Introduction

The Author

Ignatius of Antioch signs himself with a second name, Theophoros — “God-bearer”—and the whole of his short surviving correspondence reads as a man determined to make that name true. He was the bishop of Antioch in Syria, the great city where, as the Book of Acts records, the disciples were first called Christians, and he governed that church in the earliest years of the second century, at the very edge of the apostolic age. The tradition the Church has long received names him the third bishop of the see, following Evodius and, before him, the Apostle Peter, and it counts him among the disciples of Saint John the Theologian—so that in Ignatius the living memory of the apostles passes directly into the generation that had to carry the faith without them.

Almost nothing of his life is preserved apart from its ending, and it is the ending that made him famous. Under the Emperor Trajan, in the years around 107 to 110, Ignatius was condemned for his confession of Christ and sent under military guard across Asia Minor and the sea to be killed by wild beasts in the amphitheater at Rome. (Most scholars keep to this traditional dating within Trajan’s reign; a few have argued for a somewhat later date, but the reign of Trajan remains the received setting.) The journey was slow, public, and strangely fruitful: as the prisoner and his guard of ten soldiers—“leopards,” he called them—moved from city to city, the local churches sent delegations to greet and comfort him, and he answered them with letters. Seven of these letters survive as authentic, and Ignatius is known to us almost entirely through them. He did not write to compose theology at leisure; he wrote in chains, hurried, aware that each stage brought him nearer to the beasts, and out of that pressure came some of the most intense Christian prose of the second century. He is commemorated by the Church on the twentieth of December, and his feast keeps alive not a scholar but a martyr who begged his friends in Rome not to rob him of his death.

Of the seven, four were written from Smyrna—to the Ephesians, the Magnesians, the Trallians, and the Romans—and three later from Troas, to the Philadelphians, the Smyrnaeans, and to Polycarp, the young bishop of Smyrna who had received him and who would one day be martyred in his turn. The letter presented here belongs to the first group, and it is best read as one voice among seven, each addressed to a particular community but all animated by the same few burning convictions.

The Work: Occasion and Purpose

Magnesia lay on the river Maeander in the province of Asia, a short distance southeast of Ephesus. When word reached the Magnesian Christians that the bishop of Antioch was being held at Smyrna on his way to Rome, they did what several of the Asian churches did: they sent a delegation to see him. Ignatius names them at the letter’s opening with evident affection—Damas, their bishop; the presbyters Bassus and Apollonius; and the deacon Zotion, whose submission to his bishop and presbytery Ignatius singles out for praise. The delegation embodied all three orders of the local ministry, and in receiving it Ignatius says he felt he had seen the whole community in the persons of its representatives. The letter is his reply, carried back to Magnesia in the delegates’ hands, and written—as he tells us at the close—from Smyrna, where the Ephesians were with him and where Polycarp had refreshed him.

One detail shapes everything that follows. Damas, the Magnesian bishop, was a young man, evidently young enough that his age might tempt some in the congregation to take him lightly. Ignatius had learned that the presbyters, to their credit, did not presume on their bishop’s youth but honored his God-given wisdom, and he writes to urge the whole church to do the same. This is not an abstract treatise on church order; it is a pastoral letter about a specific bishop and a specific temptation, and its warmth comes from that concreteness. Alongside the question of the young bishop runs a second concern: Ignatius has heard, or fears, that some are being drawn toward a Judaizing manner of life—keeping the practices of the old Law, observing the Sabbath in the old way—and he writes to call them instead to the newness of life in Christ. The two themes are not really separate. For Ignatius, to be gathered around the bishop and to live by the new covenant are two faces of one thing: belonging wholly and undividedly to Jesus Christ.

Argument and Structure

The letter runs to fourteen short chapters, and though Ignatius writes at speed his thought moves in a discernible arc, from the community’s inner order outward to its confession of Christ, and back again to a final plea for unity.

He begins (chapters 1–2) with thanksgiving for the Magnesians’ “orderly love” and moves at once to the matter of the young bishop. Honor Damas, he says, not according to his apparent youth but according to the wisdom of God in him. To make the point he assembles a remarkable catena of Scripture: the young are not to be despised, for the Spirit spoke through the boy Daniel who confounded the elders, through the child Samuel who rebuked aged Eli, through the young kings Solomon and Josiah, and through Timothy, whom Paul told to let no one despise his youth. The counter-examples are equally vivid—Dathan, Abiram, and Korah, who rose against Moses and Aaron and were swallowed or consumed; Uzziah struck with leprosy for seizing the priest’s office; Saul dishonored for not waiting on Samuel. To resist the bishop, Ignatius argues, is not to deceive a visible man but to try to deceive the invisible God who stands behind him.

From this he draws the principle that governs the middle of the letter (chapters 3–6): it is not enough to bear the name of Christian, or to have a bishop in name only while acting without him. Christ himself is “the true and first bishop,” and those who honor their earthly bishop honor God through him. Ignatius then gives the image for which this letter is best remembered—the pattern of the one community gathered in harmony, “with the bishop presiding in the place of God, the presbyters in the place of the council of the apostles, and the deacons entrusted with the ministry of Jesus Christ.” Just as the Lord does nothing apart from the Father, he says, so the members of the church should do nothing apart from the bishop; and he pictures the whole congregation running together to one temple, one altar, one Jesus Christ. Threaded through this is a soaring confession of Christ as the eternal Word, “begotten by the Father before the ages,” through whom alone true unity is possible.

The letter then turns (chapters 7–10) to its second great concern, the pull toward Judaizing. Do not be led astray, Ignatius writes, by strange teachings and “endless genealogies,” for the old things have passed away and all things have become new. Here he is careful and, in his own way, generous: the prophets themselves, he insists, “lived according to Jesus Christ,” were persecuted for his sake, and awaited him as their teacher and Lord—so that Moses and the prophets are not being cast aside but read as witnesses to Christ. If those raised on the ancient Scriptures came to the “newness of hope,” then the way forward is not to keep the Sabbath in idleness but to keep it spiritually, and above all to keep the Lord’s Day, “the day of resurrection, the queen and chief of all days,” on which Christian life itself dawned. To profess Christ with the tongue while holding to Judaism in the mind, he says, is incoherent; for it was not Christianity that believed into Judaism, but Judaism into Christianity, into which every believing nation has now been gathered. At the center of this section stands a compact rule of faith (chapter 10): Christ begotten of the Father before the ages, born of the Virgin Mary, who lived, healed, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, rose, ascended, and will come to judge—a creed-like summary that anchors the whole appeal in the concrete history of Jesus.

The closing chapters (11–14) return to the personal register. Ignatius protests that he writes not because he has heard the Magnesians are in danger, but out of love and caution, and he calls them to humility on the model of Abraham, Moses, and David, who counted themselves dust and ashes before God. Be firmly grounded, he urges, in the teaching of the Lord and the apostles; submit to the bishop and to one another as Christ to the Father. He asks their prayers for himself, that he may attain to God, and for his own bereaved church in Syria, of which he says—in a line of genuine humility from a man about to die for it—that he is not worthy to be called bishop. He signs off with greetings from Smyrna and Polycarp, and a last word that gathers the whole letter into three syllables: be strong in harmony.

Theological and Spiritual Significance

Three convictions give this brief letter its lasting weight, and all three flow from a single source: Ignatius’s certainty that the church is meant to be one, visibly and really, in Christ.

The first is his vision of unity under the bishop. The Letter to the Magnesians is one of the earliest texts to describe the threefold ministry of bishop, presbyters, and deacons, and to set it within a theological frame rather than a merely practical one. The bishop images God the Father, the presbyters the apostolic council, the deacons the service of Christ; and the point is not the dignity of the offices but the unity they secure. For Ignatius, a divided church is a contradiction in terms, and the bishop is the visible center around which division is overcome. Christians of every tradition have read these lines, and they figure prominently in later reflection on church order; the letter itself, written before the great confessional divisions, presents this ministry simply as the shape of the one apostolic church.

The second is the delicate handling of the Law and the new covenant. Ignatius’s warning against “Judaizing” belongs to a first-century family of questions—the same questions Paul wrestled with in Galatians and Colossians—about how Gentile and Jewish believers were to live together now that the Messiah had come, and specifically about whether the observances of the old Law still bound those in Christ. It is an intra-Christian debate about practice, argued from within a community that revered the Hebrew Scriptures, and Ignatius argues it not by rejecting the prophets but by claiming them: they lived “according to Christ” and awaited him. His counsel is to read the whole of Scripture as pointing to Jesus and to order one’s week around the resurrection—the Lord’s Day rather than the Sabbath. Read in its own setting, this is a pastor working out what the newness of Christ means for a mixed community, and its lasting contribution is that early, confident sense that in Christ something genuinely new has begun, without the old thereby being despised.

The third is Christ as the one Teacher. Behind both the call to unity and the call to newness stands Ignatius’s Christology, which is high, personal, and strikingly developed for its date. Christ is the eternal Word of the Father, “not spoken but essential”—not a sound that passes but the very substance of God’s self-utterance. He is the true bishop, the one altar, the one to whom the whole community runs; the prophets awaited him as their teacher, and to know him is to belong to God. It is because Christ is this—the pre-existent Word made flesh, crucified under Pilate and risen—that unity matters so absolutely and that the old shadows give way to the new day. Everything in the letter finally rests on the person of Jesus Christ, and it is no accident that its most memorable images are of running together to one altar and of the resurrection day that is queen of all days.

Under all of it lies the shadow of the amphitheater. Ignatius writes as a man in chains who expects to die, and his longing for the church’s unity is inseparable from his longing to attain to God through martyrdom. That is what keeps the letter from ever reading as mere administration. When he pleads with the Magnesians to be undivided, he pleads as one already offering himself, and the words carry the authority of a man who is about to prove them with his life.

The Text and This Edition

This edition presents a fresh English translation of the Letter to the Magnesians made directly from the Greek. The Ignatian corpus survives in more than one form—an authentic collection of seven letters, an expanded and interpolated later recension, and an abbreviated version—and the translation here follows the authentic middle recension, the seven-letter text that Eusebius already knew and that scholarship regards as Ignatius’s own. It renders that Greek into clear, contemporary English, rather than reprinting an older translation or setting the Greek and English side by side; the aim is a readable modern text that a newcomer can follow without an intermediary.

In keeping with the conventions of this series, the work is attributed to Saint Ignatius of Antioch (Theophoros), the author the Church has always received, and the modern translator is credited as translator, never as author. Chapter and scriptural citations are given in ordinary Arabic numerals. Where the Greek is difficult or a proper name has come down in doubtful form, the translation reads for sense and preserves the letter’s own compact, urgent voice rather than smoothing it into something more leisurely than Ignatius ever wrote.

Suggestions for Reading

The letter is short enough to read at a sitting, and it rewards being read that way, as a single voice rather than a set of topics. A newcomer might begin simply by listening for how often Ignatius returns to the word one — one bishop, one altar, one Jesus Christ, one harmony—and by noticing that his concern for church order and his warning about the old Law are two ways of saying the same thing: belong wholly to Christ. It also helps to read the Magnesians alongside its companions, especially the letters to the Ephesians and the Trallians written from the same city on the same days, since the seven letters together form one sustained testament. Above all it helps to remember the circumstances. This is the letter of a man walking to his death who spent his last free weeks not in fear but in writing to churches he would never see, asking them only to be united in the Christ he was about to meet. Read with that in view, its brevity becomes its power.