This volume presents a modernized text of the seven surviving letters of one of our earliest Christian writers, Ignatius of Antioch, who was martyred around A.D. 107, and who is believed to have known the Apostle John personally. The seven letters presented here were all written whilst Ignatius was on his way, under arrest by the Roman authorities, to Rome to be devoured by wild beasts in the arena. As such, they are imbued with a pathos which is rarely matched elsewhere, as Ignatius strived to ensure the fledgling Christian Church continued to believe in a Messiah who was both truly God and truly man.

Included in this volume are the Shorter Greek form of Ignatius’ letters, along with the Syriac versions of three of them published by Dr. Cureton of the British Museum in 1845. There is a Longer Greek form of these letters, but they appear to be an inauthentic production of a later age. They are therefore not included in this edition.

The translation presented here is a revised and modernized re-wording of the translation of these epistles found in Alexander Roberts, D.D., James Donaldson, LL.D., and A. Cleveland Coxe, D.D. (eds.), ‘The Ante-Nicene Fathers, Volume I: The Apostolic Fathers, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus’ (T&T Clark, Edinburgh, and Wm. B. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, Michigan, reprinted 1996).