ABSTRACT
The ‘Star Hymn’ appears near the end of Ignatius’ Letter to the Ephesians, the first of seven letters the bishop of Antioch wrote while en route as a prisoner to Rome where he was martyred in c. 113 ce. Ignatius’ concern in this correspondence was two-fold: to oppose a docetic christology which had taken root in Ephesus and other Asia Minor churches, and to encourage his audience to submit themselves to the oversight of a single bishop. The hymn, with its allusion to the abolition of death in 19.3, as well as the reference to the birth and death of Christ in Ignatius’ preface, is clearly antidocetic. As esoteric teaching (for example, the oxymoronic ‘three mysteries of a loud shout’) its inclusion by Ignatius must have gone some way toward legitimating him as a spiritual authority and added weight to his exhortations to the Ephesians to submit themselves to the authority of a single bishop. 1 Whether or not Ignatius achieved the desired result by including it, the Star Hymn was to exercise an effect on an audience far wider than the bishop of Antioch's immediate circle of readers: it was one of the most quoted extracanonical passages in the early Church. 2
