In the (early) modern quest to winnow “authentic” authorities from antiquity, the letters attributed to the second-century martyr-bishop Ignatius of Antioch have presented a particularly tricky case. The manuscripts transmitting the letters appear to many obviously corrupted, riddled with chronologically suspect ecclesiastical terminology and fancifully augmented with an implausible exchange with the Virgin Mary herself. Yet these letters also provide one of the few windows, however clouded, into the earliest phase of the Christian church. This talk will take a close look at two episodes in England when the evidentiary demands for an authentic Ignatius grew particularly acute: one amidst the 17th-century circumstances precipitating the English Civil Wars, the other spurred by the mainstreaming of German New Testament criticism in the mid-19th century. In both cases, scholars met the evidentiary need by supplying new critical editions of Ignatius’s letters. These editions were instruments finely tuned to the polemical contexts of their day, drawing upon—and innovating within—the latest philological science to fix a dangerously fluid text, thereby redeeming the letters’ authenticity as firm historical ground.