All of these three areas of Ignatius’ letters have occasioned both significant scholarly elaboration and sharp critique. Of the three, it is Ignatius’ desire for martyrdom that has occasioned the most criticism as a number of scholars have suggested that Ignatius’ remarks about his death reveal a man mentally unbalanced. W. H. C. Frend, in his monumental study of Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church, describes Ignatius’s letters as displaying ‘a state of exaltation bordering on mania,’8