Clement, Ignatius, Polycarp & others · a new plain-English translation from the original language
Ignatius — also called Theophorus — sends this to the Ephesian church in Asia, a congregation richly blessed, singled out before time began for glory that never fades or shifts, made one and set apart through real suffering, according to what the Father and Jesus Christ our God have willed: abundant greetings in Jesus Christ, in joy without stain.
Having welcomed in God your name, so deeply loved, which you have earned by your just nature through faith and love in Christ Jesus our Savior — imitators of God as you are, you kindled anew the inborn work of love and carried it through to completion. For when you heard that I had been sent bound from Syria for the sake of the name and hope we hold in common, hoping through your prayers to obtain the privilege in Rome of fighting the beasts, so that through that privilege I might be able to be a true disciple, you hurried to see me. Since, then, I have received your whole company in the name of God, in the person of Onesimus, a man of indescribable love and your bishop — whom I pray you love after the pattern of Jesus Christ, and that all of you be like him — blessed is the One who granted you, deserving as you are, to possess such a bishop.
Concerning my fellow slave Burrhus, your deacon in the Lord and a blessing in every regard, I ask that he stay at my side a little longer, to your credit and the bishop's. Crocus as well, a man deserving of God and worthy of you, whom I welcomed as a living picture of the love you bear, has given me comfort on every count — may the Father of Jesus Christ grant him comfort in return — alongside Onesimus, Burrhus, Euplus, and Fronto, through whose presence I have seen your love embodied. Whatever joy comes from you, may I keep it always, provided I prove deserving. It is right, then, to honor Jesus Christ on every side, since he is the one who honored you, so that, bound together in a single submission, yielding to bishop and presbytery alike, you may be made holy through and through.
I give you no commands as if I held some rank. Though I am chained for the Name's sake, I have not yet been made complete in Jesus Christ — I am merely at the outset of discipleship, and it is as a fellow student that I address you now. In truth I needed your anointing, in faith, in counsel, in steadfastness, in patience. Yet love will not permit my silence concerning you, so I have gone ahead and urged you to press forward together in step with God's purpose. For Jesus Christ — our life undivided — expresses the Father's purpose, just as the bishops set up across the world express the purpose of Jesus Christ.
It is fitting, then, for you to press forward together in step with your bishop's purpose, which is exactly what you do. Your council of elders, deserving of its honored name and deserving of God, matches the bishop the way lyre-strings match one another. Thus, in the concord and harmony of your love, Jesus Christ is hymned. And let each of you, one by one, form a chorus, so that, in tune together in a single purpose, drawing your key from God, you may sing with one voice through Jesus Christ to the Father — so that he may hear you and, recognizing the good you accomplish, know you as limbs of his Son. It is useful for you, then, to stay within a spotless unity, so that you may forever share in God as well.
Even I, within so brief a span, have grown into such nearness to your bishop — not a nearness of merely human kind, but one belonging to the spirit — so imagine how far more blessed I judge you, fused as you are with him in the same way the assembly is fused with Christ, and Christ with the Father, so that every part might resound as one. Let no one wander astray here: a person standing outside the altar goes without the loaf that belongs to God. If the entreaty of one or two already carries weight, think how much weightier is the entreaty offered by the bishop together with the entire assembly. Anyone, then, who stays apart from the common gathering already displays pride and has cut himself off. Scripture says plainly: the proud find God arrayed against them. Let us be careful, therefore, never to stand opposed to the bishop, so that we might instead stand submitted before God.
The more one observes a bishop remaining silent, the greater the respect that bishop deserves. Whoever the master of a house dispatches to oversee his own affairs must be welcomed by us exactly as we would welcome the master in person. So too the bishop plainly deserves to be looked upon as we would look upon the Lord. Onesimus himself has spoken warmly of your good discipline in God — that every one of you conducts life in truth, and that no sect finds any foothold among you; indeed, you give ear to no one at all, except someone speaking honestly of Jesus Christ.
For some, with wicked cunning, are in the habit of carrying the Name about while doing things unworthy of God; you must shun such men as wild beasts. They are rabid dogs that bite in secret, and you must be on guard against them, for they are hard to cure. There is one physician, of flesh and of spirit, born and unborn, God come in man, true life in the midst of death, sprung both from Mary and from God, first subject to suffering and then beyond it — Jesus Christ our Lord.
Let no one lead you astray, then — and truly you cannot be led astray, belonging to God entirely as you do. When no quarrel has embedded itself among you with power to torment you, you are in that state genuinely living in God's way. I offer myself as your ransom and dedicate myself on behalf of you Ephesians, a congregation famed across the generations. Flesh-bound people are incapable of spiritual action, and spirit-filled people are equally incapable of fleshly action — exactly as belief cannot produce disbelief's works, nor can disbelief produce belief's works. Yet even your fleshly conduct turns out, in truth, to be spiritual, since everything you do is done in Jesus Christ.
I have learned that some people passed through from elsewhere carrying bad teaching, but you did not allow them to sow it among you — you stopped your ears so as not to receive what they were sowing. You are like stones of the Father's temple, made ready for the building of God the Father, hoisted up to the heights by the crane of Jesus Christ, which is the cross, using as your rope the Holy Spirit; your faith is what lifts you up, and love is the road that carries you up to God. So you are all fellow travelers, God-bearers and temple-bearers, Christ-bearers, bearers of holy things, adorned in every way with the commandments of Jesus Christ. Rejoicing in you, I have been privileged, through this letter, to speak with you and to share your joy, because in your manner of life you love nothing except God alone.
And pray without ceasing for other people too, since a hope of turning back still lives in them, that they might reach God. Allow them, then, to become your disciples at least through what you do. Answer their anger with gentleness; their boasting with humility; their slander with prayer; their error with firmness in the faith; their savagery with mildness — without straining to copy them in return. Let us be found their brothers through fair dealing, and let us strive to imitate the Lord instead — competing over who can be wronged more, who can be cheated more, who can be despised more — so that no weed of the devil may be found among you, but that you may remain in all purity and self-control, in Jesus Christ, both in body and in spirit.
These are the final times. Let us therefore be ashamed from now on; let us fear God's patience, so that it does not turn against us as judgment. We must either dread the anger still coming, or embrace the favor already given — one of the two — with this single aim: to be discovered in Christ Jesus, bound for genuine life. Let nothing else draw your attention besides him, him in whom I bear these chains about, my pearls of the spirit, and through whom, by your prayer, I hope to be raised — a prayer in which may I always share, so that I might be numbered among the Ephesian Christians, a people who have stood in agreement with the apostles all along, through the power belonging to Jesus Christ.
I am aware both of my own standing and of those I address. I stand condemned; mercy has been shown to you. I live under danger; you remain secure. You serve as a corridor for those put to death for God's sake, sharing initiation with Paul — a man made holy, who gave his testimony, whom it is right to call blessed. May I be discovered following in his footsteps when I reach God — Paul, who remembers you in every letter, in Christ Jesus.
Make it your effort, then, to convene more often to give God thanks and honor him. For whenever you come together repeatedly in one location, Satan's forces are dismantled, and the ruin he works is undone by the concord of your faith. Peace has no equal — under it every conflict, whether among heavenly things or earthly ones, is reduced to nothing.
None of this escapes you, provided you hold unbroken faith and love toward Jesus Christ, which stand as life's starting point and its close: faith the start, love the close. Joined together as one, these two constitute God, while every other excellence in living flows out from them. No one professing faith commits sin, nor does anyone possessing love hate. A tree is recognized by its fruit. So those claiming to belong to Christ will be known by their conduct. The issue now is not one of mere claim, but of being found, in the end, within the strength of faith.
Silence paired with substance beats speech without it. Teaching is a good thing, provided the teacher also practices what he says. There is one teacher, then, whose word became reality — and even his unspoken deeds deserve the Father's honor. Whoever genuinely holds the message of Jesus can likewise perceive his stillness, so as to be complete — capable of acting on what he proclaims and of being understood through what he withholds. Nothing escapes the Lord's notice; even our hidden things lie near to him. Let us, then, act in every matter as if he lived inside us, so that we might serve as shrines for him and he might dwell in us as our God — which is in fact true, and will be made plain before our eyes, and this is exactly why our love for him is right.
Do not be misled, brothers of mine: household-corrupters will have no share in God's kingdom. If, then, those who commit such deeds in the flesh met death for it, consider how much graver a fate awaits the man who, through corrupt teaching, ruins the faith that cost Jesus Christ his crucifixion. Such a man, defiled by his own doing, will end up in the fire that never goes out — and the same goes for whoever gives him a hearing.
This is why the Lord had oil poured upon his head — so that he might breathe imperishability into the church. Do not smear yourselves with the rank smell coming from the teaching of this age's ruler, or he will drag you off as a captive, away from the life laid out before you. Why don't every one of us grow wise, now that we have taken hold of the knowledge of God — knowledge that is Jesus Christ himself? Why do we destroy ourselves so senselessly, blind to the gift the Lord has genuinely bestowed?
My own spirit is devoted to the cross — an obstacle to those without faith, yet to us it is rescue and everlasting life. Where now is the sage? Where the disputant? Where is the pride of those called clever? Our God, Jesus the Christ, was carried in Mary's womb under God's design, sprung from David's seed yet also from the Holy Spirit; he was born, he was baptized, so that through his suffering he might cleanse the water.
Hidden too from this age's ruler were Mary's virginity and her act of giving birth, and the Lord's death as well — three mysteries fit to be proclaimed aloud, though carried out in God's silence. How, then, did it come to be revealed to the ages? A star blazed in the sky, outshining every other star, its light beyond description, its strangeness stirring wonder; every other star, alongside sun and moon, gathered into a ring of song about it, while it surpassed them all in brilliance. Bewilderment spread over where this strange new thing, so unlike the rest, had originated. From that instant all sorcery came undone and every chain of wickedness was erased; ignorance was demolished, the ancient order collapsed, as God showed himself in human shape for the sake of unending life made new; and what God had readied began to take hold. From this point everything was stirred into motion together, since the undoing of death was underway.
If Jesus Christ deems me worthy through your prayer, and it is his desire, I will lay out for you, in the second short book I plan to send, the design I have started to describe concerning the new humanity found in Jesus Christ — his faith, his love, his suffering, his rising — above all if the Lord shows me that each of you, separately and as a whole, come together by grace into a single faith and into Jesus Christ — human by descent, tracing back to David's line, while at the same time divine, God's own Son — so that, with a mind undivided, you might submit to bishop and presbytery, sharing a single loaf, the drug of deathlessness, the remedy against dying that lets us live on forever in Jesus Christ.
I offer myself as a ransom for you and for the ones you sent on to Smyrna, for God's honor — I write to you from that very place, giving the Lord thanks, and loving Polycarp just as I love you. Keep me in memory, as Jesus Christ keeps you in his. Offer prayer for the church in Syria, from where I am being marched off in chains to Rome, least among the faithful there, just as I was judged worthy to be found for God's honor. Be strong, resting in God the Father, and in the hope we share together in Jesus Christ.
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