St. Ignatius of Antioch and the Early Church

St. Ignatius of Antioch and the Early Church | Kenneth D. Whitehead | From One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic: The Early Church Was The Catholic Church

Sometime around the year 107 A.D., a short, sharp persecution of the Church of Christ resulted in the arrest of the bishop of Antioch in Syria. His name was Ignatius. According to one of the harsh penal practices of the Roman Empire of the day, the good bishop was condemned to be delivered up to wild beasts in the arena in the capital city. The insatiable public appetite for bloody spectacles meant a chronically short supply of victims; prisoners were thus sent off to Rome to help fill the need.

So the second bishop of Antioch was sent to Rome as a  condemned prisoner. According to Church historian Eusebius (ca. 260-ca. 340), Ignatius had been bishop in Antioch for nearly forty years at the time of his arrest. This means that he had been bishop there while some of the original apostles were almost certainly still alive and preaching.

St. Ignatius of Antioch was conducted first by land from Syria across Asia Minor (modern Turkey). He was escorted by a detachment of Roman soldiers. In a letter he sent ahead to the Church of Christ in Rome, this bishop described his ardent wish to imitate the passion of Christ through his own coming martyrdom in the Roman Colosseum. He warned the Christians in Rome not to try to save him. He also spoke of his conflicts with his military escort and of their casual cruelties, describing his guards as "ten leopards". The discipline of the march cannot have been unrelieved, however, since Ignatius was permitted to receive delegations of visitors from local Churches in the cities of Asia Minor through which the escorts and Ignatius passed along the way (To the Romans, 5:1).

In Smyrna (modern Izmir), St. Ignatius met, not only with the bishop of that city, St. Polycarp, but also with delegations from the neighboring cities of Ephesus, Magnesia, and Tralles. Each delegation was headed by a local bishop. Ignatius wrote thank-you letters to the Christians in each of these cities who had visited the notable but shackled bishop-prisoner. Chiefly through these letters, St. Ignatius of Antioch is known to us today.

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