Ignatius of Antioch

Ignatius of Antioch, surnamed Theophorus (God-bearer), was bishop of the Christian community at Antioch in Roman Syria in the late first and early second centuries and is counted among the Apostolic Fathers. Fourth-century church historians, above all Eusebius of Caesarea, place him as bishop of Antioch after Evodius and, in some succession lists, as second successor of the apostle Peter in that see; later Greek and Syriac lists treat him as an early holder of the patriarchal throne of Antioch. No contemporary source records his parentage, birthplace, or year of birth. Later legends that identify him with the child whom Jesus set in the midst of the disciples, or that make him a personal hearer of John the Evangelist, are hagiographical and are not supported by second-century evidence. What can be known of him comes from the letters he wrote under arrest, from a notice in the letter of Polycarp of Smyrna to the Philippians, and from brief citations in Irenaeus, Origen, and Eusebius.

During the reign of the emperor Trajan (98-117), Ignatius was condemned in Antioch and sent under military guard to Rome for execution. He does not state the legal charge; later tradition simply presents the journey as an act of imperial persecution. A detachment of soldiers conducted him westward through Asia Minor. At Smyrna he was received by Polycarp and by delegations from Ephesus, Magnesia, and Tralles. From Smyrna he wrote to those churches and to the church of Rome; from Troas he wrote to Philadelphia, to Smyrna, and personally to Polycarp, then continued toward Italy. The seven letters of the middle recension—to the Ephesians, Magnesians, Trallians, Romans, Philadelphians, Smyrnaeans, and to Polycarp—are the corpus that modern criticism, following the seventeenth-century reconstructions of James Ussher and Isaac Voss and the later editions of Theodor Zahn and J. B. Lightfoot, regards as authentic. A long recension interpolates them with later material, and a short Syriac abridgement published by William Cureton is generally judged secondary.

These letters are among the most important surviving documents of post-apostolic Christianity. Ignatius urges each church to remain united under a single bishop, together with the presbyters and deacons, and presents this threefold ministry as a safeguard of unity and of sound teaching. He opposes docetic claims that Christ’s suffering was only apparent, insisting on the reality of the Incarnation, the Passion, and the Resurrection. He speaks of the Eucharist as the flesh of Jesus Christ which suffered for our sins, and in the letter to the Smyrnaeans he uses the phrase for the catholic church, the earliest extant occurrence of that expression for the universal church. The letters also supply early evidence for gathering on the Lord’s Day and for the practice of one Eucharist under the bishop. The letter to the Romans is marked by a plea that the Roman Christians not obtain a pardon that would prevent his death; he describes himself as wheat of God to be ground by the teeth of beasts in order to become pure bread of Christ.

Eusebius’s Chronicle dates the martyrdom to Trajan’s tenth year, that is about 107 or 108, a chronology followed by Jerome and by much liturgical tradition, though a minority of modern historians have argued for a later second-century date. Tradition holds that Ignatius was killed by wild beasts in the amphitheatre at Rome. Christians were said to have gathered his remains and carried them back to Antioch, where they were buried first outside the city and later, in the fifth century under Theodosius II, in a former temple converted into a church of Saint Ignatius. In the seventh century, during the wars in Syria, relics attributed to him were translated to Rome and have long been associated with the Basilica of San Clemente near the Colosseum. He was honoured as a martyr-saint from the second century, without a later papal process of canonization or beatification. The Roman Catholic Church and many Western calendars keep his feast on 17 October (1 February in the pre-1969 Roman calendar); the Eastern Orthodox Church keeps it on 20 December, with an additional commemoration of the translation of relics on 29 January in some Byzantine usage.

Ignatius’s influence on later theology and church order has been continuous. Irenaeus already cites him against heresy later in the second century. The letters were read in antiquity, recovered and fiercely debated in Reformation and seventeenth-century controversies over episcopacy, and remain central evidence for the early monepiscopate, eucharistic doctrine, and the vocabulary of catholicity. He is invoked as a patron of the Church in the eastern Mediterranean and in North Africa. No reliable evidence records a wife, children, or membership in any later religious order; he is known as bishop of Antioch, teacher, and martyr.