Ignatius of Antioch

Ignatius was the third Bishop of Antioch — after Peter and Evodius. Little is known of his life before his martyrdom. What remains are seven letters he wrote on the road from Antioch to Rome, where under Emperor Trajan he was thrown to wild beasts in the arena. They are the oldest extant Christian texts after the New Testament.

In these letters — addressed to the communities at Ephesus, Magnesia, Tralles, Rome, Philadelphia, Smyrna and to Bishop Polycarp — a Church emerges that, only one generation after the apostles, is already clearly structured. Ignatius speaks of the bishop as guarantor of unity, of presbyters as his council, of deacons as servants — a model that endures to this day.

In the Letter to the Smyrnaeans he writes the sentence that will one day name an entire Church:

„Where Christ Jesus is, there is the catholic Church."
— Smyrnaeans 8.2

Here the phrase katholiké ekklēsía appears for the first time in a Christian text — from a Bishop of Antioch. Antioch is therefore not only the city where the disciples were first called „Christians", but also the one from which the word „catholic" comes.

A second great theme runs through Ignatius' letters: the Eucharist as the centre of the Church. He calls it „the medicine of immortality, an antidote against death" — one of the earliest and strongest formulations of sacramental theology ever written.

His martyrdom on the way to Rome was something he welcomed. In the Letter to the Romans he urgently begs the community there not to intervene for his release: „Let me be food for the wild beasts, through whom I can attain to God." This longing for martyrdom is foreign to modern readers, but in the second century it was the theological test case: fidelity to the last.

Ignatius is venerated as a saint in all apostolic Churches — in the Orthodox tradition on 20 December, in the Western calendar on 17 October.