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

Allen Brent has a long-standing interest in the development of church order in the early Christian centuries, set against the background of culture and history in cities of the Roman world. His appraisal of Ignatius of Antioch has been an important part of his work, and readers familiar with it will recognize what is offered in this book.

Brent's is one response to questions that have dogged scholarship on the so-called Middle Recension of the Ignatian letters and have fueled partisan Christian interpretations of them. W. R. Schoedel's introduction in Ignatius (the commentary in the Hermeneia series) would make the questions known to a novice reader on Ignatius. Brent shows someone engaged with them, here bringing his work to a wider audience, i.e., to students of history, theology, and early Christian life who are not enmeshed in "the minutiae of patristic scholarship" (p. x). The writing remains firmly based in scholarship, nevertheless, albeit with the select bibliography, indices of source references, Greek words (firstly in transliteration), subjects, and modern authors condensed neatly into twelve pages.

He revisits topics such as the history of the recovery of Ignatius's genuine letters and renewed (late twentieth-century) challenges to their authenticity (chapters 1 and 5); the position of the bishop in Antioch and elsewhere (chapter 2); Ignatius's choreography of his own journey to death—in interplay with themes of Eucharist and the Christian mysteries (chapters 3 and 4); Ignatius and Polycarp.

Rising through the text is Brent's passionate interest in episcopal government and the idea of "cultural episcopacy," i.e., one not tied to territories but rather (such as modern missionary imperative has created for indigenous peoples) one with bishops "defined in terms of the corporate personality of their culturally defined communities" (p. 162). Ignatius provided the chronological starting point for his 1992 work on Cultural Episcopacy. Ignatius is a man "trading on his Hellenistic background in his quest for ecclesial unity" (p. 83), reconceptualizing church order as he manipulates pagan imagery. Brent's task, then, is to present that bishop's "spin" (his word) on social reality and to do so in the light of the pagan politics and political theology of Ignatius's day (p. 13).

The idea of the bishop as iconic is to the fore—the tupos of the Father, the president at the Eucharist—and "any ritual of appointment or chain of succession is a matter of indifference to the author of the middle recension" (p. 127). Even in chapters of this book devoted to the letters' authenticity (which Brent defends against recent attacks) episcopacy and ecclesiology are ever-present concerns, since much of the critique of theories of interpolation and forgery (Reinoud Weijenborg, Robert Joly and Josep Rius-Camps, Thomas Lechner, Reinhard M. Hübner with Markus Vinzent) must also relate to these things within the texts.

Many writers remain unconvinced by Brent's presentation of the Ignatian view of episcopacy. Like my own previously, his reconstruction of what happened in Antioch before and after Ignatius's arrest (chapter 2) rests on a reading of the evidence that is always open to question. Yet Brent is never to be ignored. If occasionally what he derives from a passage stuns the seasoned student of Ignatius, still the provocative and innovative may provoke thought too, some reappraisal on the reader's part, and a prod to another step in the ladder of Ignatian research. This book belongs with others on reading lists about the Syrian bishop, about office and order in churches, and about early Christians' engagement with the world in which they had to function. Brent's voice is a distinctive one, nevertheless. Students need to hear it alongside others.