Ignatius of Antioch

35 – 108

Ignatius of Antioch was the third bishop of Antioch — the church where followers of Jesus were first called Christians — and he died in Rome as a martyr, consumed by lions in the Circus Maximus, around 108 AD. He wrote seven letters. They were composed while he was being transported across the Roman empire, under armed guard, toward his death. They are among the most remarkable documents in Christian history. The letters were written in chains — literally. Ignatius dictated them to messengers at stopping points along the route from Antioch through Asia Minor and across the Aegean to Rome: to the churches of Ephesus, Magnesia, Tralles, Rome, Philadelphia, and Smyrna, and one personal letter to Polycarp, the bishop of Smyrna. He never reached the original communities he wrote to. He wrote to them as he passed by. Ignatius is traditionally said to have been a disciple of the Apostle John — which would place him three degrees from the resurrection. Whether the tradition is strictly accurate is debated; what is not debated is that Ignatius stands at the leading edge of the post-apostolic generation, in living memory of those who had known Christ. What he defends in these letters is not philosophy derived from a distance but faith passed down through personal witness. Against the Docetists — who argued that Christ only appeared to suffer, that his body was a phantom — Ignatius insists with striking bluntness on the full humanity of Christ. Jesus was truly born of Mary. He truly suffered. He truly rose. This is not incidental to the faith; it is the faith. Against the Judaizers, he insists that Christianity is not a variant Judaism but a new and definitive covenant. Against the tendency toward individualism, he insists on the authority of the bishop as the center of eucharistic community: "Where the bishop appears, there let the people be, just as where Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church." It is the earliest recorded use of the phrase "Catholic Church" in Christian literature. His theology of martyrdom is unlike anything that came before or after. He does not resign himself to death; he races toward it. He begs the Roman church not to intercede on his behalf: "Let me be the food of beasts, by which it will be possible for me to attain to God... I am the wheat of God, and I am ground by the teeth of the beasts, that I may be found the pure bread of Christ." This is not pathology. It is a theology of union with Christ in his Passion — the same union expressed every Sunday in the Eucharist, completed in bodily death. Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants all claim Ignatius. Catholics read him as an early witness to episcopal authority and the real presence in the Eucharist. Orthodox honor him as Hieromartyr Ignatius the God-Bearer — Theophoros, the name he uses for himself in his letters. Protestants in the Reformed and Anglican traditions have engaged him seriously as a primary source on early church structure. He belongs to the undivided church, and to all of it.