Ignatius
was the Bishop of Antioch and he wrote many letters while he was being taken
captive from Antioch to Rome to be martyred.
He spoke in his letters to the various churches along the way of how
badly he was being treated by his captors.
‘From Syria even to Rome I fight with wild beasts by land and sea, by
night and day, by being bound amidst ten leopards, even a company of soldiers,
who only grow worse when they are kindly treated.’ He speaks of the journey as like being thrown
to wild beasts in a circus. In one place
he described himself as ‘God’s wheat ... to be ground by the teeth of wild
beasts so that I may become the pure bread of Christ.’ He was not the first to make this
journey. He says that others had
‘preceded him in martyrdom ... from Syria to Rome for the glory of God.’
Along
the way he was able to meet many church leaders and he sent several letters to
other churches by a network of runners.
This was the Church, catholic in action reaching out and expressing its
unity and solidarity. Ignatius urges
these local churches to follow their bishops ‘as Jesus Christ does the Father’
and to follow their elders ‘as you would the Apostles’ and to revere the
deacons ‘as being the institutions of God.’
Ignatius
stressed the authority of bishops and others because he was very concerned to
ensure proper teaching. An idea called
Docetism had been gaining ground. The
term comes from the Greek ‘dokein’, meaning ‘to seem’. Docetists claimed that Jesus was not a real
man – he only seemed that way. He was
really a mystical spirit. Greek
philosophers like Plato had suggested that the body – and all matter – was
intrinsically bad. So for the Docetists
it was unthinkable that Jesus, who was divine, could sweat and bleed and cry
and suffer pain and die. Ignatius
emphasised that Jesus became a man who ‘might be touched and handled in the
body...and who in every kind of way suffered for our sakes.’
Docetism
was a form of thinking that came to be known as Gnosticism. Gnostics were people who claimed to have superior
knowledge. Only fairly recently – by
which I mean in my lifetime – were actual Gnostic texts discovered. Up to this all scholars had to go on were the
writings of people opposed to Gnosticism.
In
1945 a worker near the Egyptian city of Nag Hammadi, six hundred kilometres
south of Cairo, while digging for fertiliser, found a collection of papyri made
up of forty-five Christian texts. They
were transcriptions in the Coptic language dating to the 6th Century
AD – translations of material written several centuries earlier. These apocryphal (or secret) gospels were of
different types but they almost all present Jesus from the point of view of
Gnosticism. They were written after the
gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke. Some
are fantastic accounts of Jesus, allegedly ‘hidden away’ by the Church. The only one that Scripture scholars deem
worthy of attention is the one called The Gospel of Thomas. It does not contain any material about the
life, death or resurrection of Jesus nor does it attribute any title to
him. It is a collection of one hundred
and fourteen saying (logia) allegedly of Jesus.
The title of the document says: ‘These are the secret sayings that the
living Jesus spoke and Didymos Judas Thomas recorded.’ There is a debate over its date and how it
relates to the gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke. Most scholars believe it was composed in
Syria after 70 AD and before 100 AD and that its content has some reference to
Mark, Matthew and Luke. They all agree
that it is tinged by Gnosticism to some extent.
The
Gnostics believed that the truth about Jesus was so deep that it had been
hidden even from those who knew and saw Jesus.
They solved this problem by inventing their own gospels and attributing
them to Philip or Thomas and Mary.
