The High Priest and the Temple: Metaphorical Depictions of Jesus in the Letters of Ignatius of Antioch

Jonathon Lookadoo explores Ignatius’s pairing of high priestly and temple metaphors in order to understand more clearly how Ignatius viewed Jesus and the church. The metaphors of high priest and temple are closely related in three of Ignatius’s letters. This study allows readers to appreciate better how Ignatius portrayed Jesus’s identity and work. The author also sheds light on how some of Ignatius’s audiences were to demonstrate unity. By exploring each metaphor with a view to its rhetorical function in a particular letter as well as to similar imagery in early Jewish and early Christian literature, Jonathon Lookadoo freshly illuminates Ignatius’s letters in a way that is of interest not only to Ignatian scholars, but to all who study early Christian letters, rhetoric, and theology in the first two centuries CE.