Bread for Beasts

On the Relics of St. Ignatius of Antioch, whether or not we have a real account of his martyrdom, and what it tells us about the cult of the saints in Early Christianity

Leave me to be bread for the beasts…
so that they may be my tomb
and nothing be left un-devoured
so that I become no burden to anyone
when I am dead.

St. Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the Romans

This is part of a continuing series of longer, paywalled posts called On Relics. They will contain generous previews, but the complete posts require a subscription.

“Of all religions,” writes medievalist Robert Bartlett, “Christianity is the one most concerned with dead bodies.”¹ True, but why, and how soon after the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus did this practice take hold?

We begin with the obvious: there are no relics of Jesus, because His body dwells in glory. We next must turn figures of the New Testament, such as the proto-martyr and deacon St. Stephen, the first person killed for preaching Christ. The Bible is silent about the disposition of his remains, which were only rediscovered 400 years later. Instead, we have to consider two of the earliest martyrs who left some independent paper trail along with their relics.

Witnesses of the Body

A “martyr” was a witness to the faith, and the instrument of his witness was not merely words or acts but his very body. The Roman hunger for making a spectacle of violent death created a forum for this young religion to witness not only to their courage and devotion to the Lord, but to a central dogma of the faith: the resurrection of the body. This was a bizarre belief for many in the classical world, who would largely have agreed with Plato and other philosophers that the body was best shed so the soul could move on to a truer, more pure existence.

Christian persecution was not continuous in the first centuries of the church, but when it did come, it was vicious. Sometimes decades might pass without widespread anti-Christian actions, but there was always danger, and the persecutions were a harrowing experience which left their mark on communal memory. Nero (64), Domitian (95), Trajan (108, localized and more moderate), Marcus Aurelius (177). Septimus Severus (202), Maximus (235), Decius (250, particularly vicious), Valerian (257), Aurelian (275), and Diocletian (303) all instituted persecutions that were sometimes less deadly and sometimes more, with the last one continuing for years in an attempt to eradicate the faith root and branch. During each, however, the church produced martyrs.²

Trajan, Emperor when Ignatius was martyred

Those who gave this ultimate witness to the truth of Christ were considered heroic: models to be not merely emulated, but invoked. They were truly in heaven at the side of the Lord, and this proximity enabled them to act as a bridge between the material and the divine. Their remains were holy because they themselves were holy, and these bodies would participate in the resurrection.

What We Can Know

The names of the holy dead were recorded by local churches, sometimes with little more than a date of death, but occasionally with details of their lives, virtues, sufferings, and, most importantly, the miracles attributed to their intercession. Cloths were soaked in their blood and passed from one community of Christians to another. Remains were collected when possible, and venerated. Their tombs, often found in cemeteries outside the walls of the city, became gathering places for the faithful, particularly on the anniversary of the saint’s birth into heaven.

The martyr accounts we have today can be like archaeological sites, sometimes having strata of embellishment. Some are true accounts, some are simply fabricated, and others have a mixture of reliable and unreliable information. Even St. Jacobus recognized this and says as much at certain points of the Golden Legend, when he notes certain details which he notes are merely legendary or figurative for didactic purposes. The Golden Legend, after all, was a preaching tool, and certain elements of a Vita might be symbolic in order to draw out a particular element of a saint’s life for a lesson.

The first martyr account is that of the deacon St. Stephen in Acts of the Apostles, but it doesn’t mention relics in any meaningful way. For that we have to wait for the separate martyrdoms of two friends: one whose account was corrupted over the years (and is believed to be wholly fabricated by some), and one who left behind one of the earliest authentic, extra-Biblical stories of martyrdom: Ignatius, and his friend Polycarp.

The Life and Death of St. Ignatius of Antioch

We might as well begin with a controversy, because that’s just how things roll when you’re writing about church history. The Acta Martyrii S. Ignatii is a problematic group of texts. The main text is sometimes called The Colbertine Martyrdom of St. Ignatius after the manuscript (Codex Colbertinus) where it was recorded in Paris in the 10th century, and claims to be an eyewitness account of the death of St. Ignatius of Antioch, the second or third bishop of Antioch and, along with Polycarp, a disciple of St. John.

Theodoret claims that St. Peter himself appointed Ignatius to the see³, where he became a beloved leader of the Antiochian Christians. He survived the persecutions of Domitian (81-96), but when Trajan ordered the faithful to worship the gods under pain of death, the bishop went to Rome, probably under arrest, either to plea his case or simply to meet his death.

On his way, he wrote seven remarkable letters on the faith to various communities of Christians, as well as to Polycarp. (Six more letters were later added to the corpus by someone else, and are considered spurious.) He was devoured by beasts in the arena in 107. Jerome, Eusebius, Chrysostom, and others all attest to details of Ignatius’s life.

Some reformation figures, particularly Calvinists, hold all of the letters to be fraudulent because they attest to the Catholic nature of the early church, with Calvin himself railing against them in his Institutes. Of course the letters are genuine, and Calvinists object to their veracity because in them, a bishop of the first century attests to the eucharist, papal primacy, the hierarchical nature of the church, and other Christian truths offensive to certain Reformation novelties. Less authenticity is given to the Martyrdom, however, due to the lateness of the manuscript and the various versions that exist.

The scholar JB Lightfoot believed the Antiochian version dates to the 5th century, when it was compiled to mark the translation of his relics. Lightfoot, who called Ignatius “the captain of martyrs,” noted the variety of traditions, and believes earlier accounts were blended and embellished. This leaves open the possibility that genuine eyewitness material is preserved in the Martyrdom.

If true, that would make it the earliest non-Biblical account of martyrdom, the cult of the saints, and relics. Lightfoot was a notable defender of the authenticity of the Ignatian letters, and published a groundbreaking analysis of the texts in his Apostolic Fathers. He is a critic of the Martyrdom‘s authenticity, explaining in great detail why evidence is “decidedly adverse to their claims to be regarded as an authentic document, either wholly or in great part.”⁴ There’s no need to rehash those arguments here, since his book can be found online and the discussion begins around page 384, but the diversity of the textual tradition adds significant challenges to any study of Ignatius. It includes:

1. The Antiochene Acts (Greek, Latin, and Syriac)

2. The Roman Acts (Greek and Coptic)

3. The Bollandist Acts (Latin)

4. The Armenian Acts

5. The Acts of Symeon the Metaphrast (Greek)

Lightfoot’s concern, and mine, is whether or not the documents “embodied some earlier document and thus may preserve a residuum of genuine tradition.”

Martyrdom of St. Ignatius of Antioch by Pier Leone Ghezzi

Authentic Material?

The authentic material, he observes, will be sought in the eye-witness portions using the first-person, which is attributed to the deacons Philo and Rheus Agathopus. Although Lightfoot considers the question of the transmission of the authentic material to be an almost insurmountable obstacle, he concludes:

Still I should be disposed to believe, that the martyrologist had incorporated into the latter portion of his narrative a contemporary letter of the martyr’s companions containing an account of the journey from Philippi and the death, though freely interpolating and altering it, where he was so disposed.

It is easy to discern much of the spurious material, because it reads like this:

He stood before the face of Trajan (the emperor): “Who are you, you devilish lowlife, so prepared to transgress our commandments and persuade others to do the same so that they are sadly lost?”

Ignatius said: “Nobody calls the God-carrier devilish, for devils keep far away from the servants of God. But I agree with you if you are calling me a lowlife towards devils, because I am troublesome to them. For I confound their devices, having Christ as a heavenly king.”

Trajan said: “What is a god-carrier?”

Ignatius replied: “Anyone who has Christ within.”⁵

And so on. These are tropes of saints’ lives, and don’t bear consideration as genuine historical content. Such material was added after 200 but before 500. Thus, at the most optimistic, we can place it 100 years after the events and well after the lives of its purported witnesses.

And yet the style varies in places, and we find intriguing phrases such as