Lived: c. AD 35–107
Related:
• The Letter of Ignatius to the Ephesians
• The Letter of Ignatius to the Magnesians
• The Letter of Ignatius to the Trallians
• The Letter of Ignatius to the Romans
• The Letter of Ignatius to the Philadelphians
• The Letter of Ignatius to the Smyrnaeans
• The Letter of Ignatius to Polycarp
• The Martyrdom of Ignatius of Antioch
“A soul aflame with love for God.” This is John Chrysostom’s description of Ignatius in his eulogy delivered on the martyr’s feast in Antioch, in AD 387. It is an apt phrase, for there is a fervor about these letters, an impatience and a heat of excitement in his love for Christ and his expectation of martyrdom.
The conditions under which Ignatius’ letters were written did not make for careful reflection; they are the letters of a prisoner on his way to martyrdom. Their character is heartfelt rather than dogmatic. Their style is compressed and turbulent, reflecting the energetic nature of their author, as well as the reality of a captive subjected to brutality. They disclose a real person, expressing himself in the moment of crisis, and so making clear the intense devotion of his life.
Our knowledge of Ignatius is confined almost entirely to these letters. It is only for the few days when he journeys from Philadelphia to Troas under a military guard that we catch a glimpse of this pastor at the end of the first century. He writes the first four of his letters from Smyrna – three to the churches that had sent delegates, and one to the church at Rome. Pressing northward, he stops again at Troas. From here he writes to the churches of Philadelphia and Smyrna, and adds a personal note to Polycarp. Ignatius was martyred in the Colosseum during the reign of Emperor Trajan, in AD 107.Cf. The Martyrdom of Ignatius.
Ignatius was bishop of Antioch in Syria.Eusebius, Church History,, the second bishop of Antioch. Eusebius names Euodius as the first bishop after the Apostles. Ignatius does not write to teach or convince his hearers to adopt this order; rather, in the face of threatening schisms, he exhorts his readers to love and obey the bishops already in their communities.
Ignatius’s other concern is to unmask the heretical movements which threaten the churches with schism. In Philadelphia he came into personal contact with a Judaizing movement similar to the one addressed by Paul in his Letter to the Galatians, and in Revelation 3:9. At the opposite pole to this error was the Docetic heresy which was rife in Smyrna. Here the attempt to accommodate the Gospel to Greek culture had gone to the limit of denying the reality of the Lord’s physical incarnation.
Against these deceptions, Ignatius points to two of the leading emphases of his teaching. One is the divinity of Christ. This foundational understanding was compromised by the Judaizing movement, which viewed Christ as merely the last of the prophets. There is no confusion for Ignatius: In his letters, Christ is “our God.”
The other emphasis of Ignatius’ teaching is the reality of Christ’s incarnation, passion, and resurrection. He continually stresses the genuine and actual nature of these occurrences and the inseparable unity of flesh and spirit, even after the resurrection. So much so, that such repeated phrases as “in flesh and in spirit” become expressions similar to our “body and soul,” and are used as synonyms for “thoroughly” or “completely.”
Ignatius clearly knew several letters of Paul. He was very familiar with 1 Corinthians. He likely knew Ephesians; and in his writing there may be reminiscences of others. He rarely quotes from the Gospels, though he uses phrases and ideas from Matthew and John. These can be explained by Ignatius’s living memory of the apostles and the common apostolic tradition.