As for "the writers who have specially discussed the Ignatian question during the last quarter of a century": Cureton apparently did not think it worth while to add anything regarding the Armenian version of Petermann
after its appearance; Bunsen refutes Petermann's arguments in a few pages of his "Hippolytus";(1) Baur, who wrote against Bunsen and the Curetonian letters, and, according to Dr. Lightfoot's representation, should have found this "the most formidable argument" against them, does not anywhere, subsequent to their publication, even allude to the Armenian Epistles; Ewald, in a note of a couple of lines,(2) refers to Petermann's Epistles as identical with a post-Eusebian manipulated form of the Epistles which he mentions in a sentence in his text; Dressel devotes a few unfavourable lines to them;(3) Hefele(4) supports them at somewhat greater length; but Bleek, Volkmar, Tischendorf, Bohringer, Scholten, and others have not thought them worthy of special notice, at any rate none of these nor any other writers of any weight have, so far as I am aware, introduced them into the controversy at all.
The argument itself did not seem to me of sufficient importance to introduce into a discussion already too long and complicated, and I refer the reader to Bunsen's reply to it, from which, however, I may quote the following lines:
"But it appears to me scarcely serious to say: there are the Seven Letters in Armenian, and I maintain, they prove that Coreton's text is an incomplete extract, because, I think, I have found some Syriac idioms in the Armenian text! Well, if that is not a joke, it simply proves, according to ordinary logic, that the Seven Letters must have once been translated into Syriac. But how can it prove that the Greek original of
this supposed Syriac version is the genuine text, and not an interpolated and partially forged one?" (l)
Dr. Lightfoot blames me for omitting to introduce this argument, on the ground that "a discussion which, while assuming the priority of the Curetonian letters, ignores this version altogether, has omitted a vital problem of which it was bound to give an account" Now all this is sheer misrepresentation. I do not assume the priority of the Curetonian Epistles, and I examine all the passages contained in the seven Greek Epistles which have any bearing upon our Gospels.