Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (129 page)

Some of the author’s most emphatic teachings concern his views, specifically, of Christ. He has no difficulty calling Christ “God,” although in most instances the term is anarthrous, and is, in the editing of the authentic Ignatians, made anarthrous. Thus Christ can be called
(Philip. 5); he is the “flesh-bearing God”
(Smyrn. 5); or, with the rare use of the article, the God Word
(Smyrn. 1). It is only the false teachers who preach God but disaffirm/deny/destroy Christ’s divinity
Antioch. 5).

Christ is emphatically not God the Father or fully equal to him. Hero 6 is typical in making the differentiation:
. With some rhetorical flair, the author attacks Satan for claiming that Christ is “God over all, and the Almighty” (Philip. 7). In Antiochenes 14 he differentiates between the one who is unbegotten and the one who is begotten “before the ages”
. The distinction between Father and Son is carefully kept, even where the Son is called “God.” This can be seen, for example in the changes that the interpolator made to the famous hymnlike confession of Ephesians 7. No longer is Christ himself called, as in the authentic Ignatius, the “one physician.” Now it is God “the Father and the Begetter of the only-begotten Son” who is “our physician”; at the same time “we have also as a physician
.” As seen, Christ is still divine, but now, in this new version of the passage, Christ is no longer called
; quite the contrary, only God is called
, the Lord of all, the father and begetter of the
. Christ, significantly, is indeed the “only-begotten Son and Word before time began”; he later became a human through the virgin Mary.

The distinction between Christ and God is seen as well in the interpolator’s elimination from Ignatius’s letters of the so-called exchange of predicates, so that, for example, the “blood of God” becomes the “blood of Christ” (Eph. Pref.). Similarly, the author typically changes phrases such as “Jesus Christ our God”:
in Eph. 1, becomes
. So too in the preface to Romans he shifts from
. There are a few occasions, however, where the editor appears to be inconsistent, using the article in describing Christ’s divine status, as in the Preface to Romans:
and later in
chapter 6
:
One cannot immediately rule out the possibility that the editor was occasionally inconsistent or less than rigorous.