[one Lord one faith one baptism]

I think someone who learned the faith from the Apostle John would know if the Eucharist is the Body of Christ as Jesus declared and Christians have always believed or is it symbolic as was first taught in the 16th century.

please read post #23 to see what that man taught by John had to say on the subject.
he wrote this before he was put to death in Rome for his faith.

[Springfield Reformer]

Already familiar with the Ignatius argument.  Transubstantiation is a very specific claim that goes beyond identifying the bread and wine with Jesus' body and blood.  Any Zwinglian or old school Baptist could say the same thing Ignatius did, and if doing battle with the Docetists, who rejected the physicality of Christ altogether, might well have done so.  For a clarification, see how Tertullian, still fighting Docetism, uses very similar language, but offers the clarification that the way in which the bread and the body relate is as a figure:

Then, having taken the bread and given it to His disciples, He made it His own body, by saying, "This is my body," that is, the figure of my body. A figure, however, there could not have been, unless there were first a veritable body (Against Marcion, Bk 4).

quoted from an article here: http://www.justforcatholics.org/a181.htm

Ignatius is saying the same thing.  It is a quite typical mode of expression under the platonic mode of relating type to archetype.  There is a relationship, and it can be expressed very directly, "A is B," and still have the sense of what we moderns would think of as a symbolic reference.

All of which is why we cannot build soul-binding doctrine from anything but divine revelation.  Ignatius is not inspired.  Tertullian is not inspired.  Neither you nor I are inspired.  If you want to know the truth, you have to go to the source.

Peace,

SR