Antioch and the See

Antioch on the Orontes was the third city of the Roman Empire and the cradle of Gentile Christianity — the place where, according to Acts, the disciples were “first called Christians.” Its episcopal see was traced through Peter to Evodius, its first bishop, and then to Ignatius, called Theophoros (“God-bearer”), who occupies that line as second bishop. This file sets out the city, the apostolic foundation of its see, the succession that the early Church recorded, and the meaning and later legend attached to Ignatius’s own self-designation — noting how little of his life we can recover apart from the letters he wrote on the road to martyrdom.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostolic Father)

Antioch: The Third City and the Cradle of Gentile Christianity

Antioch on the Orontes — Syrian Antioch, founded by Seleucus I Nicator around 300 BC — was by the first century one of the great metropolitan centers of the Roman world, ranked in the ancient sources with Rome and Alexandria as among the foremost cities of the Empire. Its size, its mixed Greek, Syrian, and Jewish population, and its position as the administrative seat of the province of Syria gave it an importance that the New Testament itself registers. It is in Antioch, the Acts of the Apostles records, that the new movement first acquired the name by which it would be known to the world: “and the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch” (Acts 11:26).

This was no incidental detail. Antioch is presented in Acts as the launching point of the Gentile mission. After the scattering that followed the death of Stephen, believers came to Antioch and “spake unto the Grecians, preaching the Lord Jesus,” and “a great number believed, and turned unto the Lord” (Acts 11:19–21). The Jerusalem church sent Barnabas, who in turn fetched Saul (Paul) from Tarsus, and the two taught at Antioch for a year (Acts 11:22–26). From Antioch, Paul and Barnabas were set apart and sent out on the first missionary journey (Acts 13:1–3); to Antioch they returned to report (Acts 14:26–28); and at Antioch arose the controversy over the circumcision of Gentile converts that occasioned the council of Jerusalem (Acts 15:1–2). The city is thus, in the canonical narrative, the seedbed of a Christianity that was no longer confined to the synagogue — the first place where the faith took root as something visibly distinct, with a name of its own.

That distinctiveness is the background against which Ignatius must be read. When, two generations later, the bishop of Antioch wrote letters warning against both a Judaizing observance and a docetic denial of Christ’s flesh, he was writing from the very community in which the line between Church and synagogue, and the reality of the incarnate Lord, had first been drawn out in practice (see Against Judaizing and Against Docetism).

The Apostolic Foundation of the See

Christian tradition associates the foundation of the Antiochene church with the apostles themselves, and pre-eminently with Peter and Paul. Both labored at Antioch according to the New Testament — Paul extensively, as Acts records, and Peter at least for a time, as the confrontation reported by Paul in Galatians attests, when “Peter was come to Antioch” and Paul “withstood him to the face” over table-fellowship with Gentiles (Galatians 2:11). Out of this apostolic presence the later tradition counted Peter as the founder, or first occupant, of the Antiochene see before his association with Rome — a tradition Eusebius transmits when he calls Ignatius “the second after Peter to the bishopric of Antioch” (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.36.2; trans. NPNF II/1).

Between Peter and Ignatius the tradition places Evodius (Euodius). Eusebius names him explicitly as the first bishop of Antioch: in his survey of the church under Trajan he writes that “at this time Ignatius was known as the second bishop of Antioch, Evodius having been the first” (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.22; trans. NPNF II/1). In his Chronicle Eusebius likewise enters Evodius and then Ignatius in the Antiochene line, anchoring the succession to the imperial chronology that he used as his scaffolding (Eusebius, Chronicle, Trajanic entries). The succession Peter → Evodius → Ignatius is therefore the form in which the earliest surviving witness records the Antiochene see.

A further tradition attaches to Evodius: he is credited in some sources with having coined or first applied the name “Christian” to the believers at Antioch — a pious linking of Acts 11:26 to the bishop under whom the community is supposed to have flourished. This connection is found in later compilations and is repeated in the Catholic Encyclopedia and similar reference works (newadvent.org, “Evodius”); it is a traditional attribution rather than a datum that Acts itself supplies, since Luke names no individual as the author of the term. It is reported here as the tradition it is.

“Theophoros”: Ignatius’s Self-Designation

In the salutation of every one of his seven authentic letters, Ignatius names himself not simply “Ignatius” but “Ignatius, who is also Theophorus.” The opening of To the Ephesians is representative: “Ignatius, who is also Theophorus, unto her which hath been blessed in greatness through the plenitude of God the Father…” (Ignatius, To the Ephesians, salutation; trans. Lightfoot). The same double name stands at the head of To the Romans: “Ignatius, who is also Theophorus, unto her that hath found mercy in the bountifulness of the Father Most High” (Ignatius, To the Romans, salutation; trans. Lightfoot).

The Greek epithet is Θεοφόρος (Theophoros), a compound of θεός (“God”) and the root of φέρω (“to bear, to carry”). Its accentuation is grammatically significant. Read as a paroxytone with the active sense, Θεοφόρος means “God-bearing” — one who carries or bears God within himself. Read otherwise, the passive Θεόφορος would mean “God-borne” — one carried or borne by God. Ignatius’s own usage tilts toward the active, “God-bearer,” and the theme is one he extends to all the baptized: he addresses the Ephesians as those who are “God-bearers and temple-bearers, Christ-bearers, bearers of holy things” (Ignatius, To the Ephesians 9; trans. Holmes, The Apostolic Fathers, 3rd ed.), and he calls Paul, in the same letter, a fellow-traveler of those who are “ever consecrated… in whose footsteps I would fain be found treading” (Ignatius, To the Ephesians 12; trans. Lightfoot). The name, in short, expresses a theology before it expresses a biography: to be a Christian is to carry God, and Ignatius wears the title as the common dignity of the faithful concentrated in himself as he goes to his death.

The Legend of the Child in the Saviour’s Arms

A later and well-loved tradition gives the epithet a literal and biographical origin. It holds that Ignatius was the very child whom Jesus “took… in his arms” and set in the midst of the disciples as an emblem of the Kingdom (Mark 9:36; cf. Matthew 18:2–4) — so that he was Theophoros not in a spiritual sense only but because the incarnate God had once literally borne him. This identification does not appear in Ignatius’s own letters, nor in Eusebius. It belongs to the later hagiographical and liturgical tradition — to the Martyrium Ignatii and to the Byzantine synaxaria and menaia that shaped his commemoration. It is reported in Orthodox and Catholic devotional sources to this day (orthodoxwiki.org, “Ignatius of Antioch”), but it should be classed for what it is: a pious etymology of much later date, not a fact attested by the early evidence. [Disputed: the spiritual sense of Theophoros (“God-bearer,” one who carries God) is Ignatius’s own, applied by him to all the faithful (Ignatius, To the Ephesians 9; trans. Holmes); the biographical legend that Ignatius was the child of Mark 9:36 / Matthew 18:2 is a later tradition of the Martyrium and Byzantine synaxaria, not attested in the letters or in Eusebius (orthodoxwiki.org, “Ignatius of Antioch”).]

The Martyrium Ignatii — the surviving Antiochene and Roman “acts” of his passion — is itself not an eyewitness document; it is a later composition that elaborates the journey and death, and its picturesque details (including, in some recensions, the legend that the name of Jesus was found written on his heart) are tradition, not testimony, and are not asserted here as fact (see Arrest and Condemnation for the evidentiary status of the acta).

The Episcopate at Antioch — and How Little We Know

Of Ignatius’s actual tenure as bishop of Antioch we know remarkably little. Eusebius supplies the bare framework — that he was the second bishop after Peter, following Evodius, and that he held the see until he was sent from Syria to Rome and “became food for wild beasts on account of his testimony to Christ” (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.36.2–3; trans. NPNF II/1). Beyond this, the early record is silent on his birth, his background, his conversion, and the years of his ministry. The traditions that fill these silences — that he was a disciple of the Apostle John, or of Peter — are later inferences from his stature and his Asian connections, not facts the primary sources establish.

What we do possess is concentrated in a single, narrow window. The seven authentic letters of the middle recension were all written within a few weeks, in chains, on the journey from Antioch through Asia Minor to Rome and martyrdom (see The Corpus and The Road Through Asia). They are, in effect, our only contemporary source for the man. Everything secure that we can say of Ignatius the bishop — his concern for the unity of the local church around its bishop and Eucharist (see Monepiscopacy), his fierce realism about the flesh of Christ, his longing for martyrdom — comes from these few pages. The see of Antioch gave him his office and his name in the succession; the road from Antioch gave him his voice.

References

Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1: The Apostolic Fathers with Justin Martyr and Irenaeus. Edited by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson. Buffalo: Christian Literature Company, 1885.
Eusebius of Caesarea. The Ecclesiastical History. Trans. Arthur C. McGiffert, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 1. Buffalo: Christian Literature Company, 1890.
Eusebius of Caesarea. Chronicle (Chronicon). Eusebian chronological entries for the reign of Trajan.
Holmes, Michael W. The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations. 3rd ed. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007.
Lightfoot, J. B. The Apostolic Fathers, Part II: S. Ignatius, S. Polycarp. 2nd ed. London: Macmillan, 1889.
“Evodius.” The Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1909. newadvent.org/cathen/05653a.htm.
“Ignatius of Antioch.” OrthodoxWiki. orthodoxwiki.org/Ignatius_of_Antioch (for the later devotional and synaxarial traditions, cited as such).