Note 15 — ORIGEN DE PRINCIPIIS.

Eusebius (Eccles. Hist. iii. c. 36), treating of Ignatius, quotes from his Epistle to the Church of Smyrna as follows: “Writing to the Smyrnæans, he (Ignatius) has also employed words respecting Jesus, I know not whence they are taken, to the following effect: ‘But I know and believe that He was seen after the resurrection; and when He came to Peter and his companions, He said to them, Take and handle me, and see that I am not an incorporeal spirit.’” Jerome, in his catalogue of ecclesiastical writers, says the words are a quotation from the Gospel of the Nazarenes, a work which he had recently translated. Origen here quotes them, however, from The Doctrine of Peter, on which Ruæus remarks that the words might be contained in both of these apocryphal works.