issue on this point or that point.

This one's not dying out. The past 25 years has seen a pretty significant upsurge in this type of challenge, and they're not coming from atheists and stuff, which is what I keep hearing on X and so forth.

And yeah, is a lot of it German? Yes. But a lot of it's also English, and a lot of it's also attempting to address some of the problems that we see going on, because in the 20th century, our knowledge of the 2nd century has grown by leaps and bounds.

I kind of apply a metaphor of it coming more into focus. We're getting a much more detailed view of history, and it's making a lot of the issues that were present in the 1800s a little bit more significant now.

Even Lightfoot admitted that the classic dating of Ignatius is a little bit hairy during the early parts.

Dating Ignatius and the Evidence for His Existence

Let's talk about that for a second, because I think that's really important for most folks, again, especially apologetically speaking. Why are we all concerned about this? Well, the earliest date, 107 -108 for his martyrdom.

There's a lot of 115s out there as well. But where are we getting this from? Because we don't have... There's nothing in the epistles themselves that just jumps out and says, this person was governor here, and therefore you've got this...

There are some names of bishops in what are called the genuine epistles. That's really a misleading way of using the terminology, but anyway, generally accepted. There are some names of some bishops that are mentioned there, but we don't know when they lived either.

So that doesn't really nail things down. But there is a major issue. If it's 108, or it's 180, for some things... Both of those are in the 2nd century. So for some things, that wouldn't make all that big of a difference, because we're still talking about 2nd century Christianity, this was present, this demonstrates that, that's fine.

But for other things, it's extremely important, because as you know, one of the key arguments is, he writes to the church at Rome, doesn't mention the bishop of Rome. You put that together with other studies that have seen the rise of the monarchical episcopate in Rome, a single bishop around 140, if he's before 140, then that makes sense.