Today the traditional religions of Catholicism and Orthodoxy are swelling up with converts from every walk of life, and because most people are ignorant of scripture and history they are easily seduced by what seems to be a continuation of tradition from the apostles themselves. But this is not the case, and while I have many defenses on this topic — today we will add one more to the list with the fairytale that is Ignatius of Antioch, a favorite citation of both Catholic and Orthodox apologists yet one that is without any shred of doubt a total fraud, just like these institutions.
So where do we begin? Let’s consider a few things.
More than half of Ignatius of Antioch’s writings are recognized as spurious. Neither Eusebius nor Jerome mention these 8 letters (Tarsians, Antiochians, Hero, Philippians, Maria, Mary, 1st and 2nd John, etc.) which means the 8 in question were written after these Church historians sometime in the 4th or 5th century, maybe even as late as the 6th century. That now leaves the remaining 7. We must consider first that it was standard practice to impersonate people (even Paul warns about this in his writings, that he’s being impersonated, and this was a practice even long before that with Enoch, etc. so that writings would gain notoriety and approval). In fact one consistent tactic all such texts employ is to claim direct revelation from God (’the Spirit says etc.’) — and this is exactly what we see in these letters.
In his letter to the Philadelphians, Chapter 7, he writes that the Spirit ‘proclaimed’ that members should ‘do nothing without the bishop.’ But this is not consistent with scripture at all and in fact departs from it, because scripture puts the leadership of the Church in the hand of a plurality of elders, not a single man. Despite this gross inconsistency, the author claims this command to be a revelation from God Himself. This is besides the other scriptural errors, such as claiming that Mary was hidden from the devil — where in fact Satan knew Jesus was to be born in Bethlehem which is why Herod tried to kill Him with his death decree.
So from the beginning, these simple facts alone (that more than half of Ignatius’ writings are spurious, that it was common practice to impersonate Church heroes and that there are claims of revelation that contradict genuine revelation) cast doubt on the remaining letters as genuinely written by a man from the early 2nd century; a man no less that supposedly was a contemporary of Polycarp and others connected directly to the apostles, and yet would diverge so significantly from apostolic beliefs. When over 50% of your total corpus is recognized as forgery, one can only wonder as to the quality of the remaining body of work. And what do we find when we examine that remaining body of work?
First, we find that there is a consistent, hierarchical delineation between ‘presbuteros’ and ‘episkopos’ — terms for ‘elder’ that Paul uses interchangeably and with no delineation. We see a consistent emphasis on the authority of the bishop, that members were told to be ‘subject to the bishop as to Jesus Christ and be subject to the presbytery as to the apostle of Jesus Christ’ (Trallians, Chapter 2). Members were also told that it was not lawful to baptize or to celebrate a love-feast without a bishop (Smyrnaeans, Chapter 9:1). The letters also reference bishops who were ‘very young’ and to not treat them differently ‘on account of their youth’ (Magnesians, Chapter 3). This directly violates the qualifications in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1, where elders are explicitly called elders — meaning mature men.
To claim that such drastic and obvious hierarchies, distinctions and ritualization arose within just 60 years or so of Paul’s writings in the freeform, decentralized model of the Church presented in the Book of Acts, given the rampant dispersions and persecutions of both Jews and Romans toward Christians, is wildly untenable and anachronistic. We examine authors and writings from that period and after, like Justin Martyr, 1 Clement, the Didache, and Hermas, and it shows that Rome and Asia Minor operated under a presbyterial/plural leadership well into the mid-second century. We see no such patterns of thinking in these people’s writings as we do in those of Ignatius. Why? Because at this early stage the Church was barely getting its feet on the ground with the aforementioned struggles and was still very decentralized.
Furthermore, in his letter to the Magnesians, Ignatius refers to God’s Word proceeding from ‘Silence’ (Sige). This concept directly addresses and refutes Valentinian Gnostic cosmic systems being taught at the time, and these did not develop until the mid-second century. This historical fact further implicates these remaining 7 letters as spurious (fake) or pseudepigraphal (falsely attributed). There is no justification for Ignatius’ style being so anachronistic unless, of course, these writings are from a different time much later — when the Church had become more institutionalized and hierarchical and ritualized, departing from the instructions of the New Testament with traditions of men.
A check on this is that his letters, even to the Romans, do not mention one bishop over all the other bishops, so this neatly places the likely timestamp of these writings in the transition period of the 3rd-4th centuries between the decentralized NT Church and the institutionalized Roman counterfeit born out of the 4th and 5th centuries and beyond with the papacy thereafter.
But that’s not all of the problems with Ignatius of Antioch. The remaining 7 letters that are not universally considered spurious do not have a reliable manuscript tradition. There’s a small Greek version, there’s a longer Greek version and then there’s a Syriac version. The Syriac is corrupted as it only has 3 of the 7 letters. So you are left with the small Greek and the longer Greek, but there’s no way to know with certainty which is the real one. We have no manuscript paper trail to say reliably which it is.
Next you have the pattern set forth by Rome with her laundry list of forgeries and spurious writings, like Liber Pontificalis (supposedly documenting the succession of popes from Peter, yet it was composed in the 6th century when the papacy had every motive to justify its existence) or the Donation of Constantine, a famous forgery written sometime in the 8th or 9th century and used for centuries by the popes to appeal to their authority over all things as the Vicar of Christ. Even when it was exposed as a blatant fraud in the 15th or 16th century, the papacy still did nothing for several generations.
So those with turf in institutional Christianity have an obvious motive to defend Ignatius of Antioch as early because it justifies their position. This is especially true of Orthodox and Catholic apologists, but not unique to them and it doesn’t matter. When you combine all of these factors together, you cannot in any intellectual honesty be liberal with the dating of ‘Ignatius of Antioch.’ Half of his writings are forgeries. The other half have extremely poor manuscript evidence and it’s unclear which is the original. The ones that are not considered forgeries are wildly anachronistic for their supposed time, and the pattern of impersonation and claiming divine revelation to obtain credence is fairly clear. Add to this a history of weaponization of spurious writings by Rome and a major bias by anyone with institutional ties of any kind to defend an earlier writing date, and you have countless reasons to reject the mainstream narratives.
Extreme caution in the dating of these writings would be putting it mildly, yet most are eager and liberal with their dating because it justifies their position — and that’s why you know this is not the truth.
Now critics will argue that forgers wanting to forge Ignatius presupposes he was real and authoritative and worth faking. But that doesn’t follow automatically. Ignatius may have been a real individual, but there’s little to no evidence for such an individual existing (outside of his supposed letters). A forger wanting to present their claims with authority could invent a persona and appeal to Antioch, which was a Church hub in ancient times, and with enough time passed (100-150 years) and a rapidly growing Church, these things could easily be passed off to an unsuspecting audience — especially one that was being persecuted and already steeped in superstitions like venerating relics of martyrs. In either case, the existence of forgeries does not prove or even demand that Ignatius existed and had a real corpus of work, like Paul had his corpus and also forgeries made of his works (3 Corinthians, etc.).
One may claim that nobody doubts Paul’s letters despite having forgeries made, but that’s a false equivalence. Paul’s letters had way more manuscript tradition and were also consistent with scripture. Their inspiration was also recognized by the Church fairly universally as the Spirit was moving in the first few centuries to collate the canon. Ignatius by contrast has extremely poor manuscript evidence as discussed, and also several inconsistencies with scripture. So it’s a totally different situation.
Another argument might be that a forger (especially of Rome) would have every incentive to author papal supremacy into the writings, yet Ignatius’ writings do not describe a bishop over all bishops. That’s a moot point to the position though, because the issue isn’t that Rome herself made these writings. These writings were written by someone in the transitional, institutionalizing Church of the 3rd century. Rome, which came later with its papacy (and ever since) has the highest incentive to weaponize them. So there are two factors at play, not one, and anyone objecting to the spurious claims on grounds that there is no bishop of bishops is presenting a moot point to the problem, which is anachronism.
Some may also point to the work of J.B. Lightfoot and Theodor Zahn in the late 19th century, who established the standard academic consensus that the ‘Middle Recension’ (7 Greek letters) is original, the ‘Long Recension’ (13 letters) is heavily interpolated, and the ‘Short Recension’ (3 Syriac letters) is a crude abridgment. While their rejection of the Long Recension remains unchallenged, modern critical scholars—such as Markus Vinzent, Reinhard Hübner, and Thomas Lechner have heavily critiqued and refuted Lightfoot and Zahn’s broader defense of the Middle Recension’s total authenticity. Lightfoot and Zahn argued that the 3 Syriac letters discovered by William Cureton were just an epitomized, sliced-down version of the 7 Greek letters.
Critics refute this with several points.
First, the 3 Syriac letters lack the highly structured monarchical episcopate (one-bishop rule) and advanced anti-docetic Christology found in the 7 Greek letters. It is far more historically plausible that text evolved into a higher Christology and rigid church hierarchy over time than that an abbreviator intentionally stripped those core orthodox themes out. Also, the Short and Middle recensions display completely different lexicons. If the Syriac was a mere translation of a sloppy summary, it should mirror the Greek phrasing more tightly. Textual critics note that the redactors of the Middle Recension dropped specific names across different letters to artificially create the appearance of a unified, chronological correspondence during a singular trip.
Furthermore, recall that in his letter to the Magnesians, Ignatius refers to God’s Word proceeding from ‘Silence’ (Sige). This concept directly addresses and refutes Valentinian Gnosticism, which hadn’t developed until the mid-second century — well beyond the supposed death date of the real Ignatius. Lightfoot went to extreme lengths to explain this away as pre-Valentinian, which critics argue is a circular argument to preserve his early dating. The context of Lightfoot and Zahn’s time (19th century) also cannot be overstated. Lightfoot was an Anglican Bishop fighting against the German Tübingen School, which argued that the New Testament was written late. If the Ignatian letters were genuine and from 110 AD, they could prove that the New Testament books (like John and Ephesians) were already widely known and authoritative at the turn of the century. Therefore Lightfoot’s exhaustive efforts to defend an early Ignatius was a theological necessity (of the time) to rescue the traditional New Testament dating from the critics.
Lightfoot also relied heavily on Polycarp’s Letter to the Philippians as proof of the 7 (’genuine’) letters. Modern critics argue that Polycarp’s letter is itself a composite document, or that the specific chapter mentioning the Ignatian corpus was a later interpolation added to legitimize the newly forged Middle Recension.
So in summation, there is ample criticism of the mainstream position and its manuscript narrative. Forgeries do not automatically presuppose the person had a corpus (like Paul) or was even a real person. The Church was steeped with persecution, as well as superstitions. Around the 2nd century you already start seeing the practice of gathering around martyr’s tombs, and then eventually the obsession over catacombs and relics which now saturates the Catholic and Orthodox Church.
Why this matters is because Ignatius could very well have been an invented figure that served a purpose at the time. Scholars like Markus Vinzent suggest that a 2nd-century writer constructed a fictional epistolary romance using a legendary martyr figure (Ignatius) to fight contemporary battles regarding church authority and heresy. The letters did not expand cleanly over centuries; rather, multiple variant collections were compiled simultaneously in different regions to serve local theological disputes.
Whether this is true or not doesn’t really matter, because there is enough evidence already to question the mainstream narrative that this was written by a man as early as the Didache. Even if we accept a writing date of 180 AD, which is still too early in my opinion based on all the evidence, all it serves is to document the rapid metamorphosis of the Church outlined in the New Testament with the prophesied institutional counterfeit.
But I do not accept 180 AD, or anything prior to it, because the evidence simply is not supportive whatsoever. One may argue that citing critics like Vinzent or Lechner refutes my position of a 3rd century writing date, but this isn’t true. These critical scholars are cited to show that the institutional mainstream narrative of Ignatius of Antioch is flawed for many reasons, but these scholars’ dating to the late 2nd century (as opposed to the early 2nd century) is still wrong. It divorces Ignatius’ writings from Polycarp and damages the institutional claim, but it’s not sufficiently rigorous nor consistent with history.
One need only look at the patristic manuscript record and review real people who lived in the 2nd century and who were contemporaries (and after) of the so-called Ignatius of Antioch. Absolutely none of these famous figures, who we do have good reason existed (Tatian, Irenaeus, Polycarp, Melito, Athenagoras, Justin Martyr, etc.) ever adopted Ignatius of Antioch’s hyper-focused rhetoric on the absolute authority of the local bishop, nor did they implement his sharp structural division between the office of a single bishop (episkopos) and the council of elders (presbuteros).
In his Epistle to the Philippians, Polycarp makes no mention of a solitary bishop governing Philippi. Instead, he addresses the church as ‘Polycarp and the presbyters with him,’ (much like Peter calls himself a fellow elder in his epistles) urging the community to be subject to ‘the presbyters and deacons’ as if to God. He treats episkopos and presbuteros as functional synonyms or elements of a collective leadership.
Writing around 180 AD, Irenaeus fiercely defended apostolic succession to counter the Gnostic heretics that were rampant at that time. However, his terminology remains fluid just like his contemporaries. Throughout his Against Heresies, he repeatedly uses the terms ‘bishop’ and ‘presbyter’ interchangeably. He refers to the early leaders of Rome both as ‘successions of bishops’ and as ‘the presbyters who preceded us.’ Importantly, for Irenaeus the primary emphasis was on the preservation of true doctrine through historic lineages, rather than the absolute internal authority of a single monarchical office.
When Justin Martyr describes a Christian Sunday gathering in his First Apology, he references a singular ‘president of the brethren’ (proestos) conducting the liturgy, but he avoids using formal hierarchical titles or establishing an explicit theological mandate for monarchical authority.
So this is what you get when you examine history carefully, and that is that Ignatius of Antioch is wildly anachronistic for its supposed time. Even with the critical date of around 180 AD, we see absolutely no support for Church thinking in the way that Ignatius thinks. But now you have a major problem. It’s clear that Ignatius was not written by the real Ignatius of Antioch (if the person actually existed), which means these are spurious writings of some kind. But if they were written toward the end of the 2nd century as the critical scholars concede, that still doesn’t make sense.
A forger or someone pretending to be someone else would not write something so out of touch with culture and thinking, since their goal was to convince people of the authority of their writing. Obviously, since the author claimed revelation from God and used the name of a supposed martyr. So if that was their goal, why would they write something totally irrelevant to how the Church actually thought and behaved at that time? It makes no sense, and given the total absence of patristic support — it stands to reason that these writings then are not even from the late 2nd century but from the 3rd century at least. And what do we see in the 3rd century? Exactly what we would expect to see.
The exact tripartite, hierarchical model presented by Ignatius of Antioch establishing a single monarchical bishop strictly elevated above a separate body of presbyters and deacons emerges as the universal standard in the mid-3rd century AD through the writings of Cyprian of Carthage (c. 250 AD). A few years prior around 215 AD we see the Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus. This text provides the earliest surviving liturgical evidence of distinct ordination prayers for a bishop versus a presbyter. It officially codifies the structural separation of the roles, assigning unique sacramental powers (like ordination) exclusively to the bishop.
In treatises like On the Unity of the Church, Cyprian of Carthage matches the style of Ignatius. Cyprian explicitly argues that the bishop is in the church and the church is in the bishop. These are equivalent statements to the attitude expressed in Ignatius’ writings that the bishop is the presence of Christ. Furthermore, Cyprian also asserts that anyone not with the bishop is not in the church, again matching Ignatius’ tone and style practically identically. So by this era, the linguistic and administrative distinction between episkopos (the single ruler of a diocese) and presbuteros (the subordinate local priests) became rigidly fixed across the entire Roman world.
Some may argue that there was a difference of development in various regions, particularly between East and West, and that Rome kept collegial presbyteral structures longer, while Antioch and Asia Minor may have moved toward these hierarchical divisions sooner. While it is true that the (relatively) still decentralized Church of the 2nd century was all over the place, and it is plausible that different ideas sprung up in different places at different times, the evidence for such a significant shift is absent.
Polycarp’s letter to the Philippians (addressed to a church in Macedonia) tells them to submit to the plurality of elders (presbuteros). If the Ignatian reality was already established, or even beginning to distinguish itself at that time, we should expect it in the writings of Polycarp who was a contemporary of the so-called Ignatius of Antioch.
Yet we see nothing of the sort.
Furthermore, if one will argue that Ignatius is advocating a contested, emerging structure as some sort of pioneer — this is also unsubstantiated by the author’s own works. A close reading of the text reveals that Ignatius is not trying to introduce a new structure; he treats the tripartite structure as an already universal reality. Ignatius claims that bishops are settled ‘to the utmost bounds of the earth’ (Epistle to the Ephesians 3). He argues that the bishop stands in the place of God, the presbyters in place of the Apostles, and the deacons are entrusted with the ministry of Jesus Christ (Magnesians 6).
For an author (let alone as early as people say he existed) to claim that monarchical bishops are already established ‘to the utmost bounds of the earth’ is a massive historical anachronism. It reads less like someone fighting for a local structural experiment in Antioch, and more like a later author projecting a newly globalizing structure backward onto an apostolic figure — which is exactly what happened.
The regional development argument also assumes Antioch was structurally insulated from Rome. However, early Christian networks were highly interconnected, and Antioch’s actual documented history contradicts Ignatius. The Didache is widely localized to Syria/Antioch. It dates anywhere from the late 1st to the early 2nd century and it explicitly instructs communities to ‘appoint for yourselves bishops and deacons’ (plural). It completely lacks the single monarchical bishop or the distinct class of presbyters. If Syria was transitioning to an advanced monarchical episcopate under Ignatius in 110 AD, it is highly anomalous that Syrian documents right before or alongside him reflect the exact same fluid, dual-office structure found in Rome’s 1 Clement.
Yet another thing to consider is that the Ignatian model requires a single bishop to command total authority over all Christians in a metropolitan area. Sociologically, this was virtually impossible in Asia Minor or Antioch in 110 AD. Early 2nd-century Christianity was a decentralized network of independent house-churches scattered across sprawling Roman cities. Without centralized public buildings, a single ‘monarch’ could not physically oversee or enforce authority over isolated house gatherings. The ability of a single bishop to successfully demand that ‘no baptism or love-feast happen without him’ (Smyrnaeans 8) requires a level of urban centralization that did not exist until the mid-to-late 2nd century minimum, when individual house-churches began aggregating into a singular city-wide network to fight Gnosticism.
But now what if regional development still happened but it occurred slightly later, like the late 2nd century (as the critics suggest)? This too is unsubstantiated. In Egypt, Clement of Alexandria (150-215 AD) is the earliest explicit reference to the three-tiered hierarchy as a fixed order in Alexandrian literature. In his work, The Stromata (6.13), he writes: ‘The advancements here in the Church of bishops, presbyters, deacons, are imitations of the angelic glory.’ But while Clement lists the three offices distinctly, his other writings reveal that the line between a bishop and a presbyter was still highly blurred in Egypt at that time. In his homily ‘Who is the Rich Man That Shall Be Saved?’ (Ch. 42), Clement tells a story about the Apostle John appointing a church leader. Within the span of a few sentences, Clement calls this exact same individual a ‘bishop’ (episkopos) and then a ‘presbyter.’
This proves that even though a tripartite hierarchy was recognized in theory by 200 AD in the East, the absolute structural segregation Ignatius demanded was not yet rigidly fixed in daily speech or practice in Alexandria.
Clement’s pupil Origen (185-254 AD) spent his life in Alexandria and Caesarea (Palestine) and his writings provide immense insight into a massive Eastern power struggle between the rising power of monarchical bishops and the traditional authority of the elders/teachers. Origen clearly acknowledges the three separate offices. In his Homilies on Luke, he explicitly complains about the moral failures of specific bishops, presbyters and deacons. Origen’s own life proves that the hierarchy was heavily contested even at that time well into the 3rd century. Origen was a charismatic teacher, widely considered the intellectual leader of Alexandria. However, Demetrius, the Bishop of Alexandria, asserted his newly consolidating monarchical authority by demanding that only the bishop had the right to preach or ordain. When Origen traveled to Palestine and was ordained as a presbyter by foreign bishops without Demetrius’s permission, Demetrius held a synod and excommunicated Origen from Alexandria around 231 AD.
Origen’s excommunication is one of the clearest historical data points showing a monarchical bishop actively crushing the autonomous, intellectual authority of the presbyters in the East — and it documents very clearly that even by this late point there was no such universal agreement or establishment of this hierarchical view in the East, as is presented in Ignatius of Antioch’s letters.
Around the time of the end of Origen’s life though we find a curious piece of evidence, which is the Didascalia Apostolorum (The Teaching of the Apostles), an anonymous church order written in Greek, likely in Syria (Ignatius’s home region). This text elevates the bishop to a near-divine monarch, mirroring Ignatius almost word-for-word: ‘Let the bishop be honored by you as God, for the bishop sits for you in the place of God Almighty.’ (Didascalia, Ch. II, 26) The Didascalia was written over a century after the mainstream date of Ignatius and several decades after the critical dating. The fact that an author in Syria felt the need to write an extensive manual still aggressively ordering laypeople and presbyters to submit to the bishop indicates that the Ignatian model was still actively being enforced and institutionalized in the mid-3rd century. It was not a settled, universally peaceful reality from 110 AD onward, and it certainly wasn’t the case either in or around 180 AD.
But perhaps one of the most devastating blows to the regional development hypothesis comes from what others wrote about the history of Alexandria. According to Jerome (Letter 146 to Evangelus) and the 10th-century Alexandrian Patriarch Eutychius, the Church of Alexandria maintained a unique, archaic structure well into the 3rd century. When the Bishop of Alexandria died, the twelve presbyters of the city would collectively choose one of their own number, place their hands on his head to bless him, and call him the bishop. No outside bishop was brought in to ordain him; the college of presbyters possessed the inherent power to create their own bishop.
This practice only changed around 250 AD under Bishop Heraclas, who stripped the presbyters of this power and established the standard monarchical rule that only bishops could ordain other bishops.
So now we have a clear set of witnesses that continually intersect on a 3rd century writing date for Ignatius. Cyprian of Carthage, the Didascalia Apostolorum, the excommunication of Origen and the hostile takeover of Heraclas in Alexandria. All of these witnesses, spanning both the East and the West, show a consistent reality: the hierarchy and fierce allegiance to a bishop over the people presented in Ignatius’ writings was a reality that only began to emerge in the 3rd century and solidify itself thereafter. An author impersonating a martyr to convey a message of this institutional mindset would be hard pressed to garner any support for his outlandish and anachronistic claims were he to have forged these letters any time before the 3rd century.
But given this clear history, these writings would be perfectly timed when this institutionalization was coming into the forefront, as a social and political culture shaping tool to reinforce the thing that was taking hold. In this way the regional development hypothesis fails as do the others discussed, even a later regional development (~180 AD) because the extreme nature of Ignatius’ writings are so off balance they easily testify against themselves as anachronisms for anything prior to the 3rd century.
Therefore ‘Ignatius of Antioch’ is a fraud, both mainstream and critical scholars are wrong, and the Catholic Church cannot claim that its papal office or system of bishops goes back to the time of Christ — because in fact we are warned of these very things by the authors of the New Testament, who warned of wolves in sheep’s clothing, false worship, false converts, false Christs and godlessness appearing as godliness. It is then no wonder that history reveals these things came to be, because they are a fulfillment of prophecy.
Therefore the most logically consistent and intellectually honest position for anyone surveying all of this evidence is that Ignatius of Antioch was written sometime in the 3rd century. Maybe a direct contemporary to Cyprian of Carthage, maybe slightly before during the time of Hippolytus. It doesn’t matter, because in either case it shows how the Church changed and it destroys the argument that modern institutionalized Christianity (especially Catholicism and Orthodoxy) are reflective of what the Church has always been since the New Testament. This is flatly refuted by history, as the Church in Acts and the Church of the 4th century after Constantine and beyond are two completely different realities — with an intense and highly complex transition period in between the two that involved a massive influx of pagan conversions, battling gnosticism and legalism, being persecuted by Romans and Jews alike, fasting controversies, rapid development of superstitions and traditions (because the apostles had died and their guidance along with them) and many other things.
What was originally a monergistic Israelite decentralized fellowship with God and the continuation (and fulfillment) of the history found in the Old Testament rapidly metamorphosed into a synergistic, institutionalized, hodgepodge of pagan philosophy and traditions with a Christian package, which is of course what Catholicism is today. And when we can show clearly that one of their most prized ‘authorities’ in patristic history is actually a fraud, it only further reveals the Catholic error.
At the most optimistic evaluation, Ignatius of Antioch was a real person who lived and was martyred in the 1st century or early 2nd century — only to be mythologized much later by a budding institutional Church already steeped in traditions and superstitions, and this figure was weaponized for the purpose of giving this institutional entity legitimacy in a world of political and social threats.
In the worst case, these writings were intentional and subversive frauds designed to undermine the true Church structure given by the apostles and insert the hierarchs, the ‘Nicolaitans’ (a word that I’ve covered is likely a composite of ‘nike’, victory, and ‘laos’, people, so ‘victory over the people’) — the abusers of God’s people, like Diotrephes in the 1st century with John, whom are false shepherds and who lead the people astray.
Regardless of which of these situations is the ultimate truth, the writings of the author of Ignatius were later weaponized by Rome, as it weaponized all manner of forgeries and false narratives throughout time, to support its papal supremacy and justify or backdate its existence to Christ Himself. But students of history know that history is incredibly nuanced, yet you do not need to be a historian to look simply at all these things and see what’s really going on.
