Introduction

The Author

Ignatius, who signed himself Theophoros — “God-bearer”—was bishop of Antioch in Syria at the turn of the second century, when the Church he served was scarcely two generations old and still ringed on every side by the living memory of the apostles. Antioch was the city where the disciples had first been called Christians, a great crossroads of the eastern empire, and by ancient reckoning Ignatius was its third bishop, following Evodius in a line that the tradition traces back to Peter himself. The Church has long received him as a hearer of the apostles, and in particular as a companion of Polycarp of Smyrna under the teaching of John. Of his life before his final journey almost nothing survives; he steps into history already an old man and a prisoner, and everything we know of his mind comes from the seven letters he wrote in the last weeks of it.

Those weeks were the ones that made him a martyr. Under the emperor Trajan—the arrest is traditionally dated around AD 107, though the sources allow a span of roughly a decade to AD 110 and beyond—Ignatius was condemned to die and dispatched from Antioch to Rome, to be thrown to the wild beasts in the amphitheater for the entertainment of the capital. The journey was long, overland across Asia Minor and then by sea, and he made it in the custody of a squad of soldiers whom he describes with rueful precision as “ten leopards,” men who grew only crueler the better they were treated. Yet the guard could not stop him from receiving the churches that streamed out to meet him along the road, nor from writing. It is one of the quiet ironies of his story that a sentence meant to silence a bishop instead produced, in his own hand, the earliest body of Christian correspondence we possess after the New Testament. He was killed in Rome, and Christians gathered his bones and carried them home to Antioch; the Church commemorates him East and West—on the twentieth of December in the Byzantine calendar and, since the reform of the Roman calendar, on the seventeenth of October—with a further Eastern feast on the twenty-ninth of January for the translation of his relics.

The Work: Occasion and Purpose

The seven authentic letters fall into two clusters. Four were written from Smyrna, where Ignatius broke his journey and was warmly received by Polycarp—to the Ephesians, the Magnesians, the Trallians, and the Romans; three more he sent later from Troas, to the Philadelphians, the Smyrnaeans, and to Polycarp himself. The Epistle to the Romans belongs to the Smyrna group, and the letter dates itself: he wrote it, he says, “on the ninth day before the Kalends of September”—the twenty-fourth of August—carrying it by the hand of Ephesian Christians who were traveling ahead of him toward Italy.

Every one of the other six letters is, in some measure, a work of church order. Ignatius writes them to strengthen communities he is passing through or has heard of, to press upon them the unity of the local church around its bishop, presbyters, and deacons, and to warn them against the two errors that most alarmed him: a Docetism that denied the reality of Christ’s flesh, and a Judaizing that would pull the young churches back under the Law. The letter to Rome does none of this. It contains no instruction about bishops, no polemic against heresy, no counsel for the ordering of a congregation. Ignatius is not writing to a church that needs correcting; he is writing to a church that stands in his way.

For the Roman Christians had it in their power to save him. A word in the right quarter, the intervention of influential believers in the capital, and the sentence might be commuted or quietly forgotten. Ignatius writes precisely—and urgently, and against every natural instinct of the people he is addressing—to beg them not to do it. “I fear your love,” he tells them, “lest it do me wrong.” The whole letter is a sustained plea against rescue. He asks them to be silent when silence will let him die, to pray for endurance rather than deliverance, and above all not to offer him “an untimely kindness.” This is the single, burning occasion of the letter, and it accounts for everything unusual in it.

The situation lends the letter a peculiar tension that the reader feels on every page. Ignatius must persuade Christians to do the one thing their love for a persecuted bishop would never dispose them to do—to stand back and let the sentence run. He therefore writes with a mixture of tenderness and dread: tenderness toward the church whose kindness he honors even as he refuses it, and dread that this very kindness will rob him of what he most desires. He is not indifferent to their affection; he calls it real, and calls himself its debtor. But he has weighed it against the prize before him and found that, this once, love must be asked to hold its hand. Nowhere else in early Christian literature is a community begged so earnestly not to act on a brother’s behalf.

Argument and Structure

The letter runs to ten short chapters, and for all the haste and heat of its composition it moves with a discernible logic. It opens with a salutation unusually long and unusually laden with honor, in which Ignatius heaps title upon title on the Roman church—worthy of God, of honor, of praise, of purity—and names it the church “presiding in love” in the region of the Romans. He then states his fear at once: their love could undo him, for it is easy for them to act and hard for him, if they spare him, to reach God (chapters 1–2). He asks them not to “please men” on his behalf but to please God by holding their peace, so that he may not merely be called a Christian but be found one, tested and proven when the visible world can no longer see him (chapters 3).

At the heart of the letter comes its most famous passage. Ignatius has written to all the churches, he says, charging them that he dies willingly for God—“let me be food for the wild beasts, through whom I can reach God. I am God’s wheat, and I am ground by the teeth of wild beasts, so that I may be found pure bread of Christ” (chapter 4). He would even coax the beasts to make quick work of him, and if they hang back, he says, he will force them. The catalogue of what he is ready to endure is unflinching: “Fire and cross, packs of wild beasts, cuttings and manglings, scatterings of bones, hackings of limbs, crushings of my whole body”—let all of it come, he says, “only so that I may attain to Jesus Christ” (chapter 5). Against the whole visible world he sets a single invisible good: “It is better for me to die for Christ Jesus than to reign over the ends of the earth” (chapter 6).

From there the letter turns inward and quieter. Ignatius describes the death of his old desires: “My love has been crucified, and there is no fire in me that loves matter.” What remains is a thirst answered only by Christ—the “living water” that murmurs within him, “Come to the Father”; the bread of God that is the flesh of Christ, and the drink that is his blood, “incorruptible love and eternal life” (chapter 7). He renews his plea in the barest terms—“in a few lines I beg you: do not refuse me”—and gives it a scriptural voice: “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, since Christ lives in me” (chapter 8). He commends to their prayers the church he has left behind in Syria, “which has the Lord as its shepherd in my place” (chapter 9), and closes with greetings, the note of his companions, and the date, ending on a single charge that gathers up the whole: “Be strong to the end in the endurance of Jesus Christ” (chapter 10).

Theological and Spiritual Significance

The theological weight of this letter lies in the thing that also makes it hardest for a modern reader—Ignatius’s ardent, unembarrassed longing to die. It is essential to read that longing in his own register and not in ours. He does not despise the created world as evil, nor does he seek death as an escape from suffering; his letters elsewhere insist, against the Docetists, that Christ truly took flesh, truly suffered, truly rose. What he seeks is not annihilation but union. Martyrdom, for Ignatius, is the point at which discipleship becomes real—where a man ceases merely to be named a Christian and is found to be one. “Now I am beginning to be a disciple,” he writes, as though the whole life of a bishop were only a novitiate for this. To be ground by the beasts is not, in his mind, to be destroyed but to be transformed: wheat into bread, and a man into an offering fit to reach God.

That transformation is worked out in a vocabulary that is unmistakably eucharistic. Ignatius, who in his other letters calls the Eucharist the “medicine of immortality,” here makes his own body the matter of a sacrifice—poured out “as a libation to God while the altar is still ready,” ground into “pure bread.” His hunger for the “bread of God, the bread of heaven, the bread of life, which is the flesh of Jesus Christ,” and his thirst for the blood that is “incorruptible love and eternal life,” fold his death into the pattern of the Supper and of the Cross it re-presents. This is why he can speak of imitation as the summit of his desire: “Permit me to be an imitator of the passion of my God.” Martyrdom is not a feat of heroism performed for Christ; it is a being-conformed to Christ, a suffering-with that draws its whole meaning from the suffering and rising of the One who “died for us and rose again.”

It is worth naming plainly what this letter is not, because the absence is itself instructive. In the six sibling letters Ignatius returns again and again to the same urgent themes—do nothing without the bishop; guard the unity of the one Eucharist; flee those who deny that Christ came in the flesh or who would bind the Church again to the Law. Here, on the threshold of Rome, all of that falls away. There is no threefold ministry to defend, no heresy to name, no congregation to set in order. The controversialist and the organizer are silent, and what remains is a man alone with his God and his death. The very shape of the letter—its refusal of the topics that define the rest of his corpus—is a kind of statement: at the end, the questions that consume a bishop’s working life give way to the one question of whether he will be found faithful.

There is, finally, a striking note of self-emptying in how Ignatius holds his own office. He is a bishop writing his last letter, and he lays the bishop’s authority down. He gives the Romans no commands—“I am not giving you orders like Peter and Paul; they were apostles, but I am the least”—and he entrusts the flock he is leaving not to a successor but to God directly: the church in Syria “has the Lord as its shepherd in my place,” the Good Shepherd who alone will oversee it. The man who insists so fiercely everywhere else on the bishop as the center of the church’s unity here quietly steps aside, content to be “the least” and an “untimely birth,” asking only to be found, at the last, a genuine disciple.

Reception and Influence

Few short texts have shaped the Christian imagination of martyrdom as decisively as this one. Ignatius stands at the head of a tradition—running through Polycarp, whose own martyrdom was recorded within a generation, and on through the age of the persecutions—in which the martyr’s death is understood not as tragic loss but as the fullest imitation of Christ and the truest form of witness. His images proved unforgettable: the wheat of God ground into pure bread, love (eros) crucified, the longing to “attain to God.” Polycarp of Smyrna, gathering the letters together not long after Ignatius passed through his city, already treated them as treasured possessions and mentioned each by name—an early and weighty testimony to their authenticity—and later Fathers, East and West, read Ignatius as a bishop-martyr of the apostolic age whose words carried the authority of one who had known the apostles’ world.

The letter also contains a phrase that has drawn centuries of attention beyond its martyrological heart. In the salutation Ignatius describes the Roman church as “presiding in love.” The words have been read across the Christian traditions in more than one way—as an early witness to a special primacy of the Roman see, as an acknowledgment of Rome’s honor and moral preeminence among the churches without later juridical claims, and as simply the warm, elevated courtesy of a man writing to the church of the imperial capital and the burial-place of Peter and Paul. This edition reports the phrase and its history without adjudicating the confessional debate it has fed; the letter itself neither names the bishop of Rome nor develops a theory of authority, and readers of every communion have long found in it something worth pondering.

The Text and This Edition

Ignatius’s genuine correspondence survives in more than one form, and the seven letters presented in their original, uninterpolated shape—the so-called middle recension—are the ones scholars across the traditions accept as authentically his; the Epistle to the Romans is textually distinctive in that it was also transmitted somewhat apart from the others, carried along within the ancient accounts of Ignatius’s martyrdom. This edition offers a fresh English translation made directly from the Greek text of that letter. It is not a reprint of an older published version, and it is not a bilingual or parallel edition; it is a new rendering into clear, readable modern English, prepared from the Greek and aiming to carry Ignatius’s urgency and compression into a form a present-day reader can follow without a scholarly apparatus.

In keeping with the conventions of this series, the work is attributed as the Church has always received it—to Saint Ignatius of Antioch, called Theophoros, the God-bearer—and any translator’s hand is credited only as a translator’s, never as an author’s. Chapter and verse citations follow a plain modern style, and the text is presented without footnotes so that the letter may be read as it was written: swiftly, at a single sitting, as the voice of a man very near the end of his road. Ignatius belongs to the whole Church of the undivided first centuries; his letter is a shared inheritance of all who confess Christ, and it is offered here in that spirit.

Suggestions for Reading

This is a short letter, and it repays being read at one stretch and aloud. Newcomers should not be alarmed by its intensity or read Ignatius’s longing for death as morbidity; it is best approached as the last testament of a man wholly possessed by love for Christ, in whom he sees not the end of life but its beginning. Read chapter 4 slowly—the wheat and the pure bread—and then chapter 7, where the fire of every lesser desire has gone out and only one remains. Those who wish to see the fuller Ignatius, the pastor and church-orderer, will find him in the sibling letters to the Ephesians, Magnesians, Trallians, Philadelphians, Smyrnaeans, and Polycarp; but the letter to Rome is the one place where he sets all of that down and simply asks to be allowed to go home.