Against Judaizing

In the letters to the Magnesians and the Philadelphians Ignatius warns against “Judaizing” (ἰουδαΐζειν) — the adoption by Christians of Jewish observance in a manner that, for him, denied the newness of the Gospel. It is here, in a single sharp antithesis, that the word Christianity (Χριστιανισμός) makes one of its earliest appearances in the surviving literature. Read in its second-century setting, the polemic is not a verdict on the Jewish people but an argument about where the Christian community now stands in relation to the Law, the Sabbath, and the Scriptures it shares with Israel.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostolic Father)

The Slogan: Χριστιανισμός and ἰουδαΐζειν

The heart of Ignatius’s polemic is a coined antithesis. In the letter to the Magnesians he writes: “It is monstrous to talk of Jesus Christ and to practise Judaism. For Christianity did not believe in Judaism, but Judaism in Christianity, wherein every tongue believed and was gathered together unto God” (Ignatius, To the Magnesians 10; trans. Lightfoot). The verb rendered “to practise Judaism” is ἰουδαΐζειν, a term inherited from Hellenistic Jewish usage (and from Paul, who uses it of Peter at Antioch in Galatians 2:14) for a Gentile’s adoption of Jewish custom. Against it Ignatius sets the noun Χριστιανισμός, “Christianity” — and this passage is among the very earliest attested occurrences of that word, which Ignatius appears to coin or near-coin precisely by analogy with Ἰουδαϊσμός, “Judaism” (Schoedel, Ignatius of Antioch, Hermeneia, 1985, on Magnesians 10; see The Corpus). The coinage is itself the argument: by naming the two as parallel “isms,” Ignatius asserts that the Gospel is a distinct reality, into which Judaism’s own hope has now flowed, and not a province of it.

The rhetorical thrust of Magnesians 10 is the priority of “Christianity.” Ignatius does not say that the two are simply opposed; he says that “Judaism believed in Christianity” — that is, that the faith of Israel pointed forward to and finds its term in Christ. The novelty is therefore not a rupture with Israel’s God but the arrival of what Israel awaited.

The Prophets and the Lord’s Day

Ignatius’s argument turns crucially on the prophets, whom he claims for the side of the Gospel rather than against it. “If then those who had walked in ancient practices attained unto newness of hope, no longer observing sabbaths but fashioning their lives after the Lord’s day, on which our life also arose through Him” — so the Magnesians passage runs — then the prophets themselves belong to Christ: “even the divine prophets lived after Christ Jesus” (Ignatius, To the Magnesians 8–9; trans. Lightfoot). The claim is striking and important for placing the polemic: Ignatius does not repudiate the Old Testament or its authors. He annexes them. The prophets, he insists, were already living “according to Christ Jesus” and were persecuted for it; they were “inspired by His grace” (Ignatius, To the Magnesians 8; trans. Lightfoot). The error of the Judaizers is therefore, in Ignatius’s eyes, an anachronism — to take up “ancient practices” after the very hope those practices pointed toward has arrived.

The concrete sign of the “newness of hope” is the shift from the Sabbath to “the Lord’s day” (κατὰ κυριακήν), the day “on which our life also arose through Him” — the day of the Resurrection (Ignatius, To the Magnesians 9; trans. Lightfoot). This is one of the earliest Christian texts to set the observance of the first day, the κυριακή (“the Lord’s [day]”), over against Sabbath-keeping as a mark of Christian identity, and to ground it explicitly in the Resurrection. The contrast is not arbitrary ritual preference but theology in the form of a calendar: the community that lives by the day of the Resurrection confesses the new creation that the Resurrection inaugurated.

The Dispute over the Archives (Philadelphians)

The letter to the Philadelphians shows the polemic in a more concrete and revealing form: a remembered dispute over the Scriptures. Ignatius recalls hearing certain people say, in effect, that they would credit nothing taught in “the Gospel” unless they could first find it in “the charters” — the ἀρχεῖα, the ancient records, meaning the Old Testament Scriptures. “If I find it not in the charters, I believe it not in the Gospel,” he reports them as saying; and when he answered, “It is written,” they retorted, “That is the question” (Ignatius, To the Philadelphians 8; trans. Lightfoot). Ignatius’s reply moves the ground entirely: “But as for me, my charter is Jesus Christ, the inviolable charter is His cross and His death and His resurrection, and faith through Him” (Ignatius, To the Philadelphians 8; trans. Lightfoot). For Ignatius the Gospel is not subordinate to a documentary proof from the older Scriptures; it has its own “preeminence,” for the Gospel “is the completion of immortality” and possesses a unique privilege in “the advent of the Saviour, even our Lord Jesus Christ, and His passion and resurrection” (Ignatius, To the Philadelphians 9; trans. Lightfoot).

It is in the same letter that Ignatius states the antithesis from the other direction, in a sentence often quoted: “But if any one propound Judaism unto you, hear him not: for it is better to hear Christianity from a man who is circumcised than Judaism from one uncircumcised” (Ignatius, To the Philadelphians 6; trans. Lightfoot). The formulation is precise and worth weighing. Ignatius does not equate Judaism with ethnic descent or circumcision; he distinguishes the teaching from the teacher. Christianity preached by a circumcised man (a Jewish Christian) is better than “Judaizing” preached by an uncircumcised one (a Gentile drawn to Jewish practice). The implication, which bears directly on the historical question below, is that the danger he confronts is at least partly Gentile — a “Judaism from one uncircumcised.”

Who Were the “Judaizers”?

The historical identity of Ignatius’s Judaizers is genuinely uncertain, and the texts can be read in more than one way. The principal interpretive options turn on whether the opponents were ethnically Jewish Christians keeping the Law, or Gentile Christians attracted to Jewish observance and to Old-Testament-based exegesis, and on whether they were the same people as the docetists of Smyrnaeans and Trallians or a distinct front (see Against Docetism). The evidence supplies grounds for caution on every side: the Philadelphian dispute is over exegesis and the authority of the “charters” rather than over circumcision or kosher law, and the Philadelphians 6 saying (“Judaism from one uncircumcised”) seems to envisage Gentile Judaizers (Schoedel, Ignatius of Antioch, Hermeneia, 1985, who suggests the Philadelphian Judaizers were “more interested in the idea of Judaism than the practice of it”).

[Disputed: the identity and unity of Ignatius’s Judaizing opponents. (A) That they were Jewish Christians observing the Law (Sabbath, Jewish practice) within or beside the churches — a natural reading of the Sabbath/Lord’s-day contrast of Magnesians 9. (B) That they were Gentile Christians attracted to Judaizing teaching and to an Old-Testament-only standard of proof, more interested in the “idea” than the “practice” of Judaism — the reading favored by Schoedel (Ignatius of Antioch, Hermeneia, 1985), and supported by the “Judaism from one uncircumcised” of Philadelphians 6 and the exegetical character of the Philadelphians 8 dispute. (C) That the Judaizers and the docetists were one and the same movement — a single front of error — versus the view that they were two distinct fronts (Judaizers in Magnesia and Philadelphia, docetists in Smyrna and Tralles), argued most fully by P. J. Donahue (“Jewish Christianity in the Letters of Ignatius of Antioch,” Vigiliae Christianae 32 [1978]: 81–93). The letters do not allow a decisive resolution; Ignatius names the Judaizing in Magnesians and Philadelphians and the docetism in Smyrnaeans and Trallians, and never fully develops both in one letter.]

Reading Ignatius in Context, Not as Later Anti-Judaism

A responsible presentation must distinguish Ignatius’s second-century polemic from the later, hardened Christian anti-Judaism with which it can be confused, and the present collection’s method requires that the figure be set in his own historical frame rather than enlisted for later controversy (see Methodology, §4). Three points keep the distinction clear. First, Ignatius affirms the prophets and the Old Testament: he says the prophets “lived after Christ Jesus” and were “inspired by His grace,” and he treats their writings as Scripture, not as discarded (Ignatius, To the Magnesians 8–9). His quarrel is not with the Scriptures of Israel but with a use of them that would subordinate the Gospel to a proof-from-the-archives (Ignatius, To the Philadelphians 8). Second, his target is ἰουδαΐζειν — a practice that Christians might adopt — not the Jewish people as such; the Philadelphians 6 saying explicitly prefers a circumcised teacher of the Gospel to an uncircumcised teacher of Judaizing. Third, his concern is internal to the church’s unity: Judaizing, like docetism, is for Ignatius a force that pulls believers away from the one bishop and the one assembly (see Monepiscopacy; Unity around the Eucharist). Ignatius writes near the moment when “Christianity” was first being named as a thing distinct from “Judaism,” and his vocabulary registers that emergence; to read him through the lens of much later supersessionist polemic is to flatten a far more delicate historical situation.

Orthodox Reception

Two emphases of the Judaizing polemic enter deeply into Orthodox life. The first is the Lord’s Day. Ignatius’s grounding of Sunday observance in the Resurrection — “the Lord’s day, on which our life also arose through Him” (Ignatius, To the Magnesians 9) — articulates at the very beginning of the second century what would become the settled rhythm of Christian worship: the weekly Pascha of the κυριακή, the day of the Eucharist and of the risen Lord (see Eucharistic Realism). The second is the theme of newness in Christ — the conviction that the hope of the prophets has arrived and that the community now lives “according to the Lord” rather than under the shadow of what pointed to him, while still honoring the Scriptures and prophets of Israel as bearing witness to Christ (see The Church Fathers). Ignatius belongs, with the other Apostolic Fathers, to the earliest stratum of the Church’s reflection on its relation to Israel and to the Law — a witness from the generation immediately after the apostles, and one the Orthodox tradition receives within the larger conciliar and patristic settlement of these questions (see The Apostolic Fathers; The Pre-Schism Church).

References

Ignatius of Antioch. The Seven Epistles (middle recension), esp. To the Magnesians 8–10 and To the Philadelphians 6, 8–9. In The Apostolic Fathers, Part II: S. Ignatius, S. Polycarp, ed. and trans. J. B. Lightfoot, 2nd ed., 3 vols. London: Macmillan, 1885 (1889 reprint). Online: https://www.earlychristianwritings.com/ignatius.html
Roberts, Alexander, and James Donaldson, eds. The Apostolic Fathers with Justin Martyr and Irenaeus. Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1. Buffalo: Christian Literature Company, 1885. (Ignatius, ANF 1.) Online: https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0109.htm
Holmes, Michael W. The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations. 3rd ed. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007. (Greek-English edition; Magnesians and Philadelphians.)
Schoedel, William R. Ignatius of Antioch: A Commentary on the Letters of Ignatius of Antioch. Hermeneia. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985. (Standard critical commentary; on Χριστιανισμός and the identity of the Judaizers.)
Donahue, P. J. “Jewish Christianity in the Letters of Ignatius of Antioch.” Vigiliae Christianae 32, no. 2 (1978): 81–93. (The case for distinguishing Judaizers from docetists.)
Lieu, Judith M. Image and Reality: The Jews in the World of the Christians in the Second Century. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996. (On Ignatius’s “Judaism”/“Christianity” antithesis in its second-century setting.)