Saint Polycarp of Smyrna: Father of the Church and apostle to Protestants

Saint John Henry Newman (1801-1890) was not the first Protestant who decided to become a Catholic after reading the Fathers of the Church. And he’s not alone. The Coming Home Network, a group established to help non-Catholic Christians “make the journey home to the Catholic Church,” has an entire webpage devoted to the testimonies of recent Catholic converts who were strongly influenced by their reading of the early Church Fathers.

According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, the “Fathers of the … Church are … the earlier teachers, who instructed her in the teaching of the Apostles, during her infancy and first growth.”¹ Today, there are debates about which individuals should be included or excluded from the title of Father of the Church, a time period which typically ranges from the first through the eighth centuries.²

However, everyone agrees that Saint Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, was a Father of the Church. We should not be distracted by his odd-sounding personal name—which simply means “fruitful” in Greek—or his unusual city name—an ancient city which is currently known as İzmir, Turkey.

We know much more about the end of Polycarp’s life than his beginning. According to the ancient writing known as The Martyrdom of Polycarp, Christians in Smyrna were arrested after a renewal of persecution in the Roman empire. While many Christians bravely refused to recant their faith even under torture, one Christian, a man named Quintus, did apostatize out of fear.

Bishop Polycarp, on the other hand, heard of the persecution and was ready to face arrest for his faith. However, his flock convinced their beloved bishop to escape and hide in the countryside.

Two young Christians were tortured until they revealed the bishop’s location. When the soldiers arrived to arrest him, Polycarp didn’t run away. Instead, he asked the soldiers to first give him an hour to pray, and he asked his friends to provide a meal for the soldiers while they waited.

As Polycarp was being taken into the city, an important official invited him to ride in his chariot. The official, whose name (ironically) was Herod, tried to convince Polycarp that there was no harm in simply offering a little sacrifice to Caesar. When Polycarp disagreed, he was ruthlessly thrown out of the man’s chariot.

Polycarp was then led into the noisy, crowded stadium in Smyrna. Encouraged by a voice from heaven to “be strong, and show yourself a man,” he was brought before the proconsul. The proconsul’s attempts to make Polycarp renounce his faith in Christ are humorously human.

Updated to modern language, the exchange went something like the following. The proconsul started the interview by saying, “Listen, Polycarp, you’re an old man and could never handle the torture that my soldiers could inflict upon you. But I’ll let you walk away. All you have to do is say, ‘I swear by the fortune of Caesar,’ say that you repent of being a Christian, and then say, ‘Away with the atheists.’” (The atheists were the Christians, of course, because they did not worship the Roman gods.) In response, Polycarp turned to face the pagans in the amphitheater and said, “Away with the atheists!”

Not amused by the joke, the proconsul tried again, “Look, just say, ‘I renounce Christ,’ and you’re free to go.” Polycarp replied, “I’ve served Jesus Christ for eighty-six years, and He has never failed me. How can I turn my back on my Savior now?” After similar exchanges with his prisoner, the proconsul realized he was getting nowhere and ordered Polycarp to be burned to death at the stake.

Hopefully, none of us have ever seen a living man be burned to death. But we can try to imagine what the victim of this torture would experience before he died. The bloodthirsty crowds of the ancient world apparently found it entertaining to watch a man writhe and scream during this brutal form of execution. Apparently, they also enjoyed the horrific smell of burning flesh. If the victim was lucky, he would suffocate or be rendered unconscious by the smoke before the flames killed him.

The pagans spread out quickly and brought wood to build the fire. Polycarp convinced the soldiers that he did not need to be nailed to a large stake but only bound by ropes. Before the wood was kindled, Polycarp prayed aloud to God, offering a beautiful, thoroughly Trinitarian prayer that his death would be a worthy sacrifice to God.

Then the miracle happened. The fire was started, and flames rose up to engulf the bound man. But the flames formed the shape of an arch, “like the sail of a ship when filled with the wind.”³ Polycarp did not seem to be burning so much as glowing like gold or baking like bread. Witnesses did not smell burning flesh but a spice like frankincense.

Since Polycarp was not burning to death as intended, an executioner killed him by piercing him with a dagger. A dove appeared to come forth from Polycarp’s body, and blood poured out, which extinguished the fire. To prevent the Christians from taking Polycarp’s body, the proconsul ordered the soldiers to have his body burned. (He was apparently afraid Polycarp’s followers would start to worship him as a god instead.) Polycarp’s followers came back later to retrieve his bones as relics.

It’s a moving story, of course, but what is there about it that would cause a Protestant to start thinking about entering the Catholic Church?

The first clue can be found in the dates. According to tradition, Polycarp died a martyr around the year 155 during the reign of Roman emperor Antoninus Pius (r. 138-161). In his speech to the proconsul, Polycarp said he had been a Christian for eighty-six years. If he was baptized as an infant, which was not as common a practice in the first century, he would have been born in the year 69. On the other hand, if he was baptized as a young adult, he would have been born even earlier, perhaps in the 50s. Either way, he was certainly old enough to have become friends with two other great Christian saints: Ignatius of Antioch and the Apostle John.

When the famous martyr-saint Ignatius, bishop of Antioch (modern Turkey), was arrested and sent to be executed in Rome, he was allowed to speak with the Christians who lived in the cities along his route to Rome. Ignatius wrote seven famous letters during this journey, and one of those letters was written to Polycarp.

Most traditions assume that Ignatius died in the year 107 during the reign of Roman emperor Trajan (r. 89-117), so the two men were clearly contemporaries. Based on Ignatius’ praise of Polycarp in the letter he wrote to him and from letters written by both men, Ignatius and Polycarp clearly shared a similar understanding of the Catholic faith. Ignatius wrote about his faith in such a distinctly Catholic manner—less than a century after the death of Christ—that his writings are quoted over a dozen times in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Polycarp is also quoted in the Catechism, although only three times.

Based on the year of Polycarp’s death, it is also perfectly reasonable to assume that, following a longstanding tradition, Polycarp learned about faith in Christ directly from the Apostle John (d. c. 100). Put another way, when Polycarp taught others about the Catholic faith as a layman, a priest, and later as a bishop, he was sharing the teaching he had received from none other than the beloved disciple, the only Apostle who watched our Lord die on a Cross on Calvary, Saint John the Apostle.

This unbroken chain of living witnesses can be traced from today’s bishops back to Polycarp and then right back to the Twelve. When the early Church Fathers explain the sacraments, quote Scripture passages, exhort their listeners to live virtuously, and tell Christians to avoid unorthodox teaching, their writings often sound like they could have been written by a Catholic bishop living today.

That’s why open-minded Protestants who read the Fathers of the Church start to recognize how Catholic those writings sound and find themselves drawn to the Catholic Church. The Protestant idea that the Catholic Church “lost its way” sometime after the death of Christ and that only the Protestant reformers were able to rediscover the truth in the sixteenth century is much harder for a person to accept after reading the early Church Fathers.

There are many other details in the story of Polycarp’s martyrdom which resonate with Catholic practice. Polycarp’s prayer before his execution, the details involving bread and incense in his death, and even his followers’ desire for relics sound, well, Catholic.

The innumerable Christian denominations and sects that exist today are divisions in a living Body, the Body of Christ, and we should desire for those divisions to be healed. Our Lord Himself prayed for unity among His believers⁴ and that we would be as perfectly one as He and the Father are one.⁵ Perhaps the writings of Saint Polycarp and other Fathers of the Church will help to bring about this unity.

Regardless, all those who call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ should be able to pray with Saint Polycarp, as he prayed in his Epistle to the Philippians (see below), that all followers of Jesus Christ to be blessed. We can also pray that, someday soon, we may all be one in Christ:

But may the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ Himself, who is the Son of God, and our everlasting High Priest, build you up in faith and truth, and in all meekness, gentleness, patience, long-suffering, forbearance, and purity; and may He bestow on you a lot and portion among His saints, and on us with you, and on all that are under heaven, who shall believe in our Lord Jesus Christ, and in His Father, who raised Him from the dead.⁶

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