Ignatius of Antioch: The Bishop Who Wrote Seven Letters on His Way to Die in Rome

Resumen

Ignatius was bishop of Antioch in Syria. He called himself Theophoros, “God-bearer,” and was a friend of Polycarp of Smyrna.
Early in the second century, by tradition under the emperor Trajan, he was sent under guard to Rome to die by wild beasts; he called his guards “ten leopards.”
On the way he wrote seven letters: to the Ephesians, Magnesians, Trallians and Romans from Smyrna, and to the Philadelphians, the Smyrnaeans and Polycarp from Troas.
Most scholars accept the seven-letter text, the middle recension, as genuine; the long recension adds fourth-century rewriting and six forged letters, and the Syriac “short recension” is a three-letter abridgment.
The letters teach one bishop in each church with presbyters and deacons, call the Eucharist “the medicine of immortality,” reject the teaching that Christ only seemed to suffer, and contain the first surviving use of “catholic church” (Smyrnaeans 8).
The date of his death is uncertain: tradition puts it around 107 to 110, the Episcopal Church gives about 115, and some scholars date the letters as late as the 140s.
Western churches keep his feast on 17 October; the Orthodox Church keeps 20 December. Catholics and Orthodox read his letters much alike on bishops and the Eucharist and differ over Rome; many Protestants read his bishops and his Eucharist differently.

Ignatius was the bishop of Antioch who wrote seven letters on his way to die in Rome. Early in the second century, by tradition under the emperor Trajan, soldiers took him from Syria to die by wild beasts. On the road he wrote to six churches and to Polycarp of Smyrna, and those letters hold almost everything known about him.

Who was Ignatius of Antioch?

Antioch was one of the three great cities of the Roman Empire, with Rome and Alexandria, and it lies in what is now Turkey. Barnabas brought Saul to the city, and “for a whole year they met with the church and taught a great many people. And in Antioch the disciples were first called Christians” (Acts 11:26).

Pope Benedict XVI dates Ignatius’s time as its bishop from 70 to 107. Eusebius, the fourth-century historian, calls him “the second bishop of Antioch, Evodius having been the first,” and in another chapter “second in succession to Peter.” Jerome counts differently and calls him “third bishop of the church of Antioch after Peter the apostle.” The difference is only whether Peter is counted as the city’s first bishop.

Of his early life, Vatican News says plainly, “We know little.” Tradition holds that he was a convert. He was a friend of Polycarp, the bishop of Smyrna, and Vatican News notes that Polycarp “was a disciple of St. John, so it is possible that Ignatius, too, knew the beloved disciple.” The Orthodox Church in America states it outright: Ignatius was a disciple of the apostle John, “as was also Saint Polycarp.”

Why was he called Theophoros, the God-bearer?

Every one of his letters opens with the same name. In the old Roberts–Donaldson translation it reads, “Ignatius, who is also called Theophorus.” The Greek name means “God-bearer,” and Vatican News says “he liked to call himself Theophoros.”

The Orthodox Church gives two reasons for the name. He was called God-bearer “because he bore God in his heart and prayed unceasingly to Him,” and also “because he was held in the arms of Christ.” That second reason rests on a tradition that Ignatius was the child in Matthew’s Gospel whom Jesus used as an example: “calling to him a child, he put him in the midst of them and said, ‘Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven’” (Matthew 18:2–3). The Gospel does not name the child. The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1910 thought the early writers who believed the story did so “apparently without good reason,” and it is best held as a tradition.

Why was Ignatius sent to Rome?

His letters never say what he was charged with. Eusebius passes on what was reported: “Report says that he was sent from Syria to Rome, and became food for wild beasts on account of his testimony to Christ.” A later account of his martyrdom, which the Catholic Encyclopedia describes as “greatly interpolated,” adds that Trajan condemned him in person while passing through Antioch. The Orthodox life tells the same story and dates that visit to 107.

Ignatius calls himself “the bishop of Syria” and says God has thought him worthy “to be sent for from the east unto the west.” He describes his guards this way:

“From Syria even unto Rome I fight with beasts, both by land and sea, both by night and day, being bound to ten leopards, I mean a band of soldiers, who, even when they receive benefits, show themselves all the worse.”

The soldiers probably took him overland through Asia Minor. They stopped at Smyrna, where Polycarp was bishop. There the churches of Ephesus, Magnesia and Tralles sent people to meet him, and Eusebius names their bishops: Onesimus, Damas and Polybius. From Smyrna the guards moved on to Troas, and from there they left in a hurry. Ignatius told Polycarp he could not write to every church “because I must suddenly sail from Troas to Neapolis.” From Neapolis the road ran through Philippi, where Christians saw him pass. Polycarp later reminded them of the patience they had seen “in the case of the blessed Ignatius, and Zosimus, and Rufus.”

Which seven letters did Ignatius write?

Eusebius lists the seven, and the letters themselves say where they were written.

To the Ephesians, from Smyrna. The longest of the seven.
A los magnesios, from Smyrna.
To the Trallians, from Smyrna.
To the Romans, from Smyrna, dated “the twenty-third day of August.” It asks the church in Rome not to try to save him.
To the Philadelphians, from Troas.
To the Smyrnaeans, the church he had just left, from Troas.
To Polycarp, from Troas, the only letter to a single person. He hands the care of the church in Antioch to his friend.

The letters were gathered quickly. Polycarp, answering the Philippians, wrote: “The Epistles of Ignatius written by him to us, and all the rest [of his Epistles] which we have by us, we have sent to you, as you requested.” Irenaeus of Lyons, in his book Contra las herejías, quotes a line from the letter to the Romans without naming its writer.

Are all the letters of Ignatius genuine?

Most scholars accept the seven, but they reached us tangled up with forgeries, and the names scholars give the different forms of the text are easy to confuse. There are four things to tell apart.

The seven-letter text, which scholars call the middle recension. The seven letters in a shorter, earlier Greek form, close to the text Eusebius quoted. The quotations on this page come from it. William Schoedel, in the Anchor Bible Dictionary, says its authenticity “is generally accepted,” but he adds that “almost all of the collections of letters of the middle recension in the manuscripts also include some or all of the spurious letters.” Older translations such as Roberts–Donaldson call it the “shorter version.”
The long recension. The same seven letters, expanded with later additions, plus six forged letters, among them letters to the Tarsians, the Philippians, the Antiochenes and a deacon named Hero, and an exchange with a Mary of Cassobola. Schoedel says it is “usually regarded as a 4th-century” revision.
Three Latin letters. Two letters from “Ignatius” to the apostle John and one to the Virgin Mary, with a reply from her, survive only in Latin. The Catholic Encyclopedia dates them to “no further back than the twelfth century.”
The Syriac abridgment. A Syriac text of just three letters (Ephesians, Romans and Polycarp), each cut to less than half its length, which Cureton published in 1845 and argued was the original. It is often called the short recension, but it is a different text from the seven-letter middle recension. Schoedel says it “proves to be no recension at all but merely an abridgment.”

At the Reformation the long recension was the form most readers knew. John Calvin wrote, “Nothing can be more nauseating, than the absurdities which have been published under the name of Ignatius.” The Protestant historian Philip Schaff later pointed out that Calvin “knew only the spurious and worthless longer recension,” while the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1910 held that the letters discredited “his own peculiar views on ecclesiastical government.”

Archbishop Ussher found a Latin version of the seven-letter text in English libraries and published it in 1644, and in 1646 Isaac Voss published most of its Greek. That did not settle the matter. Calvinist writers, Schaff says “in the interest of Presbyterianism or anti-prelacy,” argued that even the seven were forged: Salmasius in 1645, Blondel in 1646 and Daillé (Dallaeus) in 1666. Daillé “called into question the authenticity of all seven letters,” and the Anglican scholar Pearson answered him in 1672. As late as 1910 the Catholic Encyclopedia wrote that “Presbyterians, as a rule,” rejected everything under Ignatius’s name. In the nineteenth century Zahn, whom Schaff calls “an orthodox Lutheran,” and J. B. Lightfoot made the case that won most scholars.

Not everyone agrees. Schoedel notes that some still question the letters, “notably” Joly, in 1979.

Why did he beg the Christians in Rome not to save him?

Ignatius feared that friends in Rome would use their influence to get him freed. “I am afraid of your love,” he wrote, “lest it should do me an injury.” He asked them instead to let the sentence stand, and he reached for an image of bread:

“I am the wheat of God, and let me be ground by the teeth of the wild beasts, that I may be found the pure bread of Christ.”

He did not think himself an apostle. “I do not, as Peter and Paul, issue commandments unto you,” he wrote. “They were apostles; I am but a condemned man: they were free, while I am, even until now, a servant. But when I suffer, I shall be the freed-man of Jesus, and shall rise again emancipated in Him.” The reason he gave was Christ himself: “Him I seek, who died for us: Him I desire, who rose again for our sake.”

He also asked Rome to take up a duty he could no longer do: “Remember in your prayers the Church in Syria, which now has God for its shepherd, instead of me.”

What do the letters teach?

The bishop, the presbyters and the deacons

In the six letters written to Asia Minor, each church has one obispo, with presbyters (elders) and deacons serving with him. He tells the Magnesians to act in harmony “while your bishop presides in the place of God, and your presbyters in the place of the assembly of the apostles, along with your deacons.” To the Smyrnaeans he writes, “Let no man do anything connected with the Church without the bishop.” To the Ephesians he offers a musician’s picture: their presbytery “is fitted as exactly to the bishop as the strings are to the harp.” The letter to the Romans is different. It praises the Roman church, but, as Schaff observed, “the Roman bishop is not even mentioned.”

The Eucharist, “the medicine of immortality”

Ignatius asks the Ephesians to gather in unity, “breaking one and the same bread, which is the medicine of immortality, and the antidote to prevent us from dying, but [which causes] that we should live for ever in Jesus Christ.” He writes of teachers who stayed away from the Eucharist “because they confess not the Eucharist to be the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ, which suffered for our sins, and which the Father, of His goodness, raised up again.”

The first “catholic church”

The letter to the Smyrnaeans, chapter 8, holds the earliest surviving use of the word “catholic” for the church. Pope Benedict XVI called Ignatius “the first person in Christian literature to attribute to the Church the adjective ‘catholic’ or ‘universal.’” The Greek word, katholikos, means universal. Roberts and Donaldson translate the sentence, “wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church.” Lightfoot renders the same words, “where Jesus may be, there is the universal Church.”

The sentence sits inside Ignatius’s instructions about gathering with the bishop, and the churches read it in their own ways. The Catholic Church uses the word as its name and teaches, in the Second Vatican Council’s phrase, that the one church of the creed “subsists in the Catholic Church.” The Orthodox Church understands itself, in the words of the Catholic–Orthodox commission of 2007, “as the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.” The Orthodox Church in America explains “catholic” as “full, complete, whole, with nothing lacking,” “a definition of quality rather than quantity,” so that each local church, with its bishop, faith and sacraments, is catholic, “as is each and every Orthodox church today.” Schaff, the Protestant historian, read the passage as “the first time that the term ‘catholic’ is applied to the church, and that episcopacy is made a condition of catholicity.”

Against those who said Christ only seemed to suffer

The error Ignatius fought hardest was docetism, the teaching that Christ only seemed to have a body and to suffer. Ignatius answered with his own chains: “But if, as some that are without God, that is, the unbelieving, say, that He only seemed to suffer (they themselves only seeming to exist), then why am I in bonds?” To the Smyrnaeans he insists that Jesus “was truly born of a virgin,” was “truly, under Pontius Pilate and Herod the tetrarch, nailed [to the cross] for us in His flesh,” and “truly raised up Himself.”

When and how did Ignatius die?

No letter reports his death. The letters end on the road, and Polycarp, writing soon after, was still asking the Philippians for “any more certain information” about “Ignatius himself, and those that were with him.” Irenaeus quotes the wheat line from “a certain man of ours” who “was condemned to the wild beasts because of his testimony with respect to God,” without naming him. It is Eusebius who connects those words to Ignatius, and he reports that Ignatius “became food for wild beasts.” Jerome, who drew on Eusebius, adds that “he was put to death the eleventh year of Trajan,” which is about 108, and that his remains lay in Antioch “outside the Daphnitic gate.” Pope Benedict XVI placed the martyrdom in 107, in the Flavian Amphitheatre. The Orthodox life says he was led into the arena on 20 December.

The year is not certain. Vatican News puts the letters “somewhere between the years 107 and 110AD,” and the Church of England’s calendar gives “c.107.” The Episcopal Church’s calendar gives “c. 115.” Schoedel writes that “a date in the second half of Trajan’s reign or somewhat later seems to fit the picture of the conditions reflected in the letters.” Trajan reigned from 98 to 117. Timothy Barnes, who accepts that Ignatius wrote the letters, argued in 2008 that Ignatius knew the writings of a Gnostic teacher, Ptolemaeus, and that the letters were therefore “probably written in the 140s,” decades after Trajan. The traditional answer is that Ignatius died in Rome under Trajan, around 107 to 110; some scholars place his death later.

His relics were carried back to Antioch. The Orthodox Church in America says they were moved to Rome in 637 and placed in the church of San Clemente.

When is the feast of Saint Ignatius of Antioch?

Western churches keep his feast on 17 October. Vatican News gives the Catholic date: “His feast day is October 17.” The Church of England lists “Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, Martyr” on that day, the Episcopal Church “Ignatius of Antioch, Bishop and Martyr,” and the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod “Ignatius of Antioch, Pastor and Martyr.” The date has moved: the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1910 gives the feast as 1 February.

The Orthodox Church keeps 20 December, the day its tradition gives for his death, and honours him as “Hieromartyr Ignatius the God-Bearer.” It keeps a second day, 29 January, for the return of his relics to Antioch.

How do Catholics, Orthodox and Protestants read Ignatius?

Catholic, Orthodox and many Protestant churches keep his day, and all share the faith he defended against docetism: that Jesus Christ was truly born, truly suffered and truly rose. They read his words on bishops, Rome and the Eucharist differently. Catholics and Orthodox largely agree with each other about the bishop and the Eucharist; the question between them is Rome. The wider difference over bishops and the Eucharist lies between them and many Protestants.

Catholics and Orthodox together. In 2007 the official Catholic–Orthodox theological commission, meeting at Ravenna, cited Ignatius for the bishop’s place in the local church: the presbyters are “the council of the bishop,” so that “everything be done in concert.” Both sides agreed that Rome, “the Church that ‘presides in love’ according to the phrase of St Ignatius of Antioch,” held the first place in the order of the churches, and that its bishop was first among the patriarchs. “They disagree, however, on the interpretation of the historical evidence from this era regarding the prerogatives of the bishop of Rome.” A North American Orthodox–Catholic consultation, answering that document in 2009, wrote that “the bishop is primarily a Eucharistic person,” and asked how “the image given to us by St. Ignatius of Antioch” fits a diocese that “today can encompass hundreds of local eucharistic assemblies.”

católicos also read the letters as an early witness to Rome’s place. Benedict XVI called Ignatius “the ‘Doctor of Unity’” and wrote that, in the service of unity, “the Christian community of Rome exercised a sort of primacy of love,” pointing to the greeting to a church that “presides over love.” The Catechism of the Catholic Church quotes Ignatius on the Eucharist: “the medicine of immortality, the antidote for death.” The Catholic teaching itself is set out in the Council of Trent’s decree on the Eucharist.

The Orthodox honour him as the God-bearer, a disciple of John and a bishop of the Church of Antioch. Orthodox teaching keeps the pattern of one bishop at the head of each local church, and it gives no bishop rank over the others: “Each of the bishops has exactly the same service to perform.” The Eucharist, the Orthodox Church in America teaches, “is strictly understood as being the real presence of Christ, His true Body and Blood mystically present in the bread and wine.” Orthodox tradition also remembers Ignatius as the source of antiphonal singing, in which two choirs answer each other: “To him is attributed the practice of antiphonal singing (by two choirs) during church services.”

Protestants read him in more than one way. Anglicans and Lutherans keep his day; the Anglican calendars call him bishop, and the Missouri Synod calls him pastor. “Episcopalians admire him for his advocacy of episcopacy,” Schaff wrote, but Schaff, who taught at the German Reformed seminary in Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, held that Ignatius’s bishop leads a single congregation and that “the Ignatian episcopacy, in short, is congregational, not diocesan; a new and growing institution, not a settled policy of apostolic origin.” He found “no trace of a primacy” among the bishops. On the Eucharist, Schaff granted that Ignatius’s language “no doubt involves belief in the real presence,” but called it “rather an expression of elevated feeling than a logical definition.” Some Calvinist writers argued that even the seven were forged, but since the nineteenth century the letters’ chief defenders have included scholars the Catholic Encyclopedia called “eminent non-Catholic critics”: Zahn, Lightfoot and Harnack.

The letters are short, and each can be read in one sitting. In them Ignatius asks the churches to “come together to give thanks to God” and to remember the church in Syria, and he tells Polycarp to “stand firm, as does an anvil which is beaten.”