Introduction

The Author

Ignatius of Antioch stands at the very hinge between the apostolic generation and the Church of the second century. 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 see, by the reckoning the Church has long preserved, as its third bishop, following Euodius, who had himself succeeded the Apostle Peter. He is remembered by a second name he gives himself in the opening line of every one of his letters: Theophoros, the God-bearer, one who carries God within him. Of his early life almost nothing certain survives; the man steps into the light of history only at its end, already old, already a bishop of long standing, and already condemned.

That condemnation came during the reign of the emperor Trajan, and the events it set in motion place his death in the first decade of the second century, most commonly dated to around AD 107 to 110. Arrested for the faith, Ignatius was not martyred in his own city but sentenced to be sent under military guard across Asia Minor to Rome, there to be thrown to the wild beasts in the amphitheatre for the entertainment of the crowd. The soldiers who escorted him he would famously liken to leopards, growing only more savage as they were treated kindly. It was on this long, chained overland journey—halting at Smyrna, where he was received by its young bishop Polycarp, and later at Troas—that Ignatius composed the seven letters that have made him one of the most important witnesses to the early Church. The Epistle to the Trallians is one of them; its six companions were written to the churches at Ephesus, Magnesia, Rome, Philadelphia, and Smyrna, and to Polycarp himself. Across all seven runs the same twofold urgency: hold fast to the unity of the Church, and hold fast to the reality of Christ crucified. The letters have come down in several forms; scholars identify the shorter “middle recension,” preserved chiefly in a manuscript at Florence, as the authentic text, and it is that text which underlies the present translation.

Ignatius is honoured throughout the Christian world as a martyr and Father of the Church. The Eastern Orthodox commemorate him on the twentieth of December; in the West his feast is kept on the seventeenth of October. His relics have long rested at the Basilica of San Clemente in Rome. Because he wrote in the first years of the second century, before any of the divisions that would later separate Christians from one another, his voice belongs to the whole Church in common, and the present edition presents him in that spirit.

The Work: Occasion and Purpose

The Letter to the Trallians was written from Smyrna, at a specific and touching prompting. Tralles was a city of the Roman province of Asia, set on the great road that ran inland from Ephesus through Magnesia toward Laodicea and the East, and its church—like others in that region—most likely traced its origins to the missionary labours of disciples of the Apostle Paul. When word reached Tralles that the condemned bishop of Antioch was passing near, its own bishop, a man named Polybius, made the journey to Smyrna to stand with him. Ignatius received this visit as a gift. In Polybius, he says, he seemed to see the whole Trallian congregation gathered before him, and the bishop’s presence, rejoicing with him in his chains, moved him to write back in gratitude to the community that had sent so worthy a representative.

The letter, then, is first of all a letter of thanks, and its tone toward the Trallians themselves is warm rather than corrective. Ignatius is careful, more than once, to say that he is not accusing them of any error he has actually found among them; he writes, he insists, to fortify a healthy church against a danger he sees on the road, not to rebuke a sick one. Yet gratitude quickly opens onto warning. Ignatius knew—from other churches, and perhaps from the general climate of the age—that a corrosive teaching was abroad, and he could not let the occasion pass without arming this beloved community against it. The purpose of the letter is therefore preventive and pastoral: to bind the Trallians more closely to their clergy as a defence against division, and to set before them, in unmistakable terms, the bodily reality of Christ’s life, suffering, and rising, against those who would dissolve it into mere appearance.

Argument and Structure

The letter is brief—thirteen short chapters—and its movement is clear once its two great concerns are seen as one. Ignatius opens with the occasion itself, praising the Trallians’ steadfast and blameless spirit as Polybius had reported it, and giving thanks that he has found them imitators of God. From this personal opening he turns at once to the theme of order. Subjection to the bishop, he writes, is nothing less than living according to Jesus Christ; the community that does nothing apart from its bishop, that honours the presbytery as the council of the apostles and the deacons as servants of the mysteries of God, is a community living as Christ would have it live. In one of the letter’s most quoted images, Ignatius sets out the pattern that recurs across his correspondence: the bishop is a type of the Father, the presbyters as the council of God and the bond of the apostles, and the deacons—entrusted not with tables and provisions but with the service of the Church of God—as figures to be reverenced as Jesus Christ himself. Without these three orders, he says plainly, the assembly cannot be called a Church.

Woven through this appeal is a note that gives the letter much of its human warmth: Ignatius’s own humility. He could, he admits, write to them of lofty and heavenly things—of the ranks of angels and the ordering of the principalities, visible and invisible—but he checks himself, both because he fears such solid food would choke those he still tenderly calls infants, and because he refuses to presume. He is a condemned man, not an apostle, and though he has “many thoughts in God” he will not let them puff him up; he measures himself, lest in boasting he lose everything. Even his longing for martyrdom is held in this same humility: he loves to suffer, he says, but does not know whether he is worthy of it. This restraint, in a man walking knowingly toward the beasts, is among the most affecting things in the whole Ignatian corpus.

From the middle of the letter onward the warning sharpens. Ignatius urges the Trallians to take only the food of Christians and to refuse the “foreign plants” of heresy—teachers who lace the name of Jesus Christ with their own poison, like men who mix a lethal drug into honeyed wine so that the unwary drink death with pleasure. He returns to the safeguard of unity: those who remain inseparable from God, from Jesus Christ, from the bishop, and from the apostles’ commandments will be kept safe; whoever acts apart from bishop, presbyters, and deacons is “not pure in conscience.” Then, in the letter’s theological heart, comes the great creedal passage. Turn a deaf ear, Ignatius commands, to anyone who speaks of a Christ other than the one who was of the line of David and of Mary, who was truly born, who truly ate and drank, who was truly persecuted under Pontius Pilate, truly crucified and died in the sight of heaven and earth, and who was truly raised from the dead by his Father—and who will in the same way raise those who believe in him. The drumbeat of that word — truly — is the letter’s answer to everything the false teachers deny.

Chapter ten drives the point home with disarming directness. If, as certain godless people claim, Christ only seemed to suffer, then—Ignatius asks—why am I in chains? Why do I pray to be given to the beasts? If the Passion was an illusion, his own coming death is a lie told against the Lord, and he dies for nothing. His martyrdom, he sees, stands or falls with the reality of Christ’s. He closes by warning them once more to flee these deadly offshoots that are “not the planting of the Father,” greeting them from Smyrna in the name of the churches gathered around him, and asking, with characteristic self-forgetfulness, that they pray for the church in Syria which he has left behind and for himself, that he may be found worthy of the end he seeks.

Theological and Spiritual Significance

Small as it is, the Letter to the Trallians is a document of the first importance for two questions that would occupy the Church for centuries, and it addresses both not as speculation but as the plain requirement of the faith already held.

The first is the reality of the Incarnation. The heresy Ignatius confronts is what later ages would name Docetism, from a Greek word meaning “to seem”: the claim that Christ, being divine, could not truly take flesh, be born, suffer, or die, and that his human life was therefore an appearance, a phantom passing through the world. Against this Ignatius sets the relentless “truly” of chapter nine and the sharp logic of chapter ten. His concern is not philosophical tidiness but salvation itself. If Christ did not really assume human flesh and really die in it, then his rising is empty and the promise that God “will also raise us who believe in him” has nothing to stand on. Ignatius grasps, and states with a vividness that has never been improved upon, that a Redeemer who only seemed to suffer could redeem no one. In this he anticipates by two centuries the settled confession of the Church that Christ is fully God and fully man, and he shows how early—within living memory of the apostles—that confession was already the boundary between the faith and its counterfeits.

The second is the visible order of the Church. Ignatius is the earliest writer to describe with such clarity the threefold ministry of bishop, presbyters, and deacons as the ordinary structure of the local church, and to bind the unity and even the very identity of the Church to it. For him this order is not administrative convenience but a living icon of the divine order: the one bishop imaging the one Father, the presbyters imaging the apostolic college, the deacons imaging the servant-ministry of Christ. His insistence that nothing be done apart from the bishop, and that whoever separates himself from the clergy separates himself from the Church, would echo through all later reflection on the nature of the ministry. It is presented here descriptively, as the witness of a bishop of the first Christian century, part of the common inheritance of Christians before their later divisions; how the various traditions have received and developed it belongs to their own histories, and this edition does not adjudicate among them.

Binding both themes together is the spiritual figure of Ignatius himself. Here is a bishop who understands his impending death as a share in the death of Christ, and who therefore cannot tolerate any teaching that would make that death—Christ’s or his own—unreal. His humility, his tenderness toward a church he calls his infant children, and his fierce clarity about the one thing that cannot be surrendered form a single disposition. The letter is, in the end, a portrait of what it looks like to hold the faith unto death and to want, above all, that others hold it too.

The Text and This Edition

This edition presents a fresh modern English translation of the Letter to the Trallians, rendered directly from the Greek. The source is the authentic short text of Ignatius—the middle recension of the seven genuine letters, as preserved in the manuscript tradition and edited in the standard critical collections of the Apostolic Fathers—and the translation is made from that Greek, not adapted from any earlier English version. It is an English-only reading edition, not a parallel or bilingual one: the aim is a clear, faithful, readable Ignatius for the ordinary reader, carrying over the urgency and the compression of his Greek without smoothing away its difficulty.

A word is owed about that difficulty. Ignatius wrote in haste, in chains, in a dense and sometimes knotted Greek, and the text as it has come down to us has occasional rough or uncertain places. Where the wording is genuinely disputed or a phrase resists confident rendering, the translation follows the best-attested sense and, where it matters, notes the alternative. Scriptural language saturates the letter—Ignatius quotes and echoes the Gospels and the letters of Paul almost by instinct—and these allusions are honoured in the underlying text so that the reader can hear how thoroughly his mind was formed by the apostolic writings.

The edition follows the house conventions used across this series. The author is named as the Church has always received him—Ignatius of Antioch, called Theophoros, the God-bearer—without the qualifying labels of later critical debate; the recension question is noted, as above, in a single neutral line. Those who have prepared the English are credited as translators, never as authors. Chapter and scriptural references are given in the plain modern style. The result is intended to let a document written on the road to martyrdom nearly nineteen centuries ago speak again, directly and without apparatus, to a reader today.

Suggestions for Reading

The Letter to the Trallians repays being read at a sitting, aloud if possible, for it was written to be heard by a gathered congregation. A first-time reader may find the quickest way into it is to read chapters nine and ten first—the creedal heart, where Ignatius pours out his “truly born, truly suffered, truly raised” and then stakes his own life on it—and then return to the beginning to see how the whole letter builds toward that confession. It helps to keep in mind the human situation behind the words: an old bishop, under guard, thanking a distant church for the kindness of sending its bishop to comfort him, and using that occasion of gratitude to hand on, one last time, the two things he will not let go of—the visible unity of the Church and the flesh-and-blood reality of Christ. Read alongside its sister letters, especially the one to the Smyrnaeans, which presses the same anti-docetic point still harder, the Trallians letter reveals itself as one panel in a single unfolding testament, written in the shadow of the arena by a man determined that his death should mean exactly what Christ’s death meant.