A Reader’s Guide to Ignatius of Antioch

Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me. JOHN 5:39

Ignatius left no books, only seven letters, and they can all be read in an evening. The first counsel to anyone who wants to know him is simply: read them. What follows is a short map.

The text and its translation

The letters that survive under Ignatius’s name come down to us in three forms. The longest, made in the fourth century, expands the seven genuine letters with additions and adds six more letters that he never wrote. The shortest is a Syriac abridgement of three of the letters, found in the nineteenth century and for a time argued to be the original. Between them is the Greek text of the seven letters, usually called the middle recension. Since the work of J. B. Lightfoot and Theodor Zahn in the nineteenth century, most scholars have accepted this middle form as the genuine Ignatius, though a minority still question the letters’ date or authorship.

The letters in the Ochorus library are the seven of the middle recension, in Lightfoot’s translation. The Ochorus edition describes them as the shorter recension, meaning shorter than the long, interpolated version, and every quotation from Ignatius in this book is taken from that translation.

Begin here

The Epistles of Ignatius and His Life’s Story. In the Ochorus library, with five short introductory chapters on his life written by Ochorus and then the seven letters. Read the letters in order, and read them more than once.

The Letter to the Romans. If you read only one, read this. It is the most personal and the most intense, and it contains the words about God’s wheat. Read it with the cautions of this book in mind.

The Letter to the Smyrnaeans. The clearest statement of his faith in the real flesh of Christ, his words on the eucharist, and the sentence about the universal church.

The Letter to Polycarp. The shortest and most practical: an older pastor’s counsel to a younger one.

Then read Ephesians, the longest, for faith and love, silence and the medicine of immortality; Magnesians and Philadelphians for his warnings against Judaizing; and Trallians for his fullest short creed.

Other translations

Lightfoot’s translation is found in The Apostolic Fathers, the one-volume edition he prepared and J. R. Harmer completed (1891). Kirsopp Lake’s translation in the Loeb Classical Library (1912–13) prints the Greek beside the English. Among modern versions, Michael W. Holmes’s The Apostolic Fathers, with Greek and English on facing pages, and Maxwell Staniforth’s Early Christian Writings in the Penguin Classics are both reliable and easy to find. The first volume of the Ante-Nicene Fathers prints the middle and long forms side by side, which lets a reader see how the letters were later expanded.

The texts around him

Polycarp’s Letter to the Philippians. Short, plain and warm, by the friend who gathered Ignatius’s letters. It is the best outside witness to Ignatius.

The Martyrdom of Polycarp. The account of Polycarp’s death, written by the church of Smyrna. Read it beside the letter to Rome; it shows a church that honoured martyrdom but warned against seeking it.

Eusebius, Church History, Book Three. The fourth-century historian’s account of Ignatius, with his place in the list of Antioch’s bishops.

About Ignatius

There is no biography of Ignatius in the full sense, because there is too little to write one from. Lightfoot’s great study, The Apostolic Fathers, Part II: S. Ignatius, S. Polycarp (1885), is the foundation of all later work, though it is for the determined reader. William R. Schoedel’s commentary, Ignatius of Antioch (1985), is the standard modern commentary on the letters.

Approach with care

The long recension and the spurious letters, including a Latin exchange with the Virgin Mary, are not by Ignatius and should not be quoted as his. Later accounts of his martyrdom, with their detailed trial scenes, were written long after his death and cannot be trusted for the facts.

Three counsels for reading him

Read him whole. The letters are short, and a single line lifted out of its letter can mislead. His words about the bishop and about martyrdom especially need their setting.

Read him with the New Testament open. He knew Paul’s letters and echoes the Gospels, and he is best understood as a man trying to hold his churches to the apostles’ faith.

Read him as a man on his way to die. Every line was written under guard. Let that urgency reach you, and ask what you would write if you had only weeks left.

For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. ROMANS 8:38–39