Ignatius of Antioch

Ignatius was bishop of Antioch in Syria — the city where believers were first called Christians. He called himself Theophorus, "God-bearer." He was condemned to die in the arena at Rome, probably during the reign of Trajan, around AD 108. The Romans did not kill him at home. They chained him to a squad of ten soldiers — "ten leopards," he called them, who only got worse when treated kindly — and marched him across Asia Minor toward the capital. Churches sent delegations to meet him along the road. At Smyrna, Polycarp received him. And as he went, Ignatius wrote. Seven letters survive: to the Ephesians, the Magnesians, the Trallians, the Romans, the Philadelphians, the Smyrnaeans, and to Polycarp personally. Four were written from Smyrna, three from Troas. They are the letters of a man with weeks to live and no time for padding. He hammers three things. First, that Jesus Christ was really born, really ate and drank, really was nailed under Pontius Pilate, and really rose — against teachers who said the Son of God only seemed to have a body. If his suffering was only an appearance, Ignatius asks, then why am I in chains? Second, that the church must hold together around its bishop, its elders, and its deacons rather than splinter into private meetings. His letters give the earliest clear picture of a single bishop leading a city church, and they are the first place in Christian writing where the phrase "the catholic church" appears — meaning the whole church everywhere. Third, that he wanted to die well. The letter to Rome is the hardest to read. He begs the Roman Christians not to use their influence to get him spared: "I am God's wheat, and I am ground by the teeth of wild beasts, that I may be found the pure bread of Christ." He was afraid the church's kindness would rob him of the one thing he had left to give. For centuries his letters circulated in a padded, expanded form, and skeptics in the nineteenth century argued the whole collection was a forgery. J. B. Lightfoot's study of the manuscripts settled it: behind the long version lies a shorter, earlier set of seven letters, and that set is genuine. What we read is what he wrote. The record of what happened at Rome is thin. Early tradition says he was thrown to the beasts in the amphitheatre and that Christians gathered what the animals left. Eusebius places his death under Trajan; some scholars push the date as late as the 130s. No eyewitness account of the arena survives. What survives is the voice. A man in irons, walking to his execution across half an empire, writing letters to strengthen churches he would never see again. Sources: The seven letters of Ignatius, in J. B. Lightfoot, The Apostolic Fathers; Eusebius, Church History III.36; Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. 2; the Catholic Encyclopedia (1913), "St. Ignatius of Antioch."