Epistle to the Ephesians

Letter from Ignatius to the Ephesians

Ignatius, also known as Theophorus, to her who is blessed in greatness in the fullness of God the Father, predestined before the ages to be at all times, for a glory which does not pass, unshakably united and chosen in the true passion of Christ, by the will of the Father and of Jesus Christ our God, - to the Church worthy to be called blessed, which is in Ephesus of Asia, salvation in Jesus Christ and in blameless joy.

I, 1. I have welcomed your beloved name in God, which you have acquired by your righteous nature, according to faith and love in Christ Jesus our Savior; "imitators of God", revived in the blood of God, you have completed in perfection the work which suits your nature. 2. You have indeed learned that I came from Syria in chains for the Name and the hope which are common to us, hoping to have the happiness, thanks to your prayers, to fight against the beasts in Rome, in order to be able, if I have this happiness, to be a true disciple; and you hastened to come and see me. 3. It is therefore your whole community that I received in the name of God, in Onesimus, a man of indescribable charity, your bishop according to the flesh. I want you to love him in Jesus Christ, and that all of you will be like him. Blessed be he who has bestowed upon you the grace of you who were worthy of having such a bishop.

II, 1. For Burrhus, my fellow servant, your deacon according to God, blessed in all things, I wish him to stay with me to do honor to you and your bishop. As for Crocus, worthy of God and of you, whom I received as a copy of your charity, he was a comfort to me in all things: may the Father of Jesus Christ also comfort him with Onesimus, and Burrhus, and Euplous and Fronton; in them it is you all that I have seen according to charity. 2. May I enjoy you at all times, if I can be worthy of it. It is therefore appropriate to glorify in all ways Jesus Christ, who glorified you, so that gathered in one submission, subject to the bishop and to the presbytery, you may be sanctified in all things.

III, 1. I don't give you orders as if I were someone. For if I'm in chains for the Name, I'm not yet fulfilled in Jesus Christ. Now, I'm just starting to educate myself, and I'm speaking to you as to my classmates. It is I who would need to be anointed by you with faith, exhortations, patience, long-suffering. 2. But since charity does not allow me to be silent about you, this is why I took the initiative to exhort you to walk in accordance with the mind of God. For Jesus Christ, our inseparable life, is the mind of the Father, as also the bishops, established to the ends of the earth, are in the mind of Jesus Christ.

IV, 1. So it is advisable to walk in agreement with the thoughts of your bishop, which besides you do. Your justly renowned presbytery, worthy of God, is granted to the bishop like the strings to the zither; thus, in the harmony of your feelings and the harmony of your charity, you sing about Jesus Christ. 2. May each one of you also become a choir, so that, in the harmony of your agreement, taking the tone of God in unity, you sing with one voice through Jesus Christ a hymn to the Father, in order to that he listens to you and that he recognizes you, by your good works, as the members of his Son. It is therefore useful for you to be in an inseparable unity, in order to always participate in God.

V, 1. If, in fact, I myself have in such a short time contracted such an intimacy with your bishop, which is not human, but entirely spiritual, how much more I congratulate you on being so deeply united to him, as the Church is to Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ to the Father, that all things may be in harmony in unity. 2. Let no one go astray; if someone is not inside the sanctuary, he is depriving himself of “the bread of God”. Because if the prayer of two people together has such strength, how much more that of the bishop and the whole Church. 3. The one who does not come to the common meeting, this one already made the proud and he judged himself, because it is written: "God resists the proud". Let us therefore be careful not to resist the bishop, in order to be subject to God.

VI, I. And the more one sees the bishop keeping silence, the more he must be revered; for he whom the master of the house sends to administer his house, we must receive him as he who sent him. So it is clear that we have to look at the bishop as the Lord himself. 2. Besides, Onesimus himself praises very high your good order in God [saying] that you all live according to the truth, and that no heresy dwells among you, but that you do not listen to anyone who speaks to you about it. other than Jesus Christ in the truth.

VII, 1. For perverse cunning men are in the habit of bearing the name of God everywhere, but act differently and in a manner unworthy of God; these, you must avoid them like wild beasts. They are mad dogs, who bite sly. You must beware of them, as their bites are difficult to heal. 2. There is only one physician, carnal and spiritual, begotten and un begotten, come in the flesh, God, in death true life, born of Mary and born of God, first liable and now impassive, Jesus Christ our Lord.

VIII, 1. Let no one therefore deceive you, as moreover you do not allow yourself to be deceived, being entirely with God. When no quarrel has befallen you that can torment you, then you are truly living according to God. I am your atoning victim, and I offer myself as a sacrifice for your Church, Ephesians, which is renowned down through the centuries. 2. The carnal cannot do spiritual works, nor the spiritual ones carnal works, as neither can faith do the works of infidelity, nor unfaithfulness those of faith. And the very things that you do in the flesh are spiritual, for it is in Jesus Christ that you do everything.

IX, 1. I have heard that some from there have come to you, bearers of bad doctrine, but you did not let them sow in you, covering your ears, so as not to receive what they sow, in the thought that you are the stones of the temple of the Father, prepared for the building of God the Father, lifted up to the top by the machine of Jesus Christ, which is the cross, serving you as a cable of the Spirit Holy ; your faith pulls you up, and love is the way that lifts you up to God. 2. You are therefore also all companions on the journey, bearers of God and bearers of the temple, bearers of Christ, bearers of sacred objects, adorned in everything with the precepts of Jesus Christ. With you, I am in joy, since I have been deemed worthy to speak with you by this letter and to rejoice with you that living a new life, you love nothing but God alone.

X, 1. "Pray without ceasing" for other men. For there is hope in them to repent, so that they may come to God. So allow them at least by your works to be your disciples. 2. In the face of their anger, you, be gentle; of their boasting, you, be humble; of their blasphemies you [show] your prayers; of their errors, you, be "firm in the faith"; of their savagery, you, be peaceful, without seeking to imitate them. 3. Let us be their brothers by kindness and seek to be "imitators of the Lord": - who more was the object of injustice? who stripped? who repelled? - that no devil's weed may be found among you, but in all purity and temperance you dwell in Christ Jesus, both in flesh and in spirit.

XI, 1. These are the last times; henceforth let us blush, and fear that the long-suffering of God will turn to our condemnation. Either we fear the wrath to come, or we love the present grace: one of two things. It is only if we are found in Christ that we will enter into real life. 2. Apart from him that nothing has value for you, he in whom I wear my chains, spiritual pearls; I would like to rise with them, thanks to your prayer, in which I would always like to participate in order to be found in the heritage of the Christians of Ephesus, who have always been united with the apostles, by the strength of Jesus Christ.

XII, 1. I know who I am and to whom I am writing: I am a condemned man; you, you have obtained mercy; I am in danger; you are established. You are the way through which pass those who are led to death to go to God, initiated into the mysteries with Paul the saint, who has received witness, and is worthy to be called blessed. May I be found in his footsteps when I obtain God; in all his letters he remembers you in Christ Jesus.

XIII, 1. Be sure to meet more frequently to give thanks and praise to God. For when you come together often, the powers of Satan are cut down and his work of ruin destroyed by the harmony of your faith. 2. Nothing is better than the peace which reduces to nothing any war that the powers of heaven and earth make against us.

XIV, 1. None of this is hidden from you, if you have faith and love for Jesus Christ, which are the beginning and the end of life: the beginning is faith, and the end, the charity. The two together is God, and everything else that leads to the perfection of man just follows. 2. No one, if he professes the faith, sins; no one, if he possesses charity, hates. "We know the tree by its fruits": thus those who profess to be you of Christ will be recognized by their works. For now the work that is asked of us is not a simple profession of faith, but to be found until the end in the practice of the faith.

XV, 1. It is better to be silent and to be than to speak without being. It is good to teach, if the one who speaks acts. There is therefore only one master, the one who "said and all was done" and the things he did in silence are worthy of his Father. 2. Whoever possesses the word of Jesus in truth can hear even his silence, in order to be perfect, in order to act by his word and make himself known to you by his silence. Nothing is hidden from the Lord, but our very secrets are near him. 3. Let us therefore do everything in the mind that he dwells in us, that we may be his temples, and that he may be our God in us, which in fact he is, and what he will appear before our face if we just love it.

XVI, 1. "Make no mistake, my brothers: those who corrupt families will not inherit the Kingdom of God". 2. If therefore those who did this were put to death, how much more would he who would corrupt by his evil doctrine the faith of God, for whom Jesus Christ was crucified? He who is thus defiled will go to the unquenchable fire, and so will he who listens to it.

XVII, 1. If the Lord has received an anointing on the head, it is in order to exhale for his Church a perfume of incorruptibility. So do not allow yourselves to be anointed with the bad smell of the prince of this world, so that he does not take you into captivity far from the life that awaits you. 2. Why don't we all become wise by receiving the knowledge of God, who is Jesus Christ? Why perish foolishly, ignoring the gift that the Lord has truly sent to us?

XVIII, 1. My spirit is the victim of the cross, which is a scandal for unbelievers, but for us salvation and eternal life: "Where is the wise? Or the disputer?" where the vanity of those who are called scientists? 2. For our God, Jesus Christ, was borne in the womb of Mary, according to the divine economy, born "of the offspring of David" and of the Holy Spirit. He was born, and was baptized to purify water by his passion.

XIX, 1. The prince of this world ignored the virginity of Mary, and her childbirth, as well as the death of the Lord, three resounding mysteries, which were fulfilled in the silence of God. 2. How then were they manifested for ages? A star shone in the sky more than all the stars, and its light was indescribable, and its novelty astonished, and all the other stars with the sun and the moon formed in chorus around the star and projected its light more than all the others. 2. And they were confused, wondering where this novelty so different from themselves came from. 3. Then all magic was destroyed, and all wickedness abolished, ignorance was dispelled, and the old kingdom wasted, when God appeared in human form, "for a newness of life" everlasting; what had been decided by God was beginning to come true. So everything was in turmoil, for the destruction of death was brewing.

XX, 1. If Jesus Christ makes me worthy of me thanks to your prayers, and if it is the will of God, I will explain to you in the second booklet that I must write to you the economy about which I have started to speak to you. , concerning the new man, Jesus Christ. It consists in faith in him and in love for him, in his suffering and his resurrection. 2. Especially if the Lord reveals to me that each one in particular and all together, in the grace which comes from his name, you come together in one faith, and in Jesus Christ "of the offspring of David according to the flesh", son of man and son of God, - to obey the bishop and the presbytery, in harmony without tension, breaking the same bread which is the remedy of immortality, antidote not to die, but to live in Jesus Christ forever .

XXI, 1. I am your ransom, for you and for those whom, for the honor of God, you sent to Smyrna, from where I write to you, giving thanks to the Lord, and loving Polycarp as I love you too . Remember me as Jesus Christ remembers you. 2. Pray for the Church which is in Syria, from where I am led to Rome in chains, for being the last of the faithful there, I have been deemed worthy to serve in honor of God. Be well in God the Father, and in Jesus Christ, our common hope.