“If any of the writings attributed to those who are called apostolical fathers, as Ignatius, teacher at Antioch, Polycarp, at Smyrna, Barnabas, who was half a Jew, and Hermas, who was brother to Pius, teacher at Rome, if any of these be genuine, of which there is great reason to doubt, they only prove the piety and illiteracy of the good men. Some are worse, and the best not better, than the godly epistles of the lower sort of Baptists and Quakers in the time of the civil war in England. Barnabas and Hermas both mention baptism; but both of these books are contemptible reveries of wild and irregular geniuses.”[493] The doubtful character of these Ignatian epistles is thus sufficiently attested. The quotation in behalf of Sunday is not taken from one of the three epistles that are still claimed as genuine; and what is still further to be observed, it would say nothing in behalf of any day were it not for an extraordinary license, not to say fraud, which the translator has used in inserting the word _day_. This fact is shown with critical accuracy by Kitto, whose Cyclopedia is in high repute among first-day scholars. Thus he presents the original of Ignatius with comments and a translation as follows:— “We must here notice one other passage ... as bearing on the subject of the Lord’s day, though it certainly contains no mention of it. It occurs in the epistle of Ignatius to the Magnesians (about A. D. 100.) The whole passage is confessedly obscure, and the text may be corrupt.... The passage is as follows:— Εἰ οὖν ὁι ἐν πἀλαιοῖς πράγμασιν ἀναστραφέντες, εἰς καινότητα ἐλπίδος ἤλθον—μηκέτι σαββατίζοντες, ἀλλὰ κατὰ κυριακὴν ζωὴν ζῶντες—(ἐν ἡ καὶ ἡ ζωὴ ἡμῶν ἀνέτειλεν δὶ’ ἀυτοῦ, etc.)[494] “Now many commentators assume (on what ground does not appear), that after κυριακὴν [Lord’s] the word ἡμέραν [day] is to be understood.... Let us now look at the passage simply as it stands. The defect of the sentence is the want of a substantive to which ἀυτοῦ can refer. This defect, so far from being remedied, is rendered still more glaring by the introduction of ἡμέρα. Now if we take κυριακὴ ζωὴ as simply ‘the life of the Lord,’ having a more personal meaning, it certainly goes nearer to supplying the substantive to ἀυτοῦ.... Thus upon the whole the meaning might be given thus:— “If those who lived under the old dispensation have come to the newness of hope, no longer keeping sabbaths, but living according to our Lord’s life (in which, as it were, our life has risen again through him, &c.).... “On this view the passage does not refer at all to the Lord’s day; but even on the opposite supposition it cannot be regarded as affording any positive evidence to the early use of the term ‘Lord’s day’ (for which it is often cited), since the material word ἡμέρα [day] is purely conjectural.”[495]