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To: ksen
You overstate your case.

According to your own post,

the best modern criticism favors the authenticity of the seven letters mentioned by Eusebius. Even such eminent non-Catholic critics as Zahn, Lightfoot, and Harnack hold this view. Perhaps the best evidence of their authenticity is to be found in the letter of Polycarp to the Philippians, which mentions each of them by name. As an intimate friend of Ignatius, Polycarp, writing shortly after the martyr's death, bears contemporaneous witness to the authenticity of these letters, unless, indeed, that of Polycarp itself be regarded as interpolated or forged.

Here is the crux of the issue, as usual:

Each has been favored to the exclusion of all the others, and all, in turn, have been collectively rejected, especially by the coreligionists of Calvin. The reformer himself, in language as violent as it is uncritical (Institutes, 1-3), repudiates in globo the letters which so completely discredit his own peculiar views on ecclesiastical government. The convincing evidence which the letters bear to the Divine origin of Catholic doctrine is not conducive to predisposing non-Catholic critics in their favor...whilst Presbyterians, as a rule, and perhaps a priori, repudiate everything claiming Ignatian authorship.

So in summary,

NO, there is no controversy whatsoever among Christians as to the authenticity of the individual Ignatian letter I quoted except among those unwilling to accept the blatantly obvious witness of history and desire to replace real, valid history with their own fallacious hystories made up out of whole cloth to support their new false doctrines of the reformation.

Just as Martin Luther attempted to remove James from the New Testament, because it refutes his new novel interpretations, and successfully removed Old Testament books (like 2 Maccabees, which refutes his rejection of purgatory,) so the reformers and their heirs attempt to discredit Ignatius, because his letters PROVE the early Church believed universally in the Real Presence, the hierarchy, the authority of men to lose and bind, and the CATHOLICITY of all early Christians.

Of course, that's what this entire thread is about, and your efforts to cast doubt upon the letter of Ignatius that I quote is just more of the same revisionist deception that the original story above completely disproves.

66 posted on 04/01/2002 8:57:28 AM PST by Brian Kopp DPM
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To: proud2bRC
From the Catholic Encylcopedia article above:

We find these seven mentioned not only by Eusebius ("Hist. eccl.", III, xxxvi) but also by St. Jerome (De viris illust., c. xvi). Of later collections of Ignatian letters which have been preserved, the oldest is known as the "long recension". This collection, the author of which is unknown, dates from the latter part of the fourth century. It contains the seven genuine and six spurious letters, but even the genuine epistles were greatly interpolated to lend weight to the personal views of its author. For this reason they are incapable of bearing witness to the original form. The spurious letters in this recension are those that purport to be from Ignatius

It seems like the only things we can be sure of about the original seven epistles are their titles.

-ksen

67 posted on 04/01/2002 9:11:47 AM PST by ksen
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To: proud2bRC
Prove Catholicism existed in name prior to 450 ad.
89 posted on 04/02/2002 10:40:49 AM PST by Havoc
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