for instance by bribing the authorities or trying to persuade him to recant.
While journeying slowly but surely towards a gruesome martyrdom, he
nevertheless embraces his fate with joy, exclaiming:
It is better for me to die in Christ Jesus than to be king over the ends of the earth.
I seek him who died for our sake. I desire him who rose for us. Birth-pangs are
upon me. Suffer me, my brethren; hinder me not from living, do not wish me to
die....Suffer me to receive the pure light; when I shall have arrived there, I shall
be a human being [ἄνθρωποςἔσομαι]. Suffer me to follow the example of the
passion of my God.^6These are very dramatic and apparently paradoxical words:‘Do not wish me to
die’byfinding a way to get me out of my coming martyrdom!‘Do not hinder
me from living’ by stopping me from being martyred! Death, here, is a
defining moment—not the end, but the beginning. Ignatius is himself in
travail, with birth pangs. His impending martyrdomishis birth, and it will
be a birth in which he will become,finally, a‘human being’. Becoming human
means attaining humanity in the stature of Christ, the‘perfect human being’^7
or the‘new human being’.^8 Martyrdom is a transformation into Christlikeness
because Christ’s own death and resurrection inaugurate the new humanity.
For this reason, the martyr from Antioch refers to Christ as‘the faithful
martyr, thefirstborn of the dead’(Rev. 1:5),‘the Amen, the faithful and true
martyr, the beginning of God’s creation’(Rev. 3:14).
By his martyrdom, by giving his own‘fiat’, and in doing so returning
through his death to the earth to become clay in the ground, Ignatius will
become a human being. A similarly striking understanding of what it is to be
human is given in the Letter of Barnabas, again from the second century, in
what is perhaps the most pithy and profound definition of the human being.
Rather than defining the human being in terms of rational capacity or
‘personal’existence, as we have since become accustomed, Barnabas focuses
on our existence as earth in the hands of God:‘The human being is earth that
suffers.’^9 Undoubtedly Barnabas is thinking of the account of the creation of
Adam in Genesis 2, with God taking earth from the ground and moulding it
into a human shape. But it would be short-sighted in the extreme not to take
this‘suffering’of the earth as what is experienced by ourselves throughout our
lives on earth, culminating, as it must, in our returning to the earth.
From these initial reflections, drawn from some early Christian writings, on
what it is to be human and how we become human, two threads emerge—
suffering and learning—that need to be explored more fully. The connection
between suffering and learning (pathein–mathein), of course, is one that goes
(^6) Ignatius of Antioch,Rom. 6 – 7. (^7) Ignatius of Antioch,Smyrn. 4.2.
(^8) Ignatius of Antioch,Eph.20.1.
(^9) Barnabas,Letter6.9:ἄνθρωποςγὰργῆἐστινπάσχουσα.
22 John Behr