The Letter to the Romans

Alone among the seven authentic letters, To the Romans warns of no heresy and exhorts no obedience to a bishop; its whole burden is a single, anguished plea that the Christians of Rome use none of their influence to spare Ignatius from the beasts. Written from Smyrna and internally dated to 24 August, it opens with the longest and most laudatory salutation in the corpus — an address to the Roman church studded with honorifics, naming it as the church that “presides in the country of the region of the Romans” and that “presides over love.” This file reads the letter as a whole; its disputed prescript-phrase is treated separately in Presides in Love.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostolic Father)

A Letter Unlike the Other Six

Among the seven letters of the middle recension, To the Romans is the anomaly, and every reader of the corpus notices it at once. The six other letters are occupied with two great concerns — the unity of each local church around its bishop, presbytery, and deacons, and the defense of the reality of Christ’s flesh against docetic and Judaizing teachers (see The Corpus). To the Romans contains neither. It issues no warning against false teachers; it names no Roman bishop and gives no exhortation to obey one; it offers no instruction in church order at all (Ignatius, To the Romans, salutation–10; trans. Lightfoot). Its single, overwhelming preoccupation is Ignatius’s own coming martyrdom and his fear that the Roman Christians, out of love for him, will intervene to obtain his release.

This silence about the Roman bishop is itself a datum that later interpreters have weighed heavily, in opposite directions, and it is one of the threads that runs into the disputed reading of the prescript (see Presides in Love). For the present file the point is structural: the letter that addresses the church of the imperial capital is the one letter in which Ignatius does not deploy his characteristic ecclesiology of the single bishop (Ignatius, To the Magnesians 6; To the Trallians 3; see Monepiscopacy). Whatever the reason — that he did not know the Roman bishop’s name, that he had no occasion to instruct a church he was approaching as a condemned prisoner, or that the genre of the letter (a personal petition) simply did not call for it — the absence is real and shapes the letter’s whole character.

Place and Date of Writing

The letter was written from Smyrna, the city on the Aegean coast of Asia where Ignatius was detained for a time under guard and received delegations from the neighboring churches (see The Road Through Asia). Ignatius says so himself in the letter’s closing chapter: “I write these things to you from Smyrna by the hand of the Ephesians who are worthy of all felicitation” (Ignatius, To the Romans 10; trans. Lightfoot). The Ephesian delegation, headed by their bishop Onesimus, had come to greet the prisoner at Smyrna, and Ignatius entrusted the letter to them to carry westward ahead of him; it thus belongs to the Smyrnaean cluster of four letters, dispatched before the journey moved on to Troas (see Arrest and Condemnation).

Uniquely in the corpus, the letter carries a precise calendar date. In the same closing chapter Ignatius notes that he writes “on the ninth day before the Kalends of September” (Ignatius, To the Romans 10; trans. Lightfoot) — the Roman inclusive reckoning that corresponds to 24 August. No other letter of the seven is dated to the day, and the notice is doubly valuable: it fixes a fixed point in the chronology of the journey, and it confirms that To the Romans was sent ahead of Ignatius’s own arrival, since he is still in Asia on 24 August while begging a church in Italy to take no action on his behalf (Lightfoot, The Apostolic Fathers, Part II, vol. 2, ad loc.). The year cannot be fixed with the same precision and depends on the broader question of Ignatius’s dates under Trajan (see The Dating Problem).

The Salutation: The Longest and Most Laudatory in the Corpus

Every Ignatian letter opens with an elaborate salutation, but the one prefixed to To the Romans is by common consent the longest and most ornate of the seven. Where the other prescripts greet a church briefly before turning to business, this one heaps honorific upon honorific. In Lightfoot’s translation it runs: “Ignatius, who is also Theophorus, unto her that hath found mercy in the bountifulness of the Father Most High and of Jesus Christ His only Son; to the church that is beloved and enlightened through the will of Him who willed all things that are, by faith and love towards Jesus Christ our God; even unto her that hath the presidency in the country of the region of the Romans, being worthy of God, worthy of honour, worthy of felicitation, worthy of praise, worthy of success, worthy in purity, and having the presidency of love, walking in the law of Christ and bearing the Father’s name” (Ignatius, To the Romans, salutation; trans. Lightfoot).

The cascade of adjectives is unmistakable in the Greek, where six compounds in axio- (“worthy of…”) stand in a row: ἀξιόθεος, ἀξιοπρεπής, ἀξιομακάριστος, ἀξιέπαινος, ἀξιεπίτευκτος, ἀξίαγνος (“worthy of God, worthy of honour, worthy of felicitation, worthy of praise, worthy of success, worthy in purity”) (Ignatius, To the Romans, salutation; trans. Lightfoot). No other church in the corpus is greeted with anything approaching this density of praise. The two phrases that have drawn the most attention bracket the list: the church “presides in the country of the region of the Romans” (ἥτις καὶ προκάθηται ἐν τόπῳ χωρίου Ῥωμαίων) and is “presiding over love” (προκαθημένη τῆς ἀγάπης) (Ignatius, To the Romans, salutation; trans. Lightfoot). What the doubled verb προκαθ- (“to preside”) means here — a presidency of honor and charity, or a presidency of rank and authority — is precisely the contested question, and it is reserved for separate, even-handed treatment (see Presides in Love). For the purposes of reading the letter as a whole, the salient fact is the tone: Ignatius approaches the Roman church with a warmth and deference that exceed his address to any other community.

“Ye Were the Teachers of Others”

That tone of honor continues into the body of the letter. In its third chapter Ignatius tells the Roman Christians that they have never been grudging or envious toward others and that they have been instructors of the faith: “Ye never grudged any one; ye were the instructors of others” (Ignatius, To the Romans 3; trans. Lightfoot). The remark credits Rome with a teaching role — the church of the capital as a community from which others had learned — and Ignatius adds that his own desire is that the lessons they teach should hold firm (Ignatius, To the Romans 3; trans. Lightfoot). Holmes renders the same passage with Ignatius noting that Rome has “taught others,” echoing the sense that the Roman church enjoyed a recognized standing as a source of instruction (Ignatius, To the Romans 3; trans. Holmes, The Apostolic Fathers, 3rd ed.).

This is the high-water mark of Ignatius’s deference, and it is the textual basis on which much later discussion of Roman precedence is built. It is worth stressing, for accuracy, what the chapter does and does not say in its immediate context: Ignatius praises Rome’s past generosity and its role as a teacher, and in the same breath he turns the compliment toward his own petition — he does not want their teaching authority used now to overrule his desire to die (Ignatius, To the Romans 3–4; trans. Lightfoot). The honor and the plea are intertwined throughout the letter, and the question of how far the honor amounts to a claim of jurisdiction is taken up where it belongs (see Presides in Love).

The Plea: That Their Love Not “Harm” Him

The heart of the letter, and the reason it exists, is a sustained and almost paradoxical request: Ignatius begs the Roman Christians not to help him. He fears that their love and their influence in the capital might be turned to securing his release, and so depriving him of the martyrdom he longs for. “I fear your love,” he writes, “lest it do me wrong”; for if they intervene, it will be hard for him “to attain unto God,” and he will have to be born again to win the prize (Ignatius, To the Romans 1–2; trans. Lightfoot). He asks them only to pray that he may have strength within and without, “that I may not only say it but also desire it; that I may not merely be called a Christian, but also be found one” (Ignatius, To the Romans 3; trans. Lightfoot).

The petition rises to the most famous sentence Ignatius ever wrote — his image of himself as grain to be milled in the arena: “I am God’s wheat, and I am ground by the teeth of the wild beasts, that I may be found pure bread of Christ” (Ignatius, To the Romans 4; trans. Lightfoot; quoted also by Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.36.7–9; trans. NPNF II/1). He enumerates the deaths he is ready to suffer — fire, cross, beasts, the wrenching of bones, the crushing of his whole body — and entreats the Romans to “let me be given to the wild beasts, for through them I can attain unto God” (Ignatius, To the Romans 4–5; trans. Lightfoot). The theology that animates this longing — martyrdom as the imitation of the Passion and the consummation of discipleship — is treated in its own section and is only the engine of the present letter, not its subject (see Wheat of God; Imitation of the Passion). What is distinctive about To the Romans is that this longing is bent into a request directed at a specific church with the specific power to thwart it: the prisoner’s whole rhetoric of honor toward Rome is harnessed to the single end of persuading Rome to stand aside.

A Text-Critical Peculiarity: Transmitted Apart from the Corpus

The Letter to the Romans presents a distinctive problem in the transmission of the Ignatian corpus, and it is one of the reasons the letter can be discussed almost as a separate document. In the manuscript tradition of the middle recension, the six other Greek letters are preserved together in the eleventh-century Codex Mediceus (Laurentianus 57.7), the chief Greek witness; but To the Romans is absent from that manuscript (Lightfoot, The Apostolic Fathers, Part II, vol. 2). The reason is that the Letter to the Romans circulated separately, having been taken up into the Martyrium Ignatii — the later “Antiochene Acts” narrating Ignatius’s death — where it was embedded as part of the account of the saint’s passion. Its survival in Greek therefore depends not on the main epistolary collection but on the manuscripts of the martyrdom-narrative and on the ancient versions (Lightfoot, The Apostolic Fathers, Part II, vol. 2; cf. the synthesis in The Recension Problem).

This is a fact about the corpus rather than an argument about authenticity: the letter is securely Ignatian — Eusebius quotes from it by name in the early fourth century (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.36; trans. NPNF II/1) — but its separate vehicle of transmission means that its text is established along a partly independent line from the rest of the seven (see The Corpus; Modern Scholarship). For the history of interpretation this has a curious consequence: the letter that would become the most quoted in debates over the standing of the Roman church was, materially, the one most likely to be read on its own, detached from the other six and framed by the story of a martyr’s death.

The Letter’s Place in the Collection

Read in its setting, To the Romans is the pivot of this section of the collection. It supplies the prescript whose two προκαθ- phrases generate the contested question of Roman precedence (see Presides in Love); it is the source of the martyrdom-theology that the seventh section unfolds (see Wheat of God); and it is, in its tone of unmatched deference toward Rome, the chief patristic text behind both the Orthodox account of Rome’s primacy of honor and the Roman account of an early avowal of Roman primacy. The letter itself does not adjudicate between those readings. It is a condemned bishop’s petition, written from Smyrna on 24 August, addressed with extraordinary honor to a church he was about to die under, asking that church for one thing only: to let him die (Ignatius, To the Romans 1–10; trans. Lightfoot).

References

Ignatius of Antioch. To the Romans. In The Apostolic Fathers, Part II: S. Ignatius, S. Polycarp, ed. and trans. J. B. Lightfoot, 2nd ed., 3 vols. London: Macmillan, 1889. Greek text and English translation of the middle recension. Online: https://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/ignatius-romans-lightfoot.html
Holmes, Michael W. The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations. 3rd ed. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007. Greek-English edition of To the Romans with introduction.
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. (ANF 1.) Online: https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0107.htm
Eusebius of Caesarea. Ecclesiastical History 3.36. Trans. Arthur C. McGiffert, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 1. Buffalo: Christian Literature Company, 1890. Online: https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/250103.htm
J. B. Lightfoot. The Apostolic Fathers, Part II: S. Ignatius, S. Polycarp, 2nd ed., 3 vols. London: Macmillan, 1889. The standard critical edition: the Greek text of To the Romans, its transmission within the Martyrium Ignatii, its absence from Codex Mediceus, and the dating of the letter.