Ecumenical Commemoration
Bishop & Martyr
October 17 · d. 107
also known as Ignatius of Antioch, Ignatius Theophorus, Ignatius the God-bearer
Ignatius was the second or third bishop of Antioch in Roman Syria, the city where the disciples were first called Christians. Arrested in the persecution under the emperor Trajan and marched under guard toward Rome to be thrown to the beasts, he wrote seven letters along the way, to five churches of Asia Minor, to the church at Rome, and to his fellow bishop Polycarp of Smyrna. Those letters, written in the early second century, are among the earliest Christian writings outside the New Testament, and they gave the church its first clear language for unity around the bishop and for the total, longing surrender of martyrdom. His feast is October 17.
Ignatius was the bishop of Antioch, the great city of Roman Syria where the disciples of Jesus were first called Christians. He had shepherded that church for years, through what he called a peace bought back for it, when the peace broke. The emperor Trajan had renewed the demand that Christians offer sacrifice to the gods of the empire, and refuse it on pain of death, and Ignatius refused it. He was condemned to be thrown to the wild beasts in Rome, and a guard of ten soldiers was set to march him there overland, the length of the empire.
He called them leopards. "From Syria even unto Rome I fight with beasts," he wrote, "both by land and sea, both by night and day, being bound to ten leopards, I mean a band of soldiers, who, even when they receive benefits, show themselves all the worse." Chained to men who only grew crueler for kindness, carried through one province after another toward a death he had already been told was certain, Ignatius did not spend the journey in despair. He spent it writing.
Word of his passing ran ahead of him, and at every city where the guard paused, the church came out to meet him. Bishops and deacons and whole congregations from Ephesus, from Magnesia, from Tralles, walked out to the road to see the old man in chains and to hear him preach. He wrote back to each of them from the next stopping place, and the letters he sent are why the church remembers him still. He signed them "Ignatius, who is also called Theophorus," the God-bearer, and every line bears that name out.
He had one great fear for the churches he was leaving behind, and it was not persecution. It was division. False teachers had begun to say that Christ had not really taken flesh, that his sufferings were only appearance, a shadow play staged for men who could not have borne the truth of very God walking among them. Against this Ignatius set the plainest possible remedy: gather round your bishop, and do nothing apart from him. "Let no one look upon his neighbour after the flesh," he wrote to the Magnesians, "but continually love each other in Jesus Christ. Let nothing exist among you that may divide you; but be united with your bishop, and those that preside over you, as a type and evidence of your immortality." A church gathered around its bishop could not be picked apart by men who wanted to argue Christ into a phantom, because it stood and worshipped and broke bread as one body, and a phantom does not need a body to eat with.
To the church at Smyrna he put the same conviction in the words that would outlast every other line he wrote: "Wherever the bishop shall appear, there let the multitude of the people also be, even as, wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the catholic Church." Where the true shepherd stood with his flock gathered close, there, and not in any breakaway conventicle, was the whole church universal, one body however far its members were scattered across the earth.
But it was the letter he sent ahead to Rome that laid his whole heart open. He had heard, or feared, that the Christians there, a large and influential church, might use their standing to beg him off, to have his sentence quietly lifted. He wrote to stop them before they could try. He did not want to be spared. He wanted, with a longing that still unsettles readers nineteen centuries later, to be given entirely to God through the very death that was coming for him. "I am writing to all the churches, and I bid all men know, that I of my own will die for God," he told them, and then, more starkly still: "Allow me to become food for the wild beasts, through whose instrumentality it will be granted me to attain to God. I am the wheat of God, and let me be ground by the teeth of the wild beasts, that I may be found the pure bread of Christ."
He was not indifferent to being alive. He loved these churches enough to cross an empire writing to them with his hands in chains. But he had come to see his death, if it came as martyrdom, not as a loss inflicted on him but as the one gift he still had left to give, the last and completest way a man could be joined to the Christ who had already died and risen for him. He begged Rome not to take that gift out of his hands.
The record does not tell us, with the certainty a document from the amphitheater itself would give, exactly how or precisely when his journey ended. The church has long told that it ended exactly as he asked: bound in the Roman arena, given to the beasts, gathered up afterward by the few who loved him enough to carry home what the beasts had left. What is certain is what he left behind on the road: seven letters, carried by hand from city to city, copied and kept and read aloud in churches that had only glimpsed him once, chained, walking to his death, and had never forgotten him.
The wheat that is ground becomes bread for others. Ignatius asked to be ground fine, and the church that received his letters, and prayed his name, and stood the closer around its own bishops for having read him, has been fed by that bread ever since. He did not attain to God alone. He is still, all these centuries later, bringing others with him.
How we know Ignatius rests on an unusually strong foundation for a figure this early: seven letters that a near-unanimous modern scholarly consensus accepts as his own genuine writing, composed within living memory of the apostles. This is a better-attested primary source base than the church has for almost any other figure of the first Christian generations after the New Testament, and it is worth saying so plainly before anything else.
The outward facts are these. Ignatius was bishop, by most reckonings the second or third, of the church at Antioch in Roman Syria, at the time the third-largest city of the empire and, by the witness of the Acts of the Apostles, the very city where the disciples of Jesus were first called Christians (Acts 11:26). Later tradition held that he had known the apostle John, but this cannot be independently verified from his own letters or from any source close enough to the events to settle the question, and the honest answer is that we do not know. During a persecution under the emperor Trajan, Ignatius was arrested, condemned to be killed by wild beasts in Rome's arena, and sent overland under a guard of ten soldiers. Along that route, stopping at cities in Asia Minor where local churches came out to meet him, he wrote seven letters: to the churches at Ephesus, Magnesia, Tralles, Rome, and Philadelphia, to the church at Smyrna, and a personal letter to Polycarp, the bishop of that city. Those seven letters, and no others, are the body of writing that the great nineteenth-century patristic scholar J.B. Lightfoot, in the edition that settled the modern textual question, identified as authentic; they are still accepted as such by nearly all scholars working today.
The text of Ignatius survives in three distinct textual traditions, and the difference between them is a genuine and long-settled question of manuscript scholarship, not a matter of belief. A long recension of thirteen letters, expanded with theological interpolations, circulated widely in the medieval church; scholarship has dated this expansion to the fourth century and identified it as the work of a later hand, likely sympathetic to Arian theology, working over the genuine text. A short recension of three letters survives in Syriac and is generally read as a later abridgement rather than an earlier, purer form. It is the middle recension, the seven letters named above, that Lightfoot's textual work in the 1880s confirmed as Ignatius's own, and that recension is the basis for every serious modern translation and study, including the quotations on this page.
The date of his death is a live question among historians, and honesty requires saying so rather than choosing a false precision. The traditional date, drawn chiefly from the fourth-century historian Eusebius, places his martyrdom around 107, in the reign of Trajan. Some modern scholars have proposed a later date: arguments have been made for the 130s or 140s, on grounds including apparent verbal echoes of second-century Gnostic writers in the letters. Other scholars continue to defend a date within Trajan's reign, including a specific proposal tying Ignatius's arrest to an earthquake at Antioch in AD 115. No single date commands full consensus, and this page states the range rather than a single year for that reason.
Ignatius is kept on October 17 in the calendars of the Western church, the date associated with his martyrdom at Rome; the Eastern churches keep his feast on December 20, the day they hold to be the actual date of his death, with a further commemoration on the anniversary of the translation of his relics. He is honored as a bishop and martyr, and is shown in art vested as a bishop, often with lions or other beasts at his feet or attacking him, in reference to his death in the arena, and sometimes holding a heart inscribed with the name of Christ, recalling a late legend that after his death his heart was found to bear the sacred name within it.
He is remembered above all as the great early witness to the unity of the church gathered around its bishop, and it is to him that the church owes its first recorded use of the word "catholic" to describe the whole body of Christ spread across every place: the sentence from his letter to the Smyrnaeans, that wherever the bishop is, there is the catholic Church, has been quoted in support of the doctrine of the ministry for nineteen centuries and remains one of the most cited lines in all of patristic literature. He is honored, too, as the model of eager martyrdom, the bishop who begged not to be rescued from the beasts, and his letter to the Romans has shaped the church's devotional language about dying for Christ more than almost any other document outside the New Testament itself. He is counted a patron of those who face persecution for the faith, and of the Eastern Catholic Church of Antioch, which reveres him as one of its own patriarchs. His name, and Antioch's, are bound together in the church's memory: the city where believers were first called Christians gave the church, in Ignatius, one of its first great martyred bishops.
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Epistle to the Ephesians(Greek, c. 107)
One of the seven authentic letters, written from Smyrna to the church that had sent a delegation, including its bishop Onesimus, to meet Ignatius on the road.
Public domain: New Advent, Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 1
Epistle to the Magnesians(Greek, c. 107)
Contains the strong exhortations to unity under the bishop quoted in the Story and History.
Public domain: New Advent, Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 1
Epistle to the Trallians(Greek, c. 107)
Warns against docetist teaching and urges submission to bishop, presbyters, and deacons.
Public domain: New Advent, Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 1
Epistle to the Romans(Greek, c. 107)
The letter written ahead to Rome begging the church there not to intervene to save him from martyrdom; source of the "wheat of God" and "ten leopards" passages.
Public domain: New Advent, Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 1
Epistle to the Philadelphians(Greek, c. 107)
Written from Troas, urging unity and warning against schism among a church Ignatius says he found divided.
Public domain: New Advent, Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 1
Epistle to the Smyrnaeans(Greek, c. 107)
Source of the famous "where the bishop is, there is the catholic Church" line quoted in the Story and Traditions.
Public domain: New Advent, Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 1
Epistle to Polycarp(Greek, c. 107)
A personal letter of pastoral counsel to his fellow bishop, the last of the seven authentic letters.
Public domain: New Advent, Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 1
The Apostolic Fathers, Part II: S. Ignatius, S. Polycarp(English, 1885)
The founding critical edition that established the middle recension of seven letters as authentic; the reference point for all later scholarship on the text.
Public domain: Internet Archive (borrow)
Ignatius of Antioch: A Commentary on the Letters of Ignatius of Antioch(English, 1985)
Recommended: William R. Schoedel (Fortress Press, Hermeneia)
The standard modern scholarly commentary on the seven letters, verse by verse; the deeper academic second step for a reader who has read the letters themselves.
Primary sources. Ignatius's seven authentic letters (the middle recension) survive in Greek and are available in J.B. Lightfoot's landmark critical edition and in the widely used Roberts-Donaldson translation printed in the Ante-Nicene Fathers, both long in the public domain. The letters to the Ephesians, Magnesians, Trallians, Romans, Philadelphians, and Smyrnaeans, and the personal letter to Polycarp, are the whole primary-source base for his life and thought.
Principal study. J.B. Lightfoot's The Apostolic Fathers, Part II: S. Ignatius, S. Polycarp (Macmillan, 1885, multiple volumes) is the founding critical edition and remains the reference point for every later study of the text and the recensions; it is out of copyright and borrowable at the Internet Archive.
Recommended modern biography. William R. Schoedel's Ignatius of Antioch: A Commentary on the Letters of Ignatius of Antioch (Fortress Press, Hermeneia series, 1985) is the standard modern scholarly commentary and is available new; a reader wanting a shorter, more devotional entry point is well served first by the introductions accompanying a modern popular edition of the letters themselves, such as the Penguin Classics Early Christian Writings (tr. Maxwell Staniforth, rev. Andrew Louth), still in print and widely available.
Further reading. The relevant chapters of Henry Chadwick's The Early Church (Penguin, rev. edn.) set Ignatius within the wider persecution and episcopate of the early second century for the general reader.
Online resources. The full text of all seven letters in the Roberts-Donaldson translation is hosted at New Advent's Church Fathers collection and at Early Christian Writings, both freely accessible.
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Ignatius is said as one suffering fire and burning, for he was embraced and all esprised of the divine and burning love of God.
Of S. Ignatius.
S. Ignatius was disciple of S. John Evangelist, and was bishop of Antioch. And after that, as some say, he sent a letter unto our Lady or an epistle in this wise: Unto Mary the Virgin, that bare Jesu Christ in her body, I, humble Ignatius, her servant, send greeting, I, that am yet a novice in the faith and disciple to Jesu Christ and to John your dear friend, desire to have of you some comfort and consolation of some good enseignment and teaching. For of Jesus your Son I have heard say many marvels, of which I am enjoyed to hear only of you, which have been always in his company. You know well the secret desires of him, you have been plainly informed, and they that be yet young in the faith with me trust much to be endoctrined of you, and informed in their creance and belief: Lady, God salute you.
And to this letter answered the glorious Virgin Mary in this manner: Ignatius, good disciple of Jesus and his special friend, the humble handmaid of Jesu Christ sends to you greeting. I do you to wit that all that John has said to you of Jesu Christ and all that you have learned of him is true doctrine and thing certain. Go alway in good creance, and believe and keep firmly the promise of your christian faith, and do your works according to the same. I shall come with S. John for to visit you and other christian men with you. Hold you always well in the faith and in good works, and let no persecution ne adversity that you shall suffer move you from your faith ne from your creance, but have solace and affiance in Jesu Christ your Saviour. This was the answer of his letter.
S. Ignatius was a man right well learned, and the third bishop after S. Peter, the apostle of the church of Antioch, and much desired to be a martyr for the faith of Jesu Christ. It happed that Trajan, which was emperor of Rome, passed by Antioch, to whom Ignatius showed to him and blamed of this, that he persecuted christian men, wherefor the emperor did him to be taken and put in irons, and in that wise by ten knights to be led to Rome. There he was presented tofore the emperor and all the senators of Rome, and was constrained by promises, by menaces, and by torments, many and great an horrible, for to adore the idols. S. Ignatius showed to them clearly that their gods had been thieves, ribalds, and men of abominable and evil life, and that they were damned in hell, and that they had been in great error in this, that of so cursed men they made their gods and worshipped devils, and had forsaken God which had made and created all the world, and his blessed Son which in human nature had redeemed and saved the world.
Finably, after this, that he had been tormented by fire, and by beating and prison, the emperor did send for the Romans in a place and there did do set S. Ignatius, and did do bring thither two lions for to devour him. But he had never dread for death ne for other torments, of which he had suffered many, but was always comforted for to die for the love of Jesu Christ. And he said at the last: I am wheat of Jesu Christ, which ought to be grounden between the teeth of these beasts, by which I may be pure bread for to be presented to my Lord; and anon the lions came and strangled him without tearing of his flesh, or anything hurting it, wherefor Trajan had great marvel and departed from the place. It is read that S. Ignatius in all his torments and all the pains of martyrdom that he suffered, that his tongue never ceased to name the name of Jesus, and when they that tormented him demanded him wherefore he named this name so oft, he answered: Know you for certain that I have in my heart this name written, and therefore I may not leave to name this name oft. And because hereof, when he was dead, they that heard these words opened his body and drew out his heart and cut it open, and they found within the name of Jesus written with fair letters of gold, for which miracle many received the faith of Jesu Christ.
Of this saint says S. Bernard upon the psalm, Qui habitat: S. Ignatius, martyr of God glorious, is of great merit, which was minister to the disciple that Jesus so much loved, and in his epistles, the which he sent to the glorious Virgin Mary, he saluted her as mother that had borne Jesu Christ and she resaluted him again, in sign that he was a person of great honour, of great dignity, and of great authority. The body of whom was honorably buried of christian men, to the worship of Jesu Christ which is blessed in secula seculorum. Amen.
The earliest outside attestation to Ignatius's letters is Polycarp's own letter to the Philippians, written to accompany a set of Ignatius's letters that Polycarp was forwarding at the Philippians' request; some scholars have raised questions about parts of Polycarp's text, but the letter's basic witness to a collection of Ignatian letters circulating within a generation of Ignatius's death is widely accepted. The next clear external witness is Eusebius of Caesarea, writing in his Ecclesiastical History around AD 300, who is the first surviving source to describe more than a few of the seven letters and to narrate Ignatius's arrest and journey to Rome in continuous form.
Later tradition surrounded Ignatius's final journey with a fuller narrative than the letters themselves supply: an Acts of Ignatius (also called the Martyrium Ignatii), circulating in more than one recension in the centuries after his death, that describes a formal trial before the emperor Trajan himself, complete with recorded dialogue between the two men, followed by an account of the journey and the death in the amphitheater. Scholarship treats this material as a considerably later composition than the seven letters, built up around the historical fact of Ignatius's martyrdom rather than transmitted from eyewitnesses at the time; the trial scene in particular reads as a dramatized set piece of the kind common to later martyr narratives, and no source contemporary with Ignatius records any such exchange with Trajan in person. That the church nonetheless told, copied, and read this fuller story for many centuries is itself part of Ignatius's history: he had, by his own genuine letters, already given the church so vivid a picture of a man walking toward his death in joy that later generations wanted the scene filled in further, and the Acts answered that want, whether or not its dialogue is Ignatius's own.
What the seven letters do preserve, without any need for later embellishment, is a bishop consumed by two convictions: that the unity of the church stands or falls with unity around its bishop, and that his own approaching death was not a defeat to be mourned but a gift he begged not to be denied. Both convictions run through every letter he wrote, and both would shape the church's understanding of ministry and of martyrdom for the whole of its subsequent history.
Almighty God, you gave your servant Ignatius of Antioch boldness to confess the Name of our Savior Jesus Christ before the rulers of this world, and courage to die for this faith: Grant that we may always be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in us, and to suffer gladly for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
British (Received Pronunciation): Polycarp /ˈpɒlɪkɑːrp/
Readings for a Martyr
Jeremiah 15:15–21Psalm 34Revelation 7:9–17Luke 12:4–12