Philip Schaff · 11 of 60

Ignatius of Antioch. A.D. 107.

Epistola ad Trallianos, cap. 9.

The following passage is no creed nor part of a creed, but it shows what facts of the gospel history were most prominent in the mind of the famous bishop and martyr Ignatius, of Antioch, and the Church of his age, in opposition to the Gnostic heretics, who resolved the birth, death, and resurrection of Christ into an unreal and delusive show or phantom ( δόκησις, hence Docetæ}. A similar passage of greater length occurs in the commencement of his letter to the Christians at Smyrna.

The text is from the shorter Greek recension of the seven Epistles, with the chief interpolations of the longer Greek recension added in brackets. The latter mentions also Christ's lonely descent into Hades ( καθῆλθεν εἰς ᾅδην μόνος ). In the short Syriac Ignatius there is no Epistle to the Trallians. On the Ignatian controversy and literature, see my Church History, Vol. I. § 119, pp. 463 sqq.