Other contemporaries of Polycarp's were Clement of Rome and Papias. Do they give no testimony to the development of monarchical episcopacy in the later years of the Apostolic Age? Polycarp, if not acquainted with Clement personally, was yet intimately acquainted with his genuine letter, the first Epistle to the Corinthians. In this letter there is no mention of episcopacy properly so-called. With St. Clement, as in the New Testament, bishop and presbyter are convertible terms. He even drops all mention of his own name though bishop of the Church in Rome. There is not even the 'I' of Polycarp, but a 'we,' which defines that the letter is written in the name of the Church and speaks with the authority of the Church. The name and personality of the individual are absorbed in the Church of which he is the spokesman.[83] The same phenomena are observed in the letter written by Ignatius to the very Church--Rome--in which alone they are noticed as occurring. The Epistle of Ignatius to the Romans--save for the mention of his own rank--contains no indication of the existence of the episcopal office, inculcates no obedience to bishops, and says not a word about a bishop of Rome. A like phenomenon is to be noticed in the next (chronologically speaking) document, emanating from the Church of Rome--viz. the Shepherd of Hermas. What does this contrast throughout mean, but that where--as in Asia Minor--false doctrine and schismatical teachers prevailed, there episcopacy was a safeguard; where these were absent--as in Rome--there the episcopate had not yet assumed the same sharp and well-defined monarchical character as in the Eastern churches: and what does this contrast tend to disprove but the opinion of Dr. Harnack?--'Apart from the Epistles of Ignatius we do not possess a single witness to the existence of the monarchical episcopate in the churches of Asia Minor so early as the times of Trajan or Hadrian' (_i. e._ A. D. 98-138).
Turning to the other point--the Theological Polemics--disputed by Harnack, Bishop Lightfoot has dealt with the subject on its positive and negative sides respectively. The positive side yields results of real importance in attestation of the date of the letters. The heresy combated by Ignatius is a type of Gnostic Judaism, the Gnostic element manifesting itself in a sharp form of Docetism. This marked type of Docetism, far from being a difficulty, is an indication of early date, since the tendency of Docetism was to mitigation, as time went on. The negative side is educed by cross-questioning the writer's silence. There were certain controversies which rent the Church in the middle and latter half of the second century. These were such as, first, the Paschal controversy (the proper day and mode of celebrating the Paschal festival); secondly, the controversy about Montanism, the theatre of which was the very region with which these Epistles are concerned. Yet, not a word, not a hint is there, that the writer felt any interest in, or was disturbed by, anxieties about either. A similar silence points to the same conclusion, when we consider the absence of allusion to the three great heresiarchs, Basilides, Marcion, and Valentinus. Give to the first a period of notoriety conterminous with the reign of Hadrian (A. D. 117-38), yet there is not the slightest allusion in Ignatius to the tenets of the leader or his followers. Place Marcion some years before the middle of the second century. Remember that he was a native of Asia Minor and taught at Rome that there he was denounced by Polycarp as the 'first born of Satan;'[84] and that he enjoyed a world-wide reputation for evil (according to some), for good (according to others). Yet in the Ignatian letters there is not the faintest aquaintance with the man or his teaching. Valentinus also taught at Rome (c. A. D. 140-60), and his strange theories about _Æons_ and Ogdoads, about spiritual, psychical, and material men, or any other fantasy of his speculative mythology, were not thought beneath the criticism of an Irenæus, a Clement of Alexandria and a Tertullian. Yet no hint is there in the Seven Epistles that these thoughts were familiar to the writer. At one time an exultant Daillé found in his reading of 'Magn.' 8 an attack on Valentinianism, and consequently a welcome anachronism which proved the writer of the letters a forger. The discovery of the true reading has been followed not only by the collapse of the objection, but also by the adhesion to the belief, that the writer's use of certain expressions is a testimony to his existence in a pre-Valentinian epoch, when language had not been abused to heretical ends.