Introduction

The Author

St Ignatius of Antioch stands among the very first Christian writers whose voice we can still hear plainly. He was bishop of Antioch in Syria—by the reckoning of the early Church its third, after the Apostle Peter and Evodius—and he wrote the letter that follows as a prisoner in chains, on the last road of his life. Tradition, reaching back to Antioch itself, remembers him as a disciple of the Apostle John, a companion of that other John’s disciple, Polycarp of Smyrna, and a shepherd who had governed his church for the better part of a generation. He carried a second name, Theophoros, “the God-bearer,” and he understood it to mean what it says: that a Christian is one in whom God dwells and whom God carries.

His story, as the Church has told it, is quickly recounted. In the reign of the emperor Trajan, in the early years of the second century, Ignatius was condemned for the faith and sentenced to die by wild beasts in the amphitheatre at Rome. He was not martyred at home in Antioch but was sent the long way across Asia Minor under military escort—a squad of soldiers he wryly called “ten leopards, who only grow worse when kindly treated.” The journey became, improbably, the occasion of the letters by which he is still known. As the guard moved westward, Christian communities sent delegations to meet him; at Smyrna, where Polycarp was bishop, envoys came from Ephesus, Magnesia, and Tralles to embrace the condemned bishop and be strengthened by him. Out of these encounters, and a later halt at Troas, came seven short letters, dictated in haste and under strain: four written from Smyrna (to the Ephesians, Magnesians, Trallians, and Romans) and three from Troas (to the Philadelphians, the Smyrnaeans, and to Polycarp himself). They are the earliest sustained body of Christian correspondence we possess after the apostolic writings, and their author expected to be dead within weeks of setting them down. He was: he reached Rome and was killed in the arena, most likely between about AD 107 and 110, though the ancient evidence permits only an approximate date and some modern scholars have argued for a somewhat later one. The Church of the East commemorates him on 20 December; in the West he is honoured on 17 October (and on 1 February in the older Roman calendar).

A word on the letters as they have come down to us. They survive in three differing forms—a short Syriac abridgement of three letters, the seven “middle recension” letters, and a later, padded “long recension” enlarged by a fourth-century hand—and the scholarly consensus, settled after long debate, is that the middle recension of seven letters preserves Ignatius’s own words; that is the text translated here.

The Work: Occasion & Purpose

The Letter to the Ephesians is the longest and, in many ways, the most expansive of the seven—the one in which Ignatius, writing to a great and famous church, lets his themes unfold most fully. Its immediate occasion is gratitude. The Christians of Ephesus had done exactly what he most valued: they had sent a delegation to him at Smyrna, at real cost and trouble, to comfort a prisoner on his way to death. That delegation was led by their own bishop, Onesimus, “a man of inexpressible love,” and it included the deacon Burrhus, whom Ignatius asks to keep by his side, along with Crocus, Euplus, and Fronto, in whom he says he has seen the whole community’s love made visible. Onesimus bears the same name as the runaway slave of Paul’s Letter to Philemon, and some readers, ancient and modern, have wondered whether the two are one man—though this cannot be established and Ignatius himself says nothing of it. The letter is, first of all, a thank-you: for the men, for the welcome, for the refreshment they brought him.

But Ignatius never writes only to thank. He seizes the occasion to press upon the Ephesians the thing he cared about most as his own end approached—the unity of the church around its bishop and clergy, and its guarding against teachers who would divide or deceive it. He had learned, he says, that certain people had passed through the region “with evil teaching,” and though the Ephesians had rightly stopped their ears against it, he wants to fortify them. So the letter moves between warm affection and urgent exhortation: love your bishop; be knit to your presbytery; gather often for the Eucharist; shun the false teachers as you would rabid dogs; and hold fast, in these “last days,” to faith and love in Jesus Christ. Ephesus itself gives the appeal its weight. This was Paul’s city, where the apostle had labored for years, and Ignatius writes to the Ephesians as fellow initiates and “companions on the road” of the great apostle whose footsteps he hopes to follow to Rome and to martyrdom. He twice defers his deepest matter—the divine economy, the “new man” Jesus Christ—to a promised second letter he did not live to write, which lends the whole a quality of a message begun in the shadow of the arena and left, at the last, in God’s hands.

Argument & Structure

The letter has no formal outline; it moves by association, as speech does, circling back to a few great themes. But a clear shape can be traced through its twenty-one short chapters.

It opens (salutation through chapter 3) with thanksgiving and the naming of the delegation. Ignatius greets the Ephesians as a church “blessed in the greatness of God the Father’s fullness,” praises them for hurrying to see him, and commends their bishop Onesimus and the companions who came with him. Already the keynote is sounded: he is a fellow-learner, not a commander—“I am not giving you orders as though I were someone important”—a man only beginning to be a disciple.

From here the letter turns to its central concern, unity in the one bishop and presbytery (chapters 4–6). Ignatius reaches for music: the presbyters are attuned to the bishop “as strings to a lyre,” and the whole community should become a choir that, taking God’s own tone, sings with one voice through Jesus Christ to the Father. To be within this harmony is to be within the Church, and to be within the Church is to be “within the altar,” where the bread of God is found; whoever cuts himself off from the common assembly has already, by his separation, condemned himself. It is here, too, that Ignatius sets down the arresting image that later readers would return to again and again: the bishop who governs by silence is the more to be revered, for we should regard him “as we would the Lord himself.”

The middle chapters (7–10) sharpen into warning against false teachers and a confession of who Christ is. Some carry the Name about with wicked guile; shun them. Against their teaching Ignatius sets one of the most compact christological statements in early Christian literature—the “one physician, both fleshly and spiritual, begotten and unbegotten, God in man, true life in death, both from Mary and from God.” The Ephesians themselves he pictures as stones of the Father’s temple, hoisted into place by “the crane of Jesus Christ, which is the cross,” with the Holy Spirit for a rope—and then, as “God-bearers and temple-bearers, Christ-bearers,” charged to meet the anger and blasphemy of outsiders with gentleness, humility, and prayer, so that some may yet be won.

A more urgent, eschatological note enters in chapters 11–14: these are the last days; let us fear God’s patience lest it turn to judgement; let us be found in Christ for true life. Ignatius binds the letter’s ethics to two words—“faith is the beginning, and love is the end,” and the two together are God—and insists that profession is proved only by endurance to the end, for “the tree is known by its fruit.”

The letter then rises to its two summits. In chapter 15 comes the meditation on silence: “It is better to be silent and to be real than to talk and not be real”; there is one Teacher, “who spoke and it came to be,” and yet “even the things He has done in silence are worthy of the Father.” The one who truly possesses the word of Jesus can hear even his silence. This flowers, after a further warning against those who corrupt the faith (chapters 16–17), into the great christological passage of chapters 18–19: our God Jesus Christ, carried in Mary’s womb “according to God’s economy,” born and baptized to purify the water by his passion; and the “three mysteries of proclamation”—Mary’s virginity, her child-bearing, and the Lord’s death—“which were accomplished in the silence of God” and then broke upon the world in the light of a new star, before which the old magic and every bond of evil dissolved.

The close (chapters 20–21) gathers the letter’s threads. Ignatius promises the second treatise he hopes to write, and grounds his whole appeal in the assembly: that they gather in one faith, “obeying the bishop and the presbytery with undivided mind, breaking one bread, which is the medicine of immortality, the antidote that we should not die but live in Jesus Christ forever.” He signs off as their “ransom,” asks their prayers for the church in Syria he has left behind, and commends himself to their remembrance, “as Jesus Christ also remembers you.”

Theological & Spiritual Significance

Small as it is, this letter is one of the load-bearing texts of early Christianity, and three of its contributions have never ceased to be quoted.

The first is its Eucharistic realism. When Ignatius calls the one broken bread “the medicine of immortality, the antidote that we should not die but live in Jesus Christ forever,” he gives the Church a phrase it would never forget. The Eucharist, for him, is not a bare memorial but the very means by which mortal human beings are joined to the deathless life of the risen Christ—food that heals what death has done. Set beside his image of the altar as the place where “the bread of God” is found, and his insistence that the community’s gathering overthrows “the powers of Satan,” the letter witnesses to a sacramental understanding already firmly in place within a generation of the apostles.

The second is its doctrine of the Church around the bishop. Ignatius is the earliest writer to make the single bishop, surrounded by his presbytery and served by deacons, the visible centre of the local church’s unity. He does not argue the point so much as sing it—the lyre, the choir, the one voice—and he roots the whole order in the divine life it images: the community is joined to its bishop as the Church is joined to Christ and as Christ is joined to the Father. This is strong episcopal theology, stated with a warmth that keeps it from mere hierarchy; it is offered here as the shared inheritance of the whole Christian world before its later divisions, and it has been read with reverence across the traditions that trace their life to this era.

The third is the letter’s distinctive theology of silence. Ignatius pairs the bishop who leads by silence with the God who works in silence, and both with the Word who is himself the Father’s speech: the very mysteries of salvation—the Virgin, the Nativity, the Cross—were “accomplished in the silence of God” before they were proclaimed to the ages. To hear the word of Jesus rightly is to be able to hear his silence too. Few passages in the Fathers have proved so fertile for later contemplative and liturgical reflection, and none states so early the paradox that the God who speaks the world into being is also the God who saves in hiddenness.

Underlying all three is the letter’s high Christology. Against the teachers who would make Christ less than fully human or less than truly God, Ignatius answers with the unqualified confession of “our God, Jesus Christ”—one who is at once “from Mary and from God,” passible and impassible, “true life in death.” Here, decades before the great creeds, the raw material of later orthodoxy is already present, held not as a formula but as the living faith for which its author was about to die.

Around these doctrines runs a spirituality of martyrdom that gives the whole letter its temperature. Ignatius writes as a man walking toward the beasts, and he does not flinch from it; the imitation of Christ, for him, reaches its fullness in the sharing of his sufferings. Yet the Letter to the Ephesians is notably outward-turned for a prisoner’s farewell: he asks the Ephesians to answer their persecutors’ anger with gentleness and their blasphemy with prayer, “not striving to imitate them in return,” so that even opponents might “be disciples through your works.” The confessor’s readiness to die and the pastor’s patience toward those outside are, in his mind, one disposition—the mark of a people who “love nothing according to human life except God alone.”

Reception & Influence

The letters were treasured almost from the moment they were written. Polycarp of Smyrna, who had known Ignatius, gathered them and sent them on, referring to them by name in his own letter to the Philippians—a witness to their circulation within years of the martyrdom. Irenaeus quoted Ignatius before the second century was out; Eusebius, in the fourth, listed the seven and fixed the memory of his death under Trajan. Across the centuries the Letter to the Ephesians in particular supplied the Church with some of its most durable phrases—the Eucharist as the “medicine of immortality,” the mysteries “accomplished in the silence of God,” the bishop revered in his silence—which recur in liturgical, monastic, and theological writing East and West. Honoured as a saint and martyr throughout the Christian world, Ignatius has remained, for eighteen centuries, one of the primary bridges between the apostolic age and the Church that came after it.

The Text & This Edition

This edition presents a fresh modern English translation of the Letter to the Ephesians, rendered directly from the Greek of the middle recension—the seven-letter text recognized as Ignatius’s own—as transmitted in the public-domain Greek edition on which this corpus draws. It is a new translation, not a reprint of any earlier English version, and it is an English-only reading text: the Greek is the source from which it was made, not a facing column set against it.

The translation follows the house conventions used throughout this series. Ignatius is named by the traditional attribution the Church has always given him—St Ignatius of Antioch, called Theophoros, disciple of the Apostle John, bishop of Antioch, and martyr—and the translators are credited as translators, never as authors. Chapter and section divisions use Ignatius’s own numbering, and citations of Scripture and of the letter’s internal divisions are given in the plain Arabic style (Ephesians 20.2, Romans 4.1) rather than in Roman numerals. The English has been rendered in clear contemporary prose that keeps faith with the compressed, urgent character of the original—for Ignatius wrote quickly, and his Greek can be dense and elliptical. Where the Greek admits more than one defensible rendering, or where the transmitted text is uncertain, the translation makes a considered choice; the aim throughout has been a version that a reader today can follow without a commentary at the elbow, while preserving the theological precision on which so much of the letter’s meaning turns.

The Letter to the Ephesians is one of the seven Ignatian letters gathered in this corpus—with those to the Magnesians, Trallians, Romans, Philadelphians, and Smyrnaeans, and the personal letter to Polycarp—each presented in the same fresh modern rendering.