Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Ignatius Eager to be Eaten by the Wild Beasts Written by Bart Ehrman read by Ken Teutsch.
[00:00:11] Speaker A: In some respects, the most interesting of Ignatius writings is the Letter to the Romans, where he deals explicitly with his upcoming martyrdom. We might expect that Ignatius would want to find some way to avoid having to pay the ultimate price for his faith if he could do so without compromising his convictions.
Ignatius, however, goes to his death eagerly, longingly. He writes to the Romans to urge them not to interfere, for he believes that only by suffering a glorious and bloody martyrdom will he become a true disciple of Christ. Only by imitating Christ's own passion will he be able to get to God.
Most of the surviving Christian writings from antiquity take a positive view of Christian martyrdom, urging Christians to go willingly to their deaths for the faith and to endure all the tortures that humans can devise. By doing so, Christians would imitate the passion of their Lord Jesus.
Side note not everyone agreed. We know from the letters of Pliny and the writings of several Christian authors, for example, that there were large scale defections from the Christian ranks in times of persecution.
Indeed, one of these authors, Tertullian, specifically attacks Christian gnostic groups for opposing martyrdom. These groups tried to persuade their fellow Christians not to be so foolish as to die for their faith. In their view, Christ died so that his followers would not have to do so for them. Anyone who embraced the need for martyrdom in effect denied that Jesus death itself was sufficient for salvation. Tertullian Scorpion Sting 1 It appears likely that such people urged Christians to perform the necessary sacrifices to the state gods without actually committing apostasy in their hearts, since God, after all, was concerned with the heart, not with such meaningless actions as tossing a handful of incense on a burning altar.
[00:02:13] Speaker A: If there were competing Christian views of martyrdom, why do most of our surviving texts embody only one of them?
The proto orthodox Christians who won the struggle over whose views were right were quite strong in their insistence that Christians should go to their own deaths willingly, in no small measure, because this view was closely related to other theological positions that they took. In particular, the physical sufferings of the Christians served to highlight the reality of Christ's own death, a point of great importance in the debates over Docetism and Gnosticism. And in the second and third centuries, the connection between the virtues of martyrdom and the reality of Christ's death was already made clear in the writings of Ignatius.
For Christ suffered all these things on our account that we might be saved, and he truly suffered, just as he truly raised himself, not, as some unbelievers say, that he only appeared to suffer. For they are the ones who are only in appearance.
For if these things were done by the Lord in appearance only, then also I am bound only in appearance. And why then have I given myself over to death, to fire, to the sword, to the wild beasts?
And so Ignatius asks the Roman congregation to grant me no more than to be a sacrifice to God while there is an altar at hand.
He wants them to pray for him, not so he might escape his suffering, but so he might embrace it.
Pray that I may have strength of soul and body, so that I may not only talk about martyrdom, but really want it most of all. He does not want them to interfere in the proceedings.
I plead with you, do not do me an unseasonable kindness. Let me be fodder for wild beasts. That is how I can get to God. I am God's wheat and I am being ground by the teeth of wild beasts to make a pure loaf for Christ.
I would rather that you fawn on the beasts so that they may be my tomb and no scrap of my body be left.
This longing for death may appear to some modern readers to border on the pathological.
What a thrill I shall have from the wild beasts that are ready for me. I hope they will make short work of me. I shall coax them on to eat me up at once and not to hold off, as sometimes happens through fear.
And if they are reluctant, I shall force them to it. May nothing seen or unseen begrudge me making my way to Jesus Christ. Come, Fire cross, battling with wild beasts, wrenching of bones, mangling of limbs, crushing of my whole body. Cruel tortures of the devil only let me get to Jesus Christ.
[00:05:00] Speaker A: We could be wrong, though, to write Ignatius off as a demented soul who was out of touch with reality.
He was very much in touch with reality. It just happened to be a reality that most other people don't see.
Ignatius, reality, speaking from his own perspective, was a kingdom that was not of this world, a kingdom that he wanted to obtain with all his heart. The kingdoms of earth meant nothing to him and were clearly run by the forces of evil. One could escape bondage to these forces by letting them do their worst, by allowing them to kill the body so as to free the soul.
He believed that by escaping this world, he would attain God.
Ignatius was thus one of the first in a long line of Christian martyrs who came to be seen by some of their fellow Christians as people of true faith, because they alone were willing to suffer horrible abuses of their bodies for the sake of the kingdom that was not of this world.
We lose track of Ignatius soon after he penned his letters, although later Christian sources indicate that he did indeed face martyrdom in the Roman amphitheater. For an actual depiction of a martyr in the face of death, we have to go elsewhere, but not too far, since the first full blown account of a Christian martyr happens to be that of Polycarp, the Bishop of Smyrna, to whom Ignatius wrote a letter on his way to Rome.
