Ignatius of Antioch
Bishop of Antioch and martyr (c. 35 – c. 108 CE), one of the 'Apostolic Fathers', the generation that tradition holds knew or had direct contact with the apostles —some accounts make him a disciple of the apostle John himself, and later tradition identifies him with the child Jesus set among the disciples as an example of humility. Condemned for his Christianity under the reign of Trajan, he was taken in chains from Antioch to Rome to be publicly executed, a long and gruelling journey escorted by ten soldiers whom he himself bitterly and ironically described as 'leopards' for their brutal treatment, a journey that gave him the opportunity, during its stops, to receive delegations from nearby Christian communities and to write his seven authentic letters —to the churches of Ephesus, Magnesia, Tralles, Rome, Philadelphia and Smyrna, and one to Bishop Polycarp— which constitute one of the earliest and most valuable testimonies to the life, organisation and beliefs of the Christian Church just after the apostolic age. In these letters he fervently defends a monarchical ecclesiastical structure —a single local bishop, surrounded by a college of presbyters and deacons, as a guarantee of unity against Docetist heresies that denied the physical reality of Christ's suffering and death— uses for the first time on record the phrase 'Catholic Church' (universal) to refer to Christians as a whole, and expresses with moving, almost disconcerting intensity his burning desire for martyrdom: he insistently begs the Christians of Rome not to intercede or attempt to free him, for he regards being 'ground by the teeth of wild beasts' as the necessary path to becoming 'the pure bread of Christ'. His own approaching death in the Colosseum, where he was thrown to the beasts, came to pass just as he himself had foretold, making him one of the earliest and most venerated models of voluntary martyrdom in the Christian tradition.