St. Polycarp

St. Polycarp (flourished 2nd century; feast day February 23) was a Greek bishop of Smyrna and Apostolic Father who was the leading 2nd-century Christian figure in Roman Asia by virtue of his work during the initial appearance of the fundamental theological literature of Christianity. Historically, he formed a link between the apostolic and patristic ages.

By his major writing, The Letter to the Philippians, and by his widespread moral authority, Polycarp combated various heretical sects, including certain gnostic groups that claimed religious salvation exclusively through their arcane spiritual knowledge. Polycarp’s Letter to the Philippians contains a classic formulation in which he refutes the gnostics’ argument that God’s Incarnation in, and the death and Resurrection of, Christ were all imaginary phenomena of purely moral or mythological significance.

More important, however, is the way in which Polycarp referred to St. Paul the Apostle in his Letter to the Philippians. Not only does he repeatedly quote from Paul’s writings, but he also stresses the personal importance of Paul as a primary authority of the Christian church. It must be remembered that at that time Paul had been adopted as a primary authority by the gnostic heretics. Polycarp, in response, reclaimed Paul as a treasured figure of the orthodox church. It is apparently thus partly due to Polycarp that Paul, the disputed apostle, became a theologically respectable part of the Christian church’s tradition. Furthermore, Polycarp’s orthodox use of the Pauline texts marked a crucial advance in the Christian theology of biblical interpretation. According to certain scholars, Polycarp may even have composed or directly influenced some of the letters traditionally ascribed to St. Paul, the so-called Pastoral Letters (I and II Timothy, Titus). These letters possess a 2nd-century vocabulary and style that are characteristic of Polycarp.

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Polycarp’s Letter to the Philippians is doubly important for its early testimony to the existence of various other New Testament texts. It probably is the first to quote passages from the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, the Acts of the Apostles, and the first letters of St. Peter and St. John. Other immediate post-apostolic writers employed a more oral tradition.

Toward the end of his life, Polycarp visited Bishop Anicetus of Rome to discuss with him the date at which the Easter festival was to be celebrated, a controversy that threatened to provoke a schism between Rome and Asia Minor. The two men could not reach agreement on a common date on which to celebrate Easter, so they agreed that Rome and Asia Minor would follow different practices in this regard. On his return to Smyrna, Polycarp was arrested by the Roman proconsul and burned to death when he refused to renounce Christianity. This event has been eulogized in the Martyrdom of Polycarp, one of the earliestknown Christian documents of this nature.