At the time of his martyrdom, Polycarp, the bishop of Smyrna (Modern İzmir, Türkiye), confessed that he had been a Christian for eighty-six years. Since the date of his martyrdom can be fixed with reasonable certainty in A.D. 155 or 156, his birth could therefore not have been later than the year 69 or 70. This makes him perhaps forty years of age when he visited and corresponded with Ignatius on the latter’s way to martyrdom in Rome.
Polycarp’s life spanned that critical era of the Church’s development following the passing of the apostles, and encompassed the menacing growth of state persecution, the Docetic and Gnostic heresies, and the coalescence of the canon of New Testament writings.
Woodcut from an 1832 edition of John Foxe’s Book Of Martyrs.