Ignatius, also called Theophorus, to the church at Ephesus in Asia, blessed in the greatness of God the Father and worthy of all happiness: a church foreordained before the ages to be forever, for abiding and unchanging glory, united and chosen through true suffering by the will of the Father and of Jesus Christ our God; abundant greetings in Jesus Christ and in blameless joy.
Having received in God your dearly loved name, which you possess by a righteous nature according to faith and love in Christ Jesus our Saviour— being imitators of God, and having rekindled in the blood of God the work proper to your kindred, you have perfectly accomplished it.
For when you heard that I had come bound from Syria for the sake of the common name and hope, hoping through your prayer to succeed in fighting wild beasts at Rome, so that by succeeding I might be able to be a disciple, you were eager to see me.
Since therefore I have received your whole multitude in the name of God in the person of Onesimus, a man of inexpressible love and your bishop, I pray that you love him according to Jesus Christ, and that you all be like him. For blessed is he who granted to you, being worthy, to possess such a bishop.
Concerning my fellow-servant Burrhus, your deacon, blessed in all things according to God, I pray that he may remain for your honour and the bishop's. And Crocus also, worthy of God and of you, whom I received as a model of the love you bear, has refreshed me in every way— as may the Father of Jesus Christ also refresh him— together with Onesimus and Burrhus and Euplus and Fronto, in whom I saw you all in love.
May I always have joy of you, if indeed I am worthy. It is fitting, then, in every way to glorify Jesus Christ who has glorified you, so that, perfected in one obedience, being subject to the bishop and the presbytery, you may be wholly sanctified.
I do not command you as though I were someone. For even though I am bound for the Name, I am not yet perfected in Jesus Christ; for now I am only beginning to be a disciple, and I speak to you as my fellow-learners. For I needed to be anointed by you with faith, admonition, endurance, and patience.
But since love does not allow me to be silent concerning you, I have taken the lead in exhorting you to run together in harmony with the mind of God. For Jesus Christ also, our inseparable life, is the mind of the Father, just as the bishops, appointed throughout the ends of the earth, are in the mind of Jesus Christ.
Hence it is fitting for you to run together with the mind of the bishop, as indeed you do. For your justly renowned presbytery, worthy of God, is so attuned to the bishop as strings to a lyre. Therefore in your concord and harmonious love Jesus Christ is sung.
And each of you, become a chorus, so that, being in harmony and concord, taking up God's note in unity, you may sing with one voice through Jesus Christ to the Father, that he may both hear you and recognize you, through your good deeds, as members of his Son. It is therefore profitable for you to be in blameless unity, so that you may also always share in God.
For if I in a short time gained such intimacy with your bishop— not human but spiritual— how much more do I count you blessed who are so joined to him, as the church to Jesus Christ, and as Jesus Christ to the Father, that all things may be harmonious in unity.
Let no one be deceived: unless someone is within the sanctuary, he is deprived of the bread of God. For if the prayer of one or two has such power, how much more that of the bishop and of the whole church.
Whoever therefore does not come together with the rest is already proud, and has condemned himself. For it is written: 'God resists the proud.' Let us be eager, then, not to resist the bishop, that we may be subject to God.
And the more anyone sees the bishop keeping silent, the more let him fear him. For everyone whom the master of the house sends to manage his own household, we ought to receive as him who sent him. Clearly, then, we ought to regard the bishop as the Lord himself.
Onesimus himself highly praises your good order in God, that you all live according to truth and that no heresy dwells among you; indeed you do not even listen to anyone beyond what concerns Jesus Christ spoken in truth.
For some are accustomed to carry about the Name with wicked deceit, while doing other things unworthy of God; these you must shun as wild beasts. For they are mad dogs that bite by stealth; you must guard against them, for they are hard to cure.
There is one physician, both fleshly and spiritual, begotten and unbegotten, God come in man, true life in death, both of Mary and of God, first passible and then impassible— Jesus Christ our Lord.
Let no one therefore deceive you, as indeed you are not deceived, being wholly God's. For when no strife is fixed among you that is able to torment you, then you live according to God. I am the offscouring of you, and I devote myself for you, the Ephesians, the church renowned throughout the ages.
The fleshly cannot do spiritual things, nor the spiritual fleshly things, just as neither can faith do the things of unbelief, nor unbelief the things of faith. But even the things you do according to the flesh are spiritual, for you do all things in Jesus Christ.
I have learned that certain persons passed through from there with evil teaching; but you did not allow them to sow among you, stopping your ears so as not to receive what was sown by them— being stones of the Father's temple, prepared for the building of God the Father, hoisted up to the heights by the crane of Jesus Christ, which is the cross, using as a rope the Holy Spirit; your faith is your hoist, and love is the way that leads up to God.
You are therefore all fellow-travellers, God-bearers and temple-bearers, Christ-bearers, bearers of holy things, adorned in every way with the commandments of Jesus Christ; in whom I also rejoice, having been counted worthy by these letters to converse with you and to rejoice together, because in your manner of human life you love nothing except God alone.
And for the rest of mankind also pray unceasingly; for there is in them a hope of repentance, that they may attain to God. Allow them, then, to be discipled at least by your works.
Against their anger be gentle; against their boastfulness be humble; against their blasphemies set your prayers; against their error be steadfast in the faith; against their savagery be tame, not eager to imitate them in return.
Let us be found their brothers in forbearance, and let us be eager to be imitators of the Lord— who is the more wronged? who the more defrauded? who the more rejected?— so that no weed of the devil be found among you, but that in all purity and self-control you may remain in Jesus Christ, in flesh and in spirit.
These are the last times. Henceforth let us be ashamed, let us fear the longsuffering of God, lest it become for us a judgment. For let us either fear the coming wrath or love the present grace— one of the two— only to be found in Christ Jesus unto true life.
Apart from him let nothing seem fitting to you— him in whom I carry about my bonds, the spiritual pearls, in which may it be granted me to rise again through your prayer, of which may I always have a share, that I may be found in the lot of the Ephesians, the Christians, who have always agreed with the apostles in the power of Jesus Christ.
You are a passage for those being slain for God, fellow-initiates with Paul, the sanctified, the witnessed, the worthy of all blessing, in whose footsteps may I be found when I attain to God— Paul who in every letter remembers you in Christ Jesus.
Be eager, then, to come together more frequently for thanksgiving to God and for his glory. For when you frequently meet in the same place, the powers of Satan are destroyed, and his destructiveness is dissolved by the concord of your faith.
None of this escapes you, if you have perfectly toward Jesus Christ the faith and the love, which are the beginning and end of life: faith is the beginning, love the end. The two becoming one is God, and all other things follow toward nobility of character.
No one professing faith sins, nor does anyone possessing love hate. The tree is known by its fruit; so those who profess to be Christ's will be seen by what they do. For now the work is not a matter of mere profession, but it is when one is found in the power of faith to the end.
It is better to be silent and to be, than to speak and not to be. It is good to teach, if the one who speaks also does. There is one teacher, who spoke and it came to be; and even the things he has done in silence are worthy of the Father.
He who truly possesses the word of Jesus is able also to hear his silence, so that he may be perfect, that he may act through what he speaks and be known through what he keeps silent.
Nothing escapes the Lord, but even our secret things are near to him. Let us therefore do all things as those in whom he dwells, that we may be his temples and he may be in us our God— as indeed he is, and will be manifested before our face, by which we rightly love him.
If, then, those who do such things according to the flesh have died, how much more if anyone corrupts by evil teaching the faith of God, for which Jesus Christ was crucified? Such a one, having become defiled, will depart into the unquenchable fire, and likewise the one who listens to him.
For this reason the Lord received ointment upon his head, that he might breathe incorruption upon the church. Do not be anointed with the foul odour of the teaching of the ruler of this age, lest he take you captive away from the life set before you.
Why do we not all become wise, receiving the knowledge of God, which is Jesus Christ? Why do we perish foolishly, ignoring the gift which the Lord has truly sent?
My spirit is the offscouring of the cross, which is a stumbling-block to those who do not believe, but to us salvation and eternal life. Where is the wise? where the disputer? where the boasting of those called intelligent?
For our God, Jesus the Christ, was conceived by Mary according to the plan of God, of the seed of David yet of the Holy Spirit; he was born and was baptized, that by his passion he might cleanse the water.
And the virginity of Mary and her giving birth escaped the notice of the ruler of this age, likewise also the death of the Lord— three mysteries of a cry, which were accomplished in the silence of God.
How then was he made manifest to the ages? A star shone in heaven above all the stars, and its light was unspeakable, and its newness caused astonishment. All the rest of the stars, together with the sun and moon, became a chorus to the star, and it surpassed them all with its light; and there was perplexity as to whence came this newness so unlike them.
From there all magic was being dissolved and every bond of wickedness vanished; ignorance was being abolished, the old kingdom was being destroyed, when God appeared in human form for the newness of eternal life; and that which had been prepared with God received its beginning. From then on all things were set in motion, because the abolition of death was being devised.
If Jesus Christ counts me worthy through your prayer, and if it be his will, in the second little book that I intend to write to you I will further explain to you the plan I have begun concerning the new man, Jesus Christ— a plan resting in his faith and in his love, in his passion and resurrection;
especially if the Lord reveals to me that you all, individually and in common, in grace, by name come together in one faith and in Jesus Christ— who according to the flesh is of the race of David, the Son of Man and Son of God— so that you obey the bishop and the presbytery with undistracted mind, breaking one bread, which is the medicine of immortality, the antidote that we should not die but live forever in Jesus Christ.
I am a ransom for you and for those whom you sent to Smyrna for the honour of God, from where I also write to you, giving thanks to the Lord, loving Polycarp as I also love you. Remember me, as Jesus Christ also remembers you.
Pray for the church in Syria, from where I am led bound to Rome, being the least of the believers there, even as I was counted worthy to be found for the honour of God. Farewell in God the Father and in Jesus Christ, our common hope.