Several writers in the generation after the apostles knew them or their close companions, and their letters survive. The clearest chain runs from the apostle John to Polycarp, and from Polycarp to Irenaeus, who heard him teach, and it shows that a crucified and risen Jesus was what the apostles' own students were taught.
The Grace Answer
Paul told Timothy to pass on what he'd heard “to faithful men who will be able to teach others also.” You can watch that happen in the writings that survive from the decades right after the New Testament.
Clement led the church in Rome and wrote to the Corinthians around AD 96. Irenaeus says he had seen the apostles and talked with them. Clement wrote that the apostles went out preaching “being fully assured by the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.” That's a man one step from Peter and Paul, describing what moved them.
Polycarp was bishop of Smyrna and was burned in about AD 155. At his trial he said he had served Christ for eighty-six years. Irenaeus says he was “by apostles in Asia, appointed bishop of the Church in Smyrna,” and that Irenaeus himself saw him “in my early youth.” In a letter to a friend named Florinus, Irenaeus recalls “how he would speak of his familiar intercourse with John, and with the rest of those who had seen the Lord,” and says Polycarp had received what he taught “from the eye-witnesses of the Word of life.” Polycarp's own letter to the Philippians survives, and it speaks of believing in the One “who raised up our Lord Jesus Christ from the dead.”
Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, wrote seven letters around AD 110 while under guard on the way to his execution in Rome. Against teachers who said Jesus only seemed to have a body, he wrote, “I know that after His resurrection also He was still possessed of flesh.” A man walking to his death wasn't sending a symbolic resurrection ahead of him.
And Quadratus, writing to the emperor Hadrian around AD 125, said that some of the people Jesus healed or raised were still alive in his own time.
How sure can we be about these links?
Some are firmer than others, and it's good to know which. Clement's letter and Polycarp's letter are generally accepted as genuine, and they're early. Irenaeus's memory of Polycarp comes from Irenaeus himself, and his writings survive. The tradition that Ignatius was personally taught by John comes much later, so we lean only on what Ignatius wrote himself. Irenaeus also calls Papias, another early bishop, “the hearer of John.” The historian Eusebius thought Papias may have meant a different John, an elder, so that link is disputed.
What the firm links show is enough. The apostles' own students held the resurrection at the center of the faith, and two of them, Ignatius and Polycarp, died for it. John wrote that he was declaring what “we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes.” Polycarp sat and talked with the man who wrote that, and eighty-six years of following Christ ended in a fire he could have walked away from. Your faith rests on Jesus Himself. What the chain gives you is confidence that the Jesus you're trusting is the one the eyewitnesses' friends knew.
The Scriptures
Talk It Through
For a small group, a friend across the table, or your own journal.
- Polycarp heard John, and Irenaeus heard Polycarp. How does knowing the chain of people between you and the eyewitnesses change the way you hear the Gospels?
- Ignatius insisted the risen Jesus had real flesh. Why do you think that mattered so much to a man on his way to execution?
- Some of these links are firm and some are disputed. Is it easier or harder for you to trust a source that tells you which is which?