Ignatius of Antioch

To many, Ignatius of Antioch is not a household name, but his letters played a key role in shaping how people think about what early Christian communities were like.

Who was Ignatius?

According to the fourth-century Christian historian Eusebius, Ignatius was the bishop of Antioch in Syria in the second century CE. He is remembered as the third leader of the Christian community there, just one removed from the apostle Peter. We have very little information about Ignatius except for some letters he wrote in Greek to Christian communities in Asia Minor and Rome on his way to be executed. In those letters, he modeled himself after the apostle Paul, writing to some of the same cities and alluding to Paul’s letters more than any other Christian writings. He encouraged communities to live in harmony with their bishops and asked those in Rome not to interfere with his impending execution.

Why have Ignatius’s letters been so important and controversial?

Ignatius has been important to Christians both in antiquity and more recent centuries because he provides a bridge between the apostles and the more organized church that eventually emerged. He was the first writer to use the Greek term christianismos (Magn. 8, Phld. 6), which is often translated as Christianity. He was also the first to refer to the church as katholike (catholic or universal, Smyrn. 8). He was an early witness to a hierarchical bishop-presbyter-deacon leadership structure, an early martyr (Rom. 4–8), and his views of Jesus resonated even among Christians who disagreed about who Jesus was (e.g., Smyrn. 2–3). By the fourth century, Christians celebrated Ignatius as a hero of the faith, and in times of conflict, his letters offered reassurance that Christianity was unchanged and enduring. Ignatius’s letters help scholars understand how Christians distinguished themselves from their contemporaries and how a minority religion became an organized, powerful force in the Roman Empire.

Ignatius’s letters, however, have been plagued by disputes over their authenticity. Sixteenth-century reformer John Calvin decried the entire collection as a Catholic forgery because he thought the references to clergy hierarchy contradicted Christian scriptures. In subsequent centuries, scholars from the Church of England sifted through medieval manuscripts, looking for authentic letters that could be disentangled from what they saw as later forgeries.

Manuscript evidence makes it difficult to resolve these disputes definitively. Depending on the collection, there are between seven and seventeen letters, many of which are preserved in longer and shorter versions. Most scholars today accept seven of the shorter versions of the letters as authentic, the same letters reported to us by Eusebius. These shorter versions almost certainly contain earlier versions of Ignatius’s letters, but the early material has been mixed with later material in ways that are not easy to separate.

Despite the complexity involved in making sense of the many versions, Ignatius’s letters provide valuable information about how Christian beliefs and practices have evolved. They give glimpses into early Christian life and how later Christians remembered their past at different times.