The second of the seven letters is the shortest, but also what I think it is one of the most beautiful among the seven. It is also one of only two letters which contain no criticism at all. The other one sharing this tone is Philadelphia. These two small struggling churches receive only encouragement, only praise, only promise. Christ has nothing to correct in them. He only has things to comfort them with.
The letter is in Revelation chapter 2, verses 8 to 11. Four short verses. But they contain some of the most powerful sentences in the entire New Testament.
The Address
And unto the angel of the church in Smyrna write: These things saith the first and the last, which was dead, and is alive.
Christ identifies himself with three titles. The first and the last. Which was dead. Is alive.
Each of these has a Smyrnaean meaning. As I explained in the article on the city, Smyrna was a city which had, in its own civic memory, died and risen. Old Smyrna was destroyed by the Lydian king Alyattes around 600 BC. The site was almost empty for three centuries. New Smyrna was refounded around 300 BC, on a different hill. The local Greek tradition called this the resurrection of Smyrna.
Christ takes this resurrection language and applies it to himself. He is the first and the last. He died. He is alive. The pattern of dead-and-alive, which the Smyrnaeans knew from their own city, is the pattern of his own person. To a community which is about to face death, this self-identification is the most reassuring possible introduction.
The Praise and the Paradox
I know thy works, and tribulation, and poverty, but thou art rich.
A very short sentence. Three words about their condition — works, tribulation, poverty. And then one short paradoxical reversal — but thou art rich.
The Christians of Smyrna were, by all available evidence, were materially poor. They were not the senatorial Christians of Rome. They were not the wealthy converts of Corinth. They were generally small-business people, slaves, freedmen, working-class members of a Greek port city. The local Jewish community, by contrast, was relatively wealthy and well connected. The local pagan elite was even wealthier. The Christians, in this neighbourhood, were near the bottom of the social ladder. Wealth and power were strictly connected in the Roman social hierarchy.
But Christ says: thou art rich. Not in the sense of having secret wealth. In the sense of having something which the surrounding rich do not have. The community has a richness of faith, of community, of hope. The Greek word here is plousios, which is also used elsewhere in the New Testament for being rich toward God.
There is a Turkish saying which I always think of in this context. Komşusu aç iken tok yatan bizden değildir. “He who sleeps full while his neighbour is hungry is not one of us.” It is a saying often attributed to Turkish tradition but with much older roots in Anatolian rural culture. The poor of Smyrna were probably keeping each other fed, in the way that poor neighbours always have. This kind of sharing was the visible sign of an invisible richness.
The Synagogue of Satan
And I know the blasphemy of them which say they are Jews, and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan.
We have to handle this verse carefully because it has been so badly misused throughout history and has caused much disrespect and uproar against the Hebrew community of Izmir.
The phrase synagogue of Satan has been quoted, for almost two thousand years, as if it were a general theological condemnation of the Jewish people. This is a complete misreading.
The early Christian community of Smyrna was itself almost entirely Jewish in origin. Polycarp, the bishop who would be martyred about sixty years after this letter, was probably from a Jewish background. The first Christians of Smyrna were Jews who had accepted Jesus as the Messiah. They were not separate from the synagogue. They considered themselves part of the wider Jewish community.
What had happened, by 95 AD, was a local conflict. Some members of the Smyrna synagogue had begun to denounce the Christian Jews to the Roman authorities. Roman law gave the Jewish community a special legal status, allowing them to be exempt from certain civic religious obligations including the imperial cult. Christians, when they were considered Jewish, shared this exemption. But when the synagogue authorities formally declared the Christians to be no longer Jewish, the Christians lost the legal protection. They became liable to participate in the imperial cult. They were, in some cases, denounced to the Roman authorities, arrested, prosecuted.
The phrase synagogue of Satan refers to this specific local act of denunciation. It is the language of pastoral comfort to a small persecuted community. The implication is: those who are denouncing you in the name of being faithful Jews are not, by their actions, behaving as faithful Jews. They have aligned themselves with the spiritual adversary. They say they are Jews, and are not.
This is a hard thing to translate into modern speech without losing the original local meaning. But what it is not is what it has so often been taken to be. It is not an indictment of Judaism. It is a comfort to a small community which has been turned in to the police by its own former neighbours.
I want to underline this clearly because, for fifteen hundred years, this verse has been misread. We owe it to the actual historical Smyrnaean Christians, who were Jewish themselves, to read the verse as they would have read it. As a comfort, not as a weapon.
The Coming Suffering
Fear none of those things which thou shalt suffer: behold, the devil shall cast some of you into prison, that ye may be tried; and ye shall have tribulation ten days.
The letter does not promise that the suffering will be avoided. It promises only that the suffering will be limited. Ten days. Not forever. Ten days.
Why ten days? Some scholars have suggested literal interpretations, others symbolic. The most likely meaning is a defined and limited period, not a precise number of calendar days. The number ten in Jewish apocalyptic literature often represents a complete but bounded testing. Daniel and his friends, in the book of Daniel, are tested for ten days in the court of Babylon. The Smyrnaean Christians are being told that their testing will be similar. Real, but not endless.
This is, I think, one of the most pastorally useful sentences in the entire Apocalypse. Because in any actual experience of suffering, the worst part is often not the suffering itself. It is the fear that the suffering will never end. Will it always be like this? Will it get worse and worse forever? The letter answers: no. There is a limit. The suffering is bounded. Ten days. Endure.
The Crown
Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life.
Now we come to the central command of the letter. Be faithful unto death. The Greek phrase achri thanatou means all the way to the point of death. Not just until you die naturally, but even if it costs your life. The letter is preparing the Smyrnaean Christians for actual martyrdom, not just for hard times.
And the promise is the crown of life. The Greek word stephanos is the same word that the Smyrnaeans used for their own civic crown, the famous Stephanos Smyrnaion, the chain of public buildings on top of Mount Pagos which looked like a crown around the head of the city. The local pride was the stephanos of the marble buildings.
Christ says: forget the crown of marble. There is another crown. The crown of life.
When Polycarp, the bishop of Smyrna, was burned alive in the stadium of his own city in 156 AD, this promise was very directly fulfilled. He had served Christ for eighty-six years. He was tested all the way to death. He received, in the Christian understanding, the crown of life. The same crown that the letter, sixty years earlier, had promised.
The Closing Promise
He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches; He that overcometh shall not be hurt of the second death.
The closing promise is unique. The second death.
What is the second death? In the Apocalypse, this term appears several times, and in chapter 20 it is identified with the lake of fire, the final separation from God. The first death is the death of the body. The second death is the death of the soul, the eternal separation, the final loss.
The promise to the Smyrnaeans is therefore: even if the empire kills you, this is only the first death. The second death will not touch you. The Roman state can take your body, but it cannot take your soul. The worst that the empire can do is end your life. But your life, in the deeper sense, is held in a different hand.
This is the most powerful possible answer to the threat of martyrdom. It does not say that the body will be saved. It says that the body is not the deepest thing. The deepest thing, the eternal life of the person, is beyond the reach of any persecutor.
One Quiet Last Image
I will leave you with one image, again, instead of the standard pitch.
The agora of ancient Smyrna, in the centre of modern İzmir, is open to visitors. You can stand inside the colonnaded basilica, where some of the earliest Smyrnaean Christians may have worshipped, or at least walked.
The early evening, in late September, the wind comes off the bay and through the columns. The sound of the modern bazaar is just outside the fence, the sellers calling, the small bells of the bicycle vendors, the faint music from a nearby café. And inside the agora, surrounded by the noise of the modern living city, you can read the letter aloud.
Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life.
The wind keeps blowing. The city keeps living. The promise still stands.
