with still less plausibility to uphold the credit of these letters.
The following is the passage in which they are supposed to be
authenticated: "_One of our people said_, when condemned to the
beasts on account of his testimony towards God--'As I am the
wheat of God, I am also ground by the teeth of beasts, that I may
be found the pure bread of God.'" [53:1] It is worse than a mere
begging of the question to assert that Irenaeus here gives us a
quotation from one of the letters of Ignatius. In the extensive
treatise from which the words are an extract, he never once
mentions the name of the pastor of Antioch. Had he been aware of
the existence of these Epistles, he would undoubtedly have availed
himself of their assistance when contending against the heretics--
as they would have furnished him with many passages exactly suited
for their refutation. The words of a man taught by the apostles,
occupying one of the highest positions in the Christian Church,
and finishing his career by a glorious martyrdom in the very
beginning of the second century, would have been by far the
weightiest evidence he could have produced, next to the teaching
of inspiration. But though he brings forward Clemens Romanus,
Papias, Justin Martyr, Polycarp, [54:1] and others to confront the
errorists, he ignores a witness whose antiquity and weight of
character would have imparted peculiar significance to his
testimony. To say that though he never names him elsewhere, he
points to him in this place as "one of our people," is to make a
very bold and improbable statement. Even the Apostle Paul himself
would not have ventured to describe the evangelist John in this
way. He would have alluded to him more respectfully. Neither would
the pastor of a comparatively uninfluential church in the south of
Gaul have expressed himself after this fashion when speaking of a
minister who had been one of the most famous of the spiritual