2024.01.01 | Frazer MacDiarmid. The Memory of Ignatius of Antioch: The Martyr as a Locus of Christian Identity, Remembering and Remembered. Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 2.581. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2022. Pp. xii + 269. ISBN: 9783161614996.

Review by Jonathon Lookadoo, Presbyterian University and Theological Seminary, Seoul, Republic of Korea

Frazer MacDiarmid employs memory as a hermeneutical lens through which to view Ignatius’s letters from three angles: how Ignatius remembers others, how Ignatius makes provisions for his immediate memory, and how Ignatius was remembered by readers in late antiquity. The monograph began life as an Oxford D.Phil. thesis that was completed in 2021 under the supervision of Mark Edwards. The Memory of Ignatius of Antioch is carefully argued and maintains a consistent focus without getting distracted by the many possible topics on which it could have engaged. Most substantively, MacDiarmid unlocks fresh perspectives on old or overlooked issues in the letters by employing memory as a key to the Ignatian corpus.

MacDiarmid’s introduction opens on a full sprint. There are no wasted words. Instead, MacDiarmid immediately jumps into one of the thorniest issues in early Christianity, namely, the date and authenticity of Ignatius’s letters. By p. 2 of the book, MacDiarmid has already stated his acceptance of an authentic Ignatius writing in the early second century and placed the long recension in the late-fourth century in Antioch. The choice to acknowledge and then largely preempt a discussion of the complications in the Ignatian corpus is somewhat jarring but ultimately effective because it makes way for the book’s primary focus on memory. Taking a cue from Dale Allison, MacDiarmid notes that some aspects of a person’s significance are not accessible to themselves or even to their contemporaries. These aspects become increasingly apparent as time passes. By employing memory as a conceptual framework with which to study Ignatius’s letters, MacDiarmid does not intend to confirm historical facts. Rather, his project “seeks to discover the interpretative potential of memory understood as a creative faculty and exercise” (p. 5). In order to show the possibilities latent in Ignatius’s letters, MacDiarmid divides his study falls into three parts.

Part 1 (chapters 1–2) explores how Ignatius remembers others in his letters and devotes particular attention to scriptural figures and extra-Christian symbolism. MacDiarmid gives attention to how the patriarchs, prophets, and Israel are presented within the letters of Ignatius. He rightly observes that these entities function in Ignatius’s polemic against both Judaizing opponents and docetic opponents. The latter connection is particularly important, since Ignatius’s use of figures like David in his anti-docetic polemic is too easily overlooked by Ignatian scholarship. MacDiarmid argues that Israel and figures from Israel’s past provide Ignatius with a source by which believers can be unified as these memories are transformed in Christ. The benefit of MacDiarmid’s study in chapter 1 is that it focuses on how Ignatius makes his polemical arguments rather than attempting to identify the opponents—an exercise that is arduous and relies to some degree on speculative reconstructions. Turning to extra-Christian memories, MacDiarmid sets the formation of Ignatius’s thought in second-century Antioch. He then engages the thought of Allen Brent and others who have explored the cultic and imperial terminology in Ignatius’s letters. Although agreeing that Ignatius employs terminology related to unity and concord in keeping with imperial rhetoric of the late-first and early-second centuries, MacDiarmid critiques Brent for pushing beyond the evidence by, for example, presenting Ignatius as a synthusia sacrifice to unite cities. MacDiarmid points out that such terminology is nowhere to be found in Ignatius’s letters, despite his self-presentation in cultic terms. He concludes that Ignatius’s reliance upon pagan thought is primarily indirect, draws upon commonly inherited metaphors, and need not be pushed beyond such broadly utilized metaphors.

Part 2 (chapters 3–4) examines how Ignatius wants to be remembered by readers of the middle recension, namely, as a sacrifice of God. The topic of chapter 3 is thus Ignatius’s self-portrayal as a sacrifice. His martyrological and sacrificial terminology are explored at some length. MacDiarmid opens by considering two statements from Ignatius’s Romans in which he declares that he wants to be a sacrifice (Rom. 4.1–2; 2.2). He then examines terms that Ignatius employs self-deprecatingly and that have been understood by others to carry overtones of vicarious sacrifice. MacDiarmid acknowledges sacrificial elements in Ignatius’s thought but argues against any attribution of salvific or vicarious effects in Ignatius’s self-presentation. The latter positions are evident in the work of Brent and Étienne Decrept. In contrast, MacDiarmid appeals to a Girardian framework as a better means to understand the sacrificial terminology in Ignatius’s letters. MacDiarmid introduces the Girardian manner of thinking about mimesis, scapegoats, and sacrifices. The value of mimesis is ambiguous in Girardian thought, but Jesus’s non-violent actions as a sacrificial victim offer a way forward from the violent patterns of persistent scapegoating evident elsewhere. MacDiarmid argues that Ignatius’s self-sacrificial terminology should be understood in terms of his desire to imitate Jesus. Ignatius offers himself without resistance in a non-violent manner as he tries to imitate his Savior.

In Part 3 (chapters 5–7), MacDiarmid moves away from the middle recension to consider how Ignatius was remembered. Chapter 5 sets the stage by considering authenticity, pseudepigraphy, forgery, and epistolary biography in antiquity. MacDiarmid finds the long recension to be an epistolary biography of Ignatius that is worthy of study in its own right and not merely as a textual witness to the middle recension or an ethically dubious imitation of an earlier martyr. Chapter 6 turns its attention completely to the long recension. After introducing previous work on the long recension and its relative dearth in comparison to the middle recension, MacDiarmid analyzes the theology, heresiology, ecclesiology, imitation of the middle recension, and ethical concerns found in the long recension. He views the long recension as a robust composition that attempts to find christological common ground in the second half of the fourth century. Along the way, pseudo-Ignatius demonstrates his honor of Ignatius, highlights Ignatius’s nearness to Paul, and seeks to memorialize the second-century martyr afresh. A case study of Tarsians 1 enables MacDiarmid to show these elements in action while offering a relatively full commentary on this brief passage from the long recension. Finally, chapter 7 devotes attention to how Ignatius was remembered in the Ignatian cult with reference to the Ignatian Acts of Martyrdom and to John Chrysostom’s Homily about Ignatius. Collectively, these texts provide evidence of a hagiographical discourse surrounding Ignatius in late antiquity and thereby demonstrate the continued memory of Ignatius’s suffering and death by later readers.

MacDiarmid makes important contributions on a number of fronts in this monograph, and these can be noted briefly. For example, he follows a welcome trend in Ignatian studies by expanding the focus of his work beyond the confines of the middle recension and the second century. He bypasses the difficulties concerning Ignatius’s use of scripture by appealing more broadly to memory in relation to the prophets. He breaks genuinely new ground related to Ignatius’s sacrificial terminology by reading Ignatius through a Girardian lens. Finally, his attention to the long recension largely confirms what other recent studies have shown about the long recension while also drawing attention to the long recension’s situation in the fourth century in fresh ways.

Taking the book as a whole, readers may notice that MacDiarmid’s monograph contains both a stringent focus on memory in Ignatius and a broad scope of topics that are to be found within the pages of the book. This combination is due to the power of memory to bring together diverse fields and, in the case of this book, varied interests within the corpus of texts associated with one ancient figure. MacDiarmid has successfully shown the capability of memory to shed light upon the letters of Ignatius. It may be that others can continue to build upon his study of Ignatius by employing memory to examine additional facets in other parts of his corpus. For example, MacDiarmid does not study the Syriac short recension or the medieval Latin correspondence between Ignatius, John, and Mary. Alternatively, others may want to examine memory in the works of other second-century authors writing around the same time as Ignatius. Further avenues of research can thus be taken up in the wake of this study, and MacDiarmid is to be congratulated for extending memory studies in this fresh way. It only remains to say that MacDiarmid’s monograph will be of value not only for its methodological potential in future studies but for the fresh insights on Ignatius to be found in nearly every chapter. This book is cogently and thoughtfully argued, and anyone writing on Ignatius will want to have ready access to it.

Jonathon Lookadoo
Université LavalPresbyterian University and Theological Seminary
jonathon.lookadoo [at] puts.ac.kr