Justified True Belief

(●) He listened to the apostles as a young man and was burned in an arena as an old one, and for the years in between he was the living link to the men who had known Jesus. + Sometime around the year 190, a bishop in Gaul named Irenaeus sat down to write an angry letter to an old friend who had drifted into heresy, and what he reached for was a memory of boyhood. He could still see, he said, the place where Polycarp used to sit and teach. He could describe the old man’s walk, his face, the way he talked to people. And he remembered what Polycarp used to say about the conversations he himself had had, long before, with John and with others who had seen the Lord with their own eyes. That is the reason Polycarp matters. He is a hinge. The apostles died out sometime near the end of the first century, and the theologians who would put Christian doctrine into books were two generations from writing them, and in the gap sits a bishop of a Greek port city who had heard the one group and taught the other. When the second century wanted to know what the apostles had actually said, it went to Smyrna and asked him. He left one short letter, fourteen chapters long, and it is not a work of genius. Sentence after sentence in it is borrowed from Paul or Peter or John, which turns out to be the most useful thing about it. A bishop writing somewhere in the 110s or the 130s already had those letters lying to hand, and, what is more, he expected a congregation in Macedonia, several hundred miles across the Aegean, to recognise the phrases as he dropped them in. And there is one more thing that no other Christian of his generation can claim. We know how he died, in detail, on a datable afternoon, because the congregation that watched it happen wrote the day down.

(●) c. 69 AD: He was born somewhere in Roman Asia, into the last generation that would hear the apostles speak. + Nobody wrote down the year Polycarp was born. The conventional figure is worked backwards from a sentence he spoke at the end: standing before a Roman governor who was urging him to save himself, he said he had served Christ for eighty-six years. Subtract eighty-six from the likely year of his death and you land around 69 AD. That arithmetic rests on two assumptions that could each be wrong: that he was counting from birth rather than from baptism, and that his death fell in the mid-150s rather than a decade later. Both are the usual readings, and neither is certain. His parents are unknown. A Life of Polycarp written under the borrowed name of Pionius, usually dated to the late third or the fourth century, supplies a full childhood, a pious widow who adopted him, and a good deal else besides, and historians treat almost none of it as fact. Smyrna itself we know well. It was one of the wealthiest ports of the Roman province of Asia, which was not the continent but the province Rome had made out of the western end of what is now Turkey, running from the Aegean coast back into the hill country behind it, and it was a city with a strange history: destroyed, left in ruins for centuries, then rebuilt on a grand plan, so that its public buildings ran around the slope of Mount Pagus in a curve that visitors called the crown of Smyrna. It was proud of Rome. Tacitus describes the day in 26 AD when eleven cities of Asia sent delegations to the Senate to bid for a temple to the emperor Tiberius, his mother Livia and the Senate itself, and Smyrna beat the other ten, having reminded the senators that it had raised a temple to the goddess Roma in the consulship of Marcus Porcius Cato, in 195 BC, when no other city had thought to do so (Annals IV.55–56). That civic pride is not background colour. It is the reason a Christian in Smyrna could get himself killed by declining to say a short sentence about Caesar: a city that had campaigned for the honour of housing the emperor’s temple did not take kindly to neighbours who would not join in. The city also has a New Testament address. In the Revelation given to John, the risen Christ dictates short letters to seven churches in this province, and Smyrna is one of only two that get no rebuke, the other being Philadelphia: "I know your tribulation and your poverty (but you are rich)" (Revelation 2:9), and then, "Be faithful unto death, and I will give you the crown of life" (Revelation 2:10). Most scholars date those letters to the 90s. If they are right, Polycarp was a man in his twenties when they were read aloud in Smyrna.

(●) c. 90s AD: He sat under John and others who had seen the Lord, and he was still recounting those conversations half a century later. + Our witness here is Irenaeus of Lyons, who as a boy in Asia had heard Polycarp himself, and who is therefore two handshakes from the apostles. In the letter to his old friend Florinus, which the historian Eusebius preserved for us in his Church History V.20, Irenaeus makes a point that anyone over fifty will recognise: "I remember the events of that time more clearly than those of recent years." Childhood sticks. He goes on: "I am able to describe the very place in which the blessed Polycarp sat as he discoursed, and his goings out and his comings in, and the manner of his life, and his physical appearance, and his discourses to the people." (Both sentences are McGiffert’s translation in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers.) And Polycarp, he says, used to tell of his own conversations with John and with the rest who had seen the Lord. In a second passage, this one from his great book against the Gnostics, the teachers who claimed to hold a secret wisdom handed down privately from the apostles, Irenaeus states it flatly: Polycarp "was not only instructed by apostles, and conversed with many who had seen Christ, but was also, by apostles in Asia, appointed bishop of the Church in Smyrna." Tertullian, writing in North Africa a little later, says the same thing more briefly: the church of Smyrna "records that Polycarp was placed therein by John." The word bishop has collected a great deal of furniture since then, mitres and dioceses and cathedrals, and none of it belongs in this sentence. In Polycarp’s Smyrna a bishop was the overseer of the Christians of one town, working alongside a group of elders, and the flock he oversaw would have fitted into a couple of houses. Which John? Here honesty is required. Irenaeus says "John the disciple of the Lord" and clearly means the apostle, the son of Zebedee. Some modern scholars think the man in question was a different figure, the John whom Papias, a bishop in the same province, seems to distinguish from the twelve and calls the elder. Others notice something else, the kind of thing that only shows up when somebody sits down and counts. When Polycarp actually writes, the voice coming through the borrowed phrases is far more often Paul’s than John’s. Kenneth Berding, a modern scholar who went through the letter phrase by phrase to see whose words Polycarp reached for when he was not thinking about it, concluded that on the letter’s own evidence the obvious candidate for his mentor is Paul, and that the letter cannot settle either way whether he also knew a John. None of that unsettles the shape of the claim, which is what matters here. A boy in the second century heard an old man describe listening, in his own youth, to people who had watched Jesus of Nazareth teach.

(●) c. 108 AD: Ignatius of Antioch came through Smyrna under military guard on his way to die, and sent him a letter from the next port telling him to stand like an anvil. + Ignatius, bishop of Antioch in Syria, had been condemned to the beasts, which meant being put into the arena unarmed to be killed by animals in front of a paying crowd, and he was being marched the length of Asia Minor to Rome to have it done there, in the charge of a squad of soldiers he described as ten leopards. The route brought him to Smyrna, where he stayed long enough to meet the local bishop and to write four letters, one of which sends greetings from "Polycarp, the bishop of the Smyrnaeans." Later, from the port of Troas, he wrote three more, and one of them was addressed to Polycarp personally. It is a strange and rather moving document: a man walking to his execution giving pastoral advice to a younger colleague. Bear with everyone, he says. Do not let the people who teach clever novelties unsettle you. And then the line that has stuck: "Stand firm, as does an anvil which is beaten. It is the part of a noble athlete to be wounded, and yet to conquer." An anvil does not hit back and does not move. It simply outlasts the hammer. The date is soft, and the softness matters. Ignatius’ death is usually put in the reign of Trajan, who ruled from 98 to 117 AD, but the evidence allows a range running as late as the 130s, so any date attached to this meeting inherits that uncertainty. What the meeting settles is Polycarp’s office and standing: by this point he was already bishop of Smyrna, and already the kind of man to whom a condemned bishop from another province wrote as an equal.

(●) c. 110–135 AD: He wrote to Philippi about an elder who had disgraced himself over money, and answered almost entirely in the apostles’ own words. + The Christians at Philippi, the Macedonian city Paul had written to some sixty years earlier, sent Polycarp two requests. Would he see their letter carried on into Syria, and would he send them copies of everything he had by Ignatius? He did both, and added a letter of his own, and that letter is the only thing he wrote that survives. Its occasion is embarrassing and very ordinary. One of the Philippian presbyters, a man named Valens, had disgraced himself over money, and his wife with him, and the congregation was shaken. Presbyter is simply the Greek word for an older man, and it is what the first churches called the elders who led them, a group of them in each town rather than one; the English word priest is that same word worn down by centuries of use. So the man who had fallen was not a stranger on the fringe of the church. He was one of the few people trusted to run it. What exactly he did the letter never says; it names only greed, and the details every retelling adds are guesswork. Polycarp’s handling of it is worth reading slowly. He does not gloat and he does not minimise. He says he is deeply grieved for Valens, who understood so little the office he had been given; he warns the whole church that a man who will not keep himself from greed will be defiled by idolatry and judged as one of the heathen; and then he tells them to bring the man back rather than write him off, to treat the pair as sick and wandering parts of one body rather than as enemies. A bishop today would be pleased to do half as well. What makes the letter historically valuable is its texture. Polycarp is not an original thinker and does not pretend to be. He builds nearly every paragraph out of phrases lifted from the letters of Paul, from 1 Peter, from 1 John, and from the sayings of Jesus, welding them into new sentences the way a preacher quotes from memory. Paul Hartog and Kenneth Berding have each gone through the fourteen short chapters cataloguing the borrowings, and there is hardly a paragraph without one. In chapter 12, which survives only in an old Latin translation, he introduces two lines with the words "It is declared then in these Scriptures": "Be ye angry, and sin not," and "Let not the sun go down upon your wrath." Take the first line on its own and it is Psalm 4:4. Take the two together, in that order, and they are Ephesians 4:26 clause for clause. That is why many scholars read Polycarp’s little introduction as one of the earliest places, perhaps the earliest anywhere, where a letter of Paul is called Scripture. Others are not persuaded. Both halves, they answer, could be pulled from the Old Testament alone, in which case Polycarp is calling the Psalm Scripture and reaching for a second familiar line beside it, rather than promoting Paul to the same shelf. And because the Greek of that chapter is lost and we are reading a translator’s Latin, nobody can hold the original wording up to the light. The case is strong rather than settled. The date is disputed, and the dispute has a name. In 1936 P. N. Harrison argued that what we read as one letter is really two stitched together: a short covering note sent with the Ignatian letters around 110, now surviving as chapter 13, and a much longer letter written perhaps twenty years afterward. His reason is a real wrinkle in the text, and it is easy to see once somebody points it out: chapter 9 speaks of Ignatius as already dead, while chapter 13 asks the Philippians for news of him as though he might still be alive. Other scholars answer that a man collecting reports about a friend who has gone off to be executed might well write exactly that, and defend the letter as a unity from around 110. The honest position is that the letter belongs somewhere between about 110 and about 135, and that we cannot narrow it further.

(●) c. 154 AD: He sailed to Rome, disagreed with its bishop about the date of Easter, and the two of them parted in peace. + In his eighties the old man made the long voyage west, and the reason was a quarrel about a calendar. The year is an inference rather than a record. Irenaeus says only that the visit fell while Anicetus was bishop of Rome, which by itself fixes nothing, and when the dates are laid side by side the sums do not quite come out: Eusebius’ chronicle has Anicetus taking office a year or two after the usual date of Polycarp’s death, and a dead man does not make a voyage. Something has to give. Either Anicetus became bishop a little earlier than Eusebius thought, or Polycarp died a little later than the common reckoning, and putting the visit around 154 is choosing the first. The quarrel itself was over the date of the church’s oldest annual feast, the yearly keeping of the Lord’s death and rising, which Greek-speaking Christians called the Pascha and English speakers call Easter. The churches of Asia kept it on the fourteenth day of the Jewish month Nisan, the day of the Passover, whatever day of the week that happened to be, which is why they were later nicknamed Quartodecimans, from the Latin for fourteenth. Rome kept it on the Sunday that followed. Underneath the arithmetic sat a real question about how far the church was still tied to the shape of the Jewish year, and it would eventually turn ugly. It did not turn ugly here. Irenaeus, who told the story a generation later in a letter urging a hot-tempered bishop of Rome to calm down, records the outcome with obvious satisfaction. Anicetus, the bishop of Rome, could not persuade Polycarp "not to observe what he had always observed with John the disciple of our Lord," and Polycarp could not persuade Anicetus to change either. So they dropped it. Anicetus invited the visitor to preside at the Lord’s Supper in his own church, which Irenaeus reads as a deliberate mark of respect, and the two men "parted from each other in peace." Two bishops who could not agree gave each other communion instead. Rome was also where Polycarp collided with the heretics, and the two he was up against were both teaching, in different ways, that the God who made the world is not the God of Jesus. Marcion of Sinope taught that the God of the Old Testament was a lesser and crueller being than the Father of Jesus, and he cut the Scriptures down to fit, keeping a shortened Luke and ten letters of Paul and throwing out the rest. Valentinus taught something more elaborate. In his system the true God is hidden far above the world, with a long chain of lesser divine beings spilling out of him one after another, and the maker of the material world standing well down that chain. The spilling out is what Gnostic teachers meant by emanation, and the whole company of those beings taken together, the fullness of the divine world above, is what they called the pleroma. Irenaeus says Polycarp turned many people back from both. He also tells a story that ancient readers loved and modern ones tend to wince at. Marcion met him and asked, "Do you know me?" Polycarp answered, "I do know you, the first-born of Satan."

(●) 23 February, c. 155 AD: Arrested at a farmhouse outside the city, he refused to curse Christ and was burned in the stadium at Smyrna. + A local persecution was running in Smyrna, and after several Christians had been killed in the arena the crowd began shouting for the bishop. His people moved him out to a farm in the country, and then, when the search closed in, to a second one. Two slaves were seized, and one of them, under torture, said where he was. When the police arrived late in the evening he was upstairs and could have slipped away again, and did not. He came down, and then did something that reads oddly until you think about it: he ordered a meal set in front of the men who had come to arrest him, and asked for an hour to pray before they took him. They gave it to him. He prayed for two, out loud, naming everyone he had ever known and the churches across the world, and the account says some of his captors were sorry they had come. The rest moved fast. The chief of police, a man who carried the unfortunately apt name of Herod, the name the Gospels give to the ruler who questioned Jesus on the morning he died, met him on the road with his father Nicetes, pulled him up into their carriage, and tried the reasonable argument: what harm is there in saying "Caesar is Lord" and offering a little incense? Polycarp would not, and was put down from the carriage so roughly that he scraped his shin. At the stadium the proconsul tried the same thing with more force. A proconsul was the senator Rome sent out to govern a province for a year, the highest authority for hundreds of miles, and in a case like this he was also the judge. Swear by the fortune of Caesar, he said, and shout "Away with the atheists," meaning the Christians, who were called atheists because they refused the gods everyone else could see. Polycarp looked around the packed and howling stands, waved his hand at them, groaned, looked up to heaven and said, "Away with the atheists." He had said the words the governor asked for. He had also, without adding a syllable, aimed them at the crowd that was baying for him, the people who to his mind were the ones who did not know God. Nothing else that survives of him has a flicker of humour in it, and he found one here, with the wood for his own fire not yet gathered. Then came the demand he could not turn: swear, and revile Christ, and go home. His answer is the sentence he is remembered by (T4). The proconsul threatened him with beasts, then with fire, and he answered that the fire being held over him burns for an hour and is soon out, and that the proconsul knew nothing of the fire kept for the ungodly, which is not. The crowd ran to fetch wood from the workshops and the baths. They were going to nail him to the stake and he asked them not to, saying that the God who gave him strength to endure the fire would give him strength to stay in it, so they tied him instead. He was burned, and when the fire did not finish him an executioner ran him through with a dagger.

(●) c. 156 AD: His own congregation wrote down what they had watched, and Christian literature gained the earliest martyr act that survives. + The arrest, the stadium and the fire all come from a letter the church at Smyrna sent to the church at Philomelium, a town inland, telling them what had been done to their bishop, and the letter was written while the memory was fresh. It is the earliest detailed account of a Christian martyrdom we have outside the New Testament, and it created a genre. Martyr acts, as those accounts came to be called, are simply the record of how a particular Christian was arrested, questioned and killed, written down by the people who watched, and Christians went on writing and reading them for centuries. Its closing paragraph is also what lets us date the death, and the dating has been argued over for a hundred and fifty years. The letter fixes the day four times over, in the overlapping calendars an ordinary provincial had to keep in his head. He died on the second day of the month Xanthicus, an old Macedonian month name still in use in the Greek cities of Asia. He died seven days before the kalends of March, which is the Roman habit of counting backwards from the first of the month and lands on 23 February. He died on a great Sabbath, a Jewish way of marking the day whose exact sense is still argued over. And he died at the eighth hour, counted from sunrise, so somewhere in the early afternoon. Then the letter names the Roman governor: "Statius Quadratus being proconsul, but Jesus Christ being King for ever." (The Roberts-Donaldson version prints May rather than March at that point; Lightfoot and the modern critical editions read March, and the whole reckoning depends on it.) In 1867 the French scholar W. H. Waddington worked out from inscriptions when Quadratus governed Asia, and put the death on 23 February 155. That date, or 156, is what most historians now use. Eusebius, writing in the fourth century, had placed it around 166 or 167, and almost nobody follows him. A minority of scholars argue for dates later still. February of 155 is the common reckoning, and it is not beyond challenge. The state of the text is worth being straight about too. Most of the account is quoted in full by Eusebius in the fourth century, and the manuscripts we copy our own text from are a great deal later than that, so his quotation works rather like an older photograph of the same page: we can hold the two side by side and see what has changed. The comparison turns up at least one growth. Where our manuscripts say that when the executioner struck, "there came forth a dove, and a great quantity of blood, so that the fire was extinguished," Eusebius has the blood and no dove. Two Greek words appear to have been added by a later hand. The final chapters, which give the date and a note about the copying of the document, are generally taken to be appendices added as it was passed along. None of that touches the core of the account, and it is worth saying out loud rather than leaving for a critic to find.

What He Taught

(T1) The faith is something received, and the work of a lifetime is to hand it on unaltered. + Think of a family recipe copied out by a grandmother and passed down. The person holding the card is not being creative, and that is the whole point of them. Their job is to make sure the thing that arrives is the thing that was sent. That is how Polycarp understood his office, and it explains why his letter reads the way it does. He is not building a system. He is repeating, in the apostles’ own vocabulary, what the apostles said, and warning the Philippians away from people who have improved on it. Irenaeus, who watched him do this for years, put it in one line: Polycarp died "having always taught the things which he had learned from the apostles." Two things follow that are worth pausing over. The first is a claim about where Christian truth comes from. Polycarp does not appeal to a fresh revelation of his own, or to a philosophical argument, or to an inner light. He appeals to what was delivered, and he can name the men it was delivered by. The second is a limitation, and Christians should own it. A man whose gift is faithful transmission will not tell you anything new, and if you go to Polycarp looking for a theology of the Trinity or a doctrine of the atonement worked out in detail, you will come away hungry. What you get instead is a photograph of what an ordinary apostolic church believed when the apostles had only just stopped speaking.

(Q) "Wherefore, forsaking the vanity of many, and their false doctrines, let us return to the word which has been handed down to us from the beginning." + Source: Polycarp, Letter to the Philippians 7.2 (Roberts-Donaldson translation, Ante-Nicene Fathers). That is the Edinburgh series Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson began issuing in 1867 to put the Christian writings from before the Council of Nicaea into English, long out of copyright, which is why the sentence says "wherefore" and "vanity" rather than something a modern translator would write. He has just finished describing the people who deny that Christ came in a real body, and this is the turn: not a counter-system, but a going back. The Greek word behind "handed down" is the ordinary one for passing an object from one hand to another, and it is the root of the word later Christians would argue over, tradition.

(T2) Jesus Christ came in real flesh, and whoever denies it is antichrist. + A rumour was going round the churches of Asia that the Son of God had not really had a body. He had seemed to have one, the way an actor seems to be a king; the blood and the nails and the tomb were an appearance put on for our benefit. Scholars call this docetism, from the Greek dokein, to seem, and it was not the invention of cranks. It came from a genuinely pious instinct. Spirit is clean and matter is messy, so surely God would not soak himself in the mess. Polycarp’s answer is short and it does not negotiate. Anyone who will not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is antichrist. He is quoting John here almost word for word, and the language of the New Testament stands behind him: "every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God" (1 John 4:2). He then extends the test in two directions that show what he thinks is at stake. Whoever will not confess the witness of the cross belongs to the devil, and whoever twists the Lord’s sayings to suit his own appetites and says there is no resurrection and no judgment is the first-born of Satan. Notice how those three hang together. If the body was a costume, the crucifixion was theatre and did not cost God anything; and if the body was a costume, then the promise that God will raise our bodies has nothing behind it. Polycarp is not defending an abstraction. He is defending the two ends of the Christian story, a real death and a real rising, and he can see that the same false step ruins both. Fifty years later Irenaeus would build a whole theology on that insight, and Ignatius, whose letters Polycarp had just copied out, had made the same fight on his way to Rome.

(Q) "For whosoever does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh, is antichrist; and whosoever does not confess the testimony of the cross, is of the devil; and whosoever perverts the oracles of the Lord to his own lusts, and says that there is neither a resurrection nor a judgment, he is the first-born of Satan." + Source: Polycarp, Letter to the Philippians 7.1 (Roberts-Donaldson translation, Ante-Nicene Fathers). "Oracles of the Lord" means the sayings of Jesus. The last phrase is the one Irenaeus reports him throwing at Marcion in person years afterward, which suggests it was a favourite, or that the letter is where the story got its wording.

(T3) A church is tested at its money box, and its elders are tested there first. + Ancient churches kept a common fund. Members brought what they could, and the elders distributed it to widows, orphans, prisoners, and the sick, which meant that in every congregation there was a box of other people’s money and a small number of men with the key. Polycarp comes back to that box more often than to any other practical matter. When he lists what he expects of presbyters, mercy for the wandering and visits to the sick and the widow and the orphan come first, and keeping far away from love of money comes close behind. When he warns the congregation, he reaches for Paul’s sentence to Timothy about the love of money and reshapes it in his own words, calling it the beginning of all troubles rather than the root of all evils, and he takes over Paul’s harder line as well, that covetousness is a kind of idolatry (Colossians 3:5): a man who will not keep himself from greed, he says, will be defiled by idolatry and judged as one of the heathen. And when the thing he feared actually happened, and the presbyter Valens disgraced himself over money, the letter does not become a legal document. It becomes pastoral. Polycarp says he is grieved, tells the church to be sober about it, and asks them not to treat the man and his wife as enemies but as diseased limbs of a body they are trying to save. All of that is more than housekeeping, because it shows what he thought Christianity was. Not first an opinion about the nature of Christ, though he had one and would die for it, but a way of handling other people and their possessions that a watching city could check. He had probably watched it fail. Smyrna was rich, the church was poor, and the temptation was sitting there in a box.

(Q) "But the love of money is the beginning of all troubles." + Source: Polycarp, Letter to the Philippians 4.1 (J. B. Lightfoot’s translation, The Apostolic Fathers; the Roberts-Donaldson version in the Ante-Nicene Fathers smooths the line into the King James wording of 1 Timothy 6:10, which is not what the Greek says). He is turning Paul’s warning to Timothy about the love of money into a sentence of his own, and going straight on to the practical consequence: since we brought nothing into the world and can carry nothing out, we had better arm ourselves with righteousness instead. The chapter then turns to how wives, widows, and children are to live, which is where he thinks the armour is actually worn.

(T4) Dying for Christ is not a defeat to be dodged, and it is not a prize to be grabbed at either. + There is a moment early in the account of his death that most retellings leave out, and it changes the shape of the whole thing. A Christian named Quintus, newly arrived from Phrygia, the inland country behind the coastal cities, had talked himself and several others into turning themselves in. Then he saw the animals, and his nerve broke, and the proconsul talked him into swearing by Caesar and sacrificing. The letter draws the lesson without cruelty and without hedging: for this reason, brothers, we do not commend those who hand themselves over, since the gospel does not teach us to do that. Set that beside Polycarp’s own behaviour and a policy emerges. He let his people hide him. He moved farms twice. He did not walk into the stadium; he was carried there. But when the choice was actually put to him, and one sentence about Caesar would have opened the gate, he would not say it, and he was calm about the fire because he was quite sure it was short. This is where his teaching and his life stop being separable, and it is worth noticing what he thought was happening. His prayer at the stake does not ask to be spared and does not ask for revenge. It gives thanks, as though he had been handed something, and the thing he thanks God for is a place among the martyrs and a share in the cup of Christ. He is not being brave in the face of nothing. He is going somewhere, and he says so.

(Q) "Eighty and six years have I served Him, and He never did me any injury: how then can I blaspheme my King and my Saviour?" + Source: The Martyrdom of Polycarp 9 (Roberts-Donaldson translation, Ante-Nicene Fathers), the letter of the church at Smyrna, written by Christians who were in the stadium. The proconsul had just said, "Swear, and I will set thee at liberty, reproach Christ." The answer is not a speech. It is an old servant being asked to say his master had mistreated him, and refusing on the grounds that it would not be true.

(Q) "I give Thee thanks that Thou hast counted me worthy of this day and this hour, that I should have a part in the number of Thy martyrs, in the cup of thy Christ, to the resurrection of eternal life, both of soul and body." + Source: The Martyrdom of Polycarp 14 (Roberts-Donaldson translation, Ante-Nicene Fathers). He is tied to the stake and the wood is stacked, and he asks for a moment to pray aloud. What comes out is not a plea but a thanksgiving, addressed to the Father of Jesus Christ and ending in a doxology, praise offered to Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Christians who came after him read this prayer the way soldiers read a letter from the front, and they set his memory beside the promise the risen Christ had already made to his city: "Be faithful unto death, and I will give you the crown of life" (Revelation 2:10).

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) Irenaeus made him the proof that the church’s teaching could be traced, name by name, back to the apostles. + By the 170s the church had a problem that arguing from Scripture alone could not solve. The Gnostic teachers, who held that salvation comes through a secret knowledge available to the spiritually advanced, were not rejecting the Christian books. They were reading them and claiming a private line of instruction from the apostles that unlocked the real meaning underneath. Irenaeus answered with a question about receipts. If the apostles had left a secret teaching, he said, they would have left it with the men they put in charge of churches, and we can name those men and the men after them. Then he produced his exhibit. Polycarp was taught by apostles, appointed bishop by apostles, taught the same thing all his long life, and was heard by people still alive as Irenaeus wrote. There is no gap in the chain and nothing secret in it: the church at Smyrna in 180 could tell you what the apostles had taught because a man who had heard them had told it to people who were still around. Tertullian ran the same play in Latin a generation later, listing Smyrna with Polycarp from John and Rome with Clement from Peter. That argument, sometimes called the appeal to apostolic tradition, has had a long and contested life in Christendom, and Polycarp is its first and best exhibit. It is also worth seeing what the argument is not doing. Irenaeus is not asking anyone to believe something the apostles did not write. He is arguing that the public teaching of the churches and the writings of the apostles say the same thing, and that the Gnostics’ hidden version has no witnesses.

(†) His one surviving letter is a witness to the New Testament older than any list of its books. + The church did not publish an agreed table of contents for the New Testament until well into the fourth century, and sceptical accounts of Christian origins often lean on that fact, as though the books floated free and unregarded until a council pinned them down. Polycarp’s letter is a quiet piece of evidence to the contrary, precisely because he was not trying to prove anything. He was writing a pastoral note, and he wrote it, as preachers do, out of whatever was lodged in his memory. What was lodged there turns out to be a great deal: phrases from Paul’s letters, and heavily from the ones to Timothy; the language of 1 Peter over and over; the test from 1 John; sayings of Jesus in forms close to Matthew and Luke. Scholars who have catalogued the borrowings line by line, Paul Hartog and Kenneth Berding among them, find them running through all fourteen short chapters. He expects a church several hundred miles away to catch them, which means both congregations already had these writings and already treated them as common property. In chapter 12, which survives only in Latin, he introduces "Be ye angry, and sin not" and "Let not the sun go down upon your wrath" as things said "in these Scriptures," and while the first line is Psalm 4:4, the two together are Ephesians 4:26. Whether that makes it the earliest surviving place where a letter of Paul is called Scripture is argued over, since a reader who wanted to could find both halves in the Old Testament, but it is the strongest early candidate there is. He is also the reason we have Ignatius. The Philippians asked for copies; he sent them, with the note that survives as chapter 13, and that request and reply is the earliest evidence that the letters of Ignatius were being gathered into a collection at all. A modern reader can watch the New Testament and the writings around it circulating, in real time, in an ordinary bishop’s correspondence.

(†) The story of his death taught the church how to die, and warned it against volunteering. + The Smyrnaeans who wrote the account had clearly been reading the Gospels, and they shaped what they had seen to match. Their bishop is betrayed by a member of his own household, arrested by a man named Herod, brought in on a donkey, and prays that God’s will be done. They say as much in the text: he waited to be handed over, they write, as the Lord did. Some readers find the parallels contrived. Read another way, they are the point being made, which is that a Christian death is not an imitation of Socrates dying nobly but a participation in one particular death that has already happened. The letter travelled, and it became a pattern. The account of the martyrs of Lyons in 177, the diary of Perpetua in Carthage in 203, and the long shelf of martyr acts after them all owe it something. So does the practice, mentioned at the close of the letter, of keeping the anniversary of a martyr’s death as a birthday, which is the seed of the Christian calendar of saints. The restraint in it lasted too. Because of Quintus, whose nerve failed after he had turned himself in, the church had on record from the very first martyr account a plain statement that seeking out martyrdom is not commended by the gospel. Later bishops leaned on that hard. Volunteering for the arena was a real problem in the third century, and Polycarp’s congregation had already said no to it.

(†) Honouring him has never meant agreeing with him: the date of Easter, the gathering of his bones, and the sentence he threw at Marcion. + Polycarp is a saint in every branch of the church that keeps a calendar, and honesty still requires the other column of the ledger. - He lost the argument he went to Rome to make. Most of the church had gone over to the Sunday observance well before the fourth century, and the bishops who gathered at Nicaea in 325 settled the matter for everyone, doing it in the letter the council sent out announcing its decisions rather than in any of its twenty canons, the numbered rulings a council issues; the churches that clung to the Quartodeciman practice Polycarp said he had kept "with John the disciple of our Lord" were pushed to the margins. Whatever one makes of the ruling, the man with the most direct link to the apostles was on the losing side of a question about apostolic practice, which is a useful check on how much weight a chain of witnesses can carry by itself. - His congregation gathered his bones. The letter records that they took up his remains, "more precious than the most exquisite jewels, and more purified than gold," and kept them for the yearly commemoration (chapter 18). That is the earliest Christian text of its kind, and the veneration of relics has divided Christendom ever since, with Catholic and Orthodox believers seeing continuity with the apostolic church and most Protestants seeing the start of a wrong turn. What the letter itself says a chapter earlier is worth quoting into the middle of that argument: "For Him indeed, as being the Son of God, we adore; but the martyrs, as disciples and followers of the Lord, we worthily love" (chapter 17). The distinction is drawn on the very page where the practice first appears. - The miracles in the account grew in the telling. A voice from heaven, a fire that arched around him without burning, a body in the flames that looked like bread baking rather than flesh charring, a smell like frankincense, and a dove coming out of him when the dagger went in. Eusebius quotes the same passage in the fourth century and has no dove. Two words appear to have been added later, and a reader is entitled to wonder what else was, in a document that was copied by admirers. - "The first-born of Satan" is not a model. Christians have quoted Polycarp’s greeting to Marcion approvingly for eighteen centuries, and it is worth asking whether they should. Scripture does authorise hard words for those who wreck the faith of others, and the New Testament uses some. It also tells a servant of the Lord to correct opponents with gentleness (2 Timothy 2:24–25). The line is not a settled one, and quoting the story with a laugh settles it too easily. - He will not answer your theological questions. Jerome praised the letter and reported that it was still read aloud in the churches of Asia in his own day, and he was right to. But there is no system in it, and no argument. What Polycarp has is not insight; it is contact. He is the man who was in the room, and the temptation to make him more than that should be resisted, because being that is already extraordinary.