Antioch and the God-Bearer

In the first century, in the great city of Antioch in Syria, there lived a man who signed his letters with a strange and beautiful name. He was called Ignatius. But when he took up his pen, he wrote himself down another way: Ignatius, who is also called Theophorus — the God-bearer, one who carries God. It is the first thing he tells you about himself, and in the end it may be the truest thing there is to say.

Antioch was no small place. It was one of the largest cities of the Roman world, a crossroads where Greek, Syrian, Jewish, and Roman lives ran together in crowded streets. It was here, the book of Acts records, that the followers of Jesus were first called Christians. So the church Ignatius served was not a young experiment on the edge of things. It stood at one of the great centres of the faith, in a city that had known the gospel since the earliest days, and it needed a shepherd who could hold it together.

That shepherd was Ignatius. He was an early bishop of the church at Antioch — by the old reckoning the successor of a bishop named Evodius — set over the congregation as its overseer and pastor. We do not know the year of his birth. He came into the world somewhere in the mid-first century, in Syria, and the records that might tell us more have not survived. What we have instead is the man himself, in his own words, near the end of his life.

A man at the close of the apostolic age

To understand Ignatius, it helps to feel where he stood in time. He belonged to the generation that came just after the apostles. The men who had walked with Jesus were passing from the earth, or already gone. The eyewitnesses were becoming memories. And the church they had planted now had to learn how to live without them — how to keep the faith whole when the voices that first spoke it had fallen silent.

By long tradition, Ignatius himself was a disciple of the apostle John, and it was said that Peter had a hand in setting him over Antioch. These are old and cherished stories, and they may hold something true; but they are tradition, not established fact, and it is honest to name them so. What is certain is simpler and enough: he was a bishop of the apostolic age, close enough to its beginning to breathe its air, and charged with carrying its faith forward into a harder time.

There is a legend, too, that Ignatius was the little child whom Jesus once took up in his arms and set before the disciples. It is a lovely picture, and later readers were fond of it — but historians reject it, and it is almost certainly not true. We will not pretend it happened. The real Ignatius needs no such ornament.

The meaning of a name

Return, then, to that name he chose to carry: Theophorus, the God-bearer. It was not a boast. In the letters you are about to read, you will find a man who believed, plainly and without drama, that Christ dwelt in him — that a Christian is a place where God has come to live, a vessel bearing something greater than himself. Ignatius did not merely hold this as a doctrine. He was about to prove it with his body.

For this is the shadow that falls across everything he wrote. The letters in this book were not composed at a study desk in peaceful Antioch. They were written on a road, under guard, by a man being carried across the empire to his death. Somewhere in the last years of his life — around the reign of the emperor Trajan — Ignatius was arrested, condemned, and sent to Rome to be thrown to the wild beasts.

Before we walk that road with him, it is worth pausing here, in Antioch, to see him whole: a bishop of one of the first great churches, a man of the generation after the apostles, who called himself the God-bearer and meant it. Everything that follows is the story of how he made good on the name.