Syriac recension of Ignatius

[Peter Kirby]

In other news: Polycarpos might possibly have been a name in use despite the evidence, but Carpus definitely was one.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q ... 0aH-bbsuvA

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q ... 3TcEdV8YIw

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q ... CQnNZHxUYQ

Conclusion: Irenaeus might have had a glimpse of his real name but only through a mirror darkly. The closest thing to his real name is actually a joke about his real name arising from the fact that he has so many names otherwise, including Peregrinus, Proteus, Phoenix, and sundry noms de plume (Ignatius, Theophoros, and Christophoros). Indeed the multiple-name aspect of both Ignatius and Peregrinus are just another such Polycarpian feature behind both.

His unadulterated name may indeed show up in the pastoral epistles, according to Trobisch:

http://www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com/ ... _first.htm
Polycarp may even have, so to speak, signed his work. Trobisch notes how 2 Timothy 4 lists many names familiar from Acts and earlier Pauline Epistles, except for two. “When you come, bring the cloak that I left with Carpus at Tro'as, also the books, and above all the parchments.” Carpus? And this man has Paul’s “cloak”? The cloak of Pauline authorship? For he also has charge of Paul’s manuscripts. Short for Polycarp? You bet! The other name is Crescens (v. 10); it appears nowhere else in the New Testament. Guess where it does pop up, though? Why, right there in the Epistle of Polycarp 14:1!

Alternatively some ally of his may have written the real name of Carpus into the pastorals, someone who was his ally against Marcion, which the pastorals most clearly refute with a wink to the Antitheses and gnosis falsely so called. Polycarp could then produce the pastorals as writings of Paul just discovered among the property of Carpus (whether Polycarp himself, stretched to old age, or someone connected to him) along with any more-correct versions of the Marcionite epistles.

Also, Huller, in support of your idea that Polycarp was someone who formerly was in some kind of accord with Marcion, the very tenor of the question that Irenaeus attributes to Marcion in the famous exchange between them speak of it. As Marcion says when he encounters Polycarp, "don't you know me?"

(Even as an unhistorical exchange, the sitz im Leben is a quip for use in reply to the Marcionite contention that Marcion's ideas really weren't so strange to Polycarp at first. This gets doubled up with John's repudiation of Cerinthus, as a second way of attempting to refute Polycarp's secondary status to Marcion and to establish the primacy of the "apostolic" man Polycarp through John. The patristic writers don't screech and scrounge about with primacy because it went undisputed.)

[andrewcriddle]

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So the question as always is how do you reconcile these parallels? There seems to be three schools of thought:

1. Ignore them - i.e. Roger Pearse's approach here at the forum ('it's just coincidence')
2. Argue that Peregrinus wrote the letters of Ignatius as Roger Parvus has done http://vridar.org/2013/03/17/manufactur ... -problems/
3. Argue that Polycarp was Peregrinus and that the description of him as a fiery martyr was the creative germ behind the name 'Ignatius' as I have done.

Maybe there are other explanations. I happen to like mine but I am biased admittedly. I will say in my own defense that I have changed my theory a number of times which shows I am not inflexible and open to new arguments and new interpretations.

One possibility is that Lucian's work is partly fictional and that the parallels between Ignatius and Lucian's account of Peregrinus may not be historical.

Andrew Criddle