Introduction

The Author

Polycarp of Smyrna stands at the hinge between the apostles and the Church that grew from their preaching. He is one of the very few men of the second century whom we can still hear speaking in his own voice, and the few who heard the apostles speak in theirs. Irenaeus of Lyons, who as a boy sat at his feet, remembered him with unusual vividness: he could still describe the place where the old bishop used to sit and teach, the manner of his speech, and the way he would recount “his intercourse with John and with the rest who had seen the Lord.” Through Polycarp, the living memory of the apostolic generation reached down into the age of the great Fathers. He was, in Irenaeus’s telling, a disciple of the Apostle John, appointed to the oversight of the church at Smyrna by men who had themselves known Christ in the flesh.

His long life spanned the whole of that transition. The traditional reckoning places his birth around the close of the first century and his death by martyrdom in the middle of the second—Irenaeus and Eusebius agree that he lived to a great age, and the account of his martyrdom records his own words before the proconsul: “Eighty and six years I have served Him, and He has done me no wrong; how then can I blaspheme my King who saved me?” The Church commemorates his martyrdom on the twenty-third of February. He was succeeded to the see of Smyrna in a line reaching back, by tradition, to Boukolos, its first bishop; and he in turn became the teacher of a further generation.

The events of his life that the ancient sources preserve are few but weighty. He corresponded with Ignatius of Antioch, who on his way to martyrdom at Rome addressed a letter to Polycarp personally and commended him warmly to others. Late in life he travelled to Rome, where he and Bishop Anicetus discussed the date of Pascha—the churches of Asia keeping the fourteenth of Nisan, Rome observing the following Sunday—and, unable to persuade one another, parted in peace and communion, Anicetus yielding to Polycarp the honor of celebrating the Eucharist in his church. That episode was long remembered as a model of how the Church might hold together across a genuine difference of practice. Not long after his return, Polycarp was arrested during a persecution at Smyrna, refused every inducement to renounce Christ, and was put to death—bound to the stake and, when the fire was reported not to consume him, dispatched by the sword. The eyewitness account his own church composed, the Martyrdom of Polycarp, is the earliest such narrative to survive outside the New Testament.

The Work: Occasion and Purpose

The single letter of Polycarp that has come down to us was written to the church at Philippi—the community Paul had founded a lifetime earlier, and which the letter itself calls the firstborn among the churches of Europe. Its occasion was concrete and practical. The Philippians had written first, and Polycarp is answering. Reading his reply against the grain, we can recover three requests they had made of him: they had asked for a word of exhortation on righteousness; they had asked him to see that a letter of theirs reached the church at Antioch in Syria; and they had asked him to send along any letters of Ignatius of Antioch that he might have in his keeping.

The immediate spur was the passage of Ignatius through Philippi. On his journey under guard toward Rome and the beasts, Ignatius and his fellow prisoners had been received and refreshed by the Philippians, who then wrote to Smyrna both to obtain the martyr-bishop’s writings and to ask Polycarp’s counsel. Polycarp answers all three points. He praises them for the love they showed the prisoners; he undertakes to forward their letter to Syria; and he sends them the letters of Ignatius that he possesses, appending them to his own (chapter 13). Because he still writes as though Ignatius’s own fate were not yet certainly known, the letter—or at least this part of it—belongs very close in time to Ignatius’s death, in the early decades of the second century.

One further trouble had come to Polycarp’s attention, and it shapes the letter’s tone in its later chapters: a certain Valens, once a presbyter at Philippi, had fallen through covetousness, together with his wife, and had to be removed from his office. Polycarp writes of this with real grief, not with severity, urging the community to recall the offenders as straying members rather than to reject them as enemies. The letter is thus at once a covering note for a martyr’s correspondence, a general exhortation to a beloved and troubled church, and a pastor’s response to a painful local failure. (Since P. N. Harrison’s study of 1936 a number of scholars have proposed that these functions belong to two originally distinct notes later joined into one; the Church has always received and read the letter as a single work of Polycarp, and this edition presents it so.)

Argument and Structure

For all its occasional character, the letter has a clear spiritual arc, moving from thanksgiving through moral instruction to doctrinal warning and pastoral appeal. Its governing word is righteousness — the practical righteousness of a life conformed to Christ’s commandments—and its governing tone is that of a father exhorting children he loves.

Polycarp opens with joy (chapter 1): joy at the Philippians’ faith, “proclaimed from ancient times” and still bearing fruit, and joy at the love they had shown to the imprisoned confessors, whose chains he calls “the diadems of those who are truly chosen by God.” At once he grounds their hope where he will keep it throughout—in the God who raised Jesus from the dead and in salvation by grace, “not by works, but by the will of God through Jesus Christ.”

From this he turns to exhortation (chapters 2–4). Believers are to serve God in fear and truth, mindful that Christ will come as judge of the living and the dead; they are to return neither evil for evil nor insult for insult, but to live by the Lord’s own words from the Sermon on the Mount. Polycarp disclaims any pretension to the authority of Paul, “the blessed and glorious” apostle who had taught among them and written to them (chapter 3), and sets before them the triad of faith, hope, and love—faith “the mother of us all,” with hope following and love leading the way. He then addresses the classes of the community in turn (chapter 4): a warning against the love of money as “the root of all evils,” instruction for wives and for the discipline of children, and a moving picture of the widows as “an altar of God,” set apart for unceasing prayer.

The instruction widens into a portrait of good order in the church (chapters 5–6). Deacons are to be blameless, “temperate in all things, compassionate, industrious,” servants of God and not of men; the young are to guard their purity; presbyters are to be “compassionate and merciful to all, bringing back those that wander, visiting all the sick,” free of avarice and slow to judge, “knowing that we are all under a debt of sin.” Because we ask God to forgive us, Polycarp reasons, we must forgive one another, remembering that all must stand before the judgment-seat of Christ.

At the letter’s center stands its doctrinal warning (chapters 7–8). Polycarp confronts a teaching that denied the reality of Christ’s coming in the flesh, the truth of His cross, and the resurrection and judgment to come. Echoing the First Epistle of John, he declares that “everyone who does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is an antichrist,” and that whoever twists the Lord’s words to his own desire and denies resurrection and judgment “is the firstborn of Satan.” Against such error he calls the church back to “the word handed down to us from the beginning,” and lifts up Christ crucified—who “bore our sins in His own body on the tree”—as the pattern of the endurance His people are to imitate.

That summons to endurance carries the letter toward its close (chapters 9–12). Polycarp points to living and recent examples: to Ignatius, Zosimus, and Rufus, and to Paul and the other apostles, who “did not run in vain” and who “did not love the present age” but Him who died and was raised for them. He urges steadfast love within the brotherhood, almsgiving that “delivers from death,” and a blameless witness before the surrounding world. Here too he takes up the sad case of Valens with grief and hope. The letter ends with a benediction upon the church, a request for prayer even for kings, persecutors, and “the enemies of the cross,” and finally the practical business it was partly written to accomplish: the sending of the Ignatian letters (chapter 13) and the commendation of the bearer, Crescens, and his sister (chapter 14).

Theological and Spiritual Significance

The most striking feature of the letter, felt on every page, is that it is woven almost entirely out of Scripture. Sentence after sentence is built from the words of the Gospels and the apostolic writings, so that reading Polycarp is like listening to a man whose ordinary speech had been formed by long immersion in the sacred text. He is especially saturated with the First Epistle of Peter, whose language he takes up again and again, and he draws freely on Paul, on the Sermon on the Mount, and on the Johannine epistles. For students of the New Testament this makes the letter an early and valuable witness: it shows a leading churchman of the sub-apostolic age already treating these writings as authoritative and already reading Paul’s letters to Philippi as Scripture to be studied and obeyed. Polycarp does not argue for a canon; he simply lives inside one.

Doctrinally, the letter is a defense of the wholeness of the gospel against its earliest distortions. The confession Polycarp insists upon—that Jesus Christ has truly come in the flesh, that the cross was real, that resurrection and judgment lie ahead—marks out the ground on which the Church would stand against docetic and dualist teaching for generations. His conviction that error must be answered by returning to “the word handed down from the beginning” is one of the seeds of what would grow into the appeal to apostolic tradition. Yet the letter is anything but merely polemical. Its heart is pastoral and moral: it is chiefly concerned with how Christians are to hold money loosely, to forgive as they hope to be forgiven, to bear wrong without retaliation, to care for widows and the sick and the straying, and above all to endure. The pattern of that endurance is always Christ crucified, and its near horizon is martyrdom, which for Polycarp and his readers was no abstraction.

Something of the balance the ancient writers loved in him is visible throughout—a tenderness toward the church joined to an uncompromising firmness against what would corrupt it. He can call a false teacher the firstborn of Satan and, a few lines later, plead that a fallen presbyter be recalled in love. That combination of gentleness and iron gives the letter its particular authority. It is the voice of a man who had learned the faith from those who learned it from Christ, and who would seal it with his own blood.

Reception and Influence

The letter was known and prized in the ancient Church. Irenaeus, writing against the heresies of his own day, could point his readers to it as still extant and “most satisfactory,” a document from which “those that have a mind to do so may learn the character of his faith.” Eusebius, in the fourth century, cites it more than once and reckons it among the undoubted works of the bishop of Smyrna. From an early date it was copied and circulated together with the letters of Ignatius, for which it served as a kind of preface—a role it still fills in most collections of the Apostolic Fathers.

That association points to the letter’s second great value. Chapter 13, in which Polycarp forwards the Ignatian correspondence to Philippi, is among the earliest and firmest external witnesses to the genuineness of Ignatius’s letters. The two bodies of correspondence interlock so closely—each presupposing the situation the other describes—that they stand or fall together, and this mutual attestation has anchored the study of both. Whatever verdict scholars reach on the fine questions of the text’s composition, the letter’s standing as an authentic voice of the early second century, and as a bridge from the apostolic age to the age of the Fathers, has never seriously been in doubt.

The Text and This Edition

This edition presents a fresh modern English translation of the letter, made from the original Greek. The reader should know something of the state in which that original has survived. Polycarp wrote in Greek, but no complete Greek copy of the letter has come down to us; the Greek manuscripts break off partway through, and the concluding chapters are preserved only in an ancient Latin version, with a few short passages also surviving in Syriac. This translation therefore renders the Greek where the Greek is extant and the old Latin where the Greek fails, so that the whole letter—all fourteen short chapters—can be read continuously in contemporary English. It is an English-only reading edition, not a parallel-text or facing-page presentation, and it is a new translation rather than a reprint of any earlier one.

The edition follows the conventions used across this series. The author is named as the Church has always received him—Polycarp of Smyrna, disciple of the Apostle John and bishop and martyr—without the qualifications of modern critical debate, which belong to scholarship rather than to the heading of his book. Those who rendered the text are credited as translators, never as authors. Chapter and verse divisions, and any scriptural references, are given in ordinary Arabic figures for ease of reading and citation. The aim throughout has been a translation faithful to Polycarp’s plain and scriptural Greek, readable without apparatus, and true to the letter’s own spirit of sober and affectionate exhortation.

This is a text held in common. Polycarp belongs to the age before the divisions of later centuries, and his letter is the shared inheritance of all Christians who look back to the apostles—East and West, and every communion that reveres the martyrs. It is offered here in that spirit, as a word of encouragement from one of the Church’s oldest and clearest voices.

Suggestions for Reading

The letter is short and can be read at a sitting; a first reading is best done straight through, as a single pastoral appeal, without pausing over the density of its scriptural allusion. On a second reading it rewards attention to how thoroughly the words of the New Testament have become Polycarp’s own—how much of what sounds like his counsel is in fact Peter, Paul, or the words of the Lord, absorbed and recombined. Newcomers may find it most alive if they read it alongside the letters of Ignatius that it was written to accompany, and with the account of Polycarp’s own martyrdom, which shows in deed the endurance that the letter everywhere commends. What it offers is not novelty but continuity: the faith of the apostles, handed on intact by a man who had received it from their hands and would soon give his life for it.