Thomas Johann Bauer, Peter von Möllendorff, Die Briefe des Ignatios von Antiochia: Motive, Strategien, Kontexte. Millennium-Studien zu Kultur und Geschichte des ersten Jahrtausends n. Chr. 72. Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter, 2018. Pp. 288. ISBN 9783110604467 €89,95.Review by
Judith Lieu, University of Cambridge. jml68@cam.ac.uk**********
For many anglophone scholars, debate about the authenticity of the so-called middle-recension of the letters attributed to Ignatius of Antioch, their composition on his way to Rome where he suffered martyrdom under Trajan, and their subsequent collection together by Polycarp, had been settled by J. B. Lightfoot in his monumental study of the Apostolic Fathers (second edition, 1889). As a consequence, Ignatius has been taken as providing evidence from the first two decades of the second century for a variety of questions about the development of the early church, from ecclesial structures to Jewish-Christian relations and to ideas and forms of “heresy,” even where there has been a growing acceptance that his views may have been more aspirational than reflective of fact. In German scholarship, however, a tradition of dissent has become increasingly vocal over the last twenty years, to the extent that any discussion of early Christianity in the second century appealing to Ignatius is duty bound to explain and justify its position on the origin of the letters. It is, therefore, particularly welcome to have this collection of essays ...
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