“... The bishop reinforces the point with a dramatic rhetorical question in which he envisions his death in terms of fire, sword, and wild beasts. [...] Ignatius responds to his own question by saying in effect that death will bring him to God. "Near the sword, near God" has clear affinities with a saying of Jesus reported in Gos. Thom. 82; Origen (Hom. in Jer. 20.3); and Didymus (In Psalm. 88.8: [...] "he who is near me is near the fire; he who is far from me is far from the kingdom"). Also involved in the discussion, however, is a pagan proverb noted by Bauer from a late collection attributed to Aesop: [...] "he who is near Zeus is near the lightning" (Aesop. [...] 7). (a) If Ignatius was dependent on the saying of Jesus, he was interested only in the first part of it and reversed its meaning. The substitution of sword for fire was natural enough if the words "fire, sword, beasts" move to a climax and if Ignatius [...] constrained to limit the following elaboration to two of the three items. But the change in meaning is still significant. (i) If the word "fire" in the saying refers to a time of trouble, the first part of the saying has to do with counting the cost of discipleship. Ignatius, on the other hand, speaks of the glorious outcome of enduring suffering. [...] In any event, the reversal of the order in Ignatius' form of the saying (sword/God vs. Christ/fire) represents more than a superficial variation. (b) If Ignatius was dependent on the proverb, he reversed not only the order of its parts but also its meaning. [...] We would be on firmer ground if the relation between the saying of Jesus and the pagan proverb(s) could be made out. It seems a priori more likely that the saying was based on the proverb(s). [...] Thus, even if the saying of Jesus was in existence by the time of Ignatius (or, for all that we know, went back to Jesus himself), Ignatius was not necessarily dependent on it here. Since the shift of meaning involved in deriving his sentence from the proverb is not much greater than in deriving it from the saying, and since his sentence shows no trace of the antithesis (near/far) found in the saying, it seems likely that the sentence and the saying represent independent applications of the same pagan proverb. ...”