Date: 2026-08-15T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Letters

The Letter of Polycarp to the Philippians

Saint Polycarp of Smyrna

Royal Archives

2026

Copyright

The modern English translation and the cover design are © 2026 Royal Archives. All rights reserved.

The underlying source text is in the public domain.

Published by Royal Archives

First published 2026

Translated by Royal Archives

Source: Πολυκάρπου πρὸς Φιλιππησίους

Cover: Seaport with the Embarkation of Saint Ursula by Claude Lorrain (French, 1604/05–1682), Wikimedia Commons (The National Gallery, London), which is in the public domain.

Edition identifier: urn:royalarchives:polycarp_to_philippians:en:1

Introduction

The Author

Polycarp of Smyrna stands at the hinge between the apostles and the Church that grew from their preaching. He is one of the very few men of the second century whom we can still hear speaking in his own voice, and the few who heard the apostles speak in theirs. Irenaeus of Lyons, who as a boy sat at his feet, remembered him with unusual vividness: he could still describe the place where the old bishop used to sit and teach, the manner of his speech, and the way he would recount “his intercourse with John and with the rest who had seen the Lord.” Through Polycarp, the living memory of the apostolic generation reached down into the age of the great Fathers. He was, in Irenaeus’s telling, a disciple of the Apostle John, appointed to the oversight of the church at Smyrna by men who had themselves known Christ in the flesh.

His long life spanned the whole of that transition. The traditional reckoning places his birth around the close of the first century and his death by martyrdom in the middle of the second—Irenaeus and Eusebius agree that he lived to a great age, and the account of his martyrdom records his own words before the proconsul: “Eighty and six years I have served Him, and He has done me no wrong; how then can I blaspheme my King who saved me?” The Church commemorates his martyrdom on the twenty-third of February. He was succeeded to the see of Smyrna in a line reaching back, by tradition, to Boukolos, its first bishop; and he in turn became the teacher of a further generation.

The events of his life that the ancient sources preserve are few but weighty. He corresponded with Ignatius of Antioch, who on his way to martyrdom at Rome addressed a letter to Polycarp personally and commended him warmly to others. Late in life he travelled to Rome, where he and Bishop Anicetus discussed the date of Pascha—the churches of Asia keeping the fourteenth of Nisan, Rome observing the following Sunday—and, unable to persuade one another, parted in peace and communion, Anicetus yielding to Polycarp the honor of celebrating the Eucharist in his church. That episode was long remembered as a model of how the Church might hold together across a genuine difference of practice. Not long after his return, Polycarp was arrested during a persecution at Smyrna, refused every inducement to renounce Christ, and was put to death—bound to the stake and, when the fire was reported not to consume him, dispatched by the sword. The eyewitness account his own church composed, the Martyrdom of Polycarp, is the earliest such narrative to survive outside the New Testament.

The Work: Occasion and Purpose

The single letter of Polycarp that has come down to us was written to the church at Philippi—the community Paul had founded a lifetime earlier, and which the letter itself calls the firstborn among the churches of Europe. Its occasion was concrete and practical. The Philippians had written first, and Polycarp is answering. Reading his reply against the grain, we can recover three requests they had made of him: they had asked for a word of exhortation on righteousness; they had asked him to see that a letter of theirs reached the church at Antioch in Syria; and they had asked him to send along any letters of Ignatius of Antioch that he might have in his keeping.

The immediate spur was the passage of Ignatius through Philippi. On his journey under guard toward Rome and the beasts, Ignatius and his fellow prisoners had been received and refreshed by the Philippians, who then wrote to Smyrna both to obtain the martyr-bishop’s writings and to ask Polycarp’s counsel. Polycarp answers all three points. He praises them for the love they showed the prisoners; he undertakes to forward their letter to Syria; and he sends them the letters of Ignatius that he possesses, appending them to his own (chapter 13). Because he still writes as though Ignatius’s own fate were not yet certainly known, the letter—or at least this part of it—belongs very close in time to Ignatius’s death, in the early decades of the second century.

One further trouble had come to Polycarp’s attention, and it shapes the letter’s tone in its later chapters: a certain Valens, once a presbyter at Philippi, had fallen through covetousness, together with his wife, and had to be removed from his office. Polycarp writes of this with real grief, not with severity, urging the community to recall the offenders as straying members rather than to reject them as enemies. The letter is thus at once a covering note for a martyr’s correspondence, a general exhortation to a beloved and troubled church, and a pastor’s response to a painful local failure. (Since P. N. Harrison’s study of 1936 a number of scholars have proposed that these functions belong to two originally distinct notes later joined into one; the Church has always received and read the letter as a single work of Polycarp, and this edition presents it so.)

Argument and Structure

For all its occasional character, the letter has a clear spiritual arc, moving from thanksgiving through moral instruction to doctrinal warning and pastoral appeal. Its governing word is righteousness — the practical righteousness of a life conformed to Christ’s commandments—and its governing tone is that of a father exhorting children he loves.

Polycarp opens with joy (chapter 1): joy at the Philippians’ faith, “proclaimed from ancient times” and still bearing fruit, and joy at the love they had shown to the imprisoned confessors, whose chains he calls “the diadems of those who are truly chosen by God.” At once he grounds their hope where he will keep it throughout—in the God who raised Jesus from the dead and in salvation by grace, “not by works, but by the will of God through Jesus Christ.”

From this he turns to exhortation (chapters 2–4). Believers are to serve God in fear and truth, mindful that Christ will come as judge of the living and the dead; they are to return neither evil for evil nor insult for insult, but to live by the Lord’s own words from the Sermon on the Mount. Polycarp disclaims any pretension to the authority of Paul, “the blessed and glorious” apostle who had taught among them and written to them (chapter 3), and sets before them the triad of faith, hope, and love—faith “the mother of us all,” with hope following and love leading the way. He then addresses the classes of the community in turn (chapter 4): a warning against the love of money as “the root of all evils,” instruction for wives and for the discipline of children, and a moving picture of the widows as “an altar of God,” set apart for unceasing prayer.

The instruction widens into a portrait of good order in the church (chapters 5–6). Deacons are to be blameless, “temperate in all things, compassionate, industrious,” servants of God and not of men; the young are to guard their purity; presbyters are to be “compassionate and merciful to all, bringing back those that wander, visiting all the sick,” free of avarice and slow to judge, “knowing that we are all under a debt of sin.” Because we ask God to forgive us, Polycarp reasons, we must forgive one another, remembering that all must stand before the judgment-seat of Christ.

At the letter’s center stands its doctrinal warning (chapters 7–8). Polycarp confronts a teaching that denied the reality of Christ’s coming in the flesh, the truth of His cross, and the resurrection and judgment to come. Echoing the First Epistle of John, he declares that “everyone who does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is an antichrist,” and that whoever twists the Lord’s words to his own desire and denies resurrection and judgment “is the firstborn of Satan.” Against such error he calls the church back to “the word handed down to us from the beginning,” and lifts up Christ crucified—who “bore our sins in His own body on the tree”—as the pattern of the endurance His people are to imitate.

That summons to endurance carries the letter toward its close (chapters 9–12). Polycarp points to living and recent examples: to Ignatius, Zosimus, and Rufus, and to Paul and the other apostles, who “did not run in vain” and who “did not love the present age” but Him who died and was raised for them. He urges steadfast love within the brotherhood, almsgiving that “delivers from death,” and a blameless witness before the surrounding world. Here too he takes up the sad case of Valens with grief and hope. The letter ends with a benediction upon the church, a request for prayer even for kings, persecutors, and “the enemies of the cross,” and finally the practical business it was partly written to accomplish: the sending of the Ignatian letters (chapter 13) and the commendation of the bearer, Crescens, and his sister (chapter 14).

Theological and Spiritual Significance

The most striking feature of the letter, felt on every page, is that it is woven almost entirely out of Scripture. Sentence after sentence is built from the words of the Gospels and the apostolic writings, so that reading Polycarp is like listening to a man whose ordinary speech had been formed by long immersion in the sacred text. He is especially saturated with the First Epistle of Peter, whose language he takes up again and again, and he draws freely on Paul, on the Sermon on the Mount, and on the Johannine epistles. For students of the New Testament this makes the letter an early and valuable witness: it shows a leading churchman of the sub-apostolic age already treating these writings as authoritative and already reading Paul’s letters to Philippi as Scripture to be studied and obeyed. Polycarp does not argue for a canon; he simply lives inside one.

Doctrinally, the letter is a defense of the wholeness of the gospel against its earliest distortions. The confession Polycarp insists upon—that Jesus Christ has truly come in the flesh, that the cross was real, that resurrection and judgment lie ahead—marks out the ground on which the Church would stand against docetic and dualist teaching for generations. His conviction that error must be answered by returning to “the word handed down from the beginning” is one of the seeds of what would grow into the appeal to apostolic tradition. Yet the letter is anything but merely polemical. Its heart is pastoral and moral: it is chiefly concerned with how Christians are to hold money loosely, to forgive as they hope to be forgiven, to bear wrong without retaliation, to care for widows and the sick and the straying, and above all to endure. The pattern of that endurance is always Christ crucified, and its near horizon is martyrdom, which for Polycarp and his readers was no abstraction.

Something of the balance the ancient writers loved in him is visible throughout—a tenderness toward the church joined to an uncompromising firmness against what would corrupt it. He can call a false teacher the firstborn of Satan and, a few lines later, plead that a fallen presbyter be recalled in love. That combination of gentleness and iron gives the letter its particular authority. It is the voice of a man who had learned the faith from those who learned it from Christ, and who would seal it with his own blood.

Reception and Influence

The letter was known and prized in the ancient Church. Irenaeus, writing against the heresies of his own day, could point his readers to it as still extant and “most satisfactory,” a document from which “those that have a mind to do so may learn the character of his faith.” Eusebius, in the fourth century, cites it more than once and reckons it among the undoubted works of the bishop of Smyrna. From an early date it was copied and circulated together with the letters of Ignatius, for which it served as a kind of preface—a role it still fills in most collections of the Apostolic Fathers.

That association points to the letter’s second great value. Chapter 13, in which Polycarp forwards the Ignatian correspondence to Philippi, is among the earliest and firmest external witnesses to the genuineness of Ignatius’s letters. The two bodies of correspondence interlock so closely—each presupposing the situation the other describes—that they stand or fall together, and this mutual attestation has anchored the study of both. Whatever verdict scholars reach on the fine questions of the text’s composition, the letter’s standing as an authentic voice of the early second century, and as a bridge from the apostolic age to the age of the Fathers, has never seriously been in doubt.

The Text and This Edition

This edition presents a fresh modern English translation of the letter, made from the original Greek. The reader should know something of the state in which that original has survived. Polycarp wrote in Greek, but no complete Greek copy of the letter has come down to us; the Greek manuscripts break off partway through, and the concluding chapters are preserved only in an ancient Latin version, with a few short passages also surviving in Syriac. This translation therefore renders the Greek where the Greek is extant and the old Latin where the Greek fails, so that the whole letter—all fourteen short chapters—can be read continuously in contemporary English. It is an English-only reading edition, not a parallel-text or facing-page presentation, and it is a new translation rather than a reprint of any earlier one.

The edition follows the conventions used across this series. The author is named as the Church has always received him—Polycarp of Smyrna, disciple of the Apostle John and bishop and martyr—without the qualifications of modern critical debate, which belong to scholarship rather than to the heading of his book. Those who rendered the text are credited as translators, never as authors. Chapter and verse divisions, and any scriptural references, are given in ordinary Arabic figures for ease of reading and citation. The aim throughout has been a translation faithful to Polycarp’s plain and scriptural Greek, readable without apparatus, and true to the letter’s own spirit of sober and affectionate exhortation.

This is a text held in common. Polycarp belongs to the age before the divisions of later centuries, and his letter is the shared inheritance of all Christians who look back to the apostles—East and West, and every communion that reveres the martyrs. It is offered here in that spirit, as a word of encouragement from one of the Church’s oldest and clearest voices.

Suggestions for Reading

The letter is short and can be read at a sitting; a first reading is best done straight through, as a single pastoral appeal, without pausing over the density of its scriptural allusion. On a second reading it rewards attention to how thoroughly the words of the New Testament have become Polycarp’s own—how much of what sounds like his counsel is in fact Peter, Paul, or the words of the Lord, absorbed and recombined. Newcomers may find it most alive if they read it alongside the letters of Ignatius that it was written to accompany, and with the account of Polycarp’s own martyrdom, which shows in deed the endurance that the letter everywhere commends. What it offers is not novelty but continuity: the faith of the apostles, handed on intact by a man who had received it from their hands and would soon give his life for it.

Joy in Faith and Salvation

1 I rejoiced with you greatly in the Lord our Jesus Christ, because you received the examples of true love and sent on their way, as it was your duty, those who were bound in chains befitting holiness—chains that are the diadems of those who are truly chosen by God and our Lord.[1]

2 And I rejoice that the firm root of your faith, proclaimed from ancient times, endures until now and bears fruit for our Lord Jesus Christ, who endured even to death for our sins, whom God raised, loosing the pangs of Hades.[2]

3 In him, though you have not seen him, you believe with inexpressible and glorified joy—a joy into which many desire to enter, knowing that you are saved by grace, not by works, but by the will of God through Jesus Christ.[3]

[1] Translator’s note: Phil. 4:10

[2] Translator’s note: Acts 2:24

[3] Translator’s note: 1 Pet. 1:8; Eph. 2:8–9

Service to God and the Commandments of Christ

1 So, girding up your loins, serve God in fear and truth, leaving behind empty foolish talk and the error of the many, believing in him who raised our Lord Jesus Christ from the dead and gave him glory and a throne at his right hand. To him all things in heaven and on earth are subject; every living creature worships him; he is coming as judge of the living and the dead; God will require his blood from those who disobey him.

2 And the one who raised him from the dead will also raise us, if we do his will and walk in his commandments and love what he loved, abstaining from all unrighteousness, greed, love of money, slander, and false witness; not returning evil for evil, or insult for insult, or blow for blow, or curse for curse;

3 remembering what the Lord said when he taught: Do not judge, so that you may not be judged; Forgive, and you will be forgiven; show mercy, so that you may be shown mercy; With the measure you use, it will be measured back to you; and that Blessed are the poor and those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of God.

Faith, Hope, and Love

1 Brothers, I write these things to you not on my own authority about righteousness, but because you yourselves invited me to do so.

2 For neither I nor anyone like me can follow the wisdom of the blessed and glorious Paul, who when he was among you taught the word of truth accurately and firmly in the presence of those who were then living, and who when absent wrote you letters; if you study them carefully, you will be able to be built up in the faith that has been given to you.

3 Faith is the mother of us all, when hope follows and love for God and Christ and for our neighbour leads the way. For if anyone lives within these, he has fulfilled the commandment of righteousness; for the one who has love is far from all sin.

Love of Money and Righteousness in the Household

1 Love of money is the root of all evils. Since we know that we brought nothing into the world and can take nothing out of it, let us arm ourselves with the weapons of righteousness and teach ourselves first to walk in the Lord’s commandment.

2 And likewise our women, in the faith and love and purity given to them, loving their own husbands in all truth and loving all people equally with complete self-control, and to train their children in the discipline of the fear of God.

3 Widows who are prudent concerning the faith of the Lord, interceding without ceasing for all, far removed from all slander, gossip, false witness, love of money, and every vice, knowing that they are an altar of God and that all things are scrutinized, and nothing hidden from him—neither thoughts nor intentions nor anything of the secrets of the heart.

Deacons and Younger Men in Virtue

1 Knowing, then, that God is not mocked, we ought to walk worthily of his commandment and glory.[1]

2 In like manner should the deacons be blameless before the face of His righteousness, as being the servants of God and Christ, and not of men. They must not be slanderers, double-tongued, or lovers of money, but temperate in all things, compassionate, industrious, walking according to the truth of the Lord, who was the servant of all. If we please Him in this present world, we shall receive also the future world, according as He has promised to us that He will raise us again from the dead, and that if we live worthily of Him, “we shall also reign together with Him,” provided only we believe.[2]

3 In like manner, let the young men also be blameless in all things, being especially careful to preserve purity, and keeping themselves in, as with a bridle, from every kind of evil. For it is well that they should be cut off from the lusts that are in the world, since “every lust warreth against the spirit;” and “neither fornicators, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, shall inherit the kingdom of God,” nor those who do things inconsistent and unbecoming. Wherefore, it is needful to abstain from all these things, being subject to the presbyters and deacons, as unto God and Christ. The virgins also must walk in a blameless and pure conscience.[2]

[1] Translator’s note: Scripture quotation: Gal 6:7

[2] Source: ANF vol. 1 (Roberts-Donaldson)

Περὶ τῶν πρεσβυτέρων καὶ τῆς ἐλεημοσύνης

1 And let the presbyters be compassionate and merciful to all, bringing back those that wander, visiting all the sick, and not neglecting the widow, the orphan, or the poor, but always “providing for that which is becoming in the sight of God and man;” abstaining from all wrath, respect of persons, and unjust judgment; keeping far off from all covetousness, not quickly crediting [an evil report] against any one, not severe in judgment, as knowing that we are all under a debt of sin.[1]

2 If then we entreat the Lord to forgive us, we ought also ourselves to forgive; for we are before the eyes of our Lord and God, and “we must all appear at the judgment-seat of Christ, and must every one give an account of himself.”[1]

3 Let us then serve Him in fear, and with all reverence, even as He Himself has commanded us, and as the apostles who preached the Gospel unto us, and the prophets who proclaimed beforehand the coming of the Lord [have alike taught us]. Let us be zealous in the pursuit of that which is good, keeping ourselves from causes of offence, from false brethren, and from those who in hypocrisy bear the name of the Lord, and draw away vain men into error.[1]

[1] Source: ANF vol. 1 (Roberts-Donaldson)

On Those Who Deny Christ and False Teaching

1 Everyone who does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is an antichrist; and whoever does not confess the martyrdom of the cross is of the devil; and whoever distorts the words of the Lord to suit his own desires and says there is neither resurrection nor judgement—this one is the firstborn of satan.

2 Therefore, leaving behind the futility of the many and false teachings, let us turn back to the word handed down to us from the beginning, being sober toward our prayers and persisting in fasting, asking the all-seeing God in supplication that he would not lead us into temptation, as the Lord said: The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.

Christ as the Pattern of Endurance

1 Let us therefore hold fast without ceasing to our hope and to the pledge of our righteousness, who is Christ Jesus, who bore our sins in his own body on the tree, who committed no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth; but for our sake, so that we might live in him, he endured all things.

2 Let us therefore become imitators of his endurance, and if we suffer for his name, let us glorify him. For he set this pattern before us through himself, and we have believed in this.[1]

[1] Translator’s note: ὑπογραμμὸν (pattern/model) echoes the chapter heading; rendered consistently as ‘pattern’.

Obedience to the Word of Righteousness

1 So I urge all of you to obey the word of righteousness and to practice all endurance, which you saw with your own eyes not only in the blessed Ignatius, Zosimus, and Rufus, but also in others from among you, and in Paul himself and the rest of the apostles—

2 being convinced that all these did not run in vain, but in faith and righteousness, and that they are in the place owed to them with the Lord, with whom they also suffered. For they did not love the present age, but the one who died for us and was raised by God for our sake.

Obedience and Love in Christ

1 So stand firm in these things and follow the Lord's example: steadfast in faith and unchanging, lovers of the brotherhood, loving one another, united in truth, showing gentleness to one another in the Lord's meekness, despising no one.

2 When you can do good, don't delay, because almsgiving delivers from death. All of you be subject to one another, keeping your conduct blameless among the Gentiles, so that from your good works you may receive praise and the Lord may not be blasphemed because of you.

3 But woe to the one through whom the name of the Lord is blasphemed. So teach sobriety to all, and live in it yourselves.

Concerning Valens and Sobriety

1 I am deeply grieved for Valens, who was once made a presbyter among you, that he so little understands the office that was given to him. I warn you, therefore: abstain from every evil.

2 But if someone cannot govern himself in these things, how can he proclaim this to others? If anyone does not abstain from greed, he will be defiled by idolatry and will be judged as though among the Gentiles, who do not know the judgment of the Lord. Or do we not know that the saints will judge the world? as Paul teaches.[1]

3 But I have neither sensed nor heard anything of this kind among you, among whom the blessed Paul laboured, and who are at the beginning of his letter. For he boasts of you in all the churches—churches that alone knew the Lord at that time; but we did not yet know him.[2]

4 So I am deeply grieved, brothers, for him and for his wife. May the Lord grant them true repentance. Be sober, then, you also in this matter; and do not regard such people as enemies, but call them back as suffering and straying members, so that you may save your whole body. For in doing this, you build yourselves up.

[1] Translator’s note: e.g. 1 Cor 6:2

[2] Translator’s note: e.g. Phil 4:15–16

On Anger, Patience, and Prayer

1 I am confident that you are well trained in the sacred Scriptures and that nothing escapes you; but this has not been granted to me. Only, as it is said in these Scriptures, 'Be angry and do not sin,' and 'Do not let the sun go down on your anger.' Blessed is the one who remembers this; and I believe this is true of you.[1]

2 Now may God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the eternal high priest himself, the Son of God, Jesus Christ, build you up in faith and truth and in all gentleness and without anger and in patience and long-suffering and endurance and purity; and may he grant you a lot and portion among his saints, and to us with you and to all who are under heaven who will believe in our Lord and God Jesus Christ and in his Father, who raised him from the dead.

3 Pray for all the saints. Pray also for kings and authorities and rulers, and for those who persecute and hate you, and for the enemies of the cross, so that your fruit may be evident in all things, that you may be perfect in him.[2]

[1] Translator’s note: Scripture allusions: Eph 4:26, Ps 4:4

[2] Translator’s note: Scripture allusion: Matt 5:44

The Sending of Ignatius’s Letters

1 Both you and Ignatius wrote to me, asking that if anyone is going to Syria, he should also carry your letters. I will do this if I get a suitable opportunity, either I myself or the one I send as an envoy on your behalf as well.

2 The letters of Ignatius that were sent to us by him, and the others that we had with us, we have sent to you as you requested; they are attached to this letter, and from them you will be able to gain great benefit. For they contain faith and endurance and all edification that pertains to our Lord. And concerning Ignatius himself and those who are with him, let us know whatever more certain news you learn.

Concerning Crescens and His Sister

1 I have written these things to you through Crescens, whom I commended to you recently and now commend again. For he has lived among us blamelessly; I trust that he will do so among you as well. And you will have his sister commended to you when she comes to you. Be safe in the Lord Jesus Christ, in grace with all who are yours. Amen.

Scripture Index

Every Scripture reference identified in this book, sorted in canonical Bible order. Tap a reference to jump to the verse where it appears.

Matthew

Matthew 5:32. Service to God and the Commandments of Christ (3)

Matthew 5:102. Service to God and the Commandments of Christ (3)

Matthew 6:137. On Those Who Deny Christ and False Teaching (2)

Matthew 7:12. Service to God and the Commandments of Christ (3)

Matthew 7:22. Service to God and the Commandments of Christ (3)

Matthew 7:212. Service to God and the Commandments of Christ (2)

Matthew 26:417. On Those Who Deny Christ and False Teaching (2)

Luke

Luke 6:372. Service to God and the Commandments of Christ (3)

Acts

Acts 1:147. On Those Who Deny Christ and False Teaching (2)

Acts 2:241. Joy in Faith and Salvation (2)

Romans

Romans 12:14. Love of Money and Righteousness in the Household (3)

Romans 13:83. Faith, Hope, and Love (3)
1 Corinthians
1 Corinthians 4:63. Faith, Hope, and Love (1)

1 Corinthians 6:142. Service to God and the Commandments of Christ (2)

1 Corinthians 14:254. Love of Money and Righteousness in the Household (3)

2 Corinthians

2 Corinthians 6:74. Love of Money and Righteousness in the Household (1)

Galatians

Galatians 4:263. Faith, Hope, and Love (3)

Galatians 6:75. Deacons and Younger Men in Virtue (1)

Ephesians

Ephesians 2:8–91. Joy in Faith and Salvation (3)

Ephesians 6:44. Love of Money and Righteousness in the Household (2)

Philippians

Philippians 2:169. Obedience to the Word of Righteousness (2)

Philippians 4:101. Joy in Faith and Salvation (1)

Colossians

Colossians 1:101. Joy in Faith and Salvation (2)

1 Thessalonians

1 Thessalonians 5:174. Love of Money and Righteousness in the Household (3)

1 Timothy

1 Timothy 6:119. Obedience to the Word of Righteousness (2)

2 Timothy

2 Timothy 4:109. Obedience to the Word of Righteousness (2)

James
James 1:253. Faith, Hope, and Love (2)
1 Peter
1 Peter 1:81. Joy in Faith and Salvation (3)

1 Peter 2:218. Christ as the Pattern of Endurance (2)

1 Peter 2:228. Christ as the Pattern of Endurance (1)

1 Peter 2:241. Joy in Faith and Salvation (2); 8. Christ as the Pattern of Endurance (1)

1 Peter 3:92. Service to God and the Commandments of Christ (2)

1 Peter 4:77. On Those Who Deny Christ and False Teaching (2)

1 Peter 4:14–168. Christ as the Pattern of Endurance (2)

2 Peter

2 Peter 3:167. On Those Who Deny Christ and False Teaching (1)

1 John

1 John 2:62. Service to God and the Commandments of Christ (2)

1 John 3:63. Faith, Hope, and Love (3)

1 John 4:2–37. On Those Who Deny Christ and False Teaching (1)

Jude

Jude 1:203. Faith, Hope, and Love (2)

Persons

Persons mentioned in this book, with short notes and back-links to every occurrence.

St Ignatius of Antioch

Bishop of Antioch and Apostolic Father (c. 35–c. 108), martyred in Rome; author of seven letters written en route to martyrdom, foundational texts on the Eucharist, episcopacy, and Christian unity. Also known as Theophoros (the God-bearer). Feast day 17 October (West) / 29 January (East).

Mentioned in: 13. The Sending of Ignatius’s Letters (1).

Colophon

The Letter of Polycarp to the Philippians
by Saint Polycarp of Smyrna.

This edition was produced by
Royal Archives.

The cover features
Seaport with the Embarkation of Saint Ursula
by Claude Lorrain (French, 1604/05–1682), Wikimedia Commons (The National Gallery, London), which is in the public domain.

The text is set in Palatino and Georgia.

The first edition of this ebook was released on
August 25, 2026.

Table of Contents

- Title Page
- Copyright
- Introduction
- Joy in Faith and Salvation

- Service to God and the Commandments of Christ

- Faith, Hope, and Love

- Love of Money and Righteousness in the Household

- Deacons and Younger Men in Virtue
- Περὶ τῶν πρεσβυτέρων καὶ τῆς ἐλεημοσύνης
- On Those Who Deny Christ and False Teaching
- Christ as the Pattern of Endurance
- Obedience to the Word of Righteousness
- Obedience and Love in Christ
- Concerning Valens and Sobriety
- On Anger, Patience, and Prayer
- The Sending of Ignatius's Letters
- Concerning Crescens and His Sister
- Scripture Index
- Persons
- Colophon