Justified True Belief

(●) A condemned bishop wrote seven letters on the road to his execution, and they are the clearest picture we have of the church one generation after the apostles. + Picture an old man sitting down to write a thank-you note to the church at Ephesus. They have sent a few of their people to meet him, and he wants them to know how much the visit meant. He praises their bishop by name, and asks whether he may keep their deacon a little longer. He tells them to meet more often, and to sing together like a choir taking its note from one place. And he excuses himself for handing out advice at all, since he is in chains but not yet perfect, and only love would not let him keep quiet. Now add the rest of the scene. He is writing under guard, chained to a squad of soldiers, somewhere on the road across what is now Turkey. He has already been sentenced to die in the arena at Rome, and the sentence will be carried out on animals. He expects to have a few weeks left. Ignatius of Antioch is not on a Christian apologetics site because he argued well. He is here because he is a witness. Roughly seventy-five years after the crucifixion, a church leader in Syria set down in passing, with no case to make and no opponent to answer, the things he simply assumed every church already believed: that Jesus Christ is God, that he was really born of Mary and really died under Pontius Pilate and really rose in a body that could be touched, that his flesh is given in the Supper, and that a church torn by faction has lost something it cannot afford. A source that assumes a belief is worth more to a historian than a source that defends one, because nobody bothers to assume what is under dispute. He signs every letter with a second name, Theophorus, which is Greek for “God-bearer.”

(●) Before c. 107 AD: Almost nothing survives of his early life, and the stories that fill the gap are late. + We do not know where Ignatius was born, or when, or to whom. We do not know whether he was raised in a Jewish family or a pagan one, though his Greek is fluent and his handling of Paul’s letters is the handling of a man who has read them for years. That is the honest inventory, and it is short. Later centuries filled the silence, as later centuries do. One tradition makes him a disciple of the apostle John alongside Polycarp. Another has Peter himself appoint him at Antioch. A third, and much the most charming, identifies him with the child Jesus set in the middle of the disciples when they argued about who was greatest. That last one cannot be traced back any earlier than the Greek service books used in worship and Symeon Metaphrastes, a tenth-century compiler of saints’ lives, which puts its first appearance eight centuries and more after the fact. None of the three can be confirmed from anything Ignatius wrote, and he never claims to have met an apostle. Writing to the Romans he says the opposite, and says it about the two apostles whose graves were in their city: “I do not enjoin you, as Peter and Paul did. They were Apostles, I am a convict.” What we can say is where he worked. Antioch on the Orontes was the capital of Roman Syria and, in the judgment of the Jewish historian Josephus, held without dispute the third place among the cities of the Roman world for size and prosperity (Jewish War III.2.4). Josephus does not say which two stood above it, and readers ever since have taken them to be Rome and Alexandria. It is also the city Luke keeps returning to. Believers scattered by persecution preached to Greeks there; Barnabas and Saul taught there for a year; the relief money for Judea was raised there; the first mission to the gentile world was commissioned there (Acts 11:19–30; 13:1–3); and it was in Antioch, Luke says, that "the disciples were first called Christians" (Acts 11:26). Ignatius is the first writer we have who uses the matching noun for the thing itself, Christianismos, Christianity.

(●) c. 107 AD: As bishop of Antioch he was condemned to the wild beasts and started on the long road to Rome under guard. + Eusebius, the fourth-century historian to whom we owe most of the framework, names Ignatius bishop of Antioch and puts his death in the reign of Trajan, who ruled from 98 to 117 AD (Church History III.36). Eusebius counts the succession in a way that needs care. Earlier in the same book he makes Ignatius the second bishop, after a man named Evodius (III.22); in the chapter on his death he calls him “second in succession to Peter” (III.36). The two agree only if Peter is reckoned as the apostle who founded the church at Antioch rather than as its first bishop, and later writers did not all count him the same way: Jerome, working from the same short list, made Ignatius the third after Peter (On Illustrious Men 16). Early lists of this kind were compiled long afterward out of memory and inference, and the wobble is worth noticing rather than smoothing over. What we are never told is the charge. There was no empire-wide hunt for Christians in Trajan’s day, and the best evidence for how such cases actually worked is a letter and a reply. Around 112 AD Pliny, the emperor’s governor in northern Asia Minor, wrote to ask what he was supposed to do with the Christians people kept bringing before him, and Trajan wrote back with something like a rule of thumb: they were not to be sought out, anonymous accusations were to be ignored, but a man accused, tried, and unwilling to recant was to be punished. Something like that seems to have happened at Antioch, and it seems to have been local and brief. Later, from the road, Ignatius keeps asking other churches to send someone to congratulate the Christians of Antioch, because word has reached him that they “are at peace, and have recovered their proper stature” (Letter to the Smyrnaeans 11:2). Whatever the trouble was, the church survived it and he did not. He travelled in the custody of ten soldiers, and he has left the only description of them that exists.

(Q) "From Syria even unto Rome I fight with wild beasts, by land and sea, by night and by day, being bound amidst ten leopards, even a company of soldiers, who only wax worse when they are kindly treated." + Source: Ignatius, Letter to the Romans 5:1 (Lightfoot translation). The line is grim and a little funny at once. He is being marched across a continent by men he cannot get away from and cannot get along with, and the kinder he is to them the worse they behave. Eusebius quotes this same sentence in the fourth century, which is one of the reasons we can be confident the letter he read is the letter we read.

(●) c. 107 AD, at Smyrna: The guard halted, three churches sent delegations to meet him, and he answered all three in writing. + The route ran west across Asia Minor, and at Smyrna, on the Aegean coast, the party stopped long enough for word to travel. Three neighbouring churches sent people to the prisoner. Ephesus sent its bishop Onesimus, together with a deacon named Burrhus and several others. Magnesia sent its bishop Damas with two presbyters, meaning two of the elders who governed the congregation, and a deacon. Tralles sent its bishop Polybius. Polycarp, the bishop of Smyrna and later a martyr himself, was his host. Consider what that took. These were small congregations without money or influence, and the man they were visiting was already convicted. Being seen at a condemned Christian’s lodging was not a safe way to spend a week. They went anyway, and Ignatius, who was clearly moved by it, wrote back to each of their churches: the letters to the Ephesians, the Magnesians, and the Trallians. Then he wrote a fourth, to a church he had never seen and would meet only at the end. The letter to the Romans went on ahead of him, carried by Ephesian Christians, and its last line dates it: “on the 9th before the Kalends of September,” the Roman way of writing the twenty-fourth of August. Little touches of ordinary church life come through in passing. The bishop of Magnesia was young enough that people were inclined to talk over him, and Ignatius tells them to stop. He notices which visitor refreshed him and which one is a credit to his congregation. He borrows Burrhus the deacon from the Ephesians and asks them to let him keep the man, and in two of the later letters he says the writing was done by Burrhus’ hand, which is how we know he dictated rather than wrote.

(●) c. 107 AD, at Troas: Three more letters were written at the next stop, and then the ship sailed before he could finish the job. + At Troas, on the northwest coast, the good news from home caught up with him: the church at Antioch was at peace. He wrote three more letters, to the Philadelphians, to the Smyrnaeans, and one to Polycarp personally, asking each of them to send an envoy or at least a letter to Syria so that Antioch would know the wider church had noticed. He never got to the rest of the list. The letter to Polycarp explains why, and it is the most human sentence in the collection: “Since I have not been able to write to all the churches, by reason of my sailing suddenly from Troas to Neapolis.” The orders came, the ship left, and a man with a few weeks to live handed his unfinished correspondence to somebody else and got on board. Everything after that is silence. Seven letters, written in perhaps a fortnight, are all we have. The letter to Polycarp is the one letter addressed to a person rather than a congregation, and it reads like it. Look after the widows. Hold services more often. Learn everyone’s name. Do not think well of yourself for being patient with the agreeable ones; the difficult ones are the test. Do not despise slaves, and do not let the church’s money be spent buying their freedom in a way that makes them think freedom is the point. And then the image a hammered man would reach for: “Stand thou firm, as an anvil when it is smitten.”

(●) c. 108 AD: He died in the arena at Rome, and the date is disputed by serious people. + Nobody recorded the day. The surviving accounts of the execution, the various Acts of Ignatius, are much later compositions built around the letters themselves, and no historian treats them as reports. What we have instead is a chain of people who knew the letters and knew he had died in them. Eusebius put the death in Trajan’s reign, and his Chronicle points to 107 or 108 AD, which is the traditional date and where most reference books still stop. Those figures are softer than they look. Jerome’s Latin version of the Chronicle and the surviving Armenian translation do not always assign an event to the same year, and Eusebius never records how long each bishop of Antioch actually held the office, which is exactly the arithmetic a reader would need in order to check him. The dating is genuinely open, then, and honesty requires saying so. A persistent European minority has argued that even the seven-letter collection is a forgery written under a martyr’s name well after his death: Robert Joly in French in 1979, then Reinhard Hübner, Thomas Lechner and Markus Vinzent in German from the 1990s on, with the dates they propose falling in the reign of Marcus Aurelius, the 160s and 170s. The historian Timothy Barnes took a middle path. Writing in 2008, he argued that the choice between a date before 120 and a date after 160 is a false one, since he takes the letters to be genuinely Ignatius’ own and yet reads them as knowing the work of Ptolemaeus, a teacher in the Valentinian school, one of the Gnostic movements that offered a secret knowledge above the church’s ordinary preaching. That would put the letters in the 140s. Against all of this stands the older and still majority position, worked out by Theodor Zahn and J. B. Lightfoot in the 1870s and 1880s and defended more recently by Allen Brent, that the letters are what they claim to be and belong to Trajan’s reign or the years just after. Nobody has closed the question. The traditional date is still the best supported and is the one to reckon from, but a reader should know what it rests on: a chronicle compiled two centuries later, not a record kept at the time. One small detail favours the early end. Polycarp, writing to the church at Philippi, sends them the letters of Ignatius that he has collected and then adds a request: if you have any reliable news about Ignatius himself and his companions, tell us. That is a man asking after someone whose fate he has not yet heard. An earlier chapter of the same letter, though, already speaks of Ignatius as being where the martyrs are, and the two do not sit comfortably in one piece of writing, which is why some scholars read the closing chapter as a surviving scrap of a still earlier note, sent while the news was in doubt. On either reading the collecting was done within a few years of the death, by someone who had met him.

What He Taught

(T1) Jesus Christ is God, and the body he took was a real body. + A man on his way to be killed by animals had a particular reason to care whether Jesus of Nazareth had really bled. The teachers Ignatius spends most of his ink on held that he had not. Their view has a name now, docetism, from the Greek dokein, “to seem”: the doctrine that Christ only appeared to have a body, appeared to be born, appeared to suffer, because a truly divine being could not stoop to blood and hunger and nails. It was not a cynical position. It came from reverence, from an instinct that God is too pure to be mixed up with flesh, and that instinct is a good deal more common today than the label suggests. Anyone who has thought of Jesus as a shining figure gliding through Galilee rather than a man who sweated and got tired has felt its pull. Ignatius answers it by piling up one adverb. Christ was truly born, truly ate and drank, was truly persecuted under Pontius Pilate, was truly crucified, truly raised. He anchors the story to a named Roman governor and a named local ruler so that it cannot float free of a date. He passes on a saying of the risen Christ he had from somewhere, close to what Luke records (Luke 24:39, 42–43), in which Jesus tells the disciples to take hold of him and see that he is not a bodiless ghost, and adds that afterwards he ate and drank with them (Letter to the Smyrnaeans 3:2–3). And in the same breath he calls this same crucified man God, flatly and without argument: “our God, Jesus the Christ” (Letter to the Ephesians 18:2), “Jesus Christ the God who bestowed such wisdom upon you” (Letter to the Smyrnaeans 1:1). The two halves are the whole point. A God who did not really suffer would be no use, and a man who merely suffered would be no God. The apostle John had drawn the same line not long before and made it a test of spirits (1 John 4:2–3).

(Q) "Be ye deaf therefore, when any man speaketh to you apart from Jesus Christ, who was of the race of David, who was the Son of Mary, who was truly born and ate and drank, was truly persecuted under Pontius Pilate, was truly crucified and died in the sight of those in heaven and those on earth and those under the earth." + Source: Ignatius, Letter to the Trallians 9:1 (Lightfoot translation). He then draws the practical conclusion in the next paragraph, and it is the argument of a man in chains. If Christ only seemed to suffer, he asks, “why am I in bonds? And why also do I desire to fight with wild beasts? So I die in vain” (Letter to the Trallians 10:1). Doctrine, for him, was not an academic preference. It was the thing he was about to pay for, and he wanted to know that the price bought something.

(T2) The bread of the Supper is the flesh of Christ, and eating it is how mortal people are made to last. + Ignatius noticed something about his opponents that a modern reader can easily walk past: they stopped coming to communion. He says the docetists “abstain from eucharist and prayer, because they allow not that the eucharist is the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ, which flesh suffered for our sins” (Letter to the Smyrnaeans 6:2). The word eucharist is simply Greek for thanksgiving, and it was the ordinary early name for the Lord’s Supper, the bread and cup Jesus gave his disciples the night before he died. The logic of the walk-out is exact. If the flesh was never real, then bread that claims to be that flesh is claiming nothing, and there is no reason to eat it. His own phrase for the bread is the one that stuck: pharmakon athanasias, the medicine of immortality, and he adds “the antidote that we should not die but live for ever in Jesus Christ.” A pharmakon was what a doctor gave you; an antidote was what you took when you had swallowed something that would otherwise kill you. He is describing a church that thought of the Supper the way a sick man thinks of the one drug that works. He gives no theory of how, and that silence has consequences: Christians who disagree sharply about the Supper have all read these lines and found their own view in them. Catholics and the Orthodox hear a real presence stated without embarrassment. Lutherans hear the same. Reformed and Baptist readers point out that Ignatius’ interest here is not the mechanics of the bread but the reality of the body that hung on the cross, and that his whole argument collapses if the flesh in question is not historical. All of that is fair, and the honest course is to report the disagreement rather than settle it. What no reading can avoid is the setting: one bread, one cup, the whole congregation together, and language about it that no one at the time thought extravagant.

(Q) "Breaking one bread, which is the medicine of immortality and the antidote that we should not die but live for ever in Jesus Christ." + Source: Ignatius, Letter to the Ephesians 20:2 (Lightfoot translation). The sentence closes a paragraph about gathering: come together often, all of you, in one faith, breaking one bread. He is describing a congregation, not a private devotion, and the medicine is dispensed at a common table.

(T3) A church holds together around one bishop with his presbyters and deacons, and division is where the trouble starts. + Three words for three jobs, and they are worth learning slowly because English has blurred all of them. A deacon (diakonos) is a servant, the one who carries and distributes and does the practical work. A presbyter (presbyteros) is an elder, one of a council of senior men who teach and govern; the English word “priest” is worn down from it. A bishop (episkopos) is an overseer, literally one who looks over. In Ignatius, and here for the first time in surviving Christian writing as a settled arrangement, each congregation has one bishop, a council of presbyters around him, and deacons serving. He compares them to a household: the bishop presiding in the likeness of God, the presbyters like the council of the apostles, the deacons entrusted with the work of Christ. What he is anxious about is not office for its own sake. It is faction. The churches he writes to are being pulled apart by travelling teachers holding rival meetings, and he has watched what that does. So he tells them to do nothing apart from the bishop, to hold one service and not several, and to treat a gathering convened against their own leadership as a gathering of a different kind. He says elsewhere that office is no ground for pride: “Let not office puff up any man; for faith and love are all in all” (Letter to the Smyrnaeans 6:1). The sentence he is most quoted for gave the church a word. Where the bishop is, he says, let the people be, as where Jesus is, there is the katholike ekklesia. Lightfoot renders it “the universal Church,” which is what it means; other translators keep the Greek and print “the catholic Church.” This is the earliest surviving use of the phrase, and its sense here is the plain one. It is not the name of an institution. It is the claim that the little congregation meeting in Smyrna is not a local society but a visible piece of one worldwide thing.

(Q) "Wheresoever the bishop shall appear, there let the people be; even as where Jesus may be, there is the universal Church." + Source: Ignatius, Letter to the Smyrnaeans 8:2 (Lightfoot translation). Lightfoot’s “universal Church” translates he katholike ekklesia, and this is the first time the phrase appears in any writing that has come down to us. The paragraph before it is the one that begins “shun divisions, as the beginning of evils.”

(T4) The gospel is not a variety of Judaism, and the prophets themselves were waiting for Christ. + The churches around Ignatius contained people who wanted to keep the sabbath and the food laws and the calendar as though the Messiah had not yet arrived, and teachers who would not accept a claim about Jesus unless they could find it in the Old Testament records first. He answers both, and the answer has to be read with care, because he is arguing about a live question inside the church and not about a neighbouring religion. His term for the practice he opposes is Ioudaismos, keeping the law as a way of standing with God after the one it pointed to has come; the word he sets against it, and its earliest appearance anywhere, is Christianismos, Christianity. The historical direction matters to him more than anything: “Christianity did not believe in Judaism, but Judaism in Christianity” (Letter to the Magnesians 10:3). He is not saying Israel’s Scriptures were a mistake. He says the opposite in the next breath: the prophets were themselves disciples of Christ, they were expecting him as their teacher, they were persecuted for saying so, and when he came he raised them from the dead. That is an extraordinarily high view of the Old Testament, not a low one. The other half of the quarrel is preserved in one exchange that reads like a transcript, and it is worth going slowly, because the shorthand hides a real argument. The ancient records in question were the Old Testament scrolls, the archives both sides accepted. Some men in Philadelphia told Ignatius that if they could not find a thing there, they would not believe it in the gospel. He answered that it is written, meaning that what he preached does stand in those Scriptures. They came straight back at him: whether it is written there is precisely what is being disputed. And Ignatius, plainly at the end of an argument he was not winning, answered that his own archive was Jesus Christ: “the inviolable charter is His cross and His death and His resurrection, and faith through Him” (Letter to the Philadelphians 8:2). Inviolable means not open to tampering, and that is the whole force of it. The old records could be read this way or that, and were being read both ways in the room; the cross and the resurrection could not be edited.

(Q) "For if even unto this day we live after the manner of Judaism, we avow that we have not received grace: for the divine prophets lived after Christ Jesus." + Source: Ignatius, Letter to the Magnesians 8:1–2 (Lightfoot translation). “The divine prophets lived after Christ Jesus” means they lived by him and toward him, the way a man lives by a trade. Ignatius is pressing the Magnesians with a question about their own heroes: if keeping the law is what puts a person right with God, what exactly were Isaiah and Jeremiah living on?

(T5) To die for Christ is not the end of a life but an arrival. + The letter to the Romans is unlike the other six. There are no warnings against false teachers in it and no instructions about church order. It is a single request, made at length, by a man frightened of one thing: that the Christians of the capital, who evidently had contacts and possibly money, would use them to get his sentence commuted before he arrived. The phrase he keeps coming back to is “attain unto God.” Death, the way he understands it, is the last stage of a journey he is already well along, so a reprieve would not rescue him from anything; it would strand him within sight of the door. The images he reaches for are all images of arrival, or of something being finished. He calls the coming execution the pangs of a new birth. He says he is God’s wheat, ground between the teeth of animals into bread. And he tells them outright that they can do him no greater unkindness than a well-meant rescue. This is hard reading, and it ought to be admitted rather than tidied. It can sound like a man in love with his own death. Two things are worth weighing against that impression. The first is that he did not seek the arrest; he was tried, condemned, and already in transit, and the only choice actually in front of him was whether to accept a rescue that would have amounted to unsaying the confession he had been sentenced for. The second is a sentence he drops in the middle of the most extreme passage of all, right after boasting that his guards’ cruelty is making a better disciple of him: “yet am I not hereby justified” (Letter to the Romans 5:1). He is reaching for a line of Paul’s, and he is saying that none of this, not the chains, not the courage, not the beasts, is what makes him right with God (1 Corinthians 4:4; Ephesians 2:8–9).

(Q) "I am God's wheat, and I am ground by the teeth of wild beasts that I may be found pure bread." + Source: Ignatius, Letter to the Romans 4:1 (Lightfoot translation). The image is a mill. Grain is not spoiled by grinding; grinding is how grain becomes bread, and Ignatius has already spent a whole letter calling bread the flesh of Christ (T2). Around 180 AD Irenaeus of Lyons quoted this line as the saying of “a certain man of ours” condemned to the beasts for his testimony to God, without naming him (Against Heresies V.28.4), which tells us the sentence was already famous enough to travel on its own.

(Q) "That I may not only be called a Christian, but also be found one." + Source: Ignatius, Letter to the Romans 3:2 (Lightfoot translation). He asks the Roman church to pray, not that he will be brave, but that he will actually want what he says he wants. It is the most modest line in the collection and the one his readers have quoted longest.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) The next generation kept the letters because they had known the man who wrote them. + Most ancient letters vanish. These did not, and the reason is a friend with a copying habit. Polycarp of Smyrna had hosted Ignatius, and when the church at Philippi asked him for anything he had, he gathered up what Ignatius had sent him and what he could borrow and forwarded the lot, with a note explaining that the letters contain “faith and endurance and every kind of edification” (Polycarp, To the Philippians 13:2). That is how a collection came to exist at all, and it was assembled within a very few years of the death, by a man who had shaken his hand. The chain runs on from there. Irenaeus of Lyons, writing against the Gnostics around 180, quoted the wheat-and-teeth line. Origen, the greatest scholar of the third-century church, names him twice. In the prologue to his commentary on the Song of Songs he quotes “my love is crucified” as the saying of one of the saints, Ignatius by name, without saying where he had read it; the words stand in the Letter to the Romans (7:2), which Lightfoot renders “my lust hath been crucified.” In his sixth homily on Luke he calls him the second bishop of Antioch after Peter, who fought with wild beasts at Rome. Eusebius, two generations after Origen, devoted a chapter to him, listed the seven letters in order, said where each was written, and quoted enough of them that his text can be checked against ours. Four witnesses across two centuries, in Asia Minor, in Gaul, and in Caesarea of Palestine, all reading the same small bundle of letters.

(†) He is the earliest witness outside the New Testament to a great deal that the church would later have to argue about. + Set aside for a moment whether Ignatius was right about everything and ask a narrower question: what did an ordinary church leader, writing in a hurry and with no case to prove, take for granted around the turn of the second century? The answer is a longer list than most readers expect. - Jesus Christ is called God, directly and repeatedly, in a letter opening rather than a doctrinal argument. - He was born of a virgin, of the line of David, and died under Pontius Pilate and Herod the tetrarch, all named as public history. - He rose in a body that could be handled, and ate afterwards. - The Supper is his flesh, the church meets for it together, and staying away from it is the mark of a false teacher. - Sunday, “the Lord’s day,” has replaced the sabbath as the day Christians live by. - Each congregation has one bishop, a council of presbyters, and deacons. - The word for the whole body of believers everywhere is katholike, universal. - The word for the faith itself is Christianity, apparently coined here. None of that is offered as proof of anything; it is scenery. And scenery is exactly what a historian wants, because a writer will fake an argument long before he thinks to fake a background. What Ignatius shows is not what the whole church everywhere held, which no single witness could show, but what one bishop in Syria believed and confidently expected six other churches to recognize, roughly seventy-five years after the crucifixion.

(†) The Reformation dismissed him as a forgery, and it took centuries of manuscript work to sort out who was right. + John Calvin was blunt: “Nothing can be more nauseating, than the absurdities which have been published under the name of Ignatius” (Institutes I.13.29, Beveridge translation). Coming from a careful reader, that looks at first like prejudice against a text that supports bishops. It was not. Calvin was right about the text in front of him. What sixteenth-century Europe had in front of it was the long recension. A recension is one of the forms in which a text has been copied and passed down, and this one ran to thirteen letters: the seven genuine ones swollen with additions, and six more invented outright. The whole thing had been assembled by an editor in the fourth century whose theology leaned toward Arianism, the view that the Son is a creature rather than God. He was borrowing a martyr’s authority for a later fight. Anyone reading that collection and finding it absurd was reading correctly. The repair took the better part of two and a half centuries of patient work, and it was done in libraries rather than in pulpits. In 1644 James Ussher, the Irish archbishop, found in two English libraries a medieval Latin translation of a much shorter Ignatius, and he noticed that it matched the passages Eusebius had quoted; he judged the translation to be the work of Robert Grosseteste, the thirteenth-century bishop of Lincoln. Two years later Isaac Voss published six of the seven in Greek from a manuscript in Florence. John Pearson defended the recovered text in 1672, and in 1689 Thierry Ruinart supplied the one letter still missing, the letter to the Romans, from a Greek manuscript in Paris. Then in 1845 William Cureton published a Syriac version of only three letters and argued that these alone were genuine, which reopened everything for forty years. Theodor Zahn and J. B. Lightfoot closed it again in the 1870s and 1880s: seven letters, in the middle form, are the letters Polycarp collected, and the Syriac is an abridgement of them. Every modern edition prints those seven. The lesson is not a small one. A Reformer’s contempt and his opponents’ confidence were both aimed at a text that no one now defends, and the way out was not louder argument but manuscripts.

(†) Where later Christians have parted company with him: the reach of the bishop, and the hunger for the arena. + Two places, and both deserve stating at full strength rather than softening. - The bishop. Ignatius tells the Smyrnaeans to do nothing pertaining to the church apart from the bishop, and that no baptism or love-feast, the common meal a congregation ate together, is lawful without him. The apostles wrote nothing that strong. In the New Testament episkopos and presbyteros are two words for the same men: Paul summons the elders of Ephesus and then tells that same group the Spirit has made them overseers (Acts 20:17, 28), Titus is told to appoint elders and the qualifications given are for an overseer (Titus 1:5–7), and Peter writes as a fellow elder to elders who are to exercise oversight (1 Peter 5:1–2). 1 Clement, written from Rome perhaps a decade before Ignatius, still speaks of presbyter-bishops in the plural. So the single bishop over a council of elders is a development, and Ignatius is the first witness to it. Christians read that fact in different directions, and fairly: episcopal churches see an apostolic arrangement surfacing in the record exactly where one would expect, presbyterian and congregational churches see one province’s practice at one date being urged on churches that had not yet adopted it. Two things are worth noticing whoever is reading. Ignatius’ bishop is the pastor of a single congregation, not a regional prince. And in the one letter he wrote to Rome he never mentions a bishop of Rome at all, which is an awkward silence for the strongest later claims. - The arena. “I will entice them that they may devour me promptly” is not a sentence Scripture prepares a reader for, and “though of themselves they should not be willing while I am ready, I myself will force them to it” is worse (Letter to the Romans 5:2). The church itself drew the line within a lifetime. The Martyrdom of Polycarp, written about the death of the very friend who preserved Ignatius’ letters, tells of a man named Quintus who volunteered for martyrdom, lost his nerve at the sight of the animals, and recanted; the account concludes that the gospel does not teach us to come forward of ourselves, and Polycarp himself hid in a farmhouse until he was found. Paul wanted to depart and be with Christ, and stayed for the sake of the churches (Philippians 1:21–24). Salvation is a gift and not a wage, and no amount of courage purchases it (Ephesians 2:8–9). What should be kept is what he said a line or two before his worst excess: “yet am I not hereby justified.” Ignatius, in the end, did not think his death earned him anything. He thought it took him home.