Billy R Fincher

Epistles of Ignatius Billy R Fincher

The Epistles of Ignatius are translated by Archbishop Wake from the text of Vossius. He says that there were considerable differences in the editions; the best for a long time extant containing fabrications, and the genuine being altered and corrupted. Archbishop Usher printed old Latin translations of them at Oxford, in . At Amsterdam, two years afterwards, Vossius printed six of them, in their ancient and pure Greek; and the seventh greatly amended from the ancient Latin version, was printed at Paris, by Ruinart, in, in the Acts and Martyrdom of Ignatius, from a Greek uninterpolated copy. These are supposed to form the collection that Polycarp made of the Epistles of Ignatius, mentioned by Irenæus, Origen, Eusebius, Jerome, Athanasius, Theodoret, and other ancients; but many learned men have imagined all of them to be apocryphal. This supposition, the piety of Archbishop Wake, and his persuasion of their utility to the faith of the church, will not permit him to entertain; hence he has taken great pains to render the present translation acceptable, by adding numerous readings and references to the Canonical Books.]