The proconsul said to Polycarp: “Take the oath, and I will let you go. Revile Christ.” But Polycarp said: “For eighty and six years have I been his servant, and he has done me no wrong, and how can I now blaspheme my king who saved me?” Polycarp offered a prayer in the name of the triune God, and then he was bound. The faggots were lit. Like Jesus, who was crucified naked, Polycarp entered the flames without his clothes, but when they saw that his body could not be consumed by fire the executioner was ordered to stab him with a dagger.

Be faithful until death, and I will give you the crown of life. (Rev 2:10)

The ancient city of Smyrna, located on the site of today’s Izmir in Turkey, the gateway to Asia and stepping-stone to Europe, is sacred soil because of what happened there one Sunday, around 2:00 in the afternoon, in February of the year 155. On that day, Polycarp, the eighty-six-year-old leader of the Christian church in Smyrna, was cruelly put to death by fire and sword because he refused to renounce Jesus Christ. “For the blood of thy martyrs and saints shall enrich the earth, shall create the holy places,” wrote T. S. Eliot. “For wherever a saint has dwelt, wherever a martyr has given his blood for the blood of Christ, there is holy ground, and the sanctity shall not depart from it.”

Polycarp was born around the year 69 or 70, shortly after Peter and Paul had been put to death under Nero in Rome. According to one source, he had been born a slave but was adopted as a young boy by a woman of faith named Callisto, who brought him up as her own son. As a young man, he was saturated with the scriptures, powerful in prayer, and known for deeds of mercy to those in need. Later, Ignatius of Antioch would remind young Polycarp of the commitment he had made at his baptism. Through his baptism he had enrolled in the militia Christi, the army of Jesus that sheds no blood. “Let your baptism endure as your arms; your faith as your helmet; your love as your spear; your patience as a complete panoply.”

We do not know exactly when the Christian faith first came to Smyrna. Most likely it was through the preaching of the Apostle Paul during his two-year ministry in Ephesus. Polycarp never knew Paul, but he did know his writings and quoted them often. He certainly knew those who had been won to faith in Christ through the witness of the great apostle. Indeed, Polycarp would later write his own letter to the church at Philippi, the same congregation Paul had addressed from prison. Polycarp confessed that he was not able to follow all the deep wisdom of “the blessed and glorious Paul.” Still, he urged the Philippians to keep on steeping themselves in the apostle’s wisdom, to keep on studying his letters by which “you will be able to build yourselves up into the faith given you.”

Polycarp commended Paul, but he had a personal relationship with the apostle John. We know this through the witness of Irenaeus, the great teacher and bishop of Lyons, who was also a native son of Smyrna. Irenaeus grew up in this city in the very shadow of Polycarp, sitting at his feet just as Polycarp had earlier sat at the feet of John. As an old man remembering something vivid from his youth, Irenaeus tells us how he recalled the very chair where Polycarp sat, how he tilted his head, the sound of gravel in his voice when he spoke, the weight of his hand on his shoulder.

And so in Polycarp these two great streams of New Testament Christianity, the Pauline and the Johannine, converged: Paul’s emphasis on union with Christ, which declares, “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Col. 1:27), and “If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: the old has gone, the new is here!” (2 Cor. 5:17), uniting with the distinctive message of John, which says, “See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And this is what we are! . . . See how God showed his love among us: he sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. . . . God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them” (1 John 3:1a; 4:9-10, 16). From Paul, Polycarp heard Jesus say, “Will you follow me?” From John, he heard Jesus say, “Do you love me?” These two questions would shape his life and ministry and give meaning to his martyrdom.

The great challenge facing the Christian church in Polycarp’s day was an ethereal, docetic view of Christ that marked the movement we call Gnosticism—the idea that Jesus only seemed or appeared to have a real physical body but was actually a ghost-like phantom figure. Its main exponent was Marcion, a shipbuilder and the son of a bishop from Pontus on the Black Sea. Marcion liked certain passages from Paul, but not others, and he had no use for John whatsoever. He wanted to brush out of the Christian story anything that smacked of the material, the corporeal, the physical, the tangible, the vulnerable. Jesus, he said, had come to offer an alternative way of salvation, one that bypassed the world of matter, the world of “bugs and mosquitos and crocodiles and vipers.” Marcion preached a gospel with no Christmas: Jesus was not born of Mary. He had no natural, human birth at all. “Away,” he said, “with that poor inn, those mean swaddling clothes, and that rough stable.” Along with his disembodied Christology, he also wanted to rip the Old Testament out of his Bible. “It’s the book of the Jews,” he said. “It’s not our Bible.”

Read More