Ignatius of Antioch

Dates

died around 107-140 — The traditional date under Trajan rests on Eusebius; some historians place his martyrdom considerably later, into the reign of Hadrian or beyond. The range is genuinely open.

Region

Syria; martyred at Rome

See

Antioch

Language of composition

Greek

Commemoration

20 December (Orthodox Church in America and other Orthodox jurisdictions) — Also commemorated on 29 January, the translation of his relics. Dates on the Julian calendar fall thirteen days later on the civil calendar.

Life

Ignatius was bishop of Antioch in Syria, one of the three great sees of the early Church. Condemned to die in the arena, he was taken under guard across Asia Minor to Rome. On the way he wrote seven letters — to the churches at Ephesus, Magnesia, Tralles, Rome, Philadelphia and Smyrna, and to Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna.

The letters were written by a man who knew he was going to die and who wanted, urgently, to say a few things before he did. That accounts for their tone, which is unlike anything else in early Christian literature: compressed, affectionate, occasionally alarming in its longing for martyrdom.

The traditional date of his death, under Trajan around 107, comes from Eusebius. A good deal of recent scholarship has questioned it and argued for a date decades later. The letters themselves do not settle the question, and this page does not pretend they do.

Works

Generally accepted as authentic

• Epistle to the Ephesians
• Epistle to the Magnesians
• Epistle to the Trallians
• Epistle to the Romans
• Epistle to the Philadelphians
• Epistle to the Smyrnaeans
• Epistle to Polycarp

Disputed, spurious or lost

• The longer recension of the seven letters — Later expansions of the genuine letters. The Ante-Nicene Fathers print them in parallel with the shorter text, alternating paragraph by paragraph.
• The additional letters attributed to Ignatius — To the Tarsians, to the Antiochians, to Hero, to the Philippians, to the Virgin Mary and others: later compositions, not his.
• The Martyrdom of Ignatius — A later martyr-account, not a work of Ignatius.

Theological and spiritual contribution

Ignatius is the earliest writer to describe, as a settled thing, a church ordered around one bishop with a college of presbyters and deacons. He does not argue for the arrangement; he assumes it and urges the churches to hold to it. Historians differ over how widespread this order was by his time, but the letters are the earliest evidence that it existed.

He is also the first writer known to use the phrase 'the Catholic Church', in the letter to Smyrna, where it means the whole Church wherever Christ is, not a denomination.

On Christ he is emphatic against those who said the Saviour only appeared to have a body. He insists that Christ was truly born, truly ate and drank, truly suffered and truly rose — and that the eucharist is the flesh of Christ, which is why those who deny the reality of his body abstain from it.

Controversy and reception

The authenticity of the Ignatian corpus was fought over for centuries, partly because the letters bear so directly on questions of church order that divided sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Christians. The modern consensus accepts the seven letters in the shorter recension and rejects the longer recension and the additional letters, but the date of the seven is again under discussion.

In their own words

Every quotation below was located in the archived text of the edition named, at the locator given, by the build's own quotation check.