Polycarp’s letter to the Philippians, which I began discussing yesterday, consists largely of general moral exhortations. The Philippians are to love one another and to pray for one another and to give alms whenever possible; their wives are to love their husbands and to educate their children in the fear of God; their widows are to be discreet and devoted to prayer; their deacons are to be moral and upright; their younger men are to avoid passions of the flesh; and so on. Many readers of the letter have found these guidelines somewhat uninspiring, or at least uncreative. Indeed, Polycarp devotes almost the entire letter to quoting or alluding to other early Christian authorities. Rather than formulating views of his own, he has produced a kind of pastiche of earlier traditions. To get an idea of just how thoroughly immersed Polycarp was in Christian writings produced earlier, consider the following passage drawn from the fifth chapter of his letter to the Philippians. I have placed possible echoes and citations of earlier Christian writings [...]

The next “Apostolic Father” we will consider is Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna, a friend of Ignatius, who like him came to be martyred on account of his Christian faith (see chapter 26), Polycarp was himself the recipient of one of the surviving letters of Ignatius around 110 c.e., some forty-five years or so before his own death. Soon after he received this letter, he wrote to the Philippian Christians, evidently in response to their requests on several matters (Pol. Phil. 3:1). Here is what I say about him and his writing in my textbook, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings (Oxford University Press). **************************** The Philippians had requested from Polycarp a copy of “the letters of Ignatius, including both those he sent to us [in Smyrna] and any others which we had by us” (13:2). Polycarp complied with this request, sending his own epistle as a kind of cover letter for the collection. Polycarp indicates that both Ignatius and the Philippians had requested that he, or one of [...]

In some respects, the most interesting of Ignatius’s writings is the letter to the Romans, where he deals explicitly with his upcoming martyrdom. We might expect that Ignatius would want to find some way to avoid having to pay the ultimate price for his faith, if he could do so without compromising his convictions. Ignatius, however, goes to his death eagerly, longingly. He writes to the Romans to urge them not to interfere, for he believes that only by suffering a glorious and bloody martyrdom will he become a true disciple of Christ, only by imitating Christ’s own Passion will he be able to “get to God.” Most of the surviving Christian writings from antiquity take a positive view of Christian martyrdom, urging Christians to go willingly to their deaths for the faith and to endure all the tortures that humans can devise. By doing so, Christians would imitate the Passion of their Lord, Jesus. [SIDENOTE: Not everyone agreed. We know from the letters of Pliny and the writings of several Christian authors, [...]

The letters of Ignatius of Antioch are among the most fascinating earliest Christian writings from outside the New Testament.  I’ve long been fascinated by them and would like to introduce you to them in a series of three posts in this thread presenting the “Apostolic Fathers” in a nutshell. The “Apostolic Fathers,” as I have indicated before, are a group of ten or eleven (depending how you count) books/authors who have long been understood to stand in the “orthodox” Christian camp before the major theological views later considered orthodox had become the overwhelmingly dominant form of Christian belief and practice some time in the third century or so – and so we call these write “proto-orthodox”; they were collected into a group of writings only in the modern period, and called “apostolic fathers” because they were each believed to have been acquainted with the apostles of Jesus themselves.  In almost all instances, as it turns out, that turns out to be wrong, but we still give them this name. They are (for the most part) [...]