Introduction

The Author

Ignatius of Antioch, who signed himself Theophoros—“God-bearer”—is one of the earliest voices of the Church after the apostles, and among the most vivid. He was bishop of Antioch in Syria, the great city where the disciples were first called Christians, and by the tradition the Church has always held he stood third in that see, following Evodius, with an early witness naming the apostle Peter himself as the founder of the line. He belonged to the generation that had touched the apostolic age directly: an old and cherished tradition, which the sources judge fully consistent with his letters, counts both Ignatius and his friend Polycarp among the hearers of St. John the Evangelist. Whatever the precise threads of that discipleship, Ignatius writes as a man for whom the faith is not an inheritance received at second hand but a fire he is about to seal with his blood.

That is the circumstance in which the whole of his surviving work was composed. Under the emperor Trajan, around the year 107—some reckonings place the martyrdom a little later, within the decade following—Ignatius was condemned and sent under military guard from Antioch to Rome to be given to the beasts in the amphitheater. The journey ran overland across Asia Minor and then by sea, and along the way, in the brief pauses his guards allowed, the condemned bishop wrote. Seven letters survive from those weeks and are received as authentically his: four sent from Smyrna to the churches of Ephesus, Magnesia, Tralles, and Rome, and three sent a little later from Troas—to the Philadelphians, to the Smyrnaeans, and the one before us here, to Polycarp. (A longer, interpolated body of letters and a shorter Syriac abridgment also circulated in antiquity; the seven-letter middle recension, whose Greek is preserved chiefly in a manuscript at Florence, is the one modern scholarship receives as genuine.) Ignatius is honored as a saint and martyr across the ancient Christian world, East and West alike, and his letters are read as a pre-schism inheritance belonging to all who confess the faith he died for.

The Work: Occasion & Purpose

Six of the seven letters are addressed to churches. This one is addressed to a man. Ignatius writes not to the congregation of Smyrna as a body but to Polycarp personally—the bishop who had received him, sheltered him, and seen him on his way. That single fact colors everything about the letter’s tone and makes it unlike its companions in the corpus.

The two men were already bound by more than office. Polycarp of Smyrna was, like Ignatius, remembered as a disciple of the apostle John, and the letter breathes an intimacy that only such shared standing explains. He was, however, the younger man and more recently set over his church, and Ignatius writes to him with the warmth of an elder in the faith who has found in this younger bishop a spirit he trusts. There is gratitude in it—Ignatius thanks God that he had been permitted to see Polycarp’s face—and there is the poignancy of a farewell, for the writer knows he goes to die and asks the prayers of the man he is counseling.

The immediate occasion was the enforced brevity of the road. Ignatius had reached Troas and learned, to his relief, that the persecution in his own Antioch had subsided; from there he was about to sail suddenly for Neapolis and had no time to write to all the churches he wished to reach. So he turns to Polycarp both as a friend to be exhorted and as an agent to be entrusted with unfinished business: Polycarp is asked to write in Ignatius’s stead to the churches that lie ahead and to convene his people to choose a messenger who can carry news back to the now-peaceful church in Syria. The letter is thus at once a personal charge to a fellow bishop and a set of practical instructions passed from a dying man to one he is confident will complete his work.

Argument & Structure

The letter is short—eight brief chapters—and its movement is easy to follow, running from the interior life of the pastor outward to the concrete governance of his flock and, finally, to the errand Ignatius needs carried out.

It opens with the pastor himself. Ignatius praises the settled mind he has found in Polycarp, “established as upon an immovable rock,” and urges him to press forward in his race and to exhort everyone toward salvation. The counsel of the first chapter is almost entirely about bearing: bear with everyone as the Lord bears with you; devote yourself to unceasing prayer; stay watchful; carry each person’s weakness “like a perfect athlete.” Already the two images that will dominate the letter appear—the burden-bearing shepherd and the trained competitor.

The second and third chapters turn to discernment. A good pastor cannot treat every soul alike: to love only the agreeable disciples earns no credit, and “not every wound is healed by the same poultice.” Ignatius, remembered as a physician of souls, reaches for a doctor’s language of compresses and cures, then for the counsel of the Gospel—be wise as the serpent and innocent as the dove. Here too stands the letter’s most famous line, an exhortation to steadfastness under attack: stand firm “like an anvil under the hammer.” The great athlete is the one who takes the blows and still wins; and Christians must endure all things for God’s sake, so that God in turn may bear with them. The third chapter closes on a compact confession of Christ—the timeless who entered time, the invisible made visible, the impassible who for our sake became passible.

The fourth and fifth chapters descend to the specific charges of a bishop’s office. Let the widows not be neglected; after the Lord, the bishop is their guardian. Let nothing be done in the church without the bishop’s knowledge, and nothing by the bishop without God. Let the assemblies be held more frequently. Seek out each person by name. Slaves are neither to be despised nor to presume on their faith to demand their freedom at the community’s expense. Then, in the fifth chapter, marriage and continence: husbands are to love their wives as the Lord loves the Church, those who marry should do so with the bishop’s blessing so that the union is according to the Lord and not according to desire, and whoever is able to remain celibate in honor of the Lord’s own flesh must do so without a word of boasting—for the boast undoes the gift.

The sixth chapter gathers the community around its bishop and breaks into the letter’s other great register, the military one. “Pay attention to the bishop, so that God may also pay attention to you.” The faithful are to labor, struggle, run, suffer, rest, and rise together; baptism is their armor, faith a helmet, love a spear, endurance the full panoply; their deeds are the deposits against which their final wages will be paid. The last two chapters return to the errand: Polycarp is to convene a worthy council and ordain a “courier of God” to carry word to Syria, then write on Ignatius’s behalf to the churches ahead. The letter ends, as the others do, in a flurry of personal greetings—to the household of Epitropus, to Attalus, to Alce—and a final prayer that Polycarp remain strong in Christ.

Theological & Spiritual Significance

The letter’s lasting importance lies less in doctrine argued than in a portrait drawn: this is one of the earliest and most concrete pictures we possess of what a Christian bishop was expected to be. Where the letters to the churches press the authority of the bishop upon congregations, this one presses the burden of the office upon the bishop. The dominant note is not power but patience. The pastor is to carry the sicknesses of all, to gentle the difficult by kindness rather than force, to bear with each person as God bears with him. Ignatius knows that oversight is a labor measured by its weight—“where the labor is greater, the gain is great”—and he addresses Polycarp as one athlete speaking to another, both entered in the same contest.

That athletic imagery, and the military imagery that answers it in the sixth chapter, give the letter its unmistakable character. Ignatius has often been read for his doctrine of the Eucharist, the episcopate, and the unity of the Church; here those convictions are present but bent toward the practical formation of a soul who must lead. The anvil is the emblem of the whole: the pastor is not the hammer but the thing struck, whose victory is simply to remain, immovable, while the blows fall. It is a striking inversion of what strength usually means, and it comes from a man walking toward the arena, who a few days earlier had begged the Romans not to spare him the beasts. The steadfastness he urges on Polycarp he is himself about to perform.

Running beneath the practical charges is a principle of order that Ignatius states almost in passing but plainly means as the spine of church life: let nothing be done without the bishop, and let the bishop do nothing without God. It is the same conviction that his letters to the churches urge on congregations, turned here into the private discipline of the shepherd himself, who is asked to hold his people together, hold his assemblies more often, and know each of them by name—a picture of oversight as intimate attention rather than distant rule.

The letter also preserves an early and balanced word on marriage and celibacy that later ages would return to often. Ignatius honors continence highly—but he fences it at once with a warning against pride, insisting that its whole worth evaporates the moment it is boasted of, and he sets marriage within the same order of holiness, to be entered under the bishop’s blessing and lived as an image of Christ’s love for the Church. Neither state is disparaged; both are drawn under the honor of God. Woven through it all is the same short Christological confession that anchors the third chapter, the paradox of the eternal God made temporal and the impassible made passible for our sake—the conviction, against every attempt to make Christ’s suffering a mere appearance, for which Ignatius was on his way to suffer in earnest.

Reception & Influence

This letter enjoys an authenticating witness few ancient texts can claim: its recipient answered it. Not long after Ignatius passed through Smyrna, Polycarp wrote his own letter to the Philippians, in which he speaks of Ignatius by name and gathers the martyr’s letters for circulation—an almost immediate, first-hand attestation from the very man to whom Ignatius wrote. Polycarp himself lived on for decades as the great link between the apostolic generation and the age that followed; Irenaeus, who as a boy had heard him teach and remembered even where he sat as he spoke, carried Polycarp’s memory of John down into the later second century. When Polycarp at last died a martyr’s death at Smyrna—burned and then pierced when the flames spared him, declaring that he had served Christ eighty-six years and would not now deny his King—the anvil that Ignatius had urged him to be had held. The account of that martyrdom became itself one of the treasured documents of the early Church.

Through late antiquity and the Middle Ages the Ignatian letters were copied, translated, and expanded, which is why the text reached the modern age in more than one form. The disentangling of the genuine seven from the later interpolations was one of the achievements of early-modern and modern scholarship, and the letter to Polycarp, present in every ancient recension including the short Syriac, stands among the best-attested of them all.

The Text & This Edition

This edition presents a fresh modern English translation of the Letter to Polycarp, made directly from the Greek of the authentic middle recension—the seven-letter text received as Ignatius’s own. It is an English-only reading edition, not a reprint of an earlier translation and not a bilingual or parallel presentation; the rendering was prepared from the Greek source for this edition and aims at natural, readable English while keeping faith with the compressed, aphoristic force of the original, where whole counsels are delivered in a single clause.

A few features of Ignatius’s Greek are worth flagging, because the translation preserves rather than smooths them. The sixth chapter is studded with Latin loanwords drawn from military life—the deserter, the soldier’s savings and drawn pay—which Ignatius, writing in the shadow of the guard escorting him, folds naturally into his metaphor of the Christian as an enlisted soldier; the English keeps that martial coloring. The medical vocabulary of the second chapter—poultice, cooling compress—is likewise rendered plainly rather than paraphrased. A handful of phrases admit more than one defensible reading; in those places the translation follows the sense that best fits the pastoral argument.

In keeping with the conventions of this series, the work is attributed as the Church has always received it—to Ignatius of Antioch, called Theophoros—and any who labored on the translation are credited as translators, never as authors. Chapter and verse divisions follow the standard numbering of the letter, and scriptural references are given in the modern citation style for ease of use. The letter is brief; this edition is meant to let it be read at a sitting, as it was surely meant to be read by the young bishop who first received it.

Suggestions for Reading

Read the letter first straight through, without stopping, and let its speed register—it was dashed off in a few lines, as Ignatius himself says, by a man with a ship to catch and no time to spare. Then read it a second time watching for its two governing images, the athlete and the soldier, and notice how naturally the counsel to a bishop passes between them. It helps to remember at every line who is speaking: not a churchman theorizing about endurance but a prisoner walking toward the beasts, telling a younger friend to stand firm and promising to see him again at the resurrection. Read beside it, if you can, Polycarp’s own letter to the Philippians and the account of Polycarp’s death; together they show the counsel given, received, and finally lived out to the end.