Symeon and Ignatius martyred, AD 117

**Two deaths that close the apostolic connection and open the documentary record of the next generation.**

**Symeon son of Clopas** was the second bishop of Jerusalem, chosen after James was stoned, and — on Hegesippus’s account, preserved by Eusebius — a **cousin of the Lord**, Clopas being Joseph’s brother. He was accused as both a descendant of David and a Christian, tortured for many days, and crucified **at the age of a hundred and twenty**. Eusebius reports that the judge and the bystanders were astonished at his endurance.

**With him the family connection ends.** He is the last figure in this archive with a claimed blood tie to Jesus, and after him the Jerusalem succession passes out of the family entirely.

## Ignatius, and why he is different

Ignatius of Antioch was sent to Rome to die, and **wrote seven letters on the way** — to Ephesus, Magnesia, Tralles, Rome, Philadelphia, Smyrna and to Polycarp. The archive holds them.

**They are the most valuable body of evidence in the archive for what the church looked like in about AD 110**, precisely because they are not written to argue about it. He assumes a bishop, presbyters and deacons in each city as a matter of course; he assumes the churches will read each other’s letters; he assumes the eucharist is central. **What a man assumes while writing on the way to his death is better evidence than what he sets out to prove.**

And he asks the Romans not to intervene: he would rather die. The letter to Rome is the plainest statement of what martyrdom meant to the people who sought it, and the archive quotes it on his own record.

**A dating caution.** The traditional date is under Trajan, about AD 107–117, and Eusebius places it in his reign. **The evidence is not precise**, and some scholars argue for a considerably later date on the ground that the letters presuppose a church order slower to develop than 110 allows. Recorded; not adopted.