The Parvenu and the Quixote: A Bourdieuian Reading of Ignatius of Antioch, To the Philadelphians 8

If anyone has been able to lure priests and scholars away from Paul and Jesus, it is Ignatius. Except for the Pauline epistles and the canonised gospels, hardly a body of early Christian literature has drawn together more academic debate and denominational strife than the corpus of extant letters of Ignatius of Antioch. With this article, however, our aim is not to carve out space for ourselves within the densely populated field of “Ignatian studies”. After a short introduction (§ 1.), we will proceed in a different way. We will define the nature (§ 2.) and set the limits (§ 3.) of our scientific interests in a specific topic of the Ignatian research without pretending to convince ourselves or the reader that what we think we know about the biographically elusive figure of Ignatius of Antioch builds on a historically well-founded, disciplinary repository of knowledge. Rather, we set ourselves a different goal. In what follows we will analyse a short passage of the literary corpus attributed to Ignatius of Antioch (i.e., To the Philadelphians 8) and offer a new description of both its rhetoric and social locations. Tapping into Pierre Bourdieu’s epistemology and theory of action, The goal is to leverage our re-description as an opportunity to interrogate the common pattern in Early Christian studies of singling out one Christian voice (or text) within competitive ancient social spaces and proceeding as though Early Christian materials represent unique moments in history. Our re-description will encourage de-familiarising our Christian sources so that we can treat them as examples of broader social phenomena. By documenting the competitive and rhetorical textures of To the Philadelphians 8, we will gain insights into questions and phenomena that go far beyond church history, history of Christianity, and even history of religion (§ 4.).