What would you write about? Religious freedom? Pleas for help? If you're Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, you write about church unity. He wrote to six churches and one bishop to exhort them to stand strong against division and heresy. But the most interesting things in his letters may be his off-hand comments.
Writing about AD110, give or take, Ignatius' approach to the problem of schism was to tell the churches to obey their bishops and other leaders. One thing that caught me by surprise is he said believers should "respect the deacons as Jesus Christ, just as they should respect the bishop, who is a model of the Father, and the presbyters as ... the band of apostles" (Trall 3.1)*. I guess he sees the serving deacons as representing the one who "did not come to be served but to serve" (Mark 10:45), but it seems odd that those who correspond to the apostles are above those who correspond to Christ.
Which brings up the presbyters. In 1Clement, written fifteenish years earlier in Rome, the terms bishop and presbyter are used interchangeably. Ignatius sees them as distinct offices. Whether that is due to a change over those few years or to a difference in how things were done in Rome versus Syria is a great question I'd love to answer some day.
Outside of that, the letters contain the usual encouragements toward godly living you'd expect in letters from a pastor to followers of Christ.
What's really striking, though, is how he talks about Christ.
Many skeptics today echo the accusation of (spoiler alert) the villain in The Da Vinci Code, who claimed that until the Council of Nicaea, "Jesus was viewed by His followers as a mortal prophet … a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless.”
Let's look at some of the things Ignatius says about Christ:
"I welcome in God your well-beloved name which you possess by reason of your righteous nature, which is characterized by faith in and love of Christ Jesus our Savior. Being as you are imitators of God, once you took on new life through the blood of God you completed perfectly the task so natural to you." (Eph 1.1)
"There is only one physician, who is both flesh and spirit, born and unborn, God in man, true life in death, both from Mary and from God, ... Jesus Christ our Lord." (Eph 7.2)
"For our God, Jesus Christ, was conceived by Mary according to God's plan, both from the seed of David and of the Holy Spirit." (Eph 18.2)
"Consequently all magic and every kind of spell were dissolved, the ignorance so characteristic of wickedness vanished, and the ancient kingdom was abolished, when God appeared in human form to bring the newness of eternal life ..." (Eph 19.3)
In other places these letters speak of Christ's true humanity, answering the Docetists, or emphasizing that he physically rose from the dead, but many of them clearly proclaim the deity of Christ. My favorite comes in the letter to Polycarp:
"Wait expectantly for him who is above time: the Eternal, the Invisible, who for our sake became visible; the Intangible, the Unsuffering, who for our sake suffered, who for our sake endured in every way." (Poly 3.2)
If we Christians were more aware of our own history, we would have laughed The Da Vinci Code off the shelves. Instead, it sent so many into absolute panic.
It doesn't take long to read the seven letters of Ignatius. And if you only read the first in most lists, the letter to the church at Ephesus, you'd get a good taste of what they contain. And you'll get to know a saint who spent his last days encouraging us all to stand firm in the faith.
* from The Apostolic Fathers, second edition, Lightfoot and Harmer, trans; Holmes, ed. For a newer version, see this.
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