(vi) undoubtedly recalls the Syriac identification of healing with life-giving power (see Baudissian's Adonis und Esmun, 258, 341, 396 f.); yet a writer like Menander happens to use it as freely as Ignatius, and it extends from the cult of Isis to another Egyptian source in the Hermetica. Trallians, however, supplies two specimens of the edged paradox which Ignatius particularty loved, both in connection with 
(
iv, and 
iii). It is a feature of his style. ‘Ignatius elocutione utitur artificiosa et quaesita, aspera et concisa,’ H.Reinhold remarks, in his De Graecitate Patrum Apostoloum (p. 19), although this is not fully just to the bishop.
in this connexion he means whatever regulates and determines the divine fellowship of the Church; even the presbyters get a similar title (Magn. ii 
).
in vi (‘claiming credence,’ as in Polybius xii. 17, 11). It is confirmed by the paraphrase of the Coptic version, 
, which is prefixed to 
.
and the confession of Jesus Christ as 
incarnate, in Ignatius (Smyrn. i), is not derived from the Odes.
might denote this (‘announcing’) rather than ‘promising.’ Or, in modern phrasing, the union of Christians who have no cross-purposes is ‘implicit’ in the union of Christ to the Father, i.e., in God's full nature and purpose manifested through the Incarnation, Passion, and Resurrection.
, and 
become curiously alive and glowing in Ignatius, who fuses them with his dominating conviction of God's personal will and love (e.g. in Smyrn. xii, Philad. vii, Ephes. iv and xviii). Thus the union of Christians with God is realized realistically through participation in the personality (flesh and blood) of Christ, as mediated by the eucharist. The new context re-sets such gnostic terms.
(Smyrn. viii). Love in the Trallian letter is the distinctive feature of churches (iii, xiii) and of individuals (vi, xii). See note below on viii.
). Except the Armenian version, the authorities prefix 
, which, with Von der Goltz (Texte und Untersuchungen, 1894, iii. 25) and Krüger, I regard as a pious gloss. Ignatius might well have written it (‘from our God, Jesus Christ,’ Wake), but not here.
) and love (
) in viii. The latter is brotherly love, what others (though never Ignatius) called 
. These were the two supreme factors of the Christian fellowship, as is already noted in the Pastoral Epistles, and Ignatius insists that they were only possible for those who adhered to the worship of the Incarnation as enshrined in the eucharist or love-feast, under the regular bishop.
was the enclosure in which an altar stood, as distinct from the outer court. Ignatius never calls the eucharistic rite sacrificial, but he probably meant that the redemptive death of Jesus Christ, which he sometimes calls ‘his blood’ (Philad. inscription), was the central truth of the gospel, and was somehow commemorated in the eucharist — very much as the writer to the Hebrews could say that we Christians 
(13, 10) of our own.
(in Smyrn. vi) implies that rank or position in the church was one qualification of those who were conducting separatist conventicles. I cannot overhear, as Bauer does (op. cit., 73 f.), an allusion to a gnostic anti-bishop here, but rather a reference to presbyters who were developing on lines of their own, as in the inscription of Polykarp's letter to the Philippians the bishop speaks in the name of himself ‘and of his presbyters’ at Smyrna, 
, where (like the Latin mecum, as Professor Mackail observes on Aeneid i. 675) 
means ‘on his side,’ not ‘beside him’ (as though all the local presbyters could be reckoned true to the bishop). The anticipations of evil in the last days, according to the contemporary Ascensio Isaiae (iii. 23), include an appearance of ‘those who love office, though they lack wisdom’ and of ‘lawless presbyters.’
or 
collectively as a unity and authority. The contents of the Epistle of the Apostles are a ‘revelation for’ them as something similar (i) to the 
or 
of Trall. iii; Wajnberg renders the Ethiopic noun by collegium (Texte und Untersuchungen, 1919, 25).
or Col. 1, 20 (
), but of Clem. Roman. ii (
).
in Hellenistic Greek is reflected in the Ascensio Isaiae (viii. 12); ‘it is allowed you in sorte domini to come hither,’ meaning, as Charles points out, ‘though you share in the lot of your Lord.’ 
(Trall. xii), as 
(Philad. vi), amounts to ‘my letter to you’ (literally, what I have written to you, or, in your case).
denoted in the cults one in ecstatic rapture, who believed that this divine possession heralded immortality as freedom from bodily trammels.
) is not an exact parallel.
(vi), the play upon 
(vi), and assonances or alliterations like 
(iii), 
… 
(vi), and 
(viii).
once (Smyrn. v), and then of Christians suffering. In the rhythmical confession of faith (Trall, ix) he has the unusual 
but this was a Johannine term (John 15, 20 
already, and it recurs in the Christian strata of the Ascensio Isaiae (iii. 13), where the prophet predicts ‘the coming of the Beloved from the seventh heaven … his human form (
) and also his persecution or tortures at the crucifixion (
), one of the passages which suggest echoes or affinities on the part of Ignatius with this apocalypse.
. Which is his way of saying that in the gospel God had brought life and 
to light (2 Tim. 1, 10). The distinctive feature for him in the cult of Jesus the Incarnate was that it effected the experience of immortality as no other cult of the period had done or could do; even the Old Testament revelation was but an anticipation.
) never used elsewhere, is an echo of 1 Cor. 3, 1–2, just as the language used to describe the heavenly mysteries recalls (as in Smyrn. vi) the words of Col. 1, 16 and Ephes. 3, 1.
echoes of the Matthew-logion, 
, as if this quality belonged to the imitatio Christi which Ignatius enjoins on Christians. There are allusions to the humble obedience of Christ on earth in the service of God (e.g. Magn. viii, xiii), but I cannot see that the words of Matth. 11, 29 are required to explain the 
of Philad. viii, which is too general a term to require any such definite root.
) and of the verb in Smyrn. xiii (
), where the sense is ‘Strength to you’ or ‘Be strong.’
outright, and hails the Smyrniotes and the Magnesians as his 
he never addresses the Trallians thus. He does describe them, however, as 
(viii).
carries the sense of disposition or purpose here; sound or flawless (
) loyalty to convictions is an innate quality of their being. ‘Yours by nature, not by acquirement’ is a side-stroke at the gnostic claim to be spiritual by nature (
) whereas ordinary church-members, on a lower level, merely received the grace of God by acquiring it through a proper exercise of freewill (
), or for a time. This was specially held by the Valentinians (Irenaeus i. 6 and vi. 4). Your Christianity, Ignatius assures the Trallians, has been implanted by God; it is not an extra, or a passing phase of endowment for life, which God may withdraw from you at any time. Of course, as elsewhere he indicates (e.g. in viii as in Ephes. i), this divine nature had to be carefully trained and exercised by Christians. In his own way he says what the writer of the Epistle of James had said, 
(1, 21); this underlies the collocation of 
in the inscription, since the Trallian church had shown itself deserving of God's choice, living up to the nature which He had implanted within them. But here his point is that the catholic faith is not a mere product of training, much less a second-rate degree of favour from God. As he had explicitly said, in the inscription, catholics, not gnostics, are the ‘elect,’ the recipients of ‘full blessing.’
) of God, as they were reproducing the divine plan of life revealed in the hierarchical polity. 
(Ephes. iii, iv).
, is illustrated by Philad. vii, where from a slightly different angle the welfare of the Church is connected with a conscience for reproducing the principle of the divine order. Here the inscription strikes the first note of the Church, viz. loyalty to the Incarnation; the second note is struck in i–iiia, viz. loyalty to the hierarchy, since apart from this no Christians can be genuine ‘followers of God.’ In i–iiia Ignatius commends the church as a whole; it is only in what follows that he hints at another side of the matter, and in thus dealing with the local situation the letter, in musical parlance, passes from legato to agitato. As usual, however, even in telling them what they are, he means to remind them of what they should be.
), Ignatius goes off into an eager rapture at the mention of Jesus Christ, though 
implies indirectly deference to the bishop and the presbytery, since to live ‘in’ or ‘after’ (
) Jesus Christ means more than any individual piety. The insertion of 
, by the Curetonian Syriac (followed by Lightfoot), might suggest explicitly that by thus ‘living in (subjection to) the bishop, we shall be found within Christ at death’; but the shorter text is sufficient and more idiomatic. The same thought recurs in Magn. vi.
) like the deacons in I Tim. 3, 10 (
).
(so in I Peter 3, 1 and 7, with 5, 5) introduces the reciprocal aspect; for some reason Ignatius speaks about the 
at length, and upon their responsibilities, before insisting on the laity showing them respect.
(‘apart from’). In the following sentence Ignatius closes by catching up the reference to Polybius in i, and making it more personal.
means the heretics or dissenters of x (as Bruston holds), but more likely non-Christians, who are impressed by gentleness in a bishop as well as in ordinary Christians (Ephes. x).
before 
with 
instead of 
. At any rate 
alludes to the theme of the preceding paragraph, and should be rendered ‘on this matter’ rather than ‘on his behalf,’ whether ‘his’ refers to Christ or to Polybius. The text rendered above (Bunsen, Funk, Zahn, Lightfoot, Bihlmeyer) seems sound, though Lightfoot supplies 
and Bruston 
(‘en quelque sort’) before 
(‘spare’), whilst Zahn reads 
(‘though I very well might,’ Chevallier, after Wake). It is not till the very end, in xii (
), that Ignatius hints at the truth; the local presbyters were not all supporting the bishop as they should.
Perhaps what his praisers (Smyrn. v) actually said has dropped out of the text, something like ‘you are a real Theophoros’ or ‘you will be a true martyr.’ The longer recension reads the easy 
.
is on the way to become almost an equivalent for ‘martyr,’ probably inspired by the saying ‘Whosoever does not carry his cross and come after me, he cannot be my disciple’ (Luke 14, 37).
such as Ignatius feels both obliged and competent to issue, as well as an admonition upon the proper way to avoid such errors, viz., by adhering to the apostolic ministry. He thus comes round to the idea underlying i–iii, and the first sentence of viii is one of his kindly assurances (see Magn. xi, Smyrn. iv) that he is not blaming them so much as putting them upon their guard. The dominant note in 
here, as the context indicates, is sectarianism or indifference to the hierarchy; though (as in Ephes. vi) this connotes a break-away from the truth of the Incarnation, which, according to Ignatius, is bound up with the sacraments as administered by the bishop, still the emphasis at present is on the anti-episcopal side of the movement. Not until the next paragraph (ix, x) does he touch directly the ‘heretical’ teaching of these separatists.
nor the 
of Magn. xiii necessarily denote anything like the Apostles' Creed in a primitive form, much less a Johannine institution of the episcopate in Asia Minor. Some objective authority may be in the writer's mind, but how it was supposed to be embodied or transmitted, we cannot say. Phrases like this simply show how Ignatius was convinced that the apostles ‘had impressed certain features on the Church's life, they had started its career on certain lines, its development could only move within certain limits’ (C. H. Turner, The Early History of the Church and Ministry, 114).
(‘opportunity’) below, Ignatius was not conscious of the military tinge in the metaphor, though he did see in docetism and anti-episcopacy manoeuvres of 
and in another connexion speaks of defeating or deposing him, in ordinary militant language (
iv, as in Philostratus, Vita Apoll. v. 35 
).
lightly reiterates the warning (of vii) against divisive self-conceit, but it is now applied to the general behaviour of the Trallian Christians, in view of the outside world. 
is a special application of 
but since Christian love is bound up with faith (as right belief in the gospel of the Incarnation), Ignatius proceeds (ix–xi) to explain in detail what he had meant by the 
, that is, the specious, spurious teaching of docetists. There is no break in the brief discussion, for x is merely an aside, suggested as usual by his recollection of the apostle Paul, and xi sums up the argument of ix.
had been changed into the 
of the traditional text. Both terms, 
and 
are employed together by Epictetus (iii. 25, 4 
) in the same sense. Ignatius hints at the need for fresh attention to the exercise of spiritual qualities (see above on i). The force of the repeated 
may be brought out by using ‘new’ and ‘once more’; the general idea of both terms in this combination is that of pulling oneself together, as the papyri indicate.
, who defied or ignored the law of brotherly love, insensible to the living truth of their religion (so Ephes. 5, 17). In Smyrn. vi Ignatius definitely accuses the gnostic errorists of being indifferent to charitable behaviour.
thus, to bring out the emphatic tone of the term as Ignatius often employed it; a deliberate antithesis haunts his mind, whether he is speaking of people who broke away from the bishop or from the genuine Christ. The word occurs in this letter as often as in all the others put together.
as the catchword of Ignatius against docetists. It is the prophet becoming lyrical, conscious that a confession of faith is to be sung.
to 
followed by editors like Krüger and Bauer, in preference to the Coptic, Syriac, and Armenian ὡς (Whiston, Frey, Russell, Bruston, and Hilgenfeld). The general sense is unaffected, however.
logically — though not of course as if he meant people who believed in Christ but not in God. ‘These atheists of unbelievers’ is a phrase which is echoed later in writers like Origen (Cels. ii. 3) and Tertullian (De Carne Christi 15), when dealing with errorists like the docetists.
, 
that towards the end of the century these errorists got their name of Docetists. It is an anachronism, although it is convenient, to speak of them as such in the age of Ignatius himself.
into 
is due to Voss. It is now confirmed by the Coptic version. Th e alternative would be either to omit (so the longer recension and the Armenian version) or to interpret the negative as an indignant interrogative (with Jacobson, Bunsen, Dressel, Hilgenfeld, Scholz, Hoole, an d Hefele).
to be rendered ‘be seen to be,’ not ‘appear.’
) is Lightfoot's suggestion (‘be found’) for 
. The point of this saying about the divine 
presupposing 
is put otherwise in Smyrn. viii (
). If this argument, which started in viii and which closes here, be compared with the other allusion to 
(in Ephes. iv), it will be seen that both stress the vital outcome of faith in 
or 
as the evidence of such union with the Lord.
being ‘the learner'), in the spirit in which they are offered (see iii and vi), instead of resenting them.
(in 
) the Latin version reads conor, which may be (Smith) an error for coronor in the sense of cingor, but it has suggested 
(Bunsen, Lightfoot, Srawley), though this meaning of the verb (‘press eagerly’) does not recur in Ignatius. He means either that the 
was appointed him (‘set before him’) or that he was all eager for it— ‘que je suis tout près d'obtenir’ (Lelong), ‘que je souhaite ardemment d'obtenir’ (Bruston), ‘le lot que je m'efforce d'obtenir’ (Delafosse), or ‘den zu erlangen mir gar sehr angelegen ist’ (Zeller). But it is not easy to see how this comes out of 
. Conjectures like 
(Vedel, Hilgenfeld) and 
(Smith) are unhelpful, though Ivar Heikel's 
(Studien und Kritiken, 1935, 317) would certainly straighten out the text. The Coptic version has 
. Either the original verb has been lost, or 
has been twisted to suit the writer's purpose, whether he thought of himself as ‘invested’ with the 
or of the 
as imminent (sortem mihi instantem, Dressel, Funk).
).
occurs in Ephes. viii (
, ‘I am your humble, devoted servant’), where again the 
is omitted after the verb. In contemporary Greek 
had weakened in force, while 
amounted colloquially to our ‘devoted’ (‘mon esprit se dévoue pour vous,’ Delafosse); the sacrificial significance of the metaphor had begun to fade out, in both terms.
(v), ‘we are short of much (that we need to secure) if we are not to fall short of God,’ i.e. if we members of the Church are not to fail in our 
.
is to be taken thus in Philad. i and Polykarp iv; the phrase is used by Lucian in his satire upon Christian attentions to a martyr (De Morte Peregrini xiii), but, in spite of Zahn (Ignatius von Antiochen, 333) and De Genouillac (L'Eglise Chrétienne au temps de Saint Ignace d'Antioche, 1907, 11, 126), this civic sense is uncertain. In any case it is not normal.
in its military sense (Polykarp vi, as in 2 Tim. 2, 4); see note above on viii.
‘strange food’ (vi), by the way, he does not imply that the docetic dissenters were interlopers, as Bruston imagines (‘apportée du dehors’); it is not that they were outsiders but that such separatism is foreign to the Household of God (Philad. iii). In the light of Philad. ii, where the 
also work by 
, it is conceivable that Ignatius is hinting here at libertine tendencies in these enthusiasts of the spirit; but if so it is no more than a passing allusion.
, Magn. xiv). He might be literally called a friend ‘of fire,’ if the Syriac Nourono or Nourani (fiery), which was attached to his name, indicated that Ignatius was somehow connected with ignis, as Renan conjectures (Les Evangiles, 485).
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