I have recently been studying the Early Church Fathers’ writings, and there has been a question bothering me, mainly: who found these writings? Where were they when they were found? How do we know that they are authentic? How do we know when they were written and how old they are?
These writings were copied by scribes (mostly monks) over the centuries.
In the Renaissance scholars began studying the existing manuscripts and publishing critical editions of the writings of various early Christians. In the course of doing this, scholars decided that many of the writings that had been transmitted under the names of certain ancient writers couldn’t really have been written by those authors. This was partly on stylistic grounds, partly based on the kinds of concepts discussed, etc. (So, for instance, if you find a second-century writer using some of the technical language of the fourth-century Arian controversy, you’re going to get suspicious.) These debates continued for centuries, and in some cases there are still debates about authorship. But there’s a pretty solid scholarly consensus in most cases.
So how do you know? Well, if you’re looking for 100% certainty, history can never give you that. But if you want to know the state of scholarly opinion on the matter, just look at a good critical edition of any of the Fathers’ writings. Johannes Quasten’s four-volume
Patrology is a good summary of mid-20th-century scholarship on these points–he lists under each author’s name the works that are definitely by him, possibly by him, and definitely not (authentic, dubious, and spurious). For more recent scholarly opinion, you can look at the Cambridge History of Early Christian Literature.
If you want to discuss the methods scholars use to make these determinations, we can do that. It’s always a matter of analyzing various different kinds of evidence and coming to a probable conclusion. One particularly important and interesting case is the letters of St. Ignatius. The traditional manuscripts had a lot of letters by him, which Renaissance scholars justifiably challenged, since much of the style and content seemed to reflect a later era. By the late 19th century the scholarly consensus was that seven of the letters were authentic in the shorter forms found in some manuscripts. The longer versions of those letters found in other manuscripts, and the other letters, were spurious. However, the debate didn’t quite end there. There are also Syriac versions of the letters which have somewhat different readings, and some folks think that these are the more authentic versions. And a small minority of scholars continue to question the authenticity of all the letters and the historicity of the basic story they tell (that Ignatius was being sent from Antioch to Rome for execution). The consensus opinion of 100 years ago, however (seven letters are authentic in their shorter Greek forms), has remained the consensus under all that scrutiny and challenge. And by historical standards that’s pretty impressive.
Edwin
