they later interpolations and additions? This is a much
more difficult question.

As a first step towards answering this question, we may observe that
there is one very strong reason for believing that the Vossian letters
cannot have been written after the middle of the second century. The
argument from silence has been so often abused, that one is almost
afraid to employ it at all. Yet here it seems to have a real value. The
writer of these letters, whoever he was, is evidently an orthodox
Catholic Christian, and at the same time a strong controversialist. It
is therefore a striking fact that he is altogether silent on the main
controversies which agitated the Church, and more especially the Church
of Asia Minor, in the middle and latter half of the second century.
There is not a word about Montanism or about the Paschal controversy. It
is difficult to believe that such a writer could have kept clear of
these 'burning' questions, if he had lived in the midst of them. Even
though his sense of historical propriety might have preserved him from
language involving a positive anachronism, he would have taken a
distinct side, and would have made his meaning clear by indirect means.
Again, there is nothing at all bearing on the great Gnostic heresies of
this age. The doctrines of the Marcionites, of the Valentinians, even of
the Basilideans (though Basilides flourished under Hadrian), are not
touched. On the contrary, the writer several times uses language which
an orthodox churchman, writing in the second half of the second century
or later, would almost certainly have avoided. Among other expressions
he salutes the Church of the Trallians 'in the _pleroma_'--an expression
which could not escape the taint of heresy when once Valentinus had
promulgated his system, of which the pleroma was the centre. Nor again,
is it likely that such a writer would have indulged in expressions
which, however innocent in themselves, would seem very distinctly to
countenance the Gnostic doctrine of the inherent evil of matter, as for
instance, where he says that he has not in him any 'matter-loving
([Greek: philouelon]) fire (of passion),' [85:1] and the like. The
bearing of these facts has (so far as I remember) been overlooked, and
yet it is highly important.

Having regard to these and similar phenomena, I do not see how it is
reasonable to date the Vossian Epistles after the middle of the second
century. But still it does not follow that t