St. Ignatius of Antioch and the Early Church

Sometime around the year 107 A.D., a short, sharp persecution of the Church of Christ resulted in the arrest of the bishop of Antioch in Syria. His name was Ignatius. According to one of the harsh penal practices of the Roman Empire of the day, the good bishop was condemned to be delivered up to wild beasts in the arena in the capital city. The insatiable public appetite for bloody spectacles meant a chronically short supply of victims; prisoners were thus sent off to Rome to help fill the need.

So the second bishop of Antioch was sent to Rome as a condemned prisoner. According to Church historian Eusebius (ca. 260-ca. 340), Ignatius had been bishop in Antioch for nearly forty years at the time of his arrest. This means that he had been bishop there while some of the original apostles were almost certainly still alive and preaching.

St. Ignatius of Antioch was conducted first by land from Syria across Asia Minor (modern Turkey). He was escorted by a detachment of Roman soldiers. In a letter he sent ahead to the Church of Christ in Rome, this bishop described his ardent wish to imitate the passion of Christ through his own coming martyrdom in the Roman Colosseum. He warned the Christians in Rome not to try to save him. He also spoke of his conflicts with his military escort and of their casual cruelties, describing his guards as "ten leopards". The discipline of the march cannot have been unrelieved, however, since Ignatius was permitted to receive delegations of visitors from local Churches in the cities of Asia Minor through which the escorts and Ignatius passed along the way (To the Romans, 5:1).

In Smyrna (modern Izmir), St. Ignatius met, not only with the bishop of that city, St. Polycarp, but also with delegations from the neighboring cities of Ephesus, Magnesia, and Tralles. Each delegation was headed by a local bishop. Ignatius wrote thank-you letters to the Christians in each of these cities who had visited the notable but shackled bishop-prisoner. Chiefly through these letters, St. Ignatius of Antioch is known to us today.

Establishing these letters, written in Greek, as authentic and genuinely from the first decade of the second century was one of the triumphs of nineteenth-century British scholarship. Without them, this bishop of Antioch might have remained no more than a name, as obscure as many another early Christian bishop.

Escorted on to the Greek city of Troas on the Aegean Sea, Ignatius wrote yet another letter to the Church at Smyrna, through which he had passed. He also wrote personally to Bishop Polycarp of that city. Finally, from Troas he wrote still another letter to the Philadelphians; the local Church of Philadelphia had despatched two deacons who overtook his party at Troas.

Shortly after writing these seven letters to Churches in Asia Minor, St. Ignatius of Antioch was taken aboard ship. The remainder of his journey to Italy was by sea. Tradition holds that he won his longed-for martyrdom in the Roman amphitheater during the reign of Emperor Trajan (98-117).

But the letters he left behind afford us a precious and remarkable picture of what that Church was like not even two full generations after issuing from the side of Jesus Christ on the Cross.

The adult life of St. Ignatius of Antioch as a second-generation Church leader almost exactly spanned the period of transition between the end of the first Christian generation and the beginning of the third. Thus, his witness about the nature of the Church of his day is of the most profound and fundamental importance.

What was the Church like around the year 107 A.D.? The Church had already spread far and wide since the days of the apostles. St. Ignatius was conducted over a good part of what, today, is Turkey, encountering local Churches in most major towns. At the head of each of these Churches was a principal leader, a bishop. The geographical spread of individual local Churches, each headed by a bishop, is obvious from the fact that Ignatius was met by delegations headed by bishops from each sizeable town along the route.

That St. Ignatius was met by these "official" delegations indicates that local Churches were in close touch with one another. They did not see themselves as independent, self-selected, self-governing congregations of like-minded people; they saw themselves as linked together in the one body of Christ according to an already firmly established, well-understood system, even though they happened to be geographically separated.

The solidarity with which they all turned out to honor a prisoner being led to martyrdom, who also happened to be the bishop of Antioch, tells us something about their respect for the incumbent of that office. Antioch was to become one of the great patriarchal bishoprics of the Church of antiquity, along with Alexandria and Rome--and, later, Constantinople.

The letters of St. Ignatius are even more pointed concerning the role that a bishop ("overseer") held in the early Church. The modern reader may be startled at the degree to which these letters exalt the role of the bishop. "It is essential to act in no way without the bishop", Ignatius wrote to the Trallians. "... Obey the bishop as if he were Jesus Christ" (2:2,1). "Do nothing apart from the bishop", he wrote to the Philadelphians (7:2). To the Smyrnaeans, he gave the same advice: "You should all follow the bishop as Jesus Christ did the Father .... Nobody must do anything that has to do with the Church without the bishop's approval" (8:1).

The New Testament shows the apostles appointing others besides themselves to offices in the Church. Peter and the other apostles at Jerusalem very quickly decided to appoint deacons to assist them (cf. Acts 6: 1-6). Paul similarly placed someone in authority in the Churches he founded (cf. Acts 14:23; 2 Tim 1:6). These ecclesiastical appointments were carried out by means of a religious rite: the laying on of hands, either by those who already had authority conferred on them by Christ (the apostles) or those on whom they had conferred authority by the laying on of hands. These rites were sacramental ordinations.

For a period of time in the early Church there seems to have been no entirely clear terminology designating these ordained Church officers or ministers. St. Paul spoke of bishops and deacons (Phil 1:1), though he also mentions other offices, such as apostles, prophets, and teachers (1 Cor 12:29). St. James spoke of elders (5:14). In the Acts of the Apostles (e.g., 11: 30), we hear many times of elders or presbyters. Sometimes the designations bishop and elder seem to have been used interchangeably.

In the course of the second half of the first century, however, a consistent terminology for these Church offices was becoming fixed. The letters of St. Ignatius of Antioch make clear that leadership in the Christian community, in all the Churches, is exercised by an order of "bishops, presbyters, and deacons" (To the Trallians 3:2; To Polycarp 6:1). Of these designations, bishop comes from the Greek episkopos, meaning "overseer"; presbyter from the Greek presbyteros, "elder"; and deacon from the Greek diakonos, "servant" or "minister".

Thus, from that time on, these were the offices in what was already an institutional, hierarchical Church (this is not to imply that the Church was ever anything but institutional and hierarchical, only that the evidence for these characteristics had become unmistakably clear by this time).

By the way, the term priest (Greek: hierus) does not seem to have been used at first for the Christian presbyter; the nonuse of this particular term in the earliest years of the Church was due to the need to distinguish the Christian priesthood of the new dispensation from the Jewish Temple priests, who were still functioning up to the time of the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple by the Romans in the year 70 A.D. After that time, the use of the word priest for those ordained in Christ began to be more and more common.

St. Ignatius of Antioch did not know of any such thing as a "Church" that was merely an assemblage of like-minded people who believed themselves to have been moved by the Spirit. The early Christians were moved by the Spirit to join the Church, the established visible, institutional, sacerdotal, and hierarchical Church-the only kind St. Ignatius of Antioch would ever have recognized as the Church.

And it was for this visible, institutional, sacerdotal, and hierarchical Church--an entity purveying both the word and sacraments of Jesus--that this early bishop was willing to give himself up to be torn apart by wild beasts in the arena. He wrote to St. Polycarp words that were also meant for the latter's flock in Smyrna: "Pay attention to the bishop so that God will pay attention to you. I give my life as a sacrifice (poor as it is) for those who are obedient to the bishop, the presbyters, and the deacons" (6:1). To the Trallians he wrote: "You cannot have a Church without these" (3:2).

St. Ignatius certainly did not fail to recognize that, in one of today's popular but imprecise formulations, "the people are the Church." His letters were intended to teach, admonish, exhort, and encourage none other than "the people". But he also understood that each one of "the people" entered the Church through a sacred rite of baptism, and thereafter belonged to a group in which the bishop, in certain respects and for certain purposes, resembled, on the one hand, the father of a family and, on the other, a monarch--more than some democratically elected leaders.

Related IgnatiusInsight.com Articles, Book Excerpts, and Interviews:

• Selections from Jesus, The Apostles, and the Early Church | Pope Benedict XVI

• A Short Guide to Ancient Heresies | Kenneth D. Whitehead

• Studying The Early Christians: The Introduction to We Look For the Kingdom | Carl J. Sommer

• The Everyday Lives of the Early Christians | An interview with Carl J. Sommer

• Church and State in Early Christianity | Hugo Rahner, S.J.

• His Story and the History of the Church | An Interview with Dr. Glenn W. Olsen

• Are We at The End or The Beginning? | Dr. Glenn Olson

• Who Is A Priest? | Fr. Benedict Ashley, O.P.

• The Church Is the Goal of All Things | Christoph Cardinal Schönborn

• St. Peter and the Primacy of Rome | Stephen K. Ray

• Church Authority and the Petrine Element | Hans Urs von Balthasar

Additional recommended reading

FOUR WITNESSES by Rod Bennett

One reviewer wrote:

This book is an awesome story! I finished this book in a short time, finding the story very compelling. It felt more like I was reading a novel than some dry history book. Rod Bennett does a wonderful job setting the historical stage for each character, revealing the conflicts and emotions that they must have faced. Bennett reveals what early Christians believed and how they endured despite persecution, leading to the growth of the Church. "The blood of martyrs is the seed of Christians" wrote Tertullian. Every Christian will find the story of these witnesses inspiring, and I highly recommend this book to anyone.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.