I focus on two letters belonging to the "longer recension" of the corpus attributed to the bishop Ignatius of Antioch: the first letter is (allegedly) authored by a woman, Mary of Cassobola, and the second one is the response attributed to Ignatius. They were probably crafted by a fourth-century forger, who had the intention of portraying Mary as a woman with authority, inasmuch she strongly advices Ignatius to acknowledge two young men, respectively as a bishop and a priest of two cities near Antioch. My paper will show how these letters convey an extraordinary "gendered" authoritative model, set in the 2nd century, for women dwelling in Asia Minor two centuries later: women's agency can include the management of issues related with ecclesiastical hierarchy, and a high degree of with Biblical knowledge.