GOD-MANIFEST
In these letters we frequently
encounter the concept of manifestation. He writes of Jesus being “manifest [ephane]
at the end.” (Ignatius, Magesians, 247 [6.1]) But he also writes of God
being manifest through Jesus. He writes about “one God, who manifested [phanerosas]
himself through Jesus Christ his Son.” (magnesians, 249 [8:2]) This
manifestation was, in part, through the actions of Jesus, “who was pleasing in
every way to the one who sent him.” But for Ignatius, this process is much more
intimate, such that he can talk of the time “when God became manifest [phaneroumenou]
in a human way.” (Ignatius, Ephesians, 239 [19:3])
In Ephesians 7:2 Ignatius
describes Jesus as “God come in flesh” (as per Greek and Latin MS). There is
significant variant in the Syriac and patristic quotations: “in man, God”. (The
Armenian has “God and Son of Man”. [Gilliam, Ignatius, 36]) Of these two
main options, both are problematic and later textual alteration has been
proposed for both. Either one, taken out of context, might be taken to imply
incarnation. However, given Ignatius’s repeated statements about manifestation,
it is simpler to conclude that this is his sense here.
Schoedel explains the rationale of
Ignatius’ talk of manifestation by arguing that the transcendence of God in
Ignatius implied a need for intermediaries, as others will conclude in the
second century. Jesus is “the atemporal and invisible God manifesting himself
in space and time.” (Schoedel, Ignatius, 20) This is probably true,
though perhaps misleading, as it implies that for Ignatius the problem was how
a transcendent God could interact with the world. He gives no sense of that.
Rather for Ignatius the “problem” is how Jesus can meet two different
functional requirements. Jesus had to be passible so that he could suffer for
believers, but Jesus also had to reveal God to me. For Ignatius, Jesus is not
God-incarnate but rather God-manifest, that is, a human manifestation of God.
(Thomas Edmund Gaston, Dynamic Monarchianism: The Earliest Christology?
[2d ed.; Nashville: Theophilus Press, 2023], 208-9)
The phrase “God come in the flesh,” or
‘’God become incarnate is the reading in Greek and Latin MS, but the patristic
quotations read “in man, God,” Grant argues that the latter is the original as
it is more coherent with Ignatus’ style, while the former shows signs of later
Christology (Grant, Early Christian Doctrine, 39). Schoedel disagrees,
suspecting that the patristic reading was a later change made “to avoid any
suggestions of an Arian or Apollinarian Christology which denied a human soul
to Christ” (Schoedel, Ignatius, 61). (Ibid., 208-9 n. 69)