Ignatius of Antioch: A Martyr Bishop and the Origin of the Episcopacy (review)

Aimed at the nonspecialist reader, this book reprises the main insights of a number of Allen Brent’s more technical monographs composed for the scholarly community, especially The Imperial Cult and the Development of Church Order (Boston, 1999) and Ignatius and the Second Sophistic (Tübingen, 2006). These volumes take up the genuine Ignatian correspondence as it relates to its imperial, political, and cultural contexts, and they set an exciting and innovative course that will redefine Ignatian studies for the foreseeable future. Brent offers an invigorating picture of a complex historical figure whose letters can often appear arcane and bewildering to a modern reader. It is a book many will find difficult to put down. With freshness and creativity Brent sketches a vivid historical narrative of St. Ignatius and his innovative role in the emergence of the threefold office of bishops, elders, and deacons as the chief form of early Christian leadership.

Ignatius drew on the unitive language of mystery cults to celebrate union with the physical and suffering Jesus in the Eucharist by means of liturgical union with the local bishop and elders. He drew on pagan civic ideals of political concord and the imagery of the imperial cult to draw dispersed communities into a catholic union, in unity with the local bishop, sister churches, and, critically, the church at Antioch whose schism Ignatius both caused and sought to end through his gruesome death. In championing a mystical quasi- Trinitarian theology of union with God by means of liturgical solidarity with the bishop, Ignatius fashioned an alternative model of apostolic succession to the one that appealed to historically traceable chains of succession, foreshadowed in the Pastoral Epistles, and developed by Hegessipus and Irenaeus against Gnostic contenders. Consistent with Johannine themes, union with Jesus’s and the apostles’ teachings is by way of mystical participation in worship and the drama re-enacted there of death and resurrection rather than by appeals to history. Brent, who is an Anglican priest, discovers the enduring relevance of Ignatius’s ecclesial and Eucharistic teaching to the contemporary debates threatening to dissolve the Anglican Communion and so offers an account that is not only historical but also theological and pastoral.

Brent begins with a fascinating account of the place of the Ignatian corpus in the English Reformation, and the theological and political motivations of both defenders and detractors of the Middle Recension to defend or attack the historic episcopate. Ignatius was used as evidence of an apostolically appointed monarchical episcopacy as the guarantee of catholic orthodoxy. The Middle Recension achieved an authority whose place was unassailable until twentieth-century scholars began once again to challenge it. A chief aim of Brent’s book is to defend the Middle Recension by using it as evidence of a key turning point in the institutional development of early Christianity. At turns Brent’s book reads as much like a detective story as it does an historical account of the emergence of the office of bishop in early Christianity.

The “smoking gun” in the story is a division that arose in Ignatius’s church in Antioch between spirit-filled, charismatic, prophet-like figures and those championing a stable church order represented by patrons, house church governors, and administrative experts. The evidence of this discord he discovers in the Gospel of Matthew and the Didache. Ignatius’s stroke of genius was to combine a more traditional form of leadership (by elders) with the charismatic type and to wed them into one person in the form of a spiritinspired bishop-martyr whose prophetic utterances were marshaled to promote and defend a single local bishop as a kind of primus inter pares amongst his local presbyters and deacons. It is a creative reworking of an old, especially Protestant, problem—the transformation of charisma to office. But it is built on a framework of hypothetical reconstructions impossible to confirm...