A bishop under armed guard, on his way to Rome to face the beasts in the arena, writes to the churches along his road. In one letter he calls the bread they share 'the medicine of immortality'.
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Ignatius was bishop of Antioch in Syria. Condemned to die in the arena at Rome, he was marched across Asia Minor by ten soldiers he called his leopards, and on the way he wrote seven letters: six to churches and one to Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna. They read like a man writing fast, knowing what is coming, and he begs the Romans not to try to save him. The press starts with the letter to the Ephesians. Nothing is readable here yet; support it and it will be.
The letters are usually dated to the reign of Trajan, around AD 110, though some scholars place them later. In the 4th century someone padded them out and added six forgeries, and it took scholars until the 1640s to separate the seven genuine letters from the rest. They are among the earliest Christian writings outside the New Testament.
Ignatius thinks like a doctor. Christ is the one physician, of flesh and of spirit (Ephesians 7). False teaching is a deadly drug mixed with honeyed wine, which the victim swallows gladly (Trallians 6). And the bread of the shared meal is the pharmakon athanasias, the medicine of immortality, the antidote against dying (Ephesians 20).
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