Ignatius

By contrast with I Clement, which reads like a formally constructed didactic essay, the seven authentic letters of Ignatius of Antioch are hasty, personal, and, even allowing for their occasional imitation of the ‘Asian’ style in rhetoric, thoroughly breathless and inelegant. They were written, probably around AD 113, by a man who describes himself as the former ‘shepherd’ of ‘the church in Syria’ (Romans 9.1), now under arrest and being transported to Rome, where he believes and hopes that he will undergo the final test and privilege of martyrdom.

Richard A. Norris Jr., “The Apostolic and Sub-Apostolic Writings: The New Testament and the Apostolic Fathers,” in The Cambridge History of Early Christian Literature, ed. Frances Young, Lewis Ayres, and Andrew Louth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 14.