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I’ve not read much of St. Polycarp at all, St. Ignatius I’ve read, but unfortunately I don’t find him as illuminating as you seem to. His writings are platitudinous to me, he sounds very much like St. Paul only not nearly as good, not nearly as joyful or exhuberant. Though he does sound earnest and humble.

He’s good at exhorting the faithful to stick with their bishops, but since he was a bishop (is that correct?) I find that neither remarkable nor problematic, but very, very predictable instead. I don’t see how he leads me to a truth that St. Paul didn’t already lead me to, except that I don’t think I remember St. Paul using the term bishop. I do think St. Paul calls Christians to unity, but I don’t hear imposition in his tone of voice. Though to be fair, I don’t think I hear it in St. Ignatius’s voice either.

I never knew one of my bishops, not one. When I was confirmed, it was somewhat like an out-of-body experience. It was more like a conscription, as compared to St. Paul’s exhortation to join, to love. There sat this portly bishop at the bottom of the altar stairs, in full regalia ready to take me in to the army of Christ. I was way ahead of him: I had already enlisted at the age of 10, in Christ‘s Army, out of a spontaneous Love, because he showed me a place where it could be just me and Him.

This bishop had never taught me a thing, he was a complete and utter stranger to me, he was governor, not a teacher, distant in every way imaginable. Is that the same kind of bishop St. Ignatius was?

If I am to believe, because Tradition holds that I must believe, that St. Ignatius expanded upon what St. Paul could not or did not fully make known, because to call this Tradition into question traduces the Christian bonds St. Ignatius and his contemporaries established, that’s a judgment that I will leave to those who feel competent and just enough to make it.

I stand by what I said, when St. Paul died, a certain something died with him, that something being freedom, that he brought specifically to Christ’s Church by dint of his extraordinary experience of Conversion. Freedom from being the theological pack-mules that his former Pharisees in arms had the tendency to make of their followers.