Ignatius of Antioch

Ignatius of Antioch (/ɪɡˈneɪʃəs/; Ancient Greek: Ἰγνάτιος Ἀντιοχείας, romanized: Ignátios Antiokheías; died c. 108/140), also known as Ignatius Theophorus (Ἰγνάτιος ὁ Θεοφόρος, Ignátios ho Theophóros, 'the God-bearing'), was an early Christian writer and Patriarch of Antioch. While en route to Rome, where he met his martyrdom, Ignatius wrote a series of letters. This correspondence forms a central part of a later collection of works by the Apostolic Fathers. He is considered one of the three most important of these, together with Clement of Rome and Polycarp. His letters also serve as an example of early Christian theology, and address important topics including ecclesiology, the sacraments, and the role of bishops.
Nothing is known of Ignatius' life apart from the words of his letters and later traditions. It is said Ignatius converted to Christianity at a young age. Tradition identifies him and his friend Polycarp as disciples of John the Apostle. Later, Ignatius was chosen to serve as Bishop of Antioch; the fourth-century Church historian Eusebius writes that Ignatius succeeded Evodius. Theodoret of Cyrrhus claimed that St. Peter himself left directions that Ignatius be appointed to this episcopal see. Ignatius was called Theophorus (God Bearer). A tradition exists that he was one of the children whom Jesus Christ took in his arms and blessed.
Ignatius' feast day was kept in his own Antioch on 17 October, the day on which he is now celebrated in the Catholic Church and generally in western Christianity, although from the 12th century until 1969 it was put at 1 February in the General Roman Calendar.
In the Eastern Orthodox Church it is observed on 20 December. The Synaxarium of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria places it on the 24th of the Coptic Month of Koiak (which is also the 24th day of the fourth month of Tahisas in the Synaxarium of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church), corresponding in three years out of every four to 20 December in the Julian Calendar, which currently falls on 2 January of the Gregorian Calendar.
Ignatius is honored in the Church of England and in the Episcopal Church on 17 October. Likewise, Lutheran Churches honor Ignatius on 17 October.
Ignatius was condemned to death for his faith, but instead of being executed in his home town of Antioch, the bishop was taken to Rome by a company of ten soldiers:
Scholars consider Ignatius' transport to Rome unusual since those persecuted as Christians would be expected to be punished locally. Stevan Davies has pointed out that "no other examples exist from the Flavian age of any prisoners except citizens or prisoners of war being brought to Rome for execution".
If Ignatius had been a Roman citizen, he could have appealed to the emperor, with the common result of execution by beheading rather than torture. However, Ignatius's letters state that he was put in chains during the journey, but it was against Roman law for a citizen to be put in bonds during an appeal to the emperor.
Allen Brent argues that Ignatius was transferred to Rome for the emperor to provide a spectacle as a victim in the Colosseum. Brent insists, contrary to some, that "it was normal practice to transport condemned criminals from the provinces in order to offer spectator sport in the Colosseum at Rome."
Stevan Davies rejects this idea, reasoning that: "If Ignatius was in some way a donation by the Imperial Governor of Syria to the games at Rome, a single prisoner seems a rather miserly gift." Instead, Davies proposes that Ignatius may have been indicted by a legate, or representative, of the governor of Syria while the governor was away temporarily, and sent to Rome for trial and execution. Under Roman law, only the governor of a province or the emperor himself could impose capital punishment, so the legate would have faced the choice of imprisoning Ignatius in Antioch or sending him to Rome. Transporting the bishop might have avoided further agitation by the Antiochian Christians.
Christine Trevett calls Davies' suggestion "entirely hypothetical" and concludes that no fully satisfactory solution to the problem can be found: "I tend to take the bishop at his word when he says he is a condemned man. But the question remains, why is he going to Rome? The truth is that we do not know."
During the journey to Rome, Ignatius and his entourage of soldiers made a number of lengthy stops in Asia Minor, deviating from the most direct land route from Antioch to Rome. Scholars generally agree on the following reconstruction of Ignatius' route of travel:
During the journey, the soldiers seem to have allowed the chained Ignatius to meet with entire congregations of Christians, at least at Philadelphia (cf. Ign. Phil. 7), and numerous Christian visitors and messengers were allowed to meet with him individually. These messengers allowed Ignatius to send six letters to nearby churches, and one to Polycarp, the bishop of Smyrna.
These aspects of Ignatius' martyrdom are also unusual, in that a prisoner would normally be transported on the most direct route to his destination. Travel by land in the Roman Empire was far more expensive than by sea, especially since Antioch was a major sea port. Davies argues that Ignatius' circuitous route can only be explained by positing that he was not the main purpose of the soldiers' trip and that the various stops in Asia Minor were for other state business. He suggests that such a scenario would also explain the relative freedom that Ignatius was given to meet with other Christians during the journey.
Tradition places Ignatius's martyrdom in the reign of Trajan (c. 98–117). The earliest source for this is the 4th-century church historian Eusebius of Caesarea. Richard Pervo argues that Eusebius may have had an ideological interest in dating church leaders as early as possible, and asserting a continuous succession between the original apostles of Jesus and the leaders of the church in his day. However, Jonathon Lookadoo argues that John Malalas and the Acts of Martyrdom's accounts of Ignatius are independent from Eusebius and they still place his death under Trajan.
While many scholars accept this traditional dating, others have argued for a somewhat later date. Richard Pervo dated Ignatius' death to 135–140. British classicist Timothy Barnes has argued for a date in the 140s, on the grounds that Ignatius seems to have quoted a work of the Gnostic Ptolemy, who became active only in the 130s. Étienne Decrept has argued from the testimony of John Malalas and the Acts of Drosis that Ignatius was martyred under the reign of Trajan during Apollo's festival in July 116, and in response to the earthquake at Antioch in late 115.
Ignatius wrote that he would be thrown to the beasts; in the fourth century, Eusebius reports a tradition that this did happen, while Jerome is the first to explicitly mention lions. John Chrysostom is the first to place of Ignatius' martyrdom at the Colosseum. Modern scholars are uncertain whether any of these authors had sources other than Ignatius' own writings.
According to a medieval Christian text titled Martyrium Ignatii, Ignatius' remains were carried back to Antioch by his companions after his martyrdom. The sixth-century writings of Evagrius Scholasticus state that the reputed remains of Ignatius were moved by the Emperor Theodosius II to the Tychaeum, or Temple of Tyche, and converted it into a church dedicated to Ignatius. In 637, when Antioch was captured by the Rashidun Caliphate, the relics were transferred to the Basilica di San Clemente in Rome.
The Martyrium Ignatii is an account of the saint's martyrdom. It is presented as an eye-witness account for the church of Antioch, attributed to Ignatius' companions, Philō of Cilicia, deacon at Tarsus, and Rheus Agathopus, a Syrian.
Its most reliable manuscript is the 10th-century collection Codex Colbertinus (Paris), in which it is the final item. The Martyrium presents the confrontation of Bishop Ignatius with Emperor Trajan at Antioch, a familiar trope of Acta of the martyrs, and many details of the long journey to Rome. The Synaxarium of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria says that he was thrown to the wild beasts that devoured him.
The following seven epistles preserved under the name of Ignatius are generally considered authentic since they were mentioned by the historian Eusebius in the first half of the fourth century.
Seven original epistles:
The text of these epistles is known in three different recensions, or editions: the Short Recension, found in a Syriac manuscript; the Middle Recension, found in Greek, Latin, Armenian, Slavonic, Coptic, Arabic, Ethiopic and Syriac manuscripts; and the Long Recension, found in Greek, Latin and Georgian manuscripts.
For some time, it was believed that the Long Recension was the only extant version of the Ignatian epistles, but around 1628 a Latin translation of the Middle Recension was discovered by Archbishop James Ussher, who published it in 1646. For around a quarter of a century after this, it was debated which recension represented the original text of the epistles. But ever since John Pearson's strong defense of the authenticity of the Middle Recension in the late 17th century, there has been a scholarly consensus that the Middle Recension is the original version of the text. The Long Recension is the product of a fourth-century Arian Christian, who interpolated the Middle Recension epistles in order posthumously to enlist Ignatius as an unwitting witness in theological disputes of that age. This individual also forged the six spurious epistles attributed to Ignatius (see § Pseudo-Ignatius below).
Manuscripts representing the Short Recension of the Ignatian epistles were discovered and published by William Cureton in the mid-19th century. For a brief period, there was a scholarly debate on the question of whether the Short Recension was earlier and more original than the Middle Recension. But by the end of the 19th century, Theodor Zahn and J. B. Lightfoot had established a scholarly consensus that the Short Recension is merely a summary of the text of the Middle Recension, and was therefore composed later.
The original texts of six of the seven original letters are found in the Codex Mediceo Laurentianus, written in Greek in the 11th century (which also contains the pseudepigraphical letters of the Long Recension, except that to the Philippians), while the letter to the Romans is found in the Codex Colbertinus.
Though the Catholic Church has always supported the authenticity of the letters, some Protestants have tended to deny the authenticity of all the epistles because they seem to attest to a monarchical episcopate in the second century. John Calvin called the epistles "rubbish published under Ignatius' name".
In 1886, Presbyterian minister and church historian William Dool Killen published a long essay attacking the authenticity of the epistles attributed to Ignatius. He argued that Pope Callixtus I, bishop of Rome, forged the letters around 220 AD to garner support for a monarchical episcopate, modeling Saint Ignatius after his own life to give precedent for his own authority. Killen contrasted this episcopal polity with the presbyterian polity in the writings of Polycarp.
Doubts about the letters' authenticity continued throughout the 20th century and beyond. In the 1970s and 1980s, the scholars Robert Joly, Reinhard Hübner, Markus Vinzent, and Thomas Lechner argued forcefully that the epistles of the Middle Recension were forgeries from the reign of Marcus Aurelius (161–180). Joseph Ruis-Camps published a study arguing that the Middle Recension letters were pseudepigraphically composed based on an original, smaller, authentic corpus of four letters (Romans, Magnesians, Trallians, and Ephesians). In 2009, Otto Zwierlein support the thesis of a forgery written around 170 AD.
These publications stirred up heated scholarly controversy, but by 2017, most patristic scholars accepted the authenticity of the seven original epistles. However, starting with a collection of studies published in 2018, the view that all the letters are a pseudepigraphy most likely composed by a Roman pro-monepiscopate faction in 160-180 is again proposed by "a significant number of Ignatian researchers"; as of 2020, most of them were from Germany, with UK/US authors generally accepting the 7 Middle Recension letters as genuine. In notable contrast to previous research, 21st-century Ignatian studies – regardless of their conclusions – usually treat the questions of dating and authenticity as independent of each other and requiring separate proofs or refutations. A very early (pre-110) or extremely late (post-180) date is widely (but not universally) dismissed nowadays; as of 2020 most authors either propose the letters to be authentic and date from the mid-late 110s, or date them to almost 150 (with either view as regards authenticity), or consider them pseudepigraphic – and possibly a deliberate novel-like hagiographic fiction, closely tied in some way to Lucian's Peregrinus Proteus, and unrelated except in name to the Ignatius mentioned by Polycarp – dating from post-160.
Resolving the questions of dating and authenticity is made difficult by the comparative lack of reception of the Ignatian letters in proto-orthodox writings. The Epistle of Polycarp to the Philippians seems to imply that the Ignatian letters were collated into a collection before 150 AD already, but the pertinent passages are considered suspect by most authors today. Irenaeus, who was said to be familiar with Ignatius' close acquaintance Polycarp, in his Against Heresies V,28:4 (Lugdunum, c.180 AD) seems to quote a passage from the Epistle of Ignatius to the Romans almost verbatim, but actually claims the phrase in question to have been "said" by "someone of our[ people]" (quidam de nostris dixit), contrasting with his usual tendency to reference his authorities by name. Origen gives an abbreviated quotation from Epistle of Ignatius to the Ephesians in his 6th homily on Luke (Caesarea c.240 AD), attributing it to Ignatius but speaking of "the letter" in the singular form, and at about the same time in his Commentary on the Song of Songs (prologue, chapter 2) gives a brief quote from Ignatius' Roman epistle as something which Ignatius "said" and Origen "remembered". Eusebius is the first author to provide unequivocal testimony to multiple Ignatian letters, proving they were known in southern Syria Palaestina by about 300 AD. But even as late as around 400 AD, John Chrysostom – an Antiochene who knew of Ignatius supposed relics located there – in his homily on Ignatius neither gives any corroborating details of his venerated compatriot's life, nor references the letters; compare, for example, his first homily on Priscilla and Aquila which quotes the primary sources verbatim. Neither do pre-Eusebius authors in the doctrinal disputes which started in the mid-late 2nd and became highly divisive in the 3rd to 5th centuries AD refer to or quote the Ignatian letters, even when doing so would have given a decisive authority to the argument. In summary, during the initial ~150 years during which a compilation of all Ignatian letters was supposedly available, only one letter (Ephesians) is attested to exist in written form, while two passages from another (Romans) are independently cited as having been "said" – once by Ignatius, and once by an unspecified "someone". This widespread absence of Ignatian references in authors that could be expected to quote or at least paraphrase Ignatius' letters, and attribute them by name, is in striking contrast to their use of Polycarp or Clement of Rome, and to the subsequent popularity of the Ignatian letters. It was already noted by the 19th-century authors mentioned above.
Ignatius's letters bear signs of being written in great haste, such as run-on sentences and an unsystematic succession of thought. Ignatius modelled them after the biblical epistles of Paul, Peter, and John, quoting or paraphrasing these apostles' works freely. For example, in his letter to the Ephesians he quoted 1 Corinthians 1:18:
Ignatius is known to have taught the deity of Christ:
The same section in text of the Long Recension says the following:
He stressed the value of the Eucharist, calling it a "medicine of immortality" (Ignatius to the Ephesians 20:2). He regarded persecution and suffering as conferring grace and earnestly longed for his own martyrdom.
Ignatius is claimed to be the first known Christian writer to argue in favor of Christianity's replacement of the Sabbath with the Lord's Day:
This passage has provoked textual debate since the only Greek manuscript extant read Κατα κυριακήν ζωήν ζωντες which could be translated "living according to the Lord's life". Most scholars, however, have followed the Latin text (secundum dominicam) omitting ζωήν and translating "living according to Lord's Day".
Ignatius is the earliest known Christian writer to emphasize loyalty to a single bishop in each city (or diocese) who is assisted by both presbyters (elders) and deacons. Earlier writings only mention either bishops or presbyters.
For instance, his writings on bishops, presbyters and deacons:
He is also responsible for the first known use of the Greek word katholikos (καθολικός), or catholic, meaning "universal", "complete", "general", and/or "whole" to describe the Church, writing:
Anglican bishop and theologian Joseph Lightfoot states the word "catholic (καθόλου)" meant "universal" to Ignatius, as that term was commonly used at the time by classical and ecclesiastical writers. Later usages of "Catholic Church" denote a particular church with orthodox beliefs and apostolic succession, as opposed to heretical or schismatic church bodies. Ignatius of Antioch is also attributed one of the earliest uses of the term "Christianity" (Greek: Χριστιανισμός) c. 100 AD.
Several scholars have noted that there are striking similarities between Ignatius and the Christian-turned-Cynic philosopher Peregrinus Proteus, who is satirized by Lucian in The Passing of Peregrinus:
It is generally believed that these parallels are the result of Lucian intentionally copying traits from Ignatius and applying them to his satire of Peregrinus. If the dependence of Lucian on the Ignatian epistles is accepted, then this places an upper limit on the date of the epistles during the 160s AD, just before The Passing of Peregrinus was written.
In 1892, Daniel Völter sought to explain the parallels by proposing that the Ignatian epistles were in fact written by Peregrinus, and later attributed to the saint, but this speculative theory has failed to make a significant impact on the academic community.
Epistles attributed to Saint Ignatius, but of spurious origin (their author is often called Pseudo-Ignatius in English) include: