The Bond

The single most securely attested personal friendship in the sub-apostolic age is the bond between Polycarp of Smyrna and Ignatius of Antioch. When the condemned bishop of Antioch passed through Smyrna under military guard on his way to martyrdom at Rome, he met the younger Polycarp face to face, and from Smyrna and then from Troas he honored that meeting with a stream of letters — culminating in his Letter to Polycarp, in which a martyr soon to die hands over to a young bishop the whole burden of the pastoral office. The relationship that the surviving documents disclose is at once a personal friendship, a portrait of the early episcopate, and a window onto the communion of the churches of Roman Asia.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostolic Father)

Ignatius’s Journey and the Meeting at Smyrna

Ignatius, the second or third bishop of Antioch in Syria, was condemned to death during the reign of Trajan and dispatched to Rome to be thrown to the beasts in the amphitheatre, a journey conventionally dated to the years between c. 108 and c. 117 (Eusebius, HE 3.36; Holmes 2007, on the Ignatian corpus). He travelled overland across Asia Minor in the custody of a detachment of soldiers whom he describes with bitter wit as “ten leopards,” a guard “who only get worse when they are well treated” (Ignatius, To the Romans 5; Holmes 2007). The route brought him through the cities of the province of Asia, and at Smyrna he halted for a time — long enough to receive delegations from the surrounding churches and to be received by the church of Smyrna and its bishop (Eusebius, HE 3.36; Lightfoot 1885).

It was at Smyrna that Ignatius and Polycarp met. The encounter is attested from both sides of the relationship and from independent later witnesses: Ignatius writes to the Smyrnaeans and to their bishop directly, and Polycarp in turn writes of Ignatius as a man he has known (Ignatius, To the Smyrnaeans, salutation; To Polycarp 1; Polycarp, Philippians 9, 13; Eusebius, HE 3.36). This is the only securely attested face-to-face meeting between two named Apostolic Fathers — a fact of some weight for the history of the period, since it gives us a documented point of personal contact within the otherwise thinly evidenced second generation after the apostles (Holmes 2007; on the sub-apostolic generation, see The Sub-Apostolic Age).

From Smyrna, Ignatius composed four of his seven letters — to the Ephesians, the Magnesians, the Trallians, and the Romans — each addressed to a church whose envoys had come to greet him on his road (Eusebius, HE 3.36; Lightfoot 1885; Holmes 2007). The hospitality of Smyrna thus became the workshop in which a substantial part of the Ignatian corpus was written, and Polycarp’s city the place from which the dying bishop’s voice went out to the churches of Asia and to Rome. When Ignatius moved on to Troas, on the coast, he wrote three further letters — to the Philadelphians, to the Smyrnaeans, and, last, to Polycarp himself (Eusebius, HE 3.36; Holmes 2007). The geography of the journey is mirrored in the structure of the corpus, and Smyrna stands at its centre.

The Letter to Polycarp

The Letter to Polycarp is unique among the seven letters in that it is addressed not to a community but to a single man, and to a man whom Ignatius names as bishop: it is headed to “Polycarp, bishop of the church of the Smyrnaeans” (Ignatius, To Polycarp, salutation; Holmes 2007). It is, in effect, an elder martyr’s pastoral charge to a younger colleague — and its tone throughout is that of one bishop forming another in the duties of the office he is about to lay down.

The exhortations are concrete and unmistakably episcopal. Ignatius urges Polycarp to “bear the infirmities of all, as a perfect athlete” and to “bear with all people, even as the Lord bears with you” (Ignatius, To Polycarp 1; Holmes 2007). He counsels patience with difficult members of the flock, vigilance against false teachers, and constancy in prayer; he tells the young bishop to “ask for greater understanding than you have,” to “be watchful, possessing a spirit that never sleeps,” and to speak with each person individually “after the manner of God” (Ignatius, To Polycarp 1–2; Holmes 2007). The pastoral counsel reaches into the ordinary life of the congregation: Ignatius bids Polycarp not to despise slaves, yet not to let them grow puffed up; he addresses the widows, who are to be cared for and not neglected; and he gives directions on Christian marriage, that those who marry should do so “with the consent of the bishop, that the marriage may be in accordance with the Lord and not in accordance with lust” (Ignatius, To Polycarp 4–5; Holmes 2007). The letter is, in miniature, a manual of the bishop’s care of souls.

At the heart of the letter stand two great images. The first is the anvil: “Stand firm, as an anvil that is struck. It is the part of a great athlete to be bruised and yet to conquer” (Ignatius, To Polycarp 3; Holmes 2007). The image fuses endurance and immovability — the bishop is to receive the blows of persecution and false doctrine without being moved from his place — and it has become the most quoted line of the whole letter. The second is the military metaphor that governs the closing chapters: Ignatius bids Polycarp “please the One whose soldiers you are, and from whom you will receive your pay,” and develops the figure of the Christian as a soldier on campaign — keeping his baptism as a shield, faith as a helmet, love as a spear, endurance as full armour (Ignatius, To Polycarp 6; Holmes 2007; Lightfoot 1885). The anvil and the soldier together carry the letter’s single message: the steadfastness of a shepherd under pressure.

What gives the Letter to Polycarp its peculiar pathos is the situation of its author. Ignatius writes as a man already condemned, eager for the death that awaits him at Rome, and conscious that his time for instruction is nearly spent — at the close he asks Polycarp to convene a council and to choose a messenger to carry greetings to the church of Antioch, business he is entrusting to the younger man precisely because he himself will not return (Ignatius, To Polycarp 7–8; Holmes 2007). The letter is therefore a handover: the office of the bishop, with all its burdens, is being pressed by a dying elder into the hands of a young successor who would, in the event, bear it for more than four decades and crown it with his own martyrdom. The full personal portrait of Polycarp as bishop that emerges from these exhortations is treated in the foundational material on Smyrna (see Smyrna and the Apostolic Link).

What the Bond Reveals: Episcopate and Communion

The relationship discloses, first, the shape of the early episcopate. Ignatius is the great early witness to the threefold ministry of bishop, presbyters, and deacons, and to the bishop as the visible centre of the local church’s unity — “wherever the bishop appears, there let the congregation be” (Ignatius, To the Smyrnaeans 8; Holmes 2007). The Letter to Polycarp shows that doctrine in operation between two actual bishops: an established figure addressing a younger one, taking for granted that Polycarp governs the Smyrnaean church as its single head, that he presides over its presbyters, that the care of widows and slaves and the regulation of marriage fall to him (Ignatius, To Polycarp 4–6; To the Smyrnaeans 8; Lightfoot 1885; Holmes 2007). The Ignatian episcopate is not an abstraction here but a lived office passing from one holder to another.

The bond reveals, second, the communion of the churches of Asia. Ignatius’s whole journey is a chain of fellowship: delegations from Ephesus, Magnesia, Tralles, and the rest come to greet the condemned bishop, and he answers each church with a letter (Eusebius, HE 3.36; Ignatius, To the Ephesians 1–2; To the Magnesians 2; To the Trallians 1; Holmes 2007). Smyrna is the hub of this network, the city where the churches converge and from which the letters flow. Ignatius asks Polycarp to write to “the churches that are nearby” on his behalf, to send messengers and letters in every direction, treating the bishop of Smyrna as a node through which the wider communion is maintained (Ignatius, To Polycarp 7–8; Holmes 2007). The personal friendship of two men is, in this light, the visible point of a much larger web — the mutual recognition and intercommunion of the sub-apostolic churches of Roman Asia.

Third, the bond shows the transmission of a single ideal of martyrdom. Ignatius travels toward death not in dread but in longing, begging the Roman Christians not to intervene to save him: “I am God’s wheat, and I am ground by the teeth of wild beasts that I may be found pure bread” (Ignatius, To the Romans 4; Holmes 2007). That ardent theology of witness was conveyed at Smyrna to a man who would, decades later, meet his own death with comparable resolve, and whose martyrdom would be recorded as a model for the church (see The Martyrium Polycarpi; on the theology of witness, Eighty-Six Years).

Polycarp’s Veneration of Ignatius as Martyr

The bond did not end at Smyrna. When Polycarp wrote his own surviving letter, the Epistle to the Philippians, he held up Ignatius — together with the apostle Paul and the other martyrs — as a pattern of endurance for the Philippian church to imitate. He exhorts them to “be imitators” of the patient suffering of those who have gone before, naming Ignatius, Zosimus, and Rufus among them, men who “did not run in vain but in faith and righteousness, and are now in their due place with the Lord, with whom they also suffered” (Polycarp, Philippians 9; Holmes 2007; ANF Vol. 1). The younger bishop thus venerates his friend not merely as a colleague but as a witness who has attained his reward — an early instance of the cult of the martyrs among the very generation that produced them.

The same chapter shows that Polycarp regarded Ignatius’s death as more than a personal loss; it was an example to be set before another church for its edification. The transition is striking: the man who had received Ignatius at Smyrna, who had been charged by him in the Letter to Polycarp, now teaches a distant congregation to look to Ignatius’s suffering as a school of faith (Polycarp, Philippians 9, 13; Holmes 2007; Lightfoot 1885). The friendship begun in a face-to-face meeting under guard became, in Polycarp’s hands, a piece of the church’s memory — the means by which Ignatius’s witness was carried beyond Asia to Macedonia and, through the letters Polycarp gathered, to the whole later church. That gathering and forwarding of the Ignatian letters, which makes Polycarp the founder of the Ignatian corpus and the earliest external witness to Ignatius, is the subject of the companion study (see The Transmission of Ignatius).

References

Holmes, Michael W., ed. and trans. The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations. 3rd ed. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007. (Ignatius, To Polycarp 1–8; To the Smyrnaeans 7–8; To the Romans 4–5; To the Ephesians 1–2; To the Magnesians 2; To the Trallians 1; Polycarp, Philippians 9, 13.)
Lightfoot, J. B. The Apostolic Fathers, Part II: S. Ignatius, S. Polycarp. 2nd ed. London: Macmillan, 1885. (Text, translation, and commentary on the journey, the meeting at Smyrna, and the Letter to Polycarp; establishment of the middle recension.)
The Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1. Edited by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson. (English translations of Ignatius’s letters and Polycarp’s Philippians.)
Eusebius of Caesarea. Ecclesiastical History (HE) 3.36. (The journey under guard; the meeting at Smyrna; the four letters from Smyrna and three from Troas; the list of the seven letters; quotation of Polycarp’s Philippians on Ignatius.)