The One Surviving Letter

Of everything Polycarp of Smyrna must have written across a long episcopate, a single document survives: his Epistle to the Philippians, a pastoral letter sent to the church at Philippi in the years after Ignatius of Antioch passed through Asia Minor on his way to martyrdom at Rome. Occasioned by the Philippians’ own request and by the disgrace of a fallen presbyter named Valens, it takes righteousness as its governing theme and is remarkable above all for the density of its scriptural quotation — the letter is woven almost continuously out of the words of the New Testament, making it one of the earliest and most important witnesses to the circulation and authority of the apostolic writings. It comes down to us partly in Greek and partly in Latin, with one decisive chapter preserved only because Eusebius chose to quote it.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostolic Father)

The Sole Survivor

Polycarp governed the church of Smyrna for the greater part of the first half of the second century, and he was, by the testimony of those who knew his pupils, a prolific correspondent and teacher whose word carried weight across the churches of Asia. Yet of all that activity exactly one writing has come down under his name: the Epistle to the Philippians. Irenaeus, who as a boy had sat at Polycarp’s feet, recalled that there were “letters which he wrote, either to the neighbouring churches, confirming them, or to certain of the brethren, exhorting and warning them” — a plural that the centuries have reduced to a single survivor (Irenaeus, in Eusebius, HE 5.20; cf. Letter to Florinus). The loss is real, but the one letter that remains is rich enough to make Polycarp a figure of the first importance for the history of the early Church and its Scriptures.

The letter is genuinely Polycarp’s; its authenticity has never been seriously in doubt in the way that the longer recensions of the Ignatian corpus once were. Irenaeus names it, Eusebius quotes from it, and its theology, its sub-apostolic horizon, and its intimate connection to Ignatius all cohere into a single credible occasion in the first quarter of the second century (Eusebius, HE 3.36; 4.14). For the question of how many letters underlie our single text — the celebrated chapter-13 problem — see the companion study The Letter and the Corpus; the present article treats the letter as the Church has received it, a unified pastoral document.

The Occasion: Valens and Ignatius

Two events lie behind the letter, and Polycarp names both. The first is a request from the Philippians themselves. They had written to Smyrna, and Polycarp answers — he opens by rejoicing with them, in the language of Scripture, that the “firmly rooted root” of their faith, proclaimed of old, still bears fruit (Philippians 1). The Philippians had asked him about righteousness, and they had asked him to gather and forward to them the letters of Ignatius; both requests shape what follows (Philippians 3; 13).

The second occasion is a crisis of discipline within the Philippian community. A presbyter named Valens, together with his wife, had fallen — the language of chapter 11 (surviving only in Latin) points to avarice and a betrayal of his office. Polycarp is “exceedingly grieved” for Valens and his wife, and prays that the Lord may grant them “true repentance”; he warns the Philippians to “abstain from covetousness, and to be pure and truthful,” and reminds them that one who “cannot govern himself in these things, how shall he enjoin them upon another?” (Philippians 11). The Valens affair gives the letter much of its moral urgency, and it is no accident that the warning against the love of money recurs as one of the letter’s structural pillars.

Standing behind both occasions is the figure of Ignatius of Antioch, who had recently traveled through Smyrna as a prisoner bound for Rome, where he expected to die in the arena. The Philippians had received Ignatius and his companions as they passed, and Polycarp now answers their inquiry after him and undertakes to send on the collection of Ignatius’s letters (Philippians 1; 9; 13). The shadow of an imminent or accomplished martyrdom falls across the whole letter and conditions its exhortation to steadfastness.

The Theme of Righteousness

When the Philippians asked Polycarp to write to them “concerning righteousness” (peri tēs dikaiosynēs), they asked for the keynote of the whole letter. Polycarp takes it up with a striking display of humility. He will not, he says, presume to match the apostle who founded their church: “neither I, nor any other such one, can come up to the wisdom of the blessed and glorious Paul,” who, when present among them, “accurately and stedfastly taught the word of truth,” and who, when absent, “wrote a letter to you” — letters into which, if they look carefully, they will be able to be “built up in the faith given to you” (Philippians 3). Polycarp positions himself deliberately below the apostolic generation, a man of the sub-apostolic age handing on what he has received rather than originating it.

The content of this righteousness is summed up in a triad. Faith, Polycarp writes, “is the mother of us all,” and it is followed by hope, while love of God and of Christ and of neighbour goes before — “for if any one be in these, he hath fulfilled the command of righteousness; for he that hath love is far from all sin” (Philippians 3). The whole moral teaching of the letter unfolds from this root: righteousness is not an abstract ideal but the concrete shape of a life lived in faith working through love, in obedience to the commandments, in flight from covetousness, and in patient endurance after the pattern of Christ and the martyrs.

Structure and Pastoral Content

The letter is brief — fourteen short chapters — but tightly organized around its theme. After the opening salutation and thanksgiving (chs. 1–2), Polycarp introduces righteousness and grounds it in faith, hope, and love (ch. 3), then moves into a sustained section of moral exhortation built on something very like a household code. He addresses the various ranks and conditions of the community in turn: wives are to love their husbands and train their children in the fear of God; widows are to be “the altar of God,” sober in prayer and free from slander; deacons must be “blameless,” “not slanderers, not double-tongued, not lovers of money”; the young are to be subject to the presbyters and deacons “as to God and Christ”; and presbyters are to be “compassionate, merciful to all, bringing back those that wander, visiting all the sick, not neglecting the widow, the orphan, or the poor,” and keeping themselves “far from all covetousness” (Philippians 4–6).

Against this pastoral backdrop Polycarp inserts a sharp doctrinal warning. “Every one who shall not confess that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh, is antichrist,” he writes, echoing the Johannine standard; “and whosoever shall not confess the testimony of the cross, is of the devil.” Those who “pervert the oracles of the Lord to their own lusts,” who deny resurrection and judgment — these are “the first-born of Satan,” and the brethren are to “forsake the vanity of many and their false doctrines” and turn to “the word which was delivered to us from the beginning” (Philippians 7). The polemic is general rather than named, but it places Polycarp firmly in the line of resistance to docetic and gnosticizing error that his pupil Irenaeus would carry forward (see Irenaeus on Polycarp).

The letter then turns to endurance. Polycarp holds up the example of Christ’s patience and points to those who have “run the course” and now are “in their due place with the Lord” — and here he names Ignatius, Zosimus, and Rufus, along with Paul “and the rest of the apostles,” urging the Philippians to imitate their steadfastness “in all patience” (Philippians 9). The recurring moral targets — avarice above all, but also anger, falsehood, and detraction — return in chapters 10 through 12, where the Valens affair is addressed directly (ch. 11) and the Philippians are exhorted to pray even for their persecutors and for “kings and potentates” (ch. 12). The closing chapters concern the Ignatian correspondence and the dispatch of the letter itself (chs. 13–14).

A Letter Woven Out of Scripture

What sets the Epistle to the Philippians apart from almost every other early Christian writing is the sheer density of its scriptural quotation and allusion. The letter is, in stretches, a near-continuous tissue of New Testament language; scholars counting its biblical references regularly find that Polycarp alludes to or cites the apostolic writings more frequently, per line, than any other of the Apostolic Fathers (Holmes, The Apostolic Fathers, 3rd ed., 2007, intro. to Polycarp; Lightfoot, The Apostolic Fathers Part II, 1885, vol. 1). This makes the letter a document of the first importance not only for Polycarp’s own piety but for the early history of the New Testament canon: it shows which apostolic texts were already circulating, known, and authoritative in Asia Minor within roughly two generations of the apostles.

The most striking single fact is Polycarp’s use of 1 Peter. He quotes and echoes it repeatedly and unmistakably — “wherein ye believe, and rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory”; “girding up your loins, serve God in fear”; the call to abstain from “fleshly lusts which war against the soul”; the affirmation that Christ “bore our sins in his own body on the tree,” and “who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth” (Philippians 1; 2; 5; 8, drawing on 1 Pet 1:8; 1:13; 2:11; 2:22, 24). Polycarp is, in fact, our earliest clear external witness to 1 Peter: he does not name the epistle, but his saturation in its language attests that it was already received and read in his churches (Holmes, Apostolic Fathers, 2007; Lightfoot, Apostolic Fathers Part II, 1885).

Equally pervasive is the Pauline corpus. Polycarp openly reveres Paul and his letters (Philippians 3; 9; 11), and his text is studded with Pauline phrasing drawn from across the range of the corpus — Philippians and Ephesians, Galatians and Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, and notably the Pastoral Epistles. His handling of avarice leans directly on 1 Timothy 6:10: “the love of money is the root of all evils” — which Polycarp paraphrases when he warns that “the love of money is the beginning of all troubles,” adding from the same context, “we brought nothing into the world, and we can carry nothing out” (Philippians 4, citing 1 Tim 6:7, 10). The presence of the Pastorals in so early and so unguarded a use is a significant datum in the debate over their date and reception (Hartog, Polycarp’s Epistle to the Philippians and the Martyrdom of Polycarp, Oxford, 2013).

Beyond Peter and Paul, the letter draws on 1 John for its christological test of the spirits — “every one who shall not confess that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh, is antichrist” (Philippians 7, echoing 1 John 4:2–3) — and on the Gospel of Matthew and the wider Synoptic tradition for the words of the Lord. Polycarp twice gathers dominical sayings into his exhortation: “Judge not, that ye be not judged; forgive, and it shall be forgiven unto you; be merciful, that ye may obtain mercy; with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again,” and the beatitude on the poor and the persecuted (Philippians 2, drawing on Matt 7:1–2; 5:3, 10; Luke 6:36–38). He knows Acts as well, alluding to its description of the resurrection in his confession that God “raised up our Lord Jesus Christ… whom God raised, having loosed the pains of Hades” (Philippians 1; 2, echoing Acts 2:24). The cumulative effect is of a writer whose mind and speech have been thoroughly formed by the apostolic writings, quoting them by instinct rather than by deliberate proof-texting.

The Silence of the Old Testament

Against this saturation in the New Testament stands a curious and much-noted silence: Polycarp scarcely cites the Old Testament at all. Where his contemporaries among the Apostolic Fathers — Clement of Rome above all, but also Barnabas and Justin — argue at length from the law and the prophets, Polycarp’s scriptural mind runs almost entirely along apostolic channels. There is a rare exception, such as his allusion to Tobit’s “alms delivereth from death” (Philippians 10), but the overall pattern is unmistakable and unusual for its age (Lightfoot, Apostolic Fathers Part II, 1885; Hartog, Oxford, 2013). The contrast is itself a historical witness: in Polycarp’s Asia the authority and the working vocabulary of the apostolic writings had already grown so strong that they could carry the weight of a whole pastoral letter, with the Hebrew Scriptures receding into the background.

The Text and Its Transmission

The way the letter survives is itself part of its story, and it bears directly on the corpus question treated separately. The full Greek text of the Epistle to the Philippians is not preserved. The Greek manuscripts break off in the middle of chapter 9 — and, because of a confusion in the manuscript tradition, the Greek of Polycarp’s letter to that point runs on directly into the Epistle of Barnabas, so that the two were long transmitted as a single work. For everything from chapter 9 onward — including the crucial disciplinary material on Valens (ch. 11) and the discussion of the Ignatian letters (ch. 13) — we depend on an old Latin version (Lightfoot, Apostolic Fathers Part II, 1885, vol. 1; Holmes, Apostolic Fathers, 2007).

There is, however, one priceless exception. Eusebius of Caesarea, in the third book of his Ecclesiastical History, quotes chapter 13 of the letter in Greek — the passage in which Polycarp tells the Philippians that he is sending them “the letters of Ignatius which were sent to us by him, and others as many as we had by us” (Eusebius, HE 3.36). Eusebius’s quotation thus rescues the single most disputed chapter from the uncertainties of the Latin and preserves it in something close to Polycarp’s own words. That this chapter is also the linchpin of the debate over the letter’s unity and the dating of Ignatius’s martyrdom makes Eusebius’s choice to quote it one of the more consequential acts of early Christian historiography — a matter pursued in The Letter and the Corpus.

References

Polycarp of Smyrna. Epistle to the Philippians. Cited by chapter throughout (esp. chs. 1–13). Greek (to ch. 9) and Latin (chs. 9–14).
Holmes, Michael W. The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations. 3rd ed. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007. Text, translation, and introduction to Polycarp’s Philippians; the scriptural index and the witness to 1 Peter and the Pauline corpus.
Lightfoot, J. B. The Apostolic Fathers, Part II: S. Ignatius, S. Polycarp. 2nd ed. London: Macmillan, 1889 (1st ed. 1885). The standard critical edition; on the Greek/Latin transmission, the Barnabas confusion, and the density of New Testament citation.
Hartog, Paul. Polycarp’s Epistle to the Philippians and the Martyrdom of Polycarp: Introduction, Text, and Commentary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. On the scriptural usage, the paucity of Old Testament citation, and the letter’s occasion and unity.
The Apostle’s Teaching [Ante-Nicene Fathers], vol. 1, ed. Roberts and Donaldson. The Epistle of Polycarp to the Philippians. Older standard English translation (ANF).
Eusebius of Caesarea. Ecclesiastical History (Historia Ecclesiastica) 3.36; 4.14; 5.20. Quotes Philippians 13 in Greek; attests the letter and Irenaeus’s testimony to Polycarp’s correspondence.