Ignatius of Antioch

Ignatius of Antioch (; ; died 108), also known as Ignatius Theophorus (), was an early Christian writer and the Patriarch of Antioch. While en route to Rome, where he was to be killed, Ignatius wrote a series of letters. This correspondence forms a central part of a later collection of works by the Apostolic Fathers. He is considered one of the three most important of these, together with Clement of Rome and Polycarp. Although the authenticity of his letters has been questioned, they continue to serve as an example of early Christian theology, and address important topics including ecclesiology, the sacraments, and the role of bishops.

Life

Nothing is known of Ignatius' life apart from the words of his letters and later traditions. It is said Ignatius converted to Christianity at a young age. Tradition identifies him and his friend Polycarp as disciples of John the Apostle. Theodoret of Cyrrhus claimed that St. Peter himself left directions that Ignatius be appointed to this episcopal see. Ignatius was called Theophorus (God Bearer). A tradition exists that he was one of the children whom Jesus Christ took in his arms and blessed.

Veneration

Ignatius' feast day was kept in his own Antioch on 17 October, the day on which he is now celebrated in the Catholic Church and generally in western Christianity, although from the 12th century until 1969 it was put at 1 February in the General Roman Calendar.

In the Eastern Orthodox Church it is observed on 20 December. The Synaxarium of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria places it on the 24th of the Coptic Month of Koiak (which is also the 24th day of the fourth month of Tahisas in the Synaxarium of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church), corresponding in three years out of every four to 20 December in the Julian Calendar, which currently falls on 2 January of the Gregorian Calendar.

Ignatius is honored in the Church of England and in the Episcopal Church on 17 October. Likewise, Lutheran Churches honor Ignatius on 17 October.

Martyrdom

Circumstances of martyrdom

Ignatius was condemned to death for his faith, but instead of being executed in his home town of Antioch, the bishop was taken to Rome by a company of ten soldiers:

Scholars consider Ignatius' transport to Rome unusual since those persecuted as Christians would be expected to be punished locally. Stevan Davies has pointed out that "no other examples exist from the Flavian age of any prisoners except citizens or prisoners of war being brought to Rome for execution".

If Ignatius had been a Roman citizen, he could have appealed to the emperor, with the common result of execution by beheading rather than torture.

Stevan Davies rejects this idea, reasoning that: "If Ignatius was in some way a donation by the Imperial Governor of Syria to the games at Rome, a single prisoner seems a rather miserly gift."

Route of travel to Rome

During the journey to Rome, Ignatius and his entourage of soldiers made a number of lengthy stops in Asia Minor, deviating from the most direct land route from Antioch to Rome.

During the journey, the soldiers seem to have allowed the chained Ignatius to meet with entire congregations of Christians, at least at Philadelphia (cf. Ign. Phil. 7), and numerous Christian visitors and messengers were allowed to meet with him individually. Via these messengers, Ignatius sent six letters to nearby churches, and one to Polycarp, the bishop of Smyrna. especially since Antioch was a major sea port. Davies argues that Ignatius' circuitous route can only be explained by positing that he was not the main purpose of the soldiers' trip and that the various stops in Asia Minor were for other state business. He suggests that such a scenario would also explain the relative freedom that Ignatius was given to meet with other Christians during the journey.

While many scholars accept this traditional dating, others have argued for a somewhat later date. Richard Pervo dated Ignatius' death to 135–140.

thumb|320px|Martyrdom of St. Ignatius of Antioch by [[Pier Leone Ghezzi]]

Death and aftermath

Ignatius wrote that he would be thrown to the beasts; in the fourth century, Eusebius reports a tradition that this did happen, while Jerome is the first to explicitly mention lions. Modern scholars are uncertain whether any of these authors had sources other than Ignatius' own writings. The sixth-century writings of Evagrius Scholasticus state that the reputed remains of Ignatius were moved by the Emperor Theodosius II to the Tychaeum, or Temple of Tyche, and converted it into a church dedicated to Ignatius. In 637, when Antioch was captured by the Rashidun Caliphate, the relics were transferred to the Basilica di San Clemente in Rome.

The Martyrium Ignatii

The Martyrium Ignatii is an account of the saint's martyrdom.

Epistles

thumb|280px|An icon of Ignatius of Antioch from the [[Menologion of Basil II ( 1000)]]

The following seven epistles preserved under the name of Ignatius are generally considered authentic since they were mentioned by the historian Eusebius in the first half of the fourth century.

Seven original epistles:

The Epistle to the Ephesians;
The Epistle to the Magnesians;
The Epistle to the Trallians;
The Epistle to the Romans;
The Epistle to the Philadelphians;
The Epistle to the Smyrnaeans;
The Epistle to Polycarp, a bishop of Smyrna.

Style and structure

Ignatius's letters bear signs of being written in great haste, such as run-on sentences and an unsystematic succession of thought. Ignatius modelled them after the biblical epistles of Paul, Peter, and John, quoting or paraphrasing these apostles' works freely. For example, in his letter to the Ephesians he quoted 1 Corinthians 1:18:

Recensions

The text of these epistles is known in three different recensions (versions): the Short Recension, found in three pre-AD 900 Syriac manuscripts; the Middle Recension, attested as of 2024 by about three dozen manuscripts, manuscript fragments and manuscript compilations in Greek, Latin, Armenian, Slavonic, Coptic, Arabic, Ethiopic and Syriac, usually containing at least the Epistle to the Romans, often 3-16 others, and the Long Recension, found in numerous Late Medieval manuscripts in Greek, Latin and Georgian which typically contain expanded collections of around 13 letters. The original letters were written in Ancient Greek with some Latinisms, but the Middle Recension manuscripts in other languages seem to be based on more than one Greek source, as some variant readings found in them seem too divergent to be merely caused by the ambiguities of translation. In this regard, it was also noted that the Middle Recension's Epistle to the Romans was apparently transmitted on two different routes – together with the Martyrium Ignatii but none of the other epistles, as well as part of a collection of Ignatian epistles and occasionally also the Martyrium Ignatii (in which case, the Epistle to the Romans is placed after the Martyrium). Unfortunately, the famous Laurentian Library manuscript (the main source for reconstructing the Middle Recension text) has lost one or more leaves at the end; it does not contain the Epistle to the Romans in its present state, but other Ignatian letter collections of comparable age generally feature this epistle as the very last; thus, it is quite likely that the Laurentian manuscript also ended with the Epistle to the Romans before it got damaged.

For some time, it was believed that the Long Recension was the only extant version of the Ignatian epistles, but around 1628 a Latin translation of the Middle Recension was discovered by Archbishop James Ussher, who published it in 1646. For around a quarter of a century after this, it was debated which recension represented the original text of the epistles. But John Pearson's strong defense of the authenticity of the Middle Recension in the late 17th century established a scholarly consensus that the Middle Recension is the original version of the text.

The manuscripts representing the Short Recension of the Ignatian epistles were discovered and published by William Cureton in the mid-19th century. For a brief period, there was a scholarly debate on the question of whether the Short Recension was earlier and more original than the Middle Recension. But by the end of the 19th century, Theodor Zahn and J. B. Lightfoot had established a scholarly consensus that it is easier to arrive at the Short Recension text by summarizing the Middle Recension, than expanding the Short Recension to gain the Middle Recension text; thus, the Short Recension post-dates the Middle Recension. while the letter to the Romans is found in the Codex Colbertinus.

Though the Catholic Church has always supported the authenticity of at least seven letters, Killen contrasted this episcopal polity with the presbyterian polity in the writings of Polycarp. Reinhard Hübner, Markus Vinzent, and Thomas Lechner argued forcefully that the epistles of the Middle Recension were forgeries from the reign of Marcus Aurelius (161–180). Joseph Ruis-Camps published a study arguing that the Middle Recension letters were pseudepigraphically composed based on an original, smaller, authentic corpus of four letters (Romans, Magnesians, Trallians, and Ephesians). In 2009, Otto Zwierlein support the thesis of a forgery written around 170 AD.

These publications stirred up heated scholarly controversy, However, starting with a collection of studies published in 2018, the view that all the letters are a pseudepigraphy most likely composed by a Roman pro-monepiscopate faction in 160–180 is again proposed by "a significant number of Ignatian researchers". As of 2020, most of these were from Germany, with UK/US authors generally accepting the seven Middle Recension letters as genuine. In notable contrast to previous research, 21st-century Ignatian studies – regardless of their conclusions – usually treat the questions of dating and authenticity as independent of each other and requiring separate proofs or refutations. A very early (pre-110) or extremely late (post-180) date is widely (but not universally) dismissed nowadays; as of 2020 most authors either propose the letters to be authentic and date from the mid-late 110s, or date them to almost 150 (with either view as regards authenticity), or consider them pseudepigraphic – and possibly a deliberate novel-like hagiographic fiction, closely tied in some way to Lucian's Peregrinus Proteus, and unrelated except in name to the Ignatius mentioned by Polycarp – dating from post-160.

Confounding the questions of how and when the Ignatiana were assembled, and which letters and what text-type are genuine (or at least the most ancient), are the facts that a full critical edition has not been published since Lightfoot, and that as of 2024 no stemmatic analysis has been conducted. Also, the term "recension" – first applied to the Ignatiana in the early Modern era, when the manuscript evidence was still fairly straightforward – is far more ambiguous today and liable to lead to confusion between the different collections and the different text-types evidenced in the known Ignatiana manuscripts, even in some professional and scholarly sources. Unfortunately, this most severely affects the "7-letter middle-recension" version which today is the only one not rejected by a large majority of experts. For example, the reconstruction of the "middle recension" text was largely based on letters from "long" collections, and was usually called "shorter recension" before Cureton published the even shorter text-type from the Syriac manuscripts. by "someone of our[ people]" (quidam de nostris dixit), contrasting with his usual tendency to reference his authorities by name. Moreover, Irenaeus also attests elsewhere that he is quite familiar with Pol.Phil., in which a martyr named Ignatius is discussed, and it is striking that he attributes his Ign.Rom. citation to an anonymous "someone" instead of referring it to the martyr he knew from Polycarp's letter.

In the 3rd century AD, Origen gives an abbreviated quotation from the Epistle of Ignatius to the Ephesians in his 6th homily on Luke (Caesarea c. 240 AD), and at about the same time in his Commentary on the Song of Songs (prologue, chapter 2) gives a brief quote from Ignatius' Roman epistle as something which Ignatius "said" and Origen "remembered". Also, and probably in the 220s AD already, Origen cites the heterodox phrase "I am not an incorporeal daemon" which prominently occurs in the Epistle of Ignatius to the Smyrnaeans (Ign.Sm.), but instead of attributing it to this letter, he gives a "booklet which is called Doctrines of Peter" (probably the pseudepigraphic Kerygma Petri) as his source. He quite insistently and at some length expounds that the concept of incorporeality is alien to Christian thought as he understood it ("the appellation 'ασώματου' is [...] indeed also not used in our Scriptures and unknown [to mainstream Christian authors]."), suggesting that he was not trying to dissociate the Ignatian use of the phrase from the heterodox if not heretical Kerygma Petri, but instead did not know Ign.Sm. at all: the letter implicitly attributes this phrase to a heterodox (pseudo)Petrine source, which immediately collapses Origen's entire argument.

Eusebius is the first author to provide unequivocal testimony to more than 3 Ignatian letters, proving they were known in southern Syria Palaestina by about 300 AD. However, while Eusebius lists only those 7 letters which today are considered genuine by many, the early Ignatiana manuscripts neither contain all of these 7 letters and no others, nor are they arranged in the sequence given by Eusebius: typically, Ign.Rom. is missing, the other 6 letters are arranged in various different sequences, and at least one of the pseudo-Ignatian letters is added.

Even as late as around 400 AD, John Chrysostom – an Antiochene who knew of Ignatius supposed relics located there – in his homily on Ignatius neither gives any corroborating details of his venerated compatriot's life, nor references the letters; compare, for example, his first homily on Priscilla and Aquila which quotes the primary sources verbatim. Neither do pre-Eusebius authors in the doctrinal disputes, which started in the mid-late 2nd and became highly divisive in the 3rd to 5th centuries AD, refer to or quote the Ignatian letters, even when doing so would have given a decisive authority to the argument. And as Markus Vinzent – one of the few present-day experts who advocates an original collection of only 3 letters and does not dismiss the "short recension" as an abbreviation of the "middle recension" – has noted, all presently known early quotations from the Ignatian corpus are from passages which are identical (if the uncertainties of translation are accounted for) in the 3- and 7-letter collections, as well as in the short- and middle-recension text-types. The first unequivocal attestations for the existence of the 7 letters listed by Eusebius and the middle-recension text, on the other hand, considerably post-date Eusebius, and are roughly contemporary with the first witnesses to the long-recension text and the pseudepigraphically expanded collections.

In summary, during the initial ~150 years during which a compilation of all Ignatian letters was supposedly available, at least two letters are attested to exist in written form by presently-known sources, one of which (Ephesians) was used as a source, while two passages from another (Romans) are independently cited as having been "said" This widespread absence of Ignatian references in authors that could be expected to quote or at least paraphrase Ignatius' letters, and attribute them by name, is in striking contrast to the same authors' use of Polycarp or Clement of Rome, and to the subsequent popularity of the Ignatian letters. This discrepancy was already noted by the 19th-century authors mentioned above. The 7-letter-middle-recension hypothesis is thus, more than 300 years after John Pearson, still only based on the testimony of Eusebius, has no material support yet, and the pre-Eusebian references cannot distinguish between a 3-letter and a 7-letter hypothesis (and can even be interpreted as favoring the former); meanwhile, the short recension has even less evidence in its favor, at least if the Lectio brevior rule-of-thumb is held not to apply in this case. The expanded collections and the long recension, on the other hand, are today universally and robustly rejected by experts as post-AD 300 pseudepigraphies/forgeries. The earliest known source, as of 2022, which contains only the 7 letters listed by Eusebius – albeit in a very different sequence – and uses the middle-recension text, is a 13th-century Arabic manuscript (Sin. ar. 505).

Ignatius is claimed to be the first known Christian writer to argue in favor of Christianity's replacement of the Sabbath with the Lord's Day:

This passage has provoked textual debate since the only Greek manuscript extant read Κατα κυριακήν ζωήν ζωντες which could be translated "living according to the Lord's life". Most scholars, however, have followed the Latin text (secundum dominicam) omitting ζωήν and translating "living according to Lord's Day".

Ecclesiology

Ignatius is the earliest known Christian writer to emphasize loyalty to a single bishop in each city (or diocese) who is assisted by both presbyters (elders) and deacons. Earlier writings only mention bishops presbyters.

For instance, his writings on bishops, presbyters and deacons:

He is also responsible for the first known use of the Greek word katholikos (καθολικός), or catholic, meaning "universal", "complete", "general", and/or "whole" to describe the Church, writing:

Anglican bishop and theologian Joseph Lightfoot states the word "catholic (καθόλου)" meant "universal" to Ignatius, as that term was commonly used at the time by classical and ecclesiastical writers. Later usages of "Catholic Church" denote a particular church with orthodox beliefs and apostolic succession, as opposed to heretical or schismatic church bodies. Ignatius of Antioch is also attributed one of the earliest uses of the term "Christianity" () AD.

Parallels with Peregrinus Proteus

Several scholars have noted that there are striking similarities between Ignatius and the Christian-turned-Cynic philosopher Peregrinus Proteus, who is satirized by Lucian in The Passing of Peregrinus:

Both Ignatius and Peregrinus show a morbid eagerness to die;
Both are or have been, Christians;
Both are imprisoned by Roman authorities;
Upon the arrest of both prisoners, Christians from all over Asia Minor come to visit them and bring them gifts; (cf. Peregrinus 12–13).
Both prisoners send letters to several Greek cities shortly before their deaths as "testaments, counsels, and laws", appointing "couriers" and "ambassadors" for the purpose.

Pseudo-Ignatius

Epistles attributed to Saint Ignatius, but of spurious origin (their author is often called Pseudo-Ignatius in English) include:

Epistle to the Tarsians;
Epistle to the Antiochians;
Epistle to Hero, a Deacon of Antioch;
Epistle to the Philippians;
Epistle of Maria the Proselyte to Ignatius;
Epistle to Mary at Neapolis, Zarbus;
First Epistle to St. John;
Second Epistle to St. John;
Epistle of Ignatius to the Virgin Mary.

Notes and references

Notes

References

Bibliography

External links

An extensive catalogue of English translations of Ignatius's letters
Early Christian writings: On-line texts of St. Ignatius' letters (archived) (non-archived link)
The Ecclesiology of St. Ignatius of Antioch by Fr. John S. Romanides
Saint Ignatius
Opera Omnia by Jacques Paul Migne, Patrologia Graeca with analytical indexes
Catholic Encyclopedia - Spurious Epistles of St. Ignatius of Antioch
Ignatius writings in the Ante-Nicene Fathers
Greek text of Ignatius writings
2012 Translation & Audio Version (Authentic Seven Letters and Martyrdom of Ignatius)
Saint Ignatius of Antioch at the Christian Iconography web site
Here Followeth the Life of St. Ignatius, Bishop from Caxton's translation of the Golden Legend
Colonnade Statue in St Peter's Square