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Apologetics in the Letters of St Ignatius of Antioch

Today is the Feast of St Ignatius of Antioch, a very important figure in the early Church. He was the third bishop of Antioch (Peter being the first, before Peter went to Rome), and also a disciple of the Apostle John. He was martyred in the Roman Coliseum circa 107 AD, having been thrown to wild beasts.

On the way to his martyrdom, Ignatius was chained to Roman soldiers who treated him quite brutally. Ignatius called them the “ten leopards”. He also wrote seven famous letters to key outposts of the nascent Church. These missives are rife with evidence that the Early Church was, in fact, the Catholic Church.

Let’s take a look at just two important apologetic facets of just one of these letters, the one written to Smyrna, a city mentioned as an early Church hub in the Book of Revelation.

Ignatius is the first person to use the term “Catholic Church” in an extant writing. The fact that he doesn’t explain the term in any way is likely a sign that he expected his readers to know what he meant by it, and that the term predates his use of it in 107 AD. The word “catholic” comes from the Greek term kata holos, which means “universal” and also “according to the whole”. This perfectly describes the Church founded by Christ, for it is “universal” (for people of all times and places), and also keeps the “whole” of Christ’s teaching intact. Splinter groups who have departed the Church over the centuries usually reject one or more doctrines of the universal Church.

See that you all follow the bishop, even as Jesus Christ does the Father, and the presbytery as you would the apostles; and reverence the deacons, as being the institution of God. Let no man do anything connected with the Church without the bishop. Let that be deemed a proper Eucharist, which is administered either by the bishop, or by one to whom he has entrusted it. Wherever the bishop shall appear, there let the multitude of the people also be; even as wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church.

—Letter to the Smyrnaeans, Chapter 8

We may note also in this quote the hierarchical offices of bishop, priest (“priest” is the English translation of “presbyter”), and deacon as being essential features of the Church. Ignatius also speaks here of a “proper Eucharist” as one either a) celebrated by a bishop himself, or b) by his designates (the priests, or “presbyters”), with whom the bishop shares some of his prerogatives, such as the ability to confect the Eucharist. But did the early Christians believe in Eucharistic realism? The Smyrnaean letter once again comes through:

Take note of those who hold heterodox opinions on the grace of Jesus Christ which has come to us, and see how contrary their opinions are to the mind of God… They abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer, because they do not confess that the Eucharist is the Flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ, Flesh which suffered for our sins and which the Father, in his goodness, raised up again. They who deny the gift of God are perishing in their disputes.

— Letter to the Smyrnaeans, Chapter 6

Ignatius explicits says that the Eucharist is the Flesh of the same Jesus who died on the cross and was resurrected on the third day. This coheres very nicely with the words of Jesus himself in John 6:51: “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh”.

There is, in my view, a very good argument for John the apostle as the source of the material found in John 6. We also know that Ignatius of Antioch was a disciple of John himself. So, I think Ignatius had a pretty good idea of what John — and, by extension, Jesus, meant in John 6:51. Ignatius confirms that the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist is an essential feature of the apostolic Church founded by Jesus himself.

St Ignatius of Antioch, pray for us.

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Athanasius and the Myth of the “Great Apostasy”

Athanasius

Rod Bennett, author of some great books on the early Church, was interviewed about today’s feast of St. Athanasius over on the Catholic Answers blog:

The theory goes like this: just a few centuries after Christ’s death, around the time the Roman Empire converted to Christianity, the true Faith suffered a catastrophic falling-away. The simple truths of the gospel became so obscured by worldliness and pagan idolatry, kicking off the Dark Ages of Catholicism, that Christianity required a complete reboot.

This idea of a “Great Apostasy” is one of the cornerstones of American Protestantism, along with Mormonism, the Jehovah s Witnesses, and even Islam. Countless millions today profess a faith built on the assumption that the early Church quickly became broken beyond repair, requiring some new prophet or reformer to restore the pure teaching of Jesus and the apostles.

This theory is popular—but it’s also fiction. In his book The Apostasy that Wasn’t, Rod Bennett narrates the drama of the early Church’s fight to preserve Christian orthodoxy, even as powerful forces try to destroy it. Amid imperial intrigue and bitter theological debate, a hero arose: the homely little monk Athanasius, a Father of the Church, whose feast we celebrate on May 2. Athanasius stood against the world to prove that there could never be a Great Apostasy, because Jesus promised his Church would never be broken.

We asked Bennett to elaborate on this influential myth and why, logically, it couldn’t have occurred.

Q. What is the Great Apostasy?

Bennett: It’s one of the cornerstones of American religion, actually—the notion that the original Church founded by Jesus and his apostles went bust somewhere along the line and had to be restored by some latter-day prophet or reformer. Most of our Christian denominations here in the Unites States teach the idea in one form or another, though, significantly, they usually disagree completely on which “Second Founder” ought to be followed.

Usually, they date the collapse to the conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine in A.D. 313 and his subsequent adoption of Christianity for the whole Roman Empire. In doing this, he transformed the Christian Church (or so the story goes) from a simple body of pure, New Testament believers into the state religion of the Roman Empire.

This made Church membership socially advantageous for the first time, which brought in a vast flood of half-converted pagans who were admitted with minimal fuss by a mere external act of baptism. And this, in turn, subverted the original Faith so seriously that a Dark Age of idolatry and superstition was the result, a “great falling away” so serious that it required, in the end, a complete “reboot” from heaven.

Q. Where did the notion of the Great Apostasy find its beginnings?

Well, if you think about it, any group that has a short historical pedigree—founded, as most of our denominations have been, within the last few centuries of Christianity’s very long timeline—will be driven to the idea eventually. If you find that your church was founded in the twentieth century (or the nineteenth or the sixteenth) and teaches things no one was teaching in the fourteenth, the tenth, or the fifth century, then you’re going to have to account for that fact somehow.

The most common solution has been to offer a “conspiracy theory” of some kind: this idea that the early Church actually did teach Jehovah’s Witness or Seventh-day Adventism or Unitarianism or what have you, but the “powers that be” hushed the original version up—burned their books, forced them underground, and so forth. The whole “Da Vinci Code” phenomenon from a few years back was based on the same idea.

For the whole interview, including an Bennett’s interesting comparison of Constantine to a guy who marries a rich woman, click here.

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