Foreign Plant

"I exhort you therefore - yet not I, but the love of Jesus Christ - take ye only Christian food, and abstain from strange herbage, which is heresy: for these men do even mingle poison with Jesus Christ, imposing upon others by a show of honesty, like persons administering a deadly drug with honied wine, so that one who knoweth is not, fearing nothing, drinketh in death with a baneful delight" (Ignatius of Antioch, circa 107 A.D., Epistle to the Trallians 6).

The more modern rendition to the passage above is "partake only of christian food, and keep away from every strange plant, which is heresy" (Michael H. Holmes translation).

This passage strikes a certain chord with me. Our appetite for nourishment can only incline towards but two polarized paths: the Christian food versus the foreign plant. The strange herb, the barbaric plant or in the original allotria botane, is any planting whose properties are alien to the substance of the Gospel, whose planting was not of the Father. Those who, however, know the voice, not just any ordinary voice, but the living viva vox of Jesus, naturally turn away from foreign plants; for this self-same word, allotrion, is also found in the passage where Jesus states that His elect sheep "will by no means follow a stranger, but will flee from him, for they do not know the voice of strangers" (John 10:5). There are poisons and noxious plants that harm our bodies and our minds and our souls. The ones that damage the soul are the most pernicious.

I am reminded of a passage in a novel of a contemporary writer, Achilles Tatius, albeit not a Christian like Ignatius. A distraught lover concocts an elixir to remedy the effects of poison in his girlfriend's blood stream. When he gives the potion for her to drink, he prays that the drug would prove true to its prescription and "drive that other wild and barbarous drug out of her head and down to defeat!" (Leucippe and Clitophon, book 4, chapter 17). It is the same with perversions to the faith; we must drive out that manic energy of evil and of the demonic powers - that wild and barbarous plant. But Jesus Christ prepares a cure for us in a form of a potion: a cup of the fruit of the vine, which is the shed blood of Jesus in which there is life from which we derive the remedy of true wisdom.

the elixir to combat evil thoughts and evil habits caused by the inebriation of the foreign elements of this universe is the cup of the doctrine of Jesus Christ and His apostles. Stand true to the apostolic doctrine even as Paul states: "And do not be drunk with wine in which is dissipation, but be filled with the Holy Spirit" (Ephesians 5:18). There are two paths: one of light, the other of darkness. The light is the way of Jesus Christ(John 14:6), the darkness is the way of the "strong delusion" of Satan (2nd Thessalonians 2:11). Because it is during the night when the world sleeps: those who are sober are of the day and remain in the light, those, on the other hand, "who are drunk are drunk at night" (1st Thessalonians 5:7).

A papyrus fragment preserving an agraphon of Jesus - sayings of Jesus preserved in oral memory, states "I stood in the midst of the world, and I appeared to them in flesh, and I saw all of them drunk and none of them have I found thirsty, and it pains me in my soul, because they are blind, and they do not see" (P. Oxy., 1). whether the above quotation is authentic or apocryphal does not matter. The world lives in a wild dream; the world is intoxicated; the world is bamboozled; I daresay, this is the most intoxicated age history has ever seen!

The only remedy is the good fruit of the Holy Spirit, which brings peace, rest, and happiness whereas the former evil plant just gives false euphoria, but is only a gall mixed with honeyed wine. The Christian food is the only kind that could truly give life and sustenance. Do not mix Jesus Christ with poison, thus administering a deadly drug of heresy, hoodwinking an unsuspecting victim untaught in the oracles of God, who naively accepts it without question, and imbibes the fatal drink of pleasure to their undoing. 

Pauly grimly states that those who suppress that knowledge of God are given over to a reprobate mind. I pray O God to deliver me from any poisonous teachings and the foul plants of this world - as we should all be praying for.