Ignatius of Antioch

• 1. Introduction

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  Ignatius of Antioch described his own guards as leopards. He wrote: "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..."

  Ignatius was an early Christian writer and the Patriarch of Antioch. He is also known as Ignatius Theophorus, a Greek name meaning God Bearer. He died around the year 108, by the traditional reckoning. Almost nothing is known of his life apart from the words of his own letters and the traditions that grew up later.

  Those letters earned him a place among the three most important of the Apostolic Fathers, beside Clement of Rome and Polycarp. They remain a key example of early Christian thought on the church, the sacraments and the role of bishops.

  But his story leaves hard questions behind. Why would Rome drag a condemned man across the empire when local punishment was the norm? Why did his guards take such a winding road? And did Ignatius really write the letters that carry his name?

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• 2. A Prisoner Bound for Rome

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  The fourth-century church historian Eusebius records that Ignatius succeeded a bishop named Evodius at Antioch. Theodoret of Cyrrhus went further and claimed that Saint Peter himself left directions for the appointment. Another tradition says Ignatius was one of the children Jesus took in his arms and blessed. A third names him and his friend Polycarp as disciples of John the Apostle. All of these come from later tradition rather than from his own pen.

  What the letters do show is that he was condemned for his faith. Yet he was not executed at home in Antioch. A company of soldiers took him to Rome instead, and scholars find that strange.

  Stevan Davies has noted that "no other examples exist from the Flavian age of any prisoners except citizens or prisoners of war being brought to Rome for execution". Citizenship does not solve the puzzle. A citizen could appeal to the emperor, and that usually ended in beheading rather than torture. But Roman law forbade binding a citizen in chains during such an appeal, and Ignatius says he was chained.

  Allen Brent offers one answer. He suggests Ignatius was sent to Rome to serve as a victim for the crowds in the Colosseum, and he argues that shipping condemned criminals there from the provinces was normal. Davies replies that a single prisoner seems a rather miserly gift for the games.

  Davies proposes something quieter. A legate of the governor of Syria may have indicted Ignatius while the governor was briefly away. Only the governor or the emperor could impose a death sentence, so the legate could either jail the bishop in Antioch or send him to Rome. Sending him away might have calmed the city's Christians.

  Christine Trevett calls that idea "entirely hypothetical". Her verdict is blunt: "The truth is that we do not know." The route itself adds a second mystery.

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• 3. The Roundabout Route

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  Antioch was a major sea port, and travel by sea cost far less than travel by land in the Roman Empire. A prisoner would normally go by the most direct route. Ignatius did not.

  Scholars have pieced his path together from references in the letters. He was first taken from the province of Syria into Asia Minor, though it is unclear whether by sea or by land. He then reached Smyrna by a road that skipped Magnesia, Tralles and Ephesus, and probably ran through Philadelphia. At Troas he boarded a ship for Neapolis in Macedonia. He then passed through Philippi. How he travelled from there to Rome is not known.

  Along the way, the guards let the chained bishop receive visitors. At Philadelphia he apparently met whole congregations. Other Christians and messengers came to see him one by one. Through those messengers he sent six letters to nearby churches, and a seventh to Polycarp, the bishop of Smyrna.

  Davies thinks this freedom and the long detours point to one conclusion. Ignatius was not the main purpose of the soldiers' trip, and the stops in Asia Minor were for other state business. On that reading, the letters that shaped Christian history were written during a government errand that happened to have a prisoner attached.

  Whether that errand ended in the arena is the next question.

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• 4. Death, Dates and Relics

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  Eusebius of Caesarea is the earliest source to place the martyrdom in the reign of Trajan, who ruled from about 98 to 117. Richard Pervo suggests Eusebius may have wanted church leaders dated as early as possible, to show an unbroken line back to the apostles. Jonathon Lookadoo replies that John Malalas and the Acts of Martyrdom give accounts independent of Eusebius, and they also name Trajan.

  Some scholars argue for a later date. Pervo himself proposes 135 to 140. The British classicist Timothy Barnes prefers the 140s, because Ignatius seems to quote the Gnostic Ptolemy, who became active only in the 130s. Étienne Decrept goes the other way, and ties the death to Apollo's festival in July 116, after the earthquake at Antioch in late 115.

  The manner of death is also uncertain. Ignatius wrote that he would be thrown to the beasts. Eusebius reports a tradition that this happened. Jerome is the first to mention lions, and John Chrysostom is the first to place the scene in the Colosseum. Modern scholars doubt that any of them had sources beyond Ignatius' own writings.

  A medieval text called the Martyrium Ignatii claims to be an eyewitness account for the church of Antioch. It names two companions as authors, Philo of Cilicia, a deacon at Tarsus, and Rheus Agathopus, a Syrian. Its most reliable manuscript is the 10th-century Codex Colbertinus in Paris. It stages a confrontation between Ignatius and Trajan at Antioch, a familiar device in martyr stories. It says his companions carried his remains home.

  The sixth-century writer Evagrius Scholasticus says Theodosius II moved the reputed remains to the Tychaeum, the Temple of Tyche, and turned it into a church for Ignatius. In 637, when the Rashidun Caliphate captured Antioch, the relics went to the Basilica di San Clemente in Rome.

  Calendars still disagree about when to remember him. Most western Christians keep the 17th of October. From the 12th century until 1969, the General Roman Calendar used the 1st of February instead. The Eastern Orthodox Church observes the 20th of December.

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• 5. Seven Letters, Three Versions

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  Eusebius, writing in the first half of the fourth century, listed seven letters by Ignatius. They went to the Ephesians, the Magnesians, the Trallians, the Romans, the Philadelphians and the Smyrnaeans, and one went to Polycarp. These are generally treated as the authentic core.

  The letters read as if written in a hurry. They contain run-on sentences and a loose succession of thought. Ignatius modelled them on the epistles of Paul, Peter and John, and quoted or paraphrased these apostles freely. In his letter to the Ephesians he echoed 1 Corinthians 1:18: "Let my spirit be counted as nothing for the sake of the cross, which is a stumbling-block to those that do not believe, but to us salvation and life eternal."

  The text survives in three recensions, which are versions of the whole. The Short Recension appears in three Syriac manuscripts from before the year 900. The Middle Recension appears in about three dozen manuscripts and fragments, in languages from Greek and Latin to Armenian, Coptic, Arabic and Ethiopic. The Long Recension survives in many late medieval manuscripts, typically with around 13 letters.

  For a time, scholars believed the Long Recension was the only version. Around 1628, Archbishop James Ussher found a Latin translation of the Middle Recension, and he published it in 1646. Roughly 25 years of debate followed. Then John Pearson's defense of the Middle Recension in the late 17th century settled most scholars on it as the original.

  The Long Recension is blamed on a fourth-century Arian Christian. That writer padded the genuine letters to recruit Ignatius, after his death, into the theological quarrels of that age. The same person is said to have forged six false letters. The collection of spurious works attributed to Ignatius, whose author is called Pseudo-Ignatius, includes epistles to the Tarsians, the Antiochians and to Hero, a deacon of Antioch. Others are addressed to the Philippians, to Mary at Neapolis and even to the Virgin Mary, and there are two to Saint John.

  In the mid-19th century, William Cureton published the Syriac Short Recension. Theodor Zahn and J. B. Lightfoot argued by the end of that century that the short text is easier to get by trimming the Middle text than by expanding it. Markus Vinzent has revived the opposing view in the 21st century, so far without much success.

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• 6. The Forgery Question

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  John Calvin dismissed the epistles as "rubbish published under Ignatius' name". His objection was shared by other Protestants. The letters seem to describe a single ruling bishop in the second century, and some Protestants preferred to deny they were genuine. The Catholic Church has always defended at least seven.

  In 1886, the Presbyterian minister William Dool Killen published a long essay with a bold claim. He argued that Pope Callixtus I forged the letters around the year 220 to support a monarchical bishop, shaping Ignatius after his own life.

  The doubts did not fade. In the 1970s and 1980s, Robert Joly, Reinhard Hübner, Markus Vinzent and Thomas Lechner argued that the Middle Recension letters were forgeries from the reign of Marcus Aurelius, who ruled from 161 to 180. Joseph Ruis-Camps proposed that an authentic core of four letters, to the Romans, Magnesians, Trallians and Ephesians, had been expanded later. In 2009, Otto Zwierlein backed a forgery around the year 170.

  By 2017, most patristic scholars accepted the seven original letters. Then a collection of studies in 2018 revived the forgery view, which is now backed by a significant number of researchers. As of 2020, many of them worked in Germany, while British and American authors mostly accepted the seven letters as genuine.

  The silence of early Christian writers feeds the doubt. Irenaeus, writing at Lugdunum around the year 180, quoted a passage from the letter to the Romans almost word for word. He credited it only to "someone of our people", even though he normally named his authorities and knew Polycarp's letter about the martyr Ignatius.

  Around 240 in Caesarea, Origen quoted the letter to the Ephesians in a homily on Luke. In his commentary on the Song of Songs, he recalled a line from the Roman letter. Yet he credited a work called Doctrines of Peter for the phrase "I am not an incorporeal daemon", which appears in the letter to the Smyrnaeans. That suggests he did not know the letter.

  Eusebius, around the year 300, is the first to give clear testimony to more than three letters. Even around the year 400, John Chrysostom, an Antiochene who knew of Ignatius' supposed relics, praised him without mentioning the letters. The earliest known source containing only Eusebius' seven letters in the Middle Recension text is a 13th-century Arabic manuscript, catalogued as Sin. ar. 505.

  Behind all this lies a practical gap. No full critical edition has appeared since Lightfoot, and as of 2024 nobody has run a stemmatic analysis of the manuscripts.

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• 7. Echoes of Peregrinus

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  The Greek satirist Lucian wrote a work called The Passing of Peregrinus, mocking a Christian-turned-Cynic philosopher named Peregrinus Proteus. Scholars have counted striking overlaps between Peregrinus and Ignatius.

  Both men showed a morbid eagerness to die. Both were, or had been, Christians. Roman authorities imprisoned both. When each was arrested, Christians from across Asia Minor came to visit and brought gifts. Shortly before their deaths, both sent letters to several Greek cities, described as testaments, counsels and laws, and appointed couriers and ambassadors to carry them.

  Most scholars think Lucian borrowed these traits from Ignatius to build his caricature. If so, the letters must already have existed when The Passing of Peregrinus was written, which sets an upper limit in the 160s.

  A few writers read the evidence differently. In 1892, Daniel Völter suggested that Peregrinus himself wrote the Ignatian epistles, and that they were later credited to the saint. The academic world has largely ignored that theory.

  Some recent scholars go in another direction and see the letters as a deliberate, novel-like saint's tale tied to Lucian's work. On that view, the Ignatius of the letters shares only a name with the Ignatius whom Polycarp mentions.

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• 8. Bishops and the Physician

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  In the letter to the Ephesians, Ignatius called the Eucharist a "medicine of immortality", at chapter 20, verse 2. The image of medicine runs through his picture of Christ. He wrote of "one Physician who is possessed both of flesh and spirit; both made and not made; God existing in flesh; true life in death; both of Mary and of God". This is one of the clearest statements of the deity of Christ in his work. He also treated persecution and suffering as a source of grace, and he earnestly longed for his own martyrdom.

  He may also be the first known Christian writer to argue that the Lord's Day replaced the Sabbath. He urged believers to stop "observing Sabbaths but fashioning their lives after the Lord's day". The only surviving Greek manuscript of that passage reads "living according to the Lord's life". Most scholars follow the Latin text, which supports the translation "living according to Lord's Day".

  His best-known contribution is about church order. Ignatius is the earliest known writer to stress loyalty to one bishop in each city, aided by presbyters and deacons. Earlier writings mention only bishops or only presbyters. He wrote that the bishop presides in the place of God, the presbyters take the place of the council of the apostles, and the deacons are entrusted with the business of Jesus Christ.

  He is also the first known author to use the Greek word katholikos, meaning universal or whole, for the Church. He wrote: "Wherever the bishop appears, there let the people be; as wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church." He added that without the bishop's consent it is not lawful to baptize or give communion.

  Joseph Lightfoot, an Anglican bishop and theologian, argued that the word meant simply "universal" to Ignatius. Only later did it come to name a particular church with orthodox belief and apostolic succession, set against heretical or schismatic bodies. Ignatius is also credited with one of the earliest uses of the term Christianity, around the year 100.

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