From Syria Even unto Rome

I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith. 2 TIMOTHY 4:7

A bishop of Antioch. Ignatius was bishop of the church in Antioch, in Syria, in the years around the turn of the first century into the second. Antioch was one of the three or four greatest cities of the Roman world, a crowded, many-languaged place on the Orontes river. It had heard the gospel very early. Men scattered by the persecution after Stephen’s death had preached there, first to Jews and then to Greeks; Barnabas and Saul had taught there a whole year; and it was from Antioch that Paul and Barnabas were sent out on their first journey. It was there, Luke tells us, that the disciples were first called Christians. Ignatius was the pastor of that church, and he never forgot it. In every letter he asks prayer for “the church which is in Syria”.

And the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch. ACTS 11:26

What we do not know. Nearly everything else about his earlier life is hidden. Eusebius, the church historian writing some two hundred years later, names him as bishop of Antioch after Evodius, the first bishop there after the apostles. Later tradition made him a hearer of the apostle John, and a still later story made him the child whom Jesus set in the midst of the disciples. The first may hold something true; no one can now say. The second is a legend. We do not know his birthplace, his family, his age, or how long he had led the church. In his letters he calls himself Ignatius, “who is also Theophorus” — the God-bearer — but whether that was a second name he had always borne or a title he took, we cannot tell.

Arrest and sentence. At some point in the reign of the emperor Trajan, who ruled from 98 to 117, Ignatius was arrested and condemned to die by the beasts. The traditional date is around 107 or 108; most who accept the tradition would say between 107 and 110. The letters themselves give no year, and a few scholars have argued for a later date, so it is honest to hold the number loosely. We do not know the charge, or who brought it, or whether other Christians in Antioch suffered with him. His letters speak of trouble in the church he left behind, and near the end of his journey he heard that the church there had peace again. More than that the letters do not say.

Why he was sent to Rome is not certain either. Condemned men were sometimes sent from the provinces to the capital to die in the public games, and that seems to be what happened to him. So his punishment became a journey, and the journey gave us the letters.

The road. He travelled in chains under a military guard, and he did not pretend his guards were kind. “From Syria even unto Rome I fight with wild beasts,” he wrote to the Romans, “by land and sea, by night and by day, being bound amidst ten leopards, even a company of soldiers, who only wax worse when they are kindly treated.” The route took him through the cities of Asia Minor, and at each halt, as word went ahead of him, Christians came out to meet him. He was not travelling alone. Two men, Philo, a deacon from Cilicia, and Rhaius Agathopus from Syria, followed after him to serve him, and he speaks warmly of both.

Smyrna. The first long halt of which we know was at Smyrna, on the Aegean coast. There he was received by the church and by its young bishop, Polycarp, who would himself die a martyr some fifty years later. To Smyrna came delegations from three churches further inland: from Ephesus, led by its bishop Onesimus; from Magnesia, led by its young bishop Damas with two presbyters and a deacon; and from Tralles, led by its bishop Polybius. Ignatius wrote to each of their churches, thanking them, warning them against false teachers and pleading for unity. From Smyrna too he wrote a fourth letter, to the church at Rome, which he dated to the ninth day before the Kalends of September — the twenty-fourth of August. It is the only date in all his letters.

Troas. From Smyrna he was taken on to Troas, the port near ancient Troy from which Paul had once crossed into Europe. There he wrote three more letters: to the church at Philadelphia, which he had passed through on the road, and to the church at Smyrna, which had just cared for him — both, he says, by the hand of Burrhus, a deacon whom the Ephesians and Smyrnaeans had sent to go with him — and a personal letter to Polycarp. At Troas he heard the news that the church at Antioch had peace, and he asked the churches to send messengers to Syria to rejoice with it. He meant to write to other churches too, but, as he told Polycarp, he was made to sail suddenly from Troas to Neapolis, and he asked Polycarp to write for him.

I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase. 1 CORINTHIANS 3:6

Philippi and after. From Neapolis the road ran through Philippi. We know he passed that way because the Philippians afterwards wrote to Polycarp, and Polycarp’s reply survives. In it he speaks of Ignatius among those who had suffered, asks for any sure news of him, and says he is sending the Philippians the letters of Ignatius that he has. That short notice, written by a man who had met him, is the best outside witness we have that Ignatius lived, travelled and wrote as the letters say.

Rome. After Philippi the letters fall silent. Ignatius reached Rome, and the church has always held that he died there in the arena, as he had been sentenced and as he had expected. Irenaeus, writing later in the second century, quotes without naming him the saying about being God’s wheat, as the words of one of our own who was condemned to the beasts. Later accounts of his martyrdom exist, full of detail, but they were written long after and cannot be trusted for the facts. We do not know the day he died, or who watched, or what he said. It is better to say so than to invent it.

Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his saints. PSALM 116:15

The letters after him. The seven letters were copied and treasured, and in time other writings gathered around them. By the fourth century someone had expanded the seven, padding them with additions, and had added six more letters that Ignatius never wrote. For centuries that longer collection was the only one most Western readers knew. In the seventeenth century the Anglican scholar James Ussher and then others recovered the shorter, genuine form of the seven letters, and in the nineteenth century the careful work of J. B. Lightfoot and Theodor Zahn persuaded most scholars that these seven are really his. A short Syriac version of three of the letters, found in the nineteenth century, was argued for a while to be the original, but that view has not held. Most scholars today accept the seven letters as genuine, though a minority still question them.

The man in the letters. What kind of man do the letters show? An intense one: his sentences tumble over each other. A humble one, too, in a way that surprises: he calls himself “the very last” of the faithful in Syria, “an untimely birth”, a convict writing to free men, and he refuses to give orders “as though I were an Apostle”. A pastor to the end: nearly every letter is about someone else’s welfare. And a man in whom love for Christ had become the whole of life. He was on his way to die, and he wrote as one already looking past the arena to the face of his Lord.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Read Acts 11:19–30 and 13:1–3, and thank God for the church in Antioch from which the gospel went out to the nations.

2. Ignatius spent his last weeks writing to strengthen others. Write a letter or message this week to encourage a church or a Christian who is struggling.

3. Notice how carefully this chapter separates what is known from what is told. Practise the same honesty when you speak about Christians of the past.

4. Remember a Christian in prison for their faith today. Find out their name if you can, and pray for them by it.

5. Consider who, like Burrhus, Philo and Agathopus, might need you to walk some part of a hard road with them.

A PRAYER

Lord God, You were with Your servant Ignatius on every mile of his road, among the soldiers and in the cities where Your people came out to meet him.

Thank You for the churches that cared for him, for the friends who followed him, and for Polycarp, who kept his letters for us.

Teach me to be honest about what I know and humble about what I do not, and to make the most of whatever time You give me.

When my own road grows hard, let me spend it, as he did, in strengthening others, until I finish my course and see Your face. Amen.