Catholic or catholic?

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Oftentimes I quote Ignatius of Antioch when he mentioned the Catholic Church in his letters during my discussions with non-catholics and they always say that what he wrote there was a small “c” rather than a capital letter “C” for catholic church. Is it true that it is written in small letters?
 
Thank you for the link trishie, however, my question was wether it was capital letter or not. I have no idea how the word was written in the original manuscripts. God bless =)
 
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In this case a clear answer will be kind of hard to give. This is because at such an early period there was one church, meaning anyone who was christian was part of the same church and protestantism was non-existant. While the church had many disagreements you will find they still called each other brother and attempted to agree on most things as one unit relying on an internal organization of bishops and letters. The result being that saint Ignatius would have considered all christians to be catholic and all Catholics to be christians because there was no such division. In some brief research the term Catholic or catholic did not earn aa distinction until a few hundred years after he wrote his letters.
 
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In terms of dealing with Non-Catholics and c versus C. If they read any of his letters they would see three things that would squarely make him a non-protestant and in correlation more strongly allied to the one church theology under the bishops. Which is very close to The Catholic church now or to the Orthodox church structure.
  1. He believed that a bishop’s word was law.
  2. He believed that any sect that rejected the the eucharist being the true flesh of christ was not to be considered catholic.
  3. He believed that the Bishop of a church stood in as the direct word of God here on earth.
Hope this helps in your next debate.
 
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DM_P said:
Oftentimes I quote Ignatius of Antioch when he mentioned the Catholic Church in his letters during my discussions with non-catholics and they always say that what he wrote there was a small “c” rather than a capital letter “C” for catholic church. Is it true that it is written in small letters?
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Greek did not have capital letters until the modern era. Biblical Greek has only one set of letters. Same with ancient Latin.
 
Capitalization of proper nouns in English did not begin until the 17th Century and was not consistent even into the 18th Century.
 
Greek back in the day was written in majuscule, which would develop into what we now know as capital letters. It’s lowercase that developed later. Greek WOULDHAVELOOKEDSOMETHINGLIKETHISWITHALLCAPSANDNOSPACES.

So for one thing, the caps vs. no caps argument would be rather thin, since everything was all caps then. Whether the word should be capitalized or not in today’s translation would depend on context.

The word in question can be both Catholic and catholic, depending on whether the word is used as a part of a proper noun or as a common adjective. We refer to the Catholic Church as a proper identifier for the ecclesial communion around the see of Rome. We also refer to Catholic priests, bishops, and laity, as well as other items that pertain to this entity.

But catholic is valid as well, when it’s used to describe universality, or in contradistinction to heretical movements, as is the word “orthodox” (vs. “Orthodox”). We speak of catholic epistles, catholic belief, and in the Creed, we profess one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church. While we profess catholic, orthodox belief, we are Catholic, not Orthodox Christians.

St. Ignatius probably used the word in the “catholic” sense, that is, the Church scattered throughout the world.
 
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