V. The Date and Genuineness of the Vossian Epistles.—We are left therefore with the seven Epistles. Are they the genuine work of Ignatius, and, if so, at what date were they written? The main objections are as follows: (1) The conveyance of a condemned prisoner to Rome to be put to death in the amphitheatre is unlikely on historical grounds, and the route taken is improbable for geographical reasons. This objection has very little solid basis. (2) The heresies against which Ignatius contends imply the rise of the later Gnostic and Docetic sects. It is quite certain, however, that Docetism was in existence in the 1st century (cf. 1 John), while many of the principles of Gnosticism were in vogue long before the great Gnostic sects arose (cf. the Pastoral Epistles). There is nothing in Ignatius which implies a knowledge of the teaching of Basilides or Valentinus. In fact, as Harnack says: “No Christian writer after 140 could have described the false teachers in the way that Ignatius does.” (3) The ecclesiastical system of Ignatius is too developed to have arisen as early as the time of Trajan. At first sight this objection seems to be almost fatal. But we have to remember that the bishops of Ignatius are not bishops in the modern sense of the word at all, but simply pastors of churches. They are not mentioned at all in two Epistles, viz. Romans and Philippians, which seems to imply that this form of government was not universal. It is only when we read modern ecclesiastical ideas into Ignatius that the objection has much weight. To sum up, as Uhlhorn says: “The collective mass of internal evidence against the genuineness of the letters ... is insufficient to counterbalance the testimony of the Epistle of Polycarp in their favour. He who would prove the Epistles of Ignatius to be spurious must begin by proving the Epistle of Polycarp to be spurious, and such an undertaking is not likely to succeed.” This being so, there is no reason for rejecting the opinion of Eusebius that the Epistles were written in the reign of Trajan. Harnack, who formerly dated them about 140, now says that they were written in the latter years of Trajan, or possibly a little later (117-125). The majority of scholars place them a few years earlier (110-117).[5]

The letters of Ignatius unfortunately, unlike the Epistles of St Paul, contain scant autobiographical material. We are told absolutely nothing about the history of his career. The fact that like St Paul he describes himself as an ἔκτρωμα (Rom. 9), and that he speaks of himself as “the last of the Antiochene Christians” (Trall. 13; Smyrn. xi.), seems to suggest that he had been converted from paganism somewhat late in life and that the process of conversion had been abrupt and violent. He bore the surname of Theophorus, i.e. “God-clad” or “bearing God.” Later tradition regarded the word as a passive form (“God-borne”) and explained it by the romantic theory that Ignatius was the child whom Christ took in his arms (Mark ix. 36-37). The date at which he became bishop of Antioch cannot be determined. At the time when the Epistles were written he had just been sentenced to death, and was being sent in charge of a band of soldiers to Rome to fight the beasts in the amphitheatre. The fact that he was condemned to the amphitheatre proves that he could not have been a Roman citizen. We lose sight of him at Troas, but the presumption is that he was martyred at Rome, though we have no early evidence of this.

But if the Epistles tell us little of the life of Ignatius, they give us an excellent picture of the man himself, and are a mirror in which we see reflected certain ideals of the life and thought of the day. Ignatius, as Schaff says, “is the incarnation of three closely connected ideas: the glory of martyrdom, the omnipotence of episcopacy, and the hatred of heresy and schism.”

1. Zeal for martyrdom in later days became a disease in the Church, but in the case of Ignatius it is the mark of a hero. The heroic note runs through all the Epistles; thus he says:

“I bid all men know that of my own free will I die for God, unless ye should hinder me.... Let me be given to the wild beasts, for through them I can attain unto God. I am God’s wheat, and I am ground by the wild beasts that I may be found the pure bread of Christ. Entice the wild beasts that they may become my sepulchre...; come fire and cross and grapplings with wild beasts, wrenching of bones, hacking of limbs, crushings of my whole body; only be it mine to attain unto Jesus Christ” (Rom. 4-5).

2. Ignatius constantly contends for the recognition of the authority of the ministers of the church. “Do nothing,” he writes to the Magnesians, “without the bishop and the presbyters.” The “three orders” are essential to the church, without them no church is worthy of the name (cf. Trall. 3). “It is not lawful apart from the bishop either to baptize or to hold a love-feast” (Smyrn. 8). Respect is due to the bishop as to God, to the presbyters as the council of God and the college of apostles, to the deacons as to Jesus Christ (Trall. 3). These terms must not, of course, be taken in their developed modern sense. The “bishop” of Ignatius seems to represent the modern pastor of a church. As Zahn has shown, Ignatius is not striving to introduce a special form of ministry, nor is he endeavouring to substitute one form for another. His particular interest is not so much in the form of ministry as in the unity of the church. It is this that is his chief concern. Centrifugal forces were at work. Differences of theological opinion were arising. Churches had a tendency to split up into sections. The age of the apostles had passed away and their successors did not inherit their authority. The unity of the churches was in danger. Ignatius was resisting this fatal tendency which threatened ruin to the faith. The only remedy for it in those days was to exalt the authority of the ministry and make it the centre of church life. It should be noted that (1) there is no trace of the later doctrine of apostolical succession; (2) the ministry is never sacerdotal in the letters of Ignatius. As Lightfoot puts it: “The ecclesiastical order was enforced by him (Ignatius) almost solely as a security for doctrinal purity. The threefold ministry was the husk, the shell, which protected the precious kernel of the truth” (i. 40).

3. Ignatius fights most vehemently against the current forms of heresy. The chief danger to the church came from the Docetists who denied the reality of the humanity of Christ and ascribed to him a phantom body. Hence we find Ignatius laying the utmost stress on the fact that Christ “was truly born and ate and drank, was truly persecuted under Pontius Pilate ... was truly raised from the dead” (Trall. 9). “I know that He was in the flesh even after the resurrection, and when He came to Peter and his company, He said to them, ‘Lay hold and handle me, and see that I am not an incorporeal spirit’” (Smyrn. 3). Equally emphatic is Ignatius’s protest against a return to Judaism. “It is monstrous to talk of Jesus Christ and to practise Judaism, for Christianity did not believe in Judaism but Judaism in Christianity” (Magn. 10).

Reference must also be made to a few of the more characteristic points in the theology of Ignatius. As far as Christology is concerned, besides the insistence on the reality of the humanity of Christ already mentioned, there are two other points which call for notice. (1) Ignatius is the earliest writer outside the New Testament to describe Christ under the categories of current philosophy; cf. the famous passage in Eph. 7, “There is one only physician, of flesh and of spirit (σαρκικὸς καὶ πνευματικός), generate and ingenerate (γεννητὸς καὶ ἀγέννητος), God in man, true life in death, son of Mary and son of God, first passible and then impassible” (πρῶτον παθητὸς καὶ ἀπαθής). (2) Ignatius is also the first writer outside the New Testament to mention the Virgin Birth, upon which he lays the utmost stress. “Hidden from the prince of this world were the virginity of Mary and her child-bearing and likewise also the death of the Lord, three mysteries to be cried aloud, the which were wrought in the silence of God” (Eph. 19). Here, it will be observed, we have the nucleus of the later doctrine of the deception of Satan. In regard to the Eucharist also later ideas occur in Ignatius. It is termed a μυστήριον (Trall. 2), and the influence of the Greek mysteries is seen in such language as that used in Eph. 20, where Ignatius describes the Eucharistic bread as “the medicine of immortality and the antidote against death.” When Ignatius says too that “the heretics abstain from Eucharist because they do not allow that the Eucharist is the flesh of Christ,” the words seem to imply that materialistic ideas were beginning to find an entrance into the church (Smyr. 6). Other points that call for special notice are: (1) Ignatius’s rather extravagant angelology. In one place for instance he speaks of himself as being able to comprehend heavenly things and “the arrays of angels and the musterings of principalities” (Trall. 5). (2) His view of the Old Testament. In one important passage Ignatius emphatically states his belief in the supremacy of Christ even over “the archives” of the faith, i.e. the Old Testament: “As for me, my archives—my inviolable archives—are Jesus Christ, His cross, His death, His resurrection and faith through Him” (Philadel. 8).

Authorities.—T. Zahn, Ignatius von Antiochien (Gotha, 1873); J. B. Lightfoot, Apostolic Fathers, part ii. (London, 2nd ed., 1889); F. X. Funk, Die Echtheit der ignat. Briefe (Tübingen, 1892); A. Harnack, Chronologie der altchristlichen Litteratur (Leipzig, 1897). There is a good bibliography in G. Krüger, Early Christian Literature (Eng. trans., 1897, pp. 28-29). See also [Apostolic Fathers].

(H. T. A.)