Why Death and Not Sin is the Primary Human Problem

Ignatius, Irenaeus, Basil, Athanasius, and the Greek Fathers as a whole, according to John Romanides, look upon salvation as first and foremost redemption from death.[1] In the early church and Eastern tradition death, and not sin, is definitive and primary in the human predicament, while in the West the presumption has been that sin is primary and precedes death in terms of cause and effect. The biblical portrayal, that the reign of death is the cause of sin, has been rendered obscure if not inaccessible, by the presumption of Augustinian original sin (a mysterious and inherited guilt). Where this presumption can be set aside, it is clear that death and not sin is pictured as primary: it is death that is the “last enemy” (1 Cor 15:24–25); death and Hades (the place of the dead) are the last thing to be thrown into the Lake of Fire (Rev. 20:14); Paul’s primary thing from which he needs rescue is “this body that is subject to death” (Rom. 7:24); sin is the sting or result of death and not the other way round (that is death is not the sting of sin in I Cor. 15:56); the problem is not that sin reigns and then comes death but death accounts for the spread of sin because “death spread to all men” (Rom. 5:12), “death reigned” (v. 14), “the many died” (v. 15), “death reigned through the one” (v. 17), “as sin reigned in death” (v. 21). As Paul concludes in verse 21, “sin reigned in death” and not the other way round. In Paul’s explanation in Romans 5, it is not sin that is inherited from Adam (as in Augustine’s misreading) but it is death which Adam passed on. Now with death comes sin, but not inevitably or all inclusively, as Paul can speak of those who have not sinned in the manner of Adam (5:14).

Certainly, Adam sinned and introduced death, and with the spread of death sin becomes a contagion, but it is precisely this dynamism in which death is the cause and not the effect that accords with Paul’s parallel picture of Christ. Christ introduces righteousness and eternal life into the world, so that this introduction of life spreads righteousness to all of humanity (vv. 17-18). So, what was done in the first Adam is undone in the second Adam – sin introduced death to all (not because all sinned), so too righteousness introduces life to all (but even more abundantly as life and righteousness overflow to all (v. 17)).

But the question arises as to why death would cause sin? Part of the explanation is connected with the depiction of the devil, who exercises his power through fear of death. It is not that death or mortality, per se, can be equated with sin, but fear of death and deception are linked with the work of Satan. It is not that Satan is a generic or ambiguous tempter, but his temptation is specifically linked to how he misorients or enslaves through death. Hebrews pictures the devil enslaving humanity as he wields fear of death (Heb. 2:14-15) and Paul describes this same reign of fear and enslavement (Rom. 8:15). Hebrews explains, the death of Jesus was intended to “destroy him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil.” John puts it succinctly, “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work” (I John 3:8). At the opening of Revelation Jesus holds “the keys of death and Hades” (Rev. 1:18). Presumably the one who holds the keys to death has taken control of what was formerly under Satan’s power. He has the power to unlock the chains which bound human kind.

We can continue to specify in what fear of death consists by recognizing both how it is resolved and what this resolution allows for. John equates love and life as enabled through Christ: “By this the love of God was manifested in us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world so that we might live through Him” (I Jn. 4:9). The fear, that would obstruct love is cured through the love of Christ: “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear” (I Jn. 4:18). On the other hand, “We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brethren. He who does not love abides in death” (I Jn. 3:14).

Lest there is any confusion, John explains: “Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer; and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him. We know love by this, that He laid down His life for us; and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren” (I Jn. 3:15-16). Fear of death leaves one under the control of death and incapacitates love and gives rise to violence. Fear, death, hatred, and violence, pose one option and life, love, abiding in Christ, and laying down life for others constitutes the other option. But we still might ask why captivity to fear enslaves to lovelessness and death? What is it precisely in fear of death that leads to enslavement and violence?

The book of Wisdom goes some way in explaining cause and effect. It sets out to explain how Hades (the place of the dead), has come to rule in place of God’s intent for creation through the ungodly:

For they reasoned unsoundly, saying to themselves, “Short and sorrowful is our life, and there is no remedy when a life comes to its end, and no one has been known to return from Hades. For we were born by mere chance, and hereafter we shall be as though we had never been, for the breath in our nostrils is smoke, and reason is a spark kindled by the beating of our hearts; when it is extinguished, the body will turn to ashes, and the spirit will dissolve like empty air.” As a result, death is invited into a person’s life as those who are captured by it say, “Let none of us fail to share in our revelry; everywhere let us leave signs of enjoyment, because this is our portion, and this our lot. Let us oppress the righteous poor man; let us not spare the widow or regard the gray hairs of the aged. But let our might be our law of right, for what is weak proves itself to be useless. Let us lie in wait for the righteous man, because he is inconvenient to us and opposes our actions; he reproaches us for sins against the law, and accuses us of sins against our training” (Wis. 1:12–2:15).

As Richard Beck notes, the book of Wisdom may be an indicator that the tendency to read the Genesis 3 story as the origin of sin may have missed the point. It is death that comes to be shared by the race and death contains the impetus to sin. As Beck argues, “the main impulse of the story, given how the Orthodox follow the framing given in texts like those in Wisdom, is less about how the world became infected by sin than how it became infected by death.”[2] Further, “we see that the root cause of death isn’t sin, as the devil/serpent actually predates sin. It’s the “envy of the devil” that introduces sin and death into the world.”[3] In other words, the mortal condition is the situation in which the failed moral condition spreads to all. In this understanding sin is not mystified, as it is in Augustinian original sin. It can be understood how the disease and corruption of death give rise to sin.

In the generation following the first couple, it is not that Cain and Abel are equally depraved and immoral (totally depraved according to Augustine). Cain is evil and he attacks Abel because he is righteous (I Jn. 3:12). This explains how the murderous Cain and his type might come to out-populate and dominate the harmless Abels of the world. We understand how a righteous man like Noah might find himself alone amidst a murderous people. The world has been infected by death, and as Wisdom and presumably Genesis are explaining, this gives rise to murderous competition in which life is a zero sum game and one better grab all the life he can while the grabbing is good.

As Wisdom puts it, God did not intend for it to be this way: “God did not make death, and he does not delight in the death of the living. For he created all things so that they might exist; the generative forces of the world are wholesome, and there is no destructive poison in them, and the dominion of Hades is not on earth. For righteousness is immortal” (Wis. 1:14-15). This fits with Genesis but it also fits with what is obvious. People die and this creates a limit condition in which people are desperate.

This might show up, as Wisdom describes it, in a desperation to find pleasure when and where it is possible. Or it might show up in the sort of desperation on display in Cain, in which he is put into competition for God’s acknowledgement, as if there is only so much to go around. Or maybe, as with those in Babel, the attempt is to storm the heavens, make an enduring name, and leave a mark, so that people will not be undone and dispersed by death. The psychology of the fear of death may take any number of forms, but what is obvious is that God did not and does not intend it to be this way. As Beck describes it, “As mortal creatures, separated from God’s vivifying Spirit, humans are fearful and survival-driven animals, easily drawn into sinful and selfish practices.” This mortal drive to self-preservation, makes us “tragically vulnerable to death anxiety—the desire to preserve our own existence above all else and at all costs.”[4]

Mark Lilla’s description, relying upon Thomas Hobbes, describes how fear of death gives rise to the continual need for violence:

Natural man, according to Hobbes, is desiring man—which also means he is fearful man. If he finds himself alone in nature he will try to satisfy his desires, will only partially succeed, and will fear losing what he has. But if other human beings are present that fear will be heightened to an almost unbearable degree. Given his awareness of himself as a creature beset by desire—a stream of desire that ends, says Hobbes, only in death—he assumes others are similarly driven. “Whosoever looketh into himself and considereth what he doth,” Hobbes writes, “he shall thereby read and know, what are the thoughts and passions of all other men.” That means he can think of them only as potential competitors, trying to satisfy desires that may come into conflict with his own . . . That is why the natural social condition of mankind is war—if not explicit, armed hostilities, then a perpetual state of anxious readiness in preparation for conflict.[5]

As Beck notes this fits with James depiction of why there is quarrelling and violence in the church: “Those conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from? Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you? You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder. And you covet something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts” (James 4:1-2). This formulation closely follows Hobbes. “Why is there violence in the world? Because of a desire motivated by want, lack, and scarcity—whether it be real, potential, or simply perceived scarcity.”[6]

This clarifies why in overcoming the fear of death the very specific result will be the capacity to love. John describes this love as a self-sacrificial love which might be something as simple as the willingness to share worldly goods: “But whoever has the world’s goods, and sees his brother in need and closes his heart against him, how does the love of God abide in him?” (I Jn. 3:17). To obtain, possess, and survive does not lend itself to even the simplest act of sharing, apart from which love is an impossibility. Christ breaks the grip of death in his passion as he succumbs to the worst human situation, and overcomes it.

In his defeat of death Christ opens a way beyond death to life. As Basil writes, “To the extent that [man] stood apart from life, in like amount he also drew closer to death.  For life is God, and the deprivation of life is death.” In Christ life and righteousness are opened up as a possibility. Athanasius the Great writes, “When, by the counsel of the devil, men turned away from things eternal, they returned to things of corruptibility and became themselves the cause of dissolution unto death.”[7] In the defeat of the devil Christ turns men back to life and not their dissolution in death but the dissolution or defeat of death. John Chrysostom writes:

He who fears death is a slave and subjects himself to everything in order to avoid dying. . . . [But] he who does not fear death is outside the tyranny of the devil. For indeed “man would give skin for skin, and all things for [the sake of] his life,” [Job 2:4] and if a man should decide to disregard this, whose slave is he then? He fears no one, is in terror of no one, is higher than everyone, and is freer than everyone. For he who disregards his own life disregards more so all other things. And when the devil finds such a soul, he can accomplish in it none of his works. Tell me, though, what can he threaten? The loss of money or honor? Or exile from one’s country? For these are small things to him “who counteth not even his life dear,” says blessed Paul [Acts 20:24]. Do you see that in casting out the tyranny of death, He has dissolved the strength of the devil?[8]

This defeat of the fear of death frees one from slavery – “he fears no one and is freer than everyone” – it defeats the devil and opens one to love. Here is a mode of life that gives life and shares life and does not horde it in fearful self-salvation (the sort in which he who would save life experiences only death). The slavery of self-salvation is driven by fear, lack, and the attempt to preserve what is rendered absent in the attempt. Only one willing to give up the death-dealing grab to save the self has access to life.

Isn’t this the point of Christ’s self-giving sacrifice which is the model to emulate so as to defeat captivity to death?

Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind regard one another as more important than yourselves; do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others. Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped,   but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men.  Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. (Php. 2:3–8).

The selfishness and empty conceit which enslaves to death is undone in the one who reversed the instinct behind the fear of death and became the means to life and the defeat of sin.


[1] John Romanides, The Ancestral Sin, pp 34-35.

[2] Richard Beck, The Slavery of Death (Kindle Locations 263-267). Cascade Books, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition. Thank you, Tim, for the gift of this book.  

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid., 304.

[5] Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God (New York: Knopf, 2007) p. 81-82. Quoted in Beck, p. 14.

[6] Ibid. Beck, p. 422.

[7] Ibid., Romanides.

[8] The excerpt is from Homily IV of Chrysostom’s Homilies on Hebrews. Quoted in Beck, p. 14.

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The Lost Gospel of Ignatius of Antioch

There is a New Testament and patristic understanding, sometimes lost to modern theology, which organically connects Christ’s death and resurrection to salvation. That is, the predicament of death, with its corruption, inherent deception, and loss, is directly addressed in the life giving truth of the work of Christ. In the modern equation, in which resurrection is a seal of sacrifice accepted, resurrection is not intrinsically connected to either forgiveness or purification and Christ’s death is simply the payment of a penalty. For example, in Calvin’s explanation: “We have in his death the complete fulfillment of salvation, for through it we are reconciled to God, his righteous judgment is satisfied, the curse is removed, and the penalty paid in full.”[1] Once Christ’s death is set in a legal framework, his death addresses a problem in the mind of God rather than a reality inherent in death. Yet, this organic connection of Christ’s death and resurrection to the predicament of death is an understanding repeated and developed in the earliest theological writing of the post-New Testament age. Ignatius of Antioch is working with categories presumed in the New Testament and early church, linking death with corruption and which makes of resurrection, as well as the life and death of Jesus, purification, release from bondage, and forgiveness. The danger is that this understanding is obscured by theological developments from Augustine to Calvin which shift the theological focus to issues of sovereignty, determinism, law, and total depravity.  

When he writes his series of letters to various churches, Ignatius is headed to Rome where he knows he will be martyred. This march toward death informs his comparatively simple theology describing the necessity to embrace death with Christ. For Ignatius, fear of death is the corruption or disease which Satan wields so as to give death the final word. His journey and his letters are a demonstration of how one can put off the corrupting power of death by reversing the instinct and orientation to flee, rather than take up the cross.

 As he explains to the Ephesians, the death and resurrection of Christ are the medicine that provides the cure for the corruption and sickness of sin in its death denying orientation. Death is corrupting precisely in that the sinful, like the false teachers, would deny its reality and would consider the fleshly embodied world as unreal. They would assign prime reality to the soul and spirit and pass over the flesh and the reality of death, and in denying this reality they transmit the original disease. For these false teachers, “He only seemed to suffer, as they themselves only seem to be [Christians].” Ignatius grants that it may happen exactly as they believe: “as they believe, so shall it happen unto them, when they shall be divested of their bodies, and be mere evil spirits.”[2] To lose the body and to become a spirit is an evil and damnable state. The docetists, who deny the reality of the flesh of Christ, “labor under an incurable disease” in that they deny the reality of the cure of the “Physician” who “is the only true God.”[3]

Ignatius explains the cure straightforwardly: “For ‘the Word was made flesh’ [John 1:14]. Being incorporeal, He was in the body; being impassible, He was in a passible body; being immortal, He was in a mortal body; being life, He became subject to corruption, that He might free our souls from death and corruption, and heal them, and might restore them to health, when they were diseased with ungodliness and wicked lusts.”[4] Life and immortality are not innate to man, but come from God. “For were He to regard us according to our works we should cease to be.”[5] God was manifested in Christ “for the renewal of eternal life.”[6] Christ is “the constant source of our life, and of faith and love.”[7] He “breathes immortality into the Church”[8] and “apart from whom we do not possess the true life.”[9]

Ignatius is reflecting the teaching of Hebrews: the defeat of death equals the seizure of the kingdom of Satan, as the devil reigns over a captive humanity through death (Heb. 2:14-15). He is following Paul’s notion that “sin reigned in death” (Rom. 5:21) and “the sting of death is sin” (I Cor. 15:56).

According to John Romanides’ explanation and expansion upon the theology of Ignatius, “Because of the tyrant death man is unable to live according to his original destiny of selfless love. He now has the instinct of self-preservation firmly rooted within him from birth.” Romanides builds upon this to say, “Because he lives constantly under the fear of death he continuously seeks bodily and psychological security, and thus becomes individualistically inclined and utilitarian in attitude.”[10] Though this may put a modern twist on Ignatius, it gets at his understanding of why the “abolition of death” is an undoing of sin and a defeat of the devil.[11]

For Ignatius, death and life are two fates: “Seeing, then, all things have an end, these two things are simultaneously set before us — death and life; and every one shall go unto his own place.” There are two kinds of coin, and each coin has stamped upon it either the character of the world or the character of God, and the sole difference is that “the believing have, in love, the character of God the Father.”[12] Those who deny Him have become the “advocates of death rather than of the truth.”[13] There is life and truth or death and a lie, but there is no means to life apart from the truth of Christ.

It is by Christ alone that man has life. He is the door to life “by which enter in Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and the prophets, and the apostles, and the Church. All these have for their object the attaining to the unity of God.” These too “proclaimed the Gospel, and placed their hope in Him, and waited for Him; in whom also believing, they were saved, through union to Jesus Christ.” [14] They pointed to this one in whom “is the perfection of immortality.”[15]

Ignatius tells Polycarp, his friend, to strive as an athlete for the prize of “immortality and eternal life” and he tells the Trallians that “by believing in His death you may escape death.”[16] He warns the Smyrnaeans that those who deny Jesus had a natural body simply succumb to death, and he equates belief in his suffering in the body as the equivalent of resurrection: “But he who does not acknowledge this, has in fact altogether denied Him, being enveloped in death. . . . Yea, far be it from me to make any mention of them, until they repent and return to [a true belief in] Christ’s passion, which is our resurrection.”[17]

Death is corrupting in that it poses a moral orientation which unleashes the fleshly passions, as the mortality of the flesh reigns unchallenged. In this sense, there is no division between the life, teaching, death, and resurrection of Christ, in that in each he is combating the same foe. The corruption of death is overcome in his life, in his passion and taking up of death, and in his resurrection. On the other hand, the false teachers are “dumb dogs,” “raving mad,” and their bite is poisonous as they inflict the original lie, which would obscure how it is that Satan and death ensnare and enslave.[18] The truth of life in Christ exposes the lie of Satan positing a death dealing lie.

What is remarkable in this understanding are all of the things that are not only missing but if they are added, will obscure Ignatius’ understanding. There is no consideration of a legal framework or of future punishment. Rather, sin is a disease which Christ cures by uniting his immortality with his mortal body. Christ became subject to corruption which is simultaneously a physical and moral state, as is evidenced in those who are spiritually corrupt. Their corruption is not only that they are subject to death, but in denying this reality they make themselves completely corrupt, as evidenced in their foolishness and vanity, leaving them subject to death.  (Ignatius puts heavy emphasis on the importance of meekness, “by which the prince of this world is brought to nought.”[19])

 As he puts it in the letter to the Trallians, “Abstain from the poison of heretics.” Partaking of heresy is like eating poisonous herbage. So he says, “use Christian nourishment only.” Ignatius claims you can either turn to the nourishment of Christ or to poison, with the result that you will die. Or more fatally, one can ingest the poison of heresy, imagining it is the word of Christ: “For those [that are given to this] mix up Jesus Christ with their own poison, speaking things which are unworthy of credit, like those who administer a deadly drug in sweet wine, which he who is ignorant of does greedily take, with a fatal pleasure leading to his own death.”[20] The result of sin is that one becomes completely subject to death, physically and morally.

Ignatius does not speak of future punishment, and he knows nothing of limited atonement or individual election. One either entrusts herself to the love of Christ or attempts to take in “herbage of a different kind.” These “unbelieving, say, that He only seemed to suffer” and it can be said of them “they themselves only seeming to exist.”[21] They have given themselves completely over to unreality through the delusion of death.

The docetic claim, that Christ did not come in human flesh, is directly from Satan, according to Ignatius, and is equivalent in its effects to the original lie of the serpent. “Flee, therefore, those evil offshoots [of Satan], which produce death-bearing fruit, whereof if any one tastes, he instantly dies.” It is evident that such men are not planting good fruit, “For if they were, they would appear as branches of the cross, and their fruit would be incorruptible.” In denying the embodiment of Christ they deny the reality of the passion, and thus they leave themselves subject to the deadly passions (death resistance) which Christ defeated. “By it (the cross) He calls you through His passion, as being His members. The head, therefore, cannot be born by itself, without its members; God, who is [the Savior] Himself, having promised their union.”[22] The true branches springing from the cross, enflesh themselves with the clothing of Christ, such as meekness and love, in which they “become the imitators of His sufferings.” These are the salvific fruit stemming from faith; specifically, faith “that is the flesh of the Lord” and “love, that is the blood of Jesus Christ.”[23] Living in faith is, by definition, to live by the flesh and blood of Christ.

There is no room here for a disembodied, in the head alone, sort of faith. Living by faith and love connects one to the incarnate, fleshly, humanity of Christ by means of which he can “continue in intimate union with Jesus Christ our Lord.” This union can be disrupted through the heretical tendency, which is a type of the sinful tendency, of denying the reality of Christ’s enfleshment. The alternative is to trust in his works in the body which bring about life in the face of death. The ‘flesh and blood’ of Jesus directly counters the “deadly disease” of “depravity,” “foolishness,” “evil,” and “vanity.”

I arm you beforehand by my admonitions, as my beloved and faithful children in Christ, furnishing you with the means of protection [literally, ‘making you drink beforehand what will preserve you’] against the deadly disease of unruly men, by which do ye flee from the disease by the good-will of Christ our Lord.[24]

As Mako Nagasawa notes, Ignatius links ransom language to cleansing: “When He gave Himself a ransom for us, that He might cleanse us by His blood from our old ungodliness, and bestow life on us.” Life is purification and cleanliness, just as death is corruption. For Ignatius the ransom, while addressing the work of Satan, also “concerns ridding human nature of ‘the depravity that was in us.’ Jesus did for us what we could not do for ourselves: heal his human nature, and rid it of sin, by uniting it perfectly with God. He can therefore do in us what we cannot do by ourselves.”[25]

 Ignatius, according to Nagasawa, reflects (and quotes) the participatory thought of 2 Peter: “He (Peter) reminds them of the power and promises of Jesus, that ‘you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world by lust’ (2 Pet.1:4). The term ‘corruption’ occurs two more times in Peter in connection with false teachers (2 Pet.2:10, 19), who ‘indulge the flesh’ (2 Pet.2:10) and ‘entice by fleshly desires’ (2 Pet.2:18).” One can either follow the dogs and pigs (2 Pet.2:22) or overcome this corruption through “purification” and healing by participation in ‘the divine nature’ in and through Jesus Christ (2 Pet.1:9).[26]

This divine nature, the cure to the predicament of death, is imparted throughout his incarnation and is made available through the fact that his flesh and blood are shared. Church historian Philip Schaff writes of Ignatius’ theology, “The central idea is the renovation of man (Eph.20), now under the power of Satan and Death (ib. 3, 19), which are undone in Christ, the risen Savior (Smyrn.3), who ‘is our true life,’ and endows us with immortality (Smyrn. 4, Magn. 6, Eph. 17).’27 Jesus’ new humanity is the ‘cure’ for our corrupted humanity. It is what the eucharist points to: the ‘cleansing remedy to drive away evil.”[27]

Again, what is missing, is the notion of wrath as a legal category (removed from death), the notion of a limited atonement, or any hint of a monophysite or monthelite will or any discussion of will. Augustine’s notion of original sin, focus on God’s sovereignty, focus on human free will or total depravity, and individual predestination, change the landscape of theology to such a degree that by the time of Calvin, even those Arminians who would oppose him were caught up in the same web. They are seemingly unable to extract themselves from the world put into place by Augustine and Calvin. Thus, they pose the innovation of prevenient grace to combat total depravity, and are left with a focus on voluntarism in which the issue of human will and God’s will is the dominant factor in the universe. What they did not have access to was the world of Ignatius and the New Testament.

 In the description of Romanides, for Ignatius death and its corruption are the condition God would destroy through the incarnation, and next to the will of God and the good, there is only the temporary kingdom of Satan, who exercises his power through death and corruption. Man is oppressed by the devil but is still free, at least in regard to will, to follow one or the other. “The world and God has each his own character – the world death, and God life (Ign. Mag. 5.) . . . It exists now under the power of corruption (Rom. 8:20-22), but in Christ is being cleansed.”[28]


[1] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, II.xvi.13

[2] Ignatius, The Epistle to the Smyrnaeans 2.

[3] Ignatius, Epistle to the Ephesians 7.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ignatius, Epistle to the Magnesians 10.

[6] Ignatius, Ephesians 19.

[7] Epistle to the Magnesians 1.

[8] Ephesians  17.

[9] Epistle to the Trallians 9.

[10] John S. Romanides, The Ecclesiology of St. Ignatius of Antioch, http://www.romanity.org/htm/rom.11.en.the_ecclesiology_of_st._ignatius_of_antioch.01.htm

[11] Ephesians 19.

[12] Magnesians 5.

[13] Smyrnaeans 5.

[14] Philadelphians 5.

[15] Ibid. 9.

[16] Epistle to Polycarp 2

[17] Smyrnaeans 5.

[18] Ephesians 7.

[19] Trallians 4.

[20] Ibid, 6.

[21] Ibid 10.

[22] Ibid 11.

[23] Ibid 8.

[24] Ibid, 8. Comments on the translation are those of Mako A. Nagasawa, “Penal Substitution vs. Medical-Ontological Substitution: A Historical Comparison” Documents/atonement/article-penal-substitution-vs-ontological-substitution-historical-comparison.pdfignatius.pdf

[25] Nagasawa, Ibid.

[26] Nagasawa, Ibid.

[27] Philip Schaff, The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers Series 2, Volume 4 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1867), p.37. Quoted in Nagasawa.

[28] Ibid. Romanides.