IGNATIUS ('Iyvarcos), bishop of Antioch, a father of the Church. Our only trustworthy information is derived from the letters which he wrote to various churches on his last journey from Antioch to Rome, and from the short epistle of Polycarp to the Philippians. For the complicated controversy over the three recensions of the letters of Ignatius the reader is referred to the authorities quoted in the bibliography. The general con sensus of opinion appears to be that the letters contained in the Medicean ms. at Florence, addressed to the Ephesians, Mag nesians, Trallians, Romans, Philadelphians, Smyrnaeans and to Polycarp are genuine, and that they were written in the reign of Trajan. Harnack placed them in the latter years of Trajan or possibly I 17–I 2 5. Most scholars date them a few years earlier (IIo–I17).
The letters of Ignatius unfortunately, unlike the Epistles of St. Paul, contain scant autobiographical material. We are told ab solutely nothing about the history of his career. The fact that like St. Paul he describes himself as an EKTpcoya (Rom. 9), and that he speaks of himself as "the last of the Antiochene Chris tians" (Trail. 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." 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.
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 omni potence of episcopacy, and the hatred of heresy and schism." 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, wrench ing of bones, hacking of limbs, crushings of my whole body ; only be it mine to attain unto Jesus Christ (Rom. • Ignatius constantly contends for the recognition of the author ity 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. Trail. 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 (Trail. 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 an other. His particular interest is not so much in the form of ministry as in the unity of the church. Centrifugal forces were at work.
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 (I) 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. 4o).
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" (Trail. 9). "I know that He was in the flesh even after the resurrection, and when He came to Peter and his com pany, 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. io).
As far as Christology is concerned, there are two points to be noted : Ignatius is the earliest writer outside the New Testa ment to describe Christ under the categories of current philos ophy; cf. the famous passage in Eph. 7. "There is one only physician, of flesh and of spirit (aapKCKds alK lrvevµaTLKOS), generate and ingenerate (y€vvs rds Kat ayipPnroS), God in man, true life in death, son of Mary and son of God, first passible and then impassible" (irp(.JTov iraOnrds Kai /t raarls) . 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 mys teries to be cried aloud, the which were wrought in the silence of God" (Eph. 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 Z,cvgTripiov (Trail. 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 (Smyrn. 6) . Other points that call for special notice are : 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" (Trail. 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) .