PREFACE

The aim of these Lectures is to pourtray the organized life of the Christian Society as that was lived in the thousands of little communities formed by the proclamation of the Gospel of our Lord during the first three centuries.

The method of description has been to select writings which seemed to reveal that life most clearly, and to group round the central sources of information illustrative evidence, contemporary or other. The principle of selection has been to take, as the central authorities, those writings which, when carefully examined, reveal the greatest number of details. Thus, the Epistles of St. Paul, especially the First Epistle to the Corinthians, have been chosen as furnishing the greatest number of facts going to form a picture of the life of the Christian Society during the first century, and the material derived from the other canonical writings such as the Acts of the Apostles, the Apocalypse and the Pastoral Epistles, have been arranged around them. Similarly the Didache, the Sources of the Apostolic Canons and the Epistles of Ignatius have been selected for the light they throw on the life and work of the Church during the second century. The Canons of Hippolytus, supplemented by the writings of Irenaeus and of Tertullian, have furnished the basis for the description of the organization during the first, and the Epistles of Cyprian of Carthage for that of the second half of the third century.

CHAPTER I

THE NEW TESTAMENT CONCEPTION OF THE CHURCH

And I say also unto thee, that thou art Petros, and on this petra I will build My Church (Ecclesia); and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it.”Matt. xvi. 18. Some modern critics (cf. Schmiedel in the Encyc. Bibl., p. 3105) declare that this passage could not have come from the lips of our Lord in the form in which it has been recorded, and in particular that He could not have used the word “ecclesia”; the main reason given being that our Lord sought to reform hearts and not external conditions. To argue from that statement, however true it may be, that Jesus had no intention of founding a religious community and could not have used the word “church,” seems to me to be purely subjective and therefore untrustworthy reasoning. Besides, the use of the word by St. Paul in Gal. i. 13, shows that St. Paul found the word existing within Christian circles when he embraced the new faith; and to find it in common use at so early a period entitles us, in my judgment, to trace it back to Jesus Himself. The trend of modern criticism has been to place St. Paul’s conversion much closer to the crucifixion than it was formerly held to be. St. Paul implies that the words of the eucharistic formula (Mk. xiv. 22-24, Matt. xxvi. 26-28) came from Jesus; he takes it for granted that every one who becomes a Christian (himself included) must be baptized. We have thus, quite independently of the Gospels or of the Acts, “church,” “baptism,” “the eucharist”—all implying a religious community, all in common use at a time scarcely two years after the death of our Lord, That entitles us to attribute them to Jesus Himself. Our Lord was far from Galilee and farther from Jerusalem when He uttered these words. He was sojourning in an almost wholly pagan land. The rocks overhanging the path were covered with the mementos of a licentious cult; and in the neighbouring city of Caesarea Philippi Herod Philip had built and consecrated a temple to the Emperor Augustus, who was there worshipped as a god.Compare Josephus, Antiq. XV. x. 3; Bell. Jud. I, xxi. 3. See also Schürer, Geschichte des Jüdischen Volkes (1898, 3rd ed.), ii. 158 f.; G. A. Smith, Historical Geography of Palestine, p. 473 ff.; Wissowa, Religion and Kultus der Römer (1902), p. 284, n. 3. It was among scenes which showed the lustful passions of man’s corrupt heart and the statecraft of Imperial Rome seating themselves on the throne of God, that Jesus made to His followers the promise which He has so marvellously fulfilled.

The word translated Church is Ecclesia—a word that had a history both theocratic and democratic, and that came trailing behind it memories both to the Jews who were then listening to Him, and to the Greeks, who, at a later period, received His Gospel. To the Jew, the Ecclesia had been the assembly of the congregation of Israel,Numbers x. 2, 3. In the Old Testament two words are used to denote the assembling of Israel, qāhāl and ’edāh; the former is translated “assembly” and the latter “congregation” in the Revised Version. In the Septuagint ἐκκλησία is almost always always used to translate qāhāl, and συναγωγὴ to translate ’edāh. Both Greek words appear continually in the later Hellenistic Judaism, and it is difficult to distinguish their meanings; but Schürer is inclined to think that συναγωγὴ means the assembly of Israel as a matter of fact; while ἐκκλησία has always an ideal reference attached to it. Compare Schürer, Geschichte des Jüdischen Volkes (3rd ed. 1898), ii. 432, n. 10; Hort, The Christian Ecclesia, pp. 5-7. summoned to meet at the door of the Tabernacle of Jehovah by men blowing silver trumpets. To the Greek the Ecclesia was the sovereign assembly of the free Greek city-state,This is the common use of the word in classical Greek; in the later Greek the word denotes any popular assembly, even a disorderly one; it is this use that is found in Acts xix. 41. Dio Cassius uses the word to denote the Roman comitia or ruling popular assembly of the sovereign Roman people. The ruling idea in the word, whether in classical or in Hellenistic Greek, is that it denotes an assembly of the people, not of a committee or council. Against this view compare Hatch, The Organization of the Early Christian Churches (1881), p. 30, n. 11; and for a criticism of Hatch, see Sohm, Kirchenrecht (1892), i. 17, n. 4. summoned by the herald blowing his horn through the streets of the town. To the followers of Jesus it was to be the congregation of the redeemed and therefore of the free, summoned by His heralds to continually appear in the presence of their Lord, who was always to be in the midst of them. It was to be a theocratic democracy.

CHAPTER II

A CHRISTIAN CHURCH IN APOSTOLIC TIMES

Can we, piercing the mists of two thousand years, see a Christian Church as it was in Apostolic times—a tiny island in a sea of surrounding heathenism? Our vision gets most assistance from the Epistles of St. Paul, which not only are the oldest records of the literature of the New Testament, but give us much clearer pictures of the earliest Christian assemblies for edification and thanksgiving than are to be found in the Acts of the Apostles. The more we study these epistles the more clearly we discern that we must not project into these primitive times a picture taken from any of the long organized churches of our days. On the other hand, we can see many an analogy in the usages of the growing churches of the mission field. This is not to be wondered at. The primitive church and churches growing among heathen surroundings have both to do with the origins of organization.

For one thing, we must remember that the meetings of the congregation were held in private houses;It is true that we read in Acts xix. 9, 10 that St. Paul held meetings in the Schola of Tyrannus: but this is a unique instance. and as the number of believers grew, more than one house must have been placed at the service of the brethren for their meetings for public worship and for the transaction of the necessary business of the congregation. We are told that in the primitive church at Jerusalem the Lord’s Supper was dispensed in the houses,Acts ii. 46: κλῶντές τε κατ᾽ οἶκον ἄρτον. and that the brethren met in the house of Mary the mother of John Mark,Acts xii. 12: “The house of Mary, the mother of John whose surname was Mark; where many were gathered together and were praying.” in the house of James the brother of our Lord,Acts xxi. 18; xii. 17. and probably elsewhere. At the close of the Epistle to the Romans, St. Paul sends greetings to three, perhaps five, groups of brethren gathered round clusters of distinguished Christians whom he names. One of these groups he calls a “church,” and the others were presumably so also.

Rom. xvi. 3-5: “Salute Prisca and Aquila . . . and the church that is in their house”; xvi. 14: “Salute Asynsritus, Phlegon, Hermes, Patrobas, Hermas, and the brethren that are with them”; 15: “Salute Philologus and Julia, Nereus and his sister, and O1ympas, and all the saints that are with them”; 10: “Salute them which are of the household of Aristobulus”; 11: “Salute them of the household of Narcissus.” The groups saluted in verses 10 and 11 may have been a number of freedmen or slaves belonging to the households of the two wealthy men mentioned; but the other three groups are evidently house-churches.

St. Paul sends salutations to other house-churches; to that meeting in the house of Philemon at Colossae (Philem. 2), to that meeting in the house of Nymphas in Laodicea (Col. iv. 15), and to that meeting in the house of Stephanas (1 Cor. xvi. 15).

Traces of these earliest house-churches survived in happier days. The ground plan of the earliest Roman church, discovered in 1900 in the Forum at Rome, is modelled not on the basilica or public hall, but on the audience hall of the wealthy Roman burgher, and the recollections of the familiar surroundings at the meetings in the house-churches probably guided the pencil of the architect who first planned the earliest public buildings dedicated to Christian worship.Compare C. Dehio, Die Genesis der christlichen Basilika in the Sitzensber. d. München. Akad. d. Wiss. 1882, ii. 301 ff. Old liturgies which enjoin the deacon, at the period of the service when the Lord’s Supper is about to be celebrated, to command the mothers to take their babies on their knees, bring

In the so-called Liturgy of St. Clement there is the following rubric:—

“The order of James, the brother of John, the son of Zebedee.

“And I James, the brother of John, the son of Zebedee, command that forthwith the deacon say,

Let none of the hearers, none of the unbelievers, none of the heterodox stay. Ye who have prayed the former prayer, depart. Mothers, take up your children. Let us stand upright to present unto the Lord our offerings with fear and trembling.” Neale and Littledale, Translations of Primitive Liturgies, p. 75.

The writer had the privilege of worshipping in a house-church in the Lebanon under the shoulder of Sunim in the autumn of 1888. The long low vaulted kitchen had been swept and garnished for the occasion, though some of the pots still stood in a corner. The congregation sat on the floor—the men together in rows on the right and the women in rows on the left. During the services which preceded the Holy Communion, babies crawled about the floor making excursions from mother to father and back again. When the non-communicants had left, and the “elements,” as we say in Scotland, were being uncovered, the mothers secured the straggling babies and kept them on their laps during the whole of the communion service, as was enjoined in the ancient rubric quoted above.

It is St. Paul, in his First Epistle to the Corinthians, who gives us the most distinct picture of the meetings of the earliest Christian communities. The brethren appear to have had three distinct meetings—one for the purposes of edification by prayer and exhortation, another for thanksgiving which began with a common meal and ended with the Holy Supper,The best account of the Agape is in Keating’s The Agape and the Eucharist (1901). and a third for the business of the little society.

1. In his description of the first the apostle introduces us to an earnest company of men and women full of restrained enthusiasm, which might soon become unrestrained. We hear of no officials appointed to conduct the services. The brethren fill the body of the hall, the women sitting together, in all probability on the one side, and the men on the other; behind them are the inquirers; and behind them, clustering round the door, unbelievers, whom curiosity or some other motive has attracted, and who are welcomed to this meeting “for the Word.”

The service, and probably each part of the service, began with the benediction: “Grace be to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ,” which was followed by an invocation of Jesus and the confession that He is Lord.St. Paul does not mention the benediction as forming part of the Christian worship, but the way in which it occurs regularly at the beginning of his epistles, preserving always the same form, warrants us in supposing its liturgical use in the manner above indicated. The invocation of Jesus as the Lord is made the test of all Christian public utterance for edification, and must have preceded the prophetic addresses if not the whole service: 1 Cor. xii. 3. One of the brethren began to pray; then another and another; one began the Lord’s Prayer,The use of the Lord’s prayer is not mentioned but it may be inferred. “Paul nowhere mentions the Lord’s prayer. But we may assume that we have a trace of it in Rom. viii. 15, and in Gal. iv. 6. In speaking of the right to call God Father, he gives the Aramaic form for father, in each instance adding a translation; and this is only to be explained by supposing that he had in mind a formula which was known wherever the Gospel had penetrate, and which, by preserving the original language, invested the name with peculiar solemnity, in order to maintain its significance unimpaired in the believer’s consciousness.” Weizsäcker, The Apostolic Age, ii. p. 258 (Eng. Trans.). According to the Didache the Lord’s Prayer was to be said three times every day (Did. viii.). and all joined; each prayer was followed by a hearty and fervent “Amen.”1 Cor. xiv. 16. Then a hymn was sung; then another and another, for several of the brethren have composed or selected hymns at home which they wish to be sung by the congregation.1 Cor. xiv. 26. Several of these hymns are preserved in the New Testament, and one is embodied in one of our Scotch paraphrases:

If it be permitted, as I think it is, to believe that the author of the Apocalypse used the outline of the Christian worship of the earliest age as the canvas on which he painted his glorious prophetic visions, then we can disentangle many a short hymn used in the services of the apostolic Church and also get many a detail about that service. The paraphrase quoted above combines two of the songs given in Revelation (v. 9-13). We have another in xv. 3 f.:—

and yet another in xi. 17:—

It is likely that the singing was antiphonal; there are alternate strophes in the hymns in the heavenly worship, and Pliny says that the Christians “carmen Christo quasi Deo dicere secum invicem” (Ep. 96 [97]).

After the hymns came reading from the Old Testament Scriptures, and readings or recitations concerning the life and death, the sayings and deeds of Jesus.St. Paul does not mention the reading of Scripture in his order of worship; but it must have been there. In his epistles to the Corinthians, to confine ourselves to them, he implies such a knowledge of the Old Testament and of deeds and sayings of Jesus as could only be got from the continuous public reading of the Scriptures, and the reciting sentences about Jesus. He takes it for granted that the Old Testament Scriptures are known and known to be the law for life and conduct, in 1 Cor. vi. 16; ix. 8-13; xiv. 21; 2 Cor. vi. 16, 18; viii. 15; ix. 9. In the beginning of 1 Cor. xv. he clearly refers to formal statements, not yet perhaps committed to writing, which he himself had handed over as he had received them, and which recited the facts about the sayings and deeds of Jesus. The opening and reading from the book comes after the singing in the heavenly worship (Rev. v. vi.). Then came the “instruction”—sober words for edification, based on what had been read, and coming either from the gift of “wisdom,” or from that intuitive power of seeing into the heart of spiritual things which the apostle calls “knowledge.”Instruction (διδαχή), teaching or doctrine includes the “wisdom” and “knowledge” of 1 Cor. xii. 8; “wisdom,” (λόγος σοφίας) is described in 1 Cor. ii. 7; vi. 5; and “knowledge” (λόγος γνώσεως) in 2 Cor. x. 5; xi. 6; and perhaps the πίστις of 1 Cor. xii. 9, which may mean depth of loyal spiritual experience. Then came the moment of greatest expectancy. It was the time for the prophets, men who believed themselves and were believed by their brethren to be specially taught by the Holy Spirit, to take part. They started forward, the gifted men, so eager to impart what had been given them, that sometimes two or more rose at once and spoke together;1 Cor. xiv. 31. and sometimes when one was speaking the message came to another, and he leapt to his feet,1 Cor. xiv. 30. increasing the emotion and taking from the edification. When the prophets were silent, first one, then another, and sometimes two at once, began strange ejaculatory prayers,I have followed Weizsäcker’s conception of what was meant by speaking “in a tongue.” These things have to be noted about the phenomenon. It occurred in prayer only (1 Cor. xiv. 2, 14); it appeared like a soliloquy (1 Cor. xiv. 2); the speaker edified himself (xiv. 4), but seems to have lost conscious control over himself (xiv. 14); what was said was not intelligible to others (xiv: 2); it could be compared to the sound of a trumpet which gave no clear call (xiv. 7, 8); or to the use of a foreign and barbarous language (xiv. 10, 11); the speaker in a tongue ought to interpret what he has said, and that he may be able to do this he ought to pray for divine assistance (xiv. 13); that such speaking was not all of one sort—there were “kinds of tongues” (xii. 10). Upon the whole then we may conceive it to have been rapt ejaculatory prayer uttered during unrestrained emotion, where words often took the place of sentences. This enables us to see how brethren, who were sympathetio enough, could follow the obscure windings of thought and expression, and interpret. Our knowledge is exclusively derived from 1 Cor. xiv.; the two passages in Acts x. 46; xix; 8, and the references in the post-apostolic period do not enlighten us. Compare Heinrici, Das Erste Sendschreiben an die Korinther, pp. 376-393; Bleek, Studien u. Kritiken (1829), pp. 3-79; Hilgenfeld, Die Glossolalie in der alien Kirche, Leipzig, 1850. This “gift” of tongues is referred to by Irenaeus, v. 6, and Tertullian, Adv. Marcion, v. 8. in sentences so rugged and disjointed that the audience for the most part could not understand, and had to wait till some of their number, who could follow the strange utterances, were ready to translate them into intelligible language.1 Cor. xiv. 27, 28. Then followed the benediction: “The Grace of the Lord Jesus be with you all”; the “kiss of peace”; and the congregation dispersed. Sometimes during the meeting, at some part of the services, but oftenest when the prophets were speaking, there was a stir at the back of the room, and a heathen, who had been listening in careless curiosity or in barely concealed scorn, suddenly felt the sinful secrets of his own heart revealed to him, and pushing forward fell down at the feet of the speaker and made his confession,1 Cor. xiv. 25. while the assembly raised the doxology: “Blessed be God, the Father of the Lord Jesus, for evermore.The other form of doxology common to St. Paul’s epistles is “Unto God our Father, be glory for ever, Amen.” These doxologies are found running through St. Paul’s and other epistles in the New Testament. They are used to end a prophetic utterance, or an exposition of divine wisdom, and they occur in the description of the heavenly worship in the Apocalypse. Amen.”

CHAPTER III

THE PROPHETIC MINISTRY

St. Paul’s conception of a Christian communityThis is equally true of the whole Church of Christ throughout the whole world: for each local church is the Church in miniature. The relation of the prophetic ministry to the whole Church on the one hand and to the local church on the other is an instructive illustration of the visibility of the Church Universal in every Christian community. is a body of which the Spirit of Christ is the soul. The individual members are all full of the Spirit, and their individual powers and capacities are laid hold of, vivified, and strengthened by the indwelling Spirit in such a way that each is “gifted” and enabled to do some special service for Christ and for His Church in the society in which he is placed. Every true Christian is “gifted” in this way. In this respect all are equal and of the same spiritual rank. The equality, however, is neither monotonous nor mechanical. Men have different natural endowments, and these lead to a diversity of “gifts,” all of which are serviceable in their places, and enable the separate members to perform different services, useful and necessary, for the spiritual life of the whole community and for the growth in sanctification of every member. Some have special “gifts” bestowed on them which enable them to do corresponding services, and some are “gifted” in a pre-eminent degree. Thus, although every Christian is the dwelling place of the Spirit, and is therefore to be called “spiritual”1 Cor. iii. 1; cf. Gal. vi. 1, and 1 Cor. ii. 15. (πνευματικὸς), some are more fitted to take leading parts than others, and are called the “spiritual” in a narrower and stricter sense of the word. These specialized gifts of the Spirit included all kinds of service, and were all, in their own place, valuable and equally the “gifts” of the one Spirit. Some of them, however, were sure to be more appreciated than others. To men and women, quivering with a new fresh spiritual life, nothing could be more thirsted after than to hear again and again renewed utterances of that “word of the Spirit,” which had first awakened in them the new life they were living. Hence among the specially “gifted” persons, those who had the “gift” to speak the “Word of God,” for edification and in exhortation, took a foremost place, and were specially honoured.Compare the τετιμημένοι of the Didache (iv. 1; xv. 2) and 1 Tim. v. 17: “oἱ καλῶς προεστῶτες πρεσβύτεροι διπλῆς τιμῆς ἀξιούσθωσαν, μάλιστα οἱ κοπιῶντες ἐν λόγῳ καὶ διδασκαλίᾳ.” It would be a mistake, however, to call this ministry of the “Word” the “Charismatic Ministry,” as if it alone depended on and came from the “gifts” of the Spirit; for every kind of service comesRom. xii. 7: “εἴ́τε διακονίαν, ἐν τῇ διακονίᾳ,” is any kind of service in the Christian community. from a “gift,” and the ministry of attending to the poor and the sick, or advising and leading the community with wise counsels, are equally charismatic.“Helps” (ἀντιλήψεις) and “wise counsels” (κυβερνήσεις) are placed in the same list of “gifts” with apostles, prophets, teachers and those who have powers of healing. The ministry of the local church, which is the foundation whence has come the present ministry in the Church in all its branches, was as much founded on the “gifts” of the Spirit as was the ministry of the Word. Sohm appears to ignore this in his otherwise admirable discussion of the “Lehrgabe” (Kirchenrecht, i. 28 ff.); and Harnack does not have it always before him, as it ought to be, in the dissertations appended to his epoch-making edition of the Didache (Texte u. Untersuchungen, II. ii.).

St. Paul always assumes that this “gift” of speaking the “Word of God” required a “gift” in the hearers which corresponded to the “gift” in the speakers, and that it would have small effect apart from the general “gift” of discernment of spirits. The spiritual voice needs the spiritual ear. The ministry of the Word depends for its effectiveness upon the ministry of discernment: for the “natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God; for they are foolishness unto him; and he cannot know them because they are spiritually examined.”1 Cor. ii. 14. There was therefore in this ministry of the “Word” the exercise of a two-fold “gift” or charisma; on the one hand the charisma which enabled the speaker to declare what was the message of God, and on the other hand the charisma in the hearers which enabled them to recognize whether the message was really what it professed to be, a declaration of the Spirit, to receive it if it was and to reject it if it was not. The duty laid upon the speakers was to speak forth the Word of God in the proportion of the faith that was in them, or to the full measure of the Christ that was in them; and the duty laid upon the hearers was to test whether what was said to them was really an utterance of the Spirit.The prophets who speak the “Word of God” are told to prophesy according to the measure of the faith that is in them: κατὰ τὴν ἀναλογίαν τῆς πίστεως (Rom. xii. 6); and the hearers are told to test the speakers (1 Cor. xii. 10, compare vv. 1, 4; 1 Thess. v. 21; cf. 1 Cor. x. 15; xi. 13); and in 1 John iv. 1-3 it is said, “Beloved, believe not every spirit, but test the spirits whether they be of God,” etc. This charisma of discernment lay at the basis of the “call” given by the congregation to men to be their office-bearers: compare Canons of Hippolytus, ii. 7-9 (Texte und Untersuchungen, VI. iv. pp. 39, 40); and its use showed that the spiritual “gift” which belonged to the whole community was higher than the gift “ possessed by an individual prophet inasmuch as it was the judge of that gift.” Compare Sohm, Kirchenrecht (1892), i. 56 ff., whose remarks, however valuable, seem too doctrinaire.

This “ministry of the Word” was the creative agency in the primitive Church, and it may almost be said to have had the same function throughout the centuries since. It was overthrown or thrust aside and placed under subjection to an official ministry springing out of the congregation, and it has never regained the recognized position it had in the first century and a half. But whenever the Church of Christ has to be awakened out of a state of lethargy, this unofficial ministry of the Word regains its old power though official sanction be withheld. From point of view, and that not the least important, the history of the Church flows on from one time of revival to another, and whether we take the awakenings in the old Catholic, the mediaeval, or the modern Church, these have always been the work of men specially gifted with the power of seeing and declaring the secrets of the deepest Christian life, and the effect of their work has always been proportionate to the spiritual receptivity of the generation they have spoken to. The Reformation movement, which may be simply described as the translation into articulate thought of the heart religion of the mediaeval Church, and which revived in so many ways the ideas and usages of the primitive times, has expressed the two cardinal ideas of this primitive ministry of the Word, in its declaration that the essential duty of the ministry of the Church is the proclamation of the Gospel, and in its statement that the principle of authority in the last resort is always the witness of the Spirit in the hearts of believers.“Ut hanc fidem consequamur, institutum est ministerium docendi Evangelii et porrigendi Sacramenta” (Augsburg Confession, Pt. I. art. v.); “Nam sicuti Deus solus de se idoneus est testis in suo sermone; ita etiam non ante fidem reperiet sermo in hominum cordibus, quam interiore Spiritus testimonio obsignetur” (Calvin, Instit. I. vii. 4). “Our full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth and divine authority thereof is from the inward work of the Holy Spirit bearing witness by and with the Word in our hearts” (West. Conf. i. 5).

The divine “gift,” whose possession placed men among the class of those who spoke the Word of God (λαλοῦντες τὸν λόγον τοῦ Θεοῦ)Heb. xiii. 7: Didache iv. 1: “My child, him that speaketh to thee the Word of God thou shalt have in remembrance day and night, and honour him as the Lord: for, where that which pertaineth to the Lord is spoken, there the Lord is.” gave the primitive Church its preaching ministry.This statement ought to be qualified: the local presidents or προϊστάμενοι of 1 Thess. v. 12 seem to have had other duties besides merely to exercise oversight; they had also to warn and instruct. Those so endowed were in no sense office-bearers in any one Christian community; they were not elected to an office: they were not set apart by any ecclesiastical ceremony; the Word of God came to them, and they spoke the message that had been sent them. They all had the divine call manifested in the “gift” they possessed and could use. They were sent for the extension and edification of the whole Church of God, and although they used their gifts in the meetings of the local communities yet they were always to be conceived as the ministers of the Church universal. Some of them were wanderers by the very nature of the work they were called to; many of them, perhaps most, did not confine themselves to one community. They came and went as they pleased. They were not responsible to any society of Christians. The local church could only test them when they appeared, and could receive or reject their ministrations. The picture of these wandering preachers, men burdened by no cares of office, with no pastoral duties, coming suddenly into a Christian community, doing their work there and as suddenly departing, is a very vivid one in sub-apostolic literature. Their presence—men who were the servants of all the churches and of no one church—was a great bond which linked together all the scattered independent local churches and made them one corporate whole.

We find in this “prophetic ministry” a threefold division. They are apostles, prophets and teachers. It does not seem possible to make a very strict or mechanical division between the kinds of “Word of God” spoken by each class of men, but it may be said that what was needed for zealous missionary endeavour was the distinguishing characteristic of the first class, exhortation and admonition of the second, and instruction of the third. In virtue of their personal “gifts” they were the venerated but not official leadersHeb. xiii. 7: “Μνημονεύετε τῶν ἡγουμένων ὑμῶν, οἵτινες ἐλάλησαν ὑμῖν τὸν λόγον τοῦ Θεοῦ.” (ἡγούμενοι) of every community where they were for the time being to be found, and were worthy, not only of honour, but of honorarium.1 Cor. ix. 13, 14; Gal. vi. 6; cf. 2 Cor. xi. 8, 9, and Phil. iv. 10 ff. “But every true prophet who will settle among you is worthy of his support. Likewise a true teacher, he also is worthy, like the workman, of his support. Every first-fruit then, of the products of the wine-press and threshing-floor, of oxen and of sheep, thou shalt take and give to the prophets.” Didache. xiii, 1-3. Τιμὴ has the two meanings of “honour” and “honorarium,” and it is difficult to know sometimes how to translate it; a case in point is 1 Tim. v. 17. We can trace this threefold ministry of the Word from the most primitive times down till the end of the second century, if not later. It existed in the oldest Gentile Christian community, that of Antioch, where a number of prophets and teachers sent forth two apostles from among their own number.Acts xiii. 1-3. Apostles, prophets and teachers are mentioned in the First Epistle to the Corinthians and in the Epistle to the Ephesians.1 Cor. xii. 28; Eph. iv. 11. The same threefold ministry is given in the Pastor of Hermas, which dates aboutHermas, Simil. ix. 15: “The thirty-five are the prophets of God and His ministers; and the forty are the apostles and teachers of the preaching of the Son of God.” 140 A.D., and in the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies, which can scarcely be earlier than 200 A.D.Homilies, xi. 35: “Wherefore, above all, remember to shun apostle or prophet or teacher who does not first accurately compare his preaching with that of James, who was called the brother of my Lord.” In all these authorities we have the three classes mentioned together, and in all save one we have them in the same order. The three classes are also placed in pairs: apostles and prophets in the Epistle to the Ephesians and in the Apocalypse;Rev. xviii. 20: “Rejoice over her, thou heaven, and ye saints and ye apostles and ye prophets.” Eph. ii. 20: “Being built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets.” Didache, xi. prophets and teachers in the Didache and in the Pseudo-Clementine Letters;Didache, xiii. 1, 2; xvi. 2. Pseudo-Clementines, De Virginitate, i. 11, “Ne multi inter vos sint doctores, fratres, neque omnes sitis prophetae”; but this is a quotation, said to be from Scripture. For fuller list of authorities compare Harnack, Texte u. Untersuchungen, II. ii. 93-110, and tabular summary in note pp. 110-112. apostles and teachers in Hermas and in the Epistles to Timothy.Hermas, Pastor, Vis. iii. 5; 1 Tim. ii. 7; 2 Tim. i. 11.

1. Apostles. The distinguishing characteristic of an apostleFor the meaning and work of an apostle: compare Lightfoot, St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, 7th ed. pp. 92-101; note on The name and office of an apostle; Harnack, Texte u. Untersuchungen, II. ii. 111-118; Weizsäcker, The Apostolic Age (Eng. Transl.), ii. 291-299; Sohm, Kirchenrecht, i. 42-45; Loening, Die Gemeindeverfassung des Urchristenthums, pp. 33-37; Armitage Robinson, Encyc. Bibl., art. Apostle, pp. 264-6; Schmiedel, Encyc. Biblic., art. Ministry, pp. 3114-3117; Hort, The Christian Ecclesia, pp. 22-41; Seufert, Ursprung and Bedeutung des Apostolats; Gwatkin, art. Apostle, Hastings’ Bible Dictionary, i. 126. was that he had given himself, and that for life,1 Cor. xv. 10; Gal. ii. 7, 8. to be a missionary, preaching the gospel of the Kingdom of Christ to those who did not know it. He had received the “gift” of speaking the “Word of God,” and he was distinguished from others who had the same “gift” in this, that he had been called either inwardly or outwardly to make this special use of it. The prophet and the teacher had the same “gift” in the same or in less measure than the apostle, but they found their sphere of its use within the Christian community, while the apostle’s sphere was for the most part outside, among those who were not yet within the Church of Christ. They built on the foundation laid by the apostle; he laid the foundation for others to build upon.Rom. xv. 20. The apostles were men who in virtue of the implanted “gift” of “speaking the Word of God” and of the “call” impelling them, were sent forth to be the heralds of the kingdom of Christ. This was their life-work. They were not appointed to an office, in the ecclesiastical sense of the word, but to a work in the prosecution of which they had to do all that is the inevitable accompaniment of missionary activity in all ages of the Church’s history.

Our Lord has Himself shown us where to look for the origin and meaning of the term “apostle.” He declared Himself to be the Apostle or Sent One of the Father; as the Father had sent Him, so He sent others in His name to be His apostles or sent ones, to deliver His message of salvation.

This appears to be the line of thought in our Lord’s address in the synagogue at Nazareth. He quoted from Isaiah lxi. 1, about the one sent from God, and declared that He was the “Sent One” (Luke iv. 18, 21); He had come to deliver a message from the Father which was to be proclaimed in the cities of Palestine (Luke iv. 41; cf. Matt. xv. 24). He made His followers His representatives in Matt. x. 40-42 (cf. the parallel passages in Mark ix. 37, and Luke ix. 48). The two thoughts are combined in John xx. 21: “Jesus therefore said unto them again, Peace be unto you; as the Father hath sent Me, even so I send you”; cf. Clement, Ep. I. xlii. 1, 2; Tertullian, De Praescriptione, 37.

In earlier classical Greek “apostolos “ meant a messenger who is also a representative of the man who sent him; in later Greek, the Attic use of the word to mean “a naval expedition, a fleet dispatched on foreign service,” seems to have superseded every other. The word however was used in later Judaism to mean the messengers sent from Jerusalem to collect the Temple tribute from the Jews of the Dispersion and who were at the same time charged with the business of carrying letters and advice from the Jewish leaders in the capital of Judaism, and of promoting religious fellowship throughout all the Jews scattered over the civilized world. Hence Dr. Lightfoot says, “In designating His immediate and most favoured disciples ‘Apostles’ our Lord was not introducing a new term, but adopting one which from its current usage would suggest to His hearers the idea of a highly responsible mission.” Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians (7th ed.); The name and office of an Apostle, pp. 93, 94; cf. also Seufert, Ursprung and Bedeutung des Apostolats, pp. 8-14. But is is very doubtful if the word was in use in Judaism until after the time of our Lord, and it seems in every way simpler to believe that the Christian origin and use of the word were what are given above.

CHAPTER IV

THE CHURCHES CREATING THEIR MINISTRY

In approaching the subject of the ministry of the local Christian communities it may be well to note these things at the outset. We have abundant evidence of the thorough independence of the local churches during the apostolic age, whether we seek for it in the epistles of St. Paul or in the Acts of the Apostles.Compare what has been said on pp. 32, 33; 54-57. We must remember the uniquely Christian correlation of the three thoughts of leadership, service and “gifts”; leadership depends on service, and service is rendered possible by the bestowal of “gifts” of the Spirit which enable the recipients to serve their brethren.Compare what has been said on pp. 62 ff. The possession of these “gifts” of the Spirit was the evidence of the presence of Jesus within the community, and gave the brotherhood a divine authority to exercise rule and oversight in the absence of any authoritative formal prescriptions about a definite form of government.Compare p. 33 and pp. 69 ff. We have also to bear in mind the general evidence which exists to show that there was a gradual growth of the associative principle from looser to more compact forms of organization.This growth of the associative principle is seen in the names given to believers as a united company. The earliest title was disciples (μαθηταὶ); which implied that Jesus, their Lord, was also their teacher, and their only teacher-for Jesus expressly forbade His followers calling any one but Himself Master, Teacher, Father or Lord (Matt. xxiii. 8-10); and the command was repeated by St. Paul when he forbade the Christians of Corinth to call themselves the followers of any of the apostles (1 Cor; iii. 3-9): The name Teacher, with the corresponding term disciples, lingered long in a sporadic way in Christian literature (for example in Justin Martyr, Apol. i. 13), and in Sources of the Apostolic Canons, vi. p. 23), and the word disciples occurs frequently in the Acts of the Apostles. It is a name which suggests a purely personal relationship to Jesus, and it was soon displaced in favour of other designations which implied association among the followers of Jesus. Among them we may select the terms saints, brethren, the people of the Way. The last mentioned—οἱ τῆς ὁδοῦ ὄντες—is specially interesting. It suggests a common worship and therefore an organization for worship. It implies groups of men and women, who, though far apart from each other, are united in spite of intervening space by the ties of a common worship. The Christians in Damascus and by implication those in Jerusalem, are so called (Acts ix. 2; xxii. 4). It was the name given to the Christians at Ephesus (Acts xxiv. 14); it was applied by St. Paul to himself when justifying the special services of the Christian worship as distinguished from the Jewish (Acts xxiv. 14). St. Paul himself usually employs the terms saints or brethren when he speaks of his fellow Christians. The brethren or the saints who form an independent community, whether in a house or in a town or in a province, are called by St. Paul a Church; and he, in his epistles to the Galatians and to the Corinthians, uses the same word to denote all the brethren, wherever they may be. These two terms saints and brethren are, like the phrase those of the Way; collective, and imply organization of some kind or other. When the brethren or the saints met together for worship the meeting or the building in which they met was frequently called a synagogue (James ii. 2), and this word was used not only by the judaising Christians (Epiphanius, xxx. 18); but also by the Marcionites, though they were the Christians furthest removed from the Jewish believers in Jesus. The oldest inscription stating that the building on which it is carved was used as a Christian place of worship comes from Syria, and states that the erection was a Marcionist church: Συναγωγὴ Μαρκιωνιστῶν κώμης Λεβάηων τοῦ Κυρίου καὶ Σωτῆρος Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ. It dates from 318 A.D. (Compare Le Bas and Waddington, Inscriptions No. 2558, iii. 583). Compare Weizsäcker; The Apostolic Age, i. 45-8 (Eng. Trans.). Harnack Texte und Untersuchungen, II. v. p. 25, or English Translation, Sources of the Apostolic Canons, p. 22, n. 10, for the use of Teacher. For the general question of designations, cf. Harnack, Expositor, 1887, Jan.-June, pp. 322-4. Nor should it be forgotten that the members of these earliest congregations of believers were well acquainted with social organization of various kinds which entered into their daily life in the world. When we remember these facts it need not surprise us that though in the end the organization of all the churches was, so far as we can see, pretty much the same, this common form of government may have arisen independently and from a variety of roots which may at least be guessed if they cannot be proved. There are traces of several primitive types of organization within the churches of the apostolic age.

The first notice we have of organization within a local church is given us in the sixth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles when, at the suggestion of the apostles, seven men were chosen for what is called the service of tables. This took place probably in the year 34 A.D. These men were selected and set apart to take care of the poor and to administer the charity of the congregation.

It is too often forgotten that this service had not the second-rate importance which now belongs to it in ecclesiastical organization. It is plain that in apostolic times the primary duty overshadowing all others, was that those who had this world’s goods should help their poorer brethren who had need. The sayings of our Lord were ringing in their ears: “If thou wouldest be perfect, go, sell all that thou hast and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven”; “Every one that hath left houses and lands for My name’s sake shall receive an hundredfold and shall inherit eternal life”;Matt. xix. 21, 23; 29. “Seek ye His kingdom, and these things shall be added unto you . . . sell that ye have and give alms; make for yourselves purses which wax not old.”Luke xii. 31-33. Their devotion to the invisible God was to manifest itself in practical love to the visible brethren.1 John iv. 20. The first duty of presbyters, according to Polycarp, was to be compassionate and merciful, “visiting all the infirm, not neglecting a widow or an orphan or a poor man”;Polycarp, Philippians, 6. and he calls widows “God’s altar”—a phrase repeated by Tertullian.Polycarp, Philippians, 4. θυσιαστήριον Θεοῦ. Tertullian, Ad Uxor. i. 7: aram Dei. The phrase θυσιαστήριον Θεοῦ is used in the Apostolic Constitutions to denote widows, orphans and the poor aided by the congregation. ii. 26: “Let the widows and orphans be esteemed as representing the altar of burnt-offering”; iv. 3: “But an orphan who, by reason of his youth, or he that by feebleness of old age, or the incidence of disease, or the bringing up of many children, receives alms . . . shall be esteemed an altar to God.” The phrase is almost always accompanied with the thought that those who receive alms are to pray for their benefactors. These men were chosen to fill the highest administrative position which the Church could give, and were to take charge in the name of the community of the most sacred of all ecclesiastical duties. The office instituted was required by the ordinary and permanent needs of the Christian society, for the Lord had said that the poor were always to be with them.Dr. Hatch in his Organization of the Early Christian Churches, pp. 32-36 (1st ed.), has, I think, exaggerated somewhat the pauperism of the early centuries throughout the Roman Empire; but the case of Jerusalem must have been peculiar. The population of the city was largely supported by the profits the citizens made from the crowds of pilgrims who came from all parts of the Jewish Dispersion to the great festivals. Conversion to the Christian faith must have deprived the converts of this means of support and brought them into a chronic state of poverty.

A few years later we read of money collected outside Palestine and brought for distribution among the poor of the Church in Jerusalem by Barnabas and Saul, who placed it in the hands of men who are called elders or presbyters. Unless we are to believe that the appointment of the seven was a merely temporary expedient, it is only natural to suppose that the duty of distributing money among the poor was performed by the men who were appointed by the Church to do it, or by others appointed in the same way and for the same purpose; and the natural inference is that the Seven of Acts vi. were the elders of Acts xi., and that we have in the narrative the account of the beginnings of the organization as a whole in the Church at Jerusalem, and not merely the institution of a special order of the Christian ministry.Dr. Lightfoot calls the attempt to identify the Seven with the elders afterwards mentioned in the church at Jerusalem a “strange perversity,” although it has the support of Boehmer (Diss. Jur. Eccl. p. 373 ff.), of Ritschl (Entstehung der Altkatholisch. Kirche, 2nd ed., p. 355 ff.), and of Lange (Apostol. Zeitalt. ii. 75), and Gwatkin regards the idea as a possible one (Hastings’ Bible Dictionary, i. 440, 574); it appears to me that it must be made unless we suppose that the appointment of the Seven was a merely temporary expedient to provide for an immediate necessity, or discredit the narrative altogether, which is what not even such a destructive critic as Schmiedel is inclined to do (Encyc. Biblica, art. Community of Goods, i. 879, 880).

To understand the change in the ministry of the local churches it is to be kept in mind that at the close of the first century every local church had at its head a college or senate or session of rulers, who were called by the technical name of elders, and were also known by names which indicated the kind of work they had to do—pastors, overseers (ἐπίσκοποι). This was the ministry of oversight. To each congregation there was also attached a body of men who rendered “subordinate service,” and who were called deacons—but whether they formed part of the college of elders, or were formed into a separate college of their own, it is not easy to say. The change made consisted in placing at the head of this college of rulers one man, who was commonly called either the pastor or the bishop, the latter name being the more usual, and apparently the technical designation. The ministry of each congregation or local church instead of being, as it had been, two-fold—of elders and deacons—became three-fold—of pastor or bishop, elders and deacons. This was the introduction of what is called the three-fold ministry. It is commonly called the beginning of episcopacy; but that idea is based on the erroneous conception that a three-fold ministry and episcopacy are identical.The Presbyterian or Conciliar system of Church government is as much a three-fold ministry as episcopacy.

In order to show what the change was and what it meant, three relics of the oldest Christian literature may be taken, the Didache or the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, certain fragments which are sources of the Apostolic Canons, and the Letters of Ignatius of Antioch. Authorities differ about the dates of these documents, but it may be taken as well ascertained that they all belonged to the years between 100 and 180 A.D.My own opinion inclines to the following dates: The Epistles of Ignatius, about 116 A.D.; the Didache, not earlier than 135 A.D.; the Sources of the Apostolic Canons, between 140-180 A.D. Compare note on next page.

In the first mentioned we find the Christian society ruled by a college of office-bearers who are called “overseers and deacons”; in the second we see one bishop or pastor (the terms are synonymous in the document), a session of elders and a body of deacons, but the elders rule over the bishop as they rule the congregation, and the bishop is not their president; in the third we have the three-fold ministry of bishop, elders and deacons constituting a governing bodyIn the Ignatian Epistles the bishop, elders and deacons are named together twelve times: Magn. ii. vi., xiii.; Trall. vii.; Philad. pref., iv., vii.; Smyrn. viii., xii.; Polyc. vi.; Trall. ii.; Philad. x.; and, in the first ten at least, the three classes of office-bearers form an inseparable unity. at the head of the congregation or local church.

The Didache or Teaching of the Twelve ApostlesThe manuscript of the Didache was discovered in 1873 in the library of the monastery of the Holy Sepulchre in the Phanar or Greek quarter of Constantinople by Philotheus Bryennios, Patriarch of Nicomedia. It was published by him in 1883. It is now known by numerous editions. Of these by far the best comes from the pen of Professor Harnack of Berlin, and it is to that edition that the references in the notes here are made. It is difficult to say what country gave birth to this manual. The external evidence is all in favour of Egypt; and Harnack and Lightfoot conclude that it came from that land. The only evidence worth mentioning which seems to invalidate this conclusion is the sentence in the eucharistic prayer:—“Just as this broken bread was scattered over the hills and having been gathered together became one, so let Thy Church be gathered together from the ends of the earth into Thy kingdom”—words which cannot refer to Egypt but which might appropriately describe the corn of the Lebanon or the regions beyond the Jordan. But there is no reason why the eucharistic prayer might not come from Palestine and be received into the Churches of Egypt. The external evidence proves the use and the knowledge of the manual in Egypt, and the internal, with the exception of the sentence quoted, confirms the idea. A few Anglican scholars have done their best to minimise the value of the book and its evidence. A good example of this depreciation is to be found in Bishop Gore’s The Ministry of the Christian Church (1893), 3rd ed., App. L. p. 410. It is very difficult to determine the date. The Didache quotes the Epistle of Barnabas and is quoted by Clement of Alexandria, and the date assigned is practically determined by the date fixed for the Epistle of Barnabas. The probable date of this epistle depends on whether the events referred to in the sixteenth section describe the condition of things in the time of Domitian or of Hadrian. Personally I am inclined to think that the references in the Epistle of Barnabas are to the later period. If this be the case it is scarcely possible to place the Didache earlier than 135 A.D., i.e. later than the Ignatian letters. The majority of scholars place it very much earlier. The commonest date is about 100 A.D.—Wordsworth, Hitchcock and Brown, Spence, Bonwetsch, Massebieau; a few place it earlier—Funk and Loening, between 80 and 100 A.D.. Zahn dates it 80-120 and more exactly about 110 A.D.; Bryennios, its first editor, gives 120-130, and Harnack 130-160 A.D. as the probable date. Hilgenfeld, who finds traces of Montanism in the writing, places it later than 160. For our purposes an exact determination of date is unnecessary; all that we have to deal with is that the Didache describes the condition of a Christian organization some time between the Epistles of S. Paul and the third century. is a short Christian manual, of composite character, containing rules for the conduct of individual men and women, and regulations for the guidance of small Christian communities, hundreds of which must have been scattered over the wide face of the Roman Empire in the second century. The sixteen paragraphs of this little manual are well-arranged when compared with most manuals of the same kind. The first six contain simple directions for living the Christian life, based upon the Beatitudes of our Lord and the Ten Commandments. They seem to have formed the instruction administered to catechumens before baptism. Then follow directions about baptism, fasting and prayer and the Eucharist. Three sections are devoted to injunctions which concern the “prophetic ministry.” Then follow instructions about the Lord’s Day services, and the selection of office-bearers. The whole concludes with a warning about the last days.

Tertullian has said: “We Christians are one body knit together by a common religious profession, by a unity of discipline and by the bond of a common hope.”Apology 39; elsewhere (De Praescrip. 20) he speaks of the contesseratio hospitalitatis which linked all Christians together. This little manual reads like a commentary on the saying. Every wayfaring stranger seeking food and lodging was to be received and fed if he came with a profession of the Christian faith. The letter of commendation which was in use among the Jews and to which St. Paul refers, was not required to ensure a hospitable receptionCompare 2 Cor. iii. 1. These commendatory letters became the rule at a later period in the Christian Church. Compare Smith’s Dictionary of Christian Antiquities, I. 407. for one night at least. It was better to be imposed upon sometimes than to miss the chance of entertaining a brother Christian. But this hospitality was not to be without discrimination. “Let every one coming in the name of the Lord be received, but afterwards ye shall test him and know the true from the false; for ye shall have insight. If he cometh as a traveller, help him as much as you can; but he shall not remain with you unless for two or three days if it be necessary. If he will take up his abode with you and is an artizan, let him work and so eat; but if he has no trade provide employment for him, that no idler live with you as a Christian. But if he will not act according to this he is a Christ-trafficker; beware of such.”Chapter xii. The brotherly love of these early Christians was a real and practical thing which no experience of imposition seems to have damped. Their simple rules are witness to the fact that they were sometimes imposed upon, and Lucian’s account of the impostor Peregrinus, shows how a heathen could see that their charity was often abused.Peregrinus Proteus, 13.

One does not naturally expect to find an elaborate ecclesiastical organization among these simple folk, and there are no traces of it. The Didache reveals a state of matters not unlike what we see in the Epistles of St. Paul. The control in all things evidently rested with the community met in congregational meeting. It is to the community as a whole that all the directions are addressed. It receives, tests, finds work for or sends away the travelling strangers who ask assistance or hospitality. It discharges all these duties of Christian benevolence which we find elsewhere laid upon the president.In Justin Martyr’s Apology it is the president (προεστὼς) who succours strangers and travellers: Apology, i. 67. It is the community, in congregational meeting, which tests and receives or rejects the members of the “prophetic ministry” when they appear. The injunctions about baptism, fasting, prayers, are all given to the whole community,“Now concerning baptism, thus baptize ye : having first uttered all these things (i.e. the instructions given in cc. i.-vi.), baptize into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost in living (running) water. But if thou hast not living, baptize in other water: and if thou canst not in cold then in warm. But if thou hast neither, pour water thrice upon the head unto the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. But before the baptism let the baptizer and the baptized fast and whatever others can; but the baptized thou shalt command to fast for one or two days before,” c. vii. and not to the office-bearers; and yet office-bearers did exist among them whom the community are required to elect and to honour.

The manual bears evidence to the value of the “prophetic ministry.” Its members are to be honoured in a very special fashion. If a prophet is present he is to preside at the Lord’s Table, and his prayers are to follow his heart’s promptings;“But permit the prophets to give thanks as much as they will,” x. 7. if no prophet was present, one of the office-bearers presided; but he had to use a fixed form of prayer. The duty of obeying the members of the “prophetic ministry” who speak the Word of the Lord is laid down in the most solemn manner. Prophets and teachers who happen to be residing within the community are to be supported by the members; the first fruits are to be set aside for them; and in this respect they are like the high priests of the Old Testament.“Every first fruit . . . thou shalt take and give to the prophets; for they are your high-priests,” xiii. 3.

The figures of these prophets, true and false, which are somewhat shadowy in the New Testament, take definite shape in this ancient church directory. We see the stir in the community when the prophet arrives. The women hasten to set apart the first baking of bread, the first cup of the newly opened wine-skin or jar of oil, the first yard or two of the newly spun cloth“Every first fruit then of the produce of the wine-press and of the threshing-floor, of oxen and of sheep, thou shalt take and give to the prophets. . . . If thou bakest a baking of bread, take the first of it and give according to the commandment. In like manner when thou openest a jar of wine or oil, take the first of it and give to the prophets; and of money and clothing and every possession take the first, as may seem good unto thee, and give according to the commandment,” xiii. 3-7. for the use of these men, gifted with magnetic speech, who have come to edify the little society and instruct them in the ways of the Lord.

Not that every one who comes among them saying that he is a prophet is to be received as such. If he asks for money, if he does not practise more than he preaches, if he has not the ways of the Lord—then he is a false prophet and is to be sent away.xi. For the Christian communities felt that they had the presence of their Lord with them according to His promise, and had the gift, however rudely it might be shown and exercised, of testing even “prophets” and “apostles.” When the members of this prophetic ministry were received they were the only persons permitted to abide within the community without earning their living by artisan or other labour. Their labour was the instruction and edification of the members of the society.“But every true prophet who will settle among you is worthy of his support. Likewise a true teacher, he also is worthy, like the workman, of his support”; xiii. 1, 2.

Although the community was honoured with the presence of these gifted men, and although the congregational meeting was, as in the Churches of Corinth and Thessalonica, the centre and seat of rule, the brethren were directed to elect office-bearers. The context gives the reason. “But on the Lord’s Day do ye assemble and break bread and give thanks, after confessing your transgressions, in order that your sacrifice may be pure. But every one that hath controversy with his friend, let him not come together with you until they be reconciled. . . . Therefore appoint for yourselves bishops and deacons worthy of the Lord, men meek and not avaricious, upright and proved, for they too render you the service of the prophets and teachers.”xiv. 1-2; xv. 1, 2.

The office-bearers are needed to act as judges in quarrels within the community, and to act as the “wise men” whom St. Paul asked the Corinthians to appoint.1 Cor. vi. 5. They are also, whether in turn or otherwise we do not know, to preside at the Holy Supper and to edify the community, for they are to serve as “prophets and teachers.”“They render you the service of the prophets and teachers. Therefore neglect them not; for they are your honoured ones along with the prophets and the teachers”: xv. 1, 2. This passage is rightly regarded by Harnack, and in this Sanday follows him, as of the utmost importance to enable us to trace the development of the Christian ministry in the primitive Church. It must be referred to later. It is sufficient to say here that we see the change taking place whereby the ministry of the local Church secured the place at an earlier period possessed by the prophetic ministry. Compare Harnack’s edition of the Didache in Texte und Untersuchungen, II. i. 58 note; ii. 140 ff.; Sanday, Expositor (1887), Jan.-June, p. 14 ff. The word τιμη was specially used to denote the respect due to spiritual guides (compare Harnack’s note for references); it is a question whether the “honoured ones” are also those who “receive an honorarium” (for the Greek word has the double reference); the prophets and teachers received the firstfruits in preference to the poor. Did the bishops and deacons who are placed among the honoured spiritual guides partake of these first fruits also? The Didache does not answer the question. There is no division of labour indicated between the bishops (presbyters) and the deacons; and the same qualities of meekness, uprightness, proved Christian character and the absence of avarice are demanded of both.

What went on in the smaller took place in the larger Christian communities; the outlines of the picture sketched for us in the Didache appear also in the Epistle of ClementIn the Epistle of Clement we find that the congregation is the supreme authority; the letter is addressed to the whole Church:—“To the Church which sojourneth in Corinth” (preface); the evil-doers are urged to do “what is ordered by the people” (liv. 2). The office-bearers are a number of presbyter-bishops and deacons (compare above pp. 159 ff.). The epistle says little or nothing about a “prophetic ministry” but that is not to be wondered at as it was written for a definite purpose which had nothing to do with the question. In Hermas we have the same organization and the distinct traces of prophets and their ministry. and in the quaint Pastor of Hermas. At the head of the community, as regular office-bearers, were a number of men presbyter-bishops with deacons as their assistants, but the congregation is seen to be the supreme judge in the last resort. The people rule and form a little democracy; they choose their office-bearers who lead their devotions and act as arbiters in all disputes. They are a self-governing community. They can even reject the services of men who assert that they are members of the prophetic ministry. They can do this in God’s name. They are a theocracy as well as a democracy. The “gifts” of the Spirit are present in their midst and are manifest in the power of judging.

Our second document is what Harnack calls the Original Sources of the Apostolic Canons.A summary of the critical history of the Apostolic Canons (to be distinguished from the Apostolic Constitutions) will be found in Harnack’s edition of the Didache (Texte und Untersuchungen, II. ii. p. 193-209) followed by Harnack’s critical reconstruction based on the discovery of the Didache (pp. 209-25), and lastly the full text of the canons (pp. 225-37), tables and summary (pp. 237-41). According to generally accepted critical opinions the compiler of the Canons used four sources, the Epistle of Barnabas, the Didache (or more probably an abridgement of the Didache), and two fragments from an old ecclesiastical law-book. It is with these fragments that we have now to do, or rather with the first of them. Harnack dates it at some time between 140 and 180 A.D. These fragments, with commentary and excursus, have been published by Harnack in the Texte und Untersuchungen, II. v. Professor Sanday appears to agree with Professor Harnack about these fragments: Expositor (1887), Jan.-June, pp. 20, 21, 106. Harnack’s edition of the Sources has been translated into English by L. A. Wheatley under the title Sources of the Apostolic Canons (1895). These sources are but fragments, preserved because they have been incorporated in a much later law-book of the Christian Church. We do not know from what land they came nor how wide or narrow was the sphere of their authority. They show us, however, what a small Christian community was in the last decades of the second century, and they describe the way in which it was created out of a number of Christian families. We can see the birth and growth of a Church with its complete organization. In many respects the process described can be seen now in any mission field, especially among peoples of ancient civilization. Perhaps the most interesting thing about it is that every body of Christians however small is ordered to form itself into a congregation, and the implied thought that the Christian life must be lived within an orderly Christian society before the full benefits which accompany it can be enjoyed.

The document takes us back to a time when a few Christian families found themselves the only believers in the midst of a surrounding paganism. Few or many, they are commanded to organize themselves as a church.“If there are few men, and not twelve persons who are competent to vote at the election of a bishop, the neighbouring Churches should be written to, where any of them is a settled one, in order that three selected men may come thence and examine carefully if he is worthy.” Sources of the Apostolic Canons, pp. 7, 8. (Here and elsewhere I quote from the English translation of Harnack’s edition in the Texte und Untersuchungen, II. v.) If the families number less than twelve, or rather if they include fewer than twelve persons entitled to vote in the election, it is supposed that they need aid in the first important step in the organization, which is the selection of some one to be their pastor or bishop—the names are synonymous in the document.The word ἐπίσκοπος occurs in i. 4, 22; ii. 15, 19; and ποιμὴν in ii. 18. In this case they are to apply to a neighbouring Christian community which has been established for some time, and ask them to appoint three men to assist them to select their pastor.The phrase is ἐκλεκτοὶ τρεῖς ἄνδρες. Various parallels may be found to the employment of three chosen men to conduct together work requiring tact and experience. The most obvious is the mission of the three men Claudius Ephebus, Valerius Bito and Fortunatus to Corinth from Rome (1 Clem. lxiii. 1). Harnack finds in the three men selected to assist the small congregation in the selection of a bishop the anticipation of the much later rule that the consecration of a bishop required the presence and co-operation of the three neighbouring bishops. He finds a middle point in the fact evidenced by the letter of Cornelius of Rome to Fabius of Antioch (Euseb. Hist. Eccl. VI., xliii. 8, 9) that by the middle of the third century it was the custom that bishops were consecrated by three neighbouring bishops (Sources of the Apostolic Canons (1895), pp. 36 ff.). This afterwards became the law and is found in canons of many councils (the Council of Arles in its twentieth canon being the first). Hence comes the saying “All Christendom becomes presbyterian on a consecration day.” It is evident from the continual repetition of the law that the Churches found it somewhat difficult to enforce their regulation. Along with these three, presumably experienced Christians, but not necessarily office-bearers, they are to select some one (whether from their own number or from the outside is not said) to be their bishop. A list of qualifications is given them to direct their choice, from which it appears that character and Christian experience are the things really needful for the office.The qualifications are divided into two classes those indispensable and those desirable. “That is if he has a good report among the heathen, if he is faultless, if a friend of the poor, if honourable—no drunkard no adulterer, not covetous nor a slanderer, nor partial or such like” (i. 10-15). These are the necessary qualifications. Then follow the desirable: “It is good if he is unmarried; if not then a man of one wife; educated, in a position to expound the scriptures; but if he is unlearned, then he must be gentle and filled with love to all, so that a bishop should never be as one accused of anything by the multitude “ (i. 10-23); Sources of the Apostolic Canons, pp. 8-10. A pastor or bishop is to be one whose character stands so high that no one may be expected to bring any charge of misconduct against him. He is not to be given to drinking, nor to covetousness nor to foul living. He must not be a respecter of persons. It is better that he should be unmarried, but if he has a wife he must be a faithful husband. It is advisable that he should be an educated man and able to expound the Scriptures, but that is not indispensable. If he is unlearned he must at least be gentle and full of love towards all persons. He has to represent the community to the outside world, and must therefore be a man whom the heathen respect. He is to be the leader in public worship, and the elders are to support him, seated on his right hand and on his left. He must be a valiant fighter against sin, and the elders are to aid him in this duty also. He is, under the control of the elders, to administer the property of the Church, which in these early days consisted of the gifts brought by the faithful to the meeting for thanksgiving. They were handed over to him, and distributed under the watchful supervision of the elders.

Besides the pastor the congregation is required to appoint at least two elders or presbyters.“Hence the presbyters must be already advanced in life, abstaining becomingly from communication with women, willingly sharing with the brotherhood, not having regard to the person, companions in consecration with the bishop (συμμύστας τοῦ ἐπισκόπου), and fighting on his side, collecting the congregation together, kindly disposed towards the pastor. The elders on the right should look after the bishops at the altar, in order that they may distribute the gifts and themselves receive the necessary contributions (ὅπως τιμήσωσι καὶ ἐντιμηθῶσιν, εἰς ὃ ἂν δέῃ). The elders on the left shall look after the congregation in order that it may be at rest and without disturbance, after that it has been first proved in all submission. But if one who is admonished should answer rudely; those at the altar should unite and condemn such an one to the punishment deserved by a general resolution, so that the others may be in awe, in order that they (the elders) look not at the person of any one, and that it may not spread as a cancer and be taken up by every one “ (ii.). They are to be men advanced in years and presumably unmarried (the meaning of the phrase is somewhat doubtful).The phrase is τρόπῳ τινὶ ἀπεχομένους τῆς πρὸς γυναῖκας συνελεύσεως. They must not be respecters of persons. They are to be ready to assist the pastor at all times in the conduct of public worship and in dealing with sinners. They are the rulers in the strict sense of the word. They are responsible for summoning the people to public worship, and it is their place to preserve order during Divine Service. The women who visit the sick are to report to them and not to the bishop. They are to see that the bishop distributes in a proper manner the offerings of the faithful. They have charge of the discipline of the congregation including the pastor.The relation of the elders to the bishops is expressed by the word προνοήσονται; this has been translated in the English version “shall assist,” which cannot be right, for the same word is used to express the relation of the elders to the people, and it is evident that the power of discipline is meant (ii. 19, 23).

Every church must have at least three deacons, who are to be the ministers of the people in their private and home life. They are to report on any unseemly conduct which may call for discipline at the hands of the elders. They are to be men well esteemed in the congregation, faithful husbands, with well-behaved families.“They shall be approved in every service, with a good testimony from the congregation, husbands of one wife, educating their children, honourable, gentle, quiet, not murmuring, not double-tongued, not quickly angry, not looking on the person of the rich, also not oppressing the poor, also not given to much wine, intelligent, encouraging well to secret works, while they compel those among the brethren who have much to open their hands, also themselves generous, communicative, honoured with all honour and esteem and fear by the congregation, carefully giving heed to those who walk disorderly, warning the one, exhorting the other, threatening a third, but leaving the scoffers completely to themselves” (iv.). Sources of the Apostolic Canons, pp. 17-19. It is their duty to move among the people, “and carefully give heed to those who walk disorderly, warning one, exhorting another, threatening a third, but leaving scoffers entirely to themselves.” They were to be men of generous disposition, for part of their duty was to insist that the wealthier members of the Brotherhood, as the congregation is called, “open their hands” to support the poor and for other ecclesiastical needs, and example is better than precept. In short their duties, as laid down in these ancient canons, are almost identical with those of the deacons in presbyterian churches now, both in what they do and in what they are to refrain from doing.

Every church was also to have a ministry of women. Three were to be appointed. They are called widows, and a curious division of duties is enjoined.“Three widows shall be appointed, two to persevere in prayer for all those who are in temptation, and for the reception of revelations where such are necessary; but one to assist the women visited with sickness. She must be ready for service, discreet, communicating what is necessary to the elders, not avaricious, not given to much love of wine, so that she may be sober and capable of performing the night services and other loving services if she will; for these are the chief good treasures of the. Lord” (v.), Sources of the Apostolic Canons, pp. 19-21. One of them is to act as a combination of nurse and Bible-woman. She is to assist the sick women of the congregation. To this end she “ must be ready for the service, discreet and not avaricious, nor given to much love of wine, so that she may be sober and capable of performing the night services and other loving ministry if she will.” The duty of the other two was to “persevere in prayer for all who are in temptation”; and they were also to pray for the reception of revelations where these were necessary. They took the place in the congregation of the old prophetic ministry, and were among the number of the New Testament prophetesses.

There was another official. The congregation is told to appoint a Reader. He is to be an experienced Christian. His duty is to read the Scriptures during Divine Service, and it is required that he should have a good voice and a clear delivery. He is told to come early to the church on the Lord’s Day. He is to be able to expound the Scripture that he has read. He is to remember that “he fills the place of an evangelist.” The Reader in these ancient times did what the pastor or bishop was expected to do in later times. There was the more need for the office when we remember that the bishop might be an unlearned man, and by unlearned was frequently meant one who did not know the alphabet.

Such is a picture of a small Christian Church in the last decades of the second century. It may be taken as the type of hundreds. It is independent and self-governing, but it is not isolated. It is a brotherhood (ἀδελφότης), consisting of brethren organized under office-bearers chosen by themselves, but it has relations with, and a knowledge of, a wider brotherhood of which it is a minute part. When need comes it can appeal for and get help in the selection of its pastor. Its ministry need not be learned; Christian character, saintly behaviour, the power to exhort and teach which comes from deep Christian experience, are more highly valued than ability to read. The Brotherhood has the Wise Men whom St. Paul desired to see in the Corinthian Church in its elders or presbyters who share the responsibilities of the pastor’s work, and in this respect are his assistants, but whose superintendence and rule extends over the pastor himself in other respects. We see the deacons going out and in among the members of the society, encouraging, warning, rebuking, if need be, and endeavouring to excite to Christian liberality by precept and example. We descry through the mists of seventeen hundred years the homely and simple ministry of women; on the one hand an active motherly woman, able to nurse her sick sisters, strong enough to endure, as women only can, long periods of night-watching, giving wholesome motherly advice to the women and girls of the community; and on the other two solitary women, in the weakness and loneliness of their sex and of their widowhood, powerful to wrestle with God in prayer, and to assist with their supplications the whole congregation and the strong men who are tempted and tried in the daily battle of life. The strong supporting the weak; and the weak, powerful in prayer, helping the strong; the picture is one which only a Christian community could show, and there it often appeared. Early Christian literature abounds in references to the prayers of the widows of the congregation. They are expected to bear the whole burden of the brethren upon their hearts, and to entreat the Lord in prayer. The prayers of believers are the sacrifice of primitive Christianity, and because the widows abound in prayer they are the altar of sacrifice.Compare Polycarp, Epistle to the Philippians, 4; in the Canons of Hippolytus (ix. 59) widows are to be highly honoured because of their copiosas orationes et infirmorum curam. In Apostolic Constitutions, iii. 12, 13, it is said: “For it becomes widows when they see that one of their fellow widows is clothed by any one or receives money or meat or drink or shoes, at the sight of the refreshment of their sister to say: Thou art blessed O God, who hast refreshed my fellow widow. Bless O Lord, and glorify him that has bestowed these things upon her, and let his good work ascend in truth unto Thee and remember him for good in the day of his visitation.” Compare Apost. Constit. iii. 5, 7.

These ancient fragments of old ecclesiastical canons are, however, specially interesting, because they represent the transition stage between the organization of the churches, shown

in the Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians or in the Didache, and the three-fold ministry of the third century. They do this in two ways; The prophetic ministry has departed, but its memories linger in the prayers of the widows for revelations and in the exhortation to the Reader that he holds the place of an evangelist. For our immediate purpose, however, it is most interesting to have in the fragments an organization lying between that of a church or congregation, ruled by a college of presbyter-bishops as in the Didache, and one where the bishop or pastor is the president of a compact circle of elders and deacons, and where these office-bearers have their fixed places under their head. In these fragments the bishop or pastor has neither the power nor the position he afterwards came to occupy almost universally in the third century.

But there is this advance on the older organization. There is now one man who has a distinct position which he occupies by himself. He is the recognized leader of the congregation or church in several definite ways. He represents the congregation to those outside, else why should it be a necessary qualification for office that he is respected by the heathen? He leads the congregational worship in the meeting for thanksgiving at any rate, and if he is learned and can expound the Scriptures, probably at the meeting for edification also. The gifts of the congregation are given into his hands for distribution, and he is the almoner. He stands alone and separate from the other office-bearers in all this. In these respects also he stands forth as the representative of the unity of the congregation or church.

On the other hand, he has not yet been placed in the position which the bishop or pastor afterwards held. In the Apostolic Constitutions it is the bishop who calls the congregation together for worship; here that duty belongs to the elders, who also watch over the behaviour of the people while in Church.Apostolic Constitutions, ii. 57; cf. Sources of the Apostolic Canons, ii. 15: the same word συναθροίζειν being used in both as the technical term to summon to Church. In later ecclesiastical manuals the deacons and deaconesses report tai the bishop; there they, or at least the deaconesses, report to the elders, who have the responsibilities for the sick and infirm of the congregation, which in later days belonged to the bishop.Apostolic Constitutions. iii. 19 orders the deacons and deaconesses: “Tell your Bishop of all those that are in affliction; for you ought to be like his soul and senses.” Sources of the Apostolic Canons, v. 8, 9, directs the Widows to “communicate what is necessary to the presbyters or elders.” In the Canons of Hippolytus, c. 5, the deacons are ordered to report to the bishop. Of. Riedel, Die Kirchenrechtsquellen des Patriarchate Alexandrien (1900), p. 203. All these things show that the discipline of the congregation is in the hands of the elders exclusively, and that the bishop is not the president of their court. If any doubt remained on this head it must vanish when we consider the unique regulation that the bishop himself is under the supervision of the elders in one of the most important of his functions.Apostolic Constitutions, ii. 25, 35, make it plain that the bishop was accountable to no one but God in his duty as almoner. The bishop is thus addressed: “Let him use those tenths and first fruits, which are given according to the command of God, as a man of God; as also let him dispense in a right manner the free-will offerings which are brought on account of the poor, to the orphans . . . as having that God for the examiner of his accounts who has committed the disposition to him” (ii. 25). And in the thirty-fifth section the people are enjoined: “Thou shalt not call the bishop to account nor watch his administration, how he does it, when or to whom, or where, or whether he does it well or ill or indifferently; for he has One who will call him to account, the Lord God.” When he acts as almoner they are to see that he acts rightly, and, what is of the highest importance for understanding the situation, the word used to express the control of the elders over the bishop is the same word (προνοεῖσθαι), which describes their power of discipline over the congregation. The bishop has emerged from the circle of presbyters, but he is not their president; and while he is the leader of the congregation in many respects he is, in one respect at least, like the members of the congregation, amenable to the discipline of the elders.

Probably had we other relics of ecclesiastical manuals belonging to this transition period we should find other instances of organizations on the road towards the three-fold ministry, but travelling by different paths. We know that the three-fold ministry grew more rapidly in some places than in others, and the organization probably passed through several transition stages, of which this is one, before it attained to maturity.

Our third group of writings consists of the famous Letters of Ignatius of Antioch—a series of documents which have provoked an immense amount of criticism which cannot be said to be ended. Without entering into the controversy we may accept the results of the scholarly criticism of the late Dr. Lightfoot in this country, and of Dr. Zahn in Germany, according to which the Seven Epistles in the shorter recension are genuine documents. These letters came from the head of the Christian community in Antioch in Syria. Ignatius had been seized in an outburst of persecution and was being dragged across Asia Minor, a prisoner in charge of a band of Roman soldiers. He wrote to the Christians of Ephesus that he was on his way from Syria, in bonds for the sake of the common Name and hope, and was expecting to succeed in fighting with wild beasts at Rome, that by so succeeding he might have power to become a disciple.To the Ephesians, 1. The journey was an apprenticeship in suffering; for the ten soldiers, who guarded him, treated him as ten leopards might have done, and only waxed worse when they were kindly entreated.To the Romans, 5. The churches of Asia Minor had sent him comforting messages by special delegates. The letters are his answers.

The letters of Ignatius were generally known during the later Middle Ages in the form of seventeen epistles, of which fifteen were believed to come from the pen of Ignatius while two (one from the Virgin and another from a Mary of Cassobola) were addressed to Ignatius. Renascence criticism disposed of the claims of four of these letters. There remained thirteen, twelve from the pen of Ignatius and one (from Mary of Cassobola) addressed to him. This collection is now known as the Long Recension, and it was this collection which was the subject of fierce controversy in the end of the sixteenth and during the seventeenth century. At the basis of these attacks made on the genuineness of these letters lay two facts: that Eusebius knew of seven letters only and that these thirteen contained passages evidently unknown to Eusebius or to any of the ancients. The learned Englishman, Ussher, afterwards archbishop of Armagh and primate of all Ireland, observed that the quotations made from Ignatius by some English writers from the thirteenth century onwards corresponded with those found in Eusebius, Theodoret, etc., and concluded that there must exist in England a manuscript which would represent the Ignatius known to the ancients. After a prolonged search two such manuscripts were brought to light, both of them in Latin. They contained seven letters but in a form shorter than the generally received letters. Ussher accepted six of these shorter letters as the genuine epistles of Ignatius (he refused to accept the letter to Polycarp). His book was published in 1644. Soon afterwards (1646) Isaac Voss published six letters from a Greek MS.—his MS. did not give the Epistle to the Romans; and in 1689 the full Greek text of the seven letters was published by Ruinart. It was generally admitted that, if any genuine letters of Ignatius had descended to the present time, they were these seven in the shorter form; but many critics still refuse to admit the genuineness of any of the letters.

The controversy was raised again in 1845 by the publication of Cureton’s Ancient Syriac Version of the Epistles of S. Ignatius to S. Polycarp, the Ephesians and the Romans. The author had found two Syriac MSS. in the library of the British Museum containing the three epistles mentioned in his title and in a still shorter form than those published by Ussher. He maintained that these three short letters were the genuine remains of Ignatius. He defended his position in a second work, Vindiciae Ignatianae (1846), and in his most complete treatise, Corpus Ignatianum (1849). His views at once attracted attention and were very largely adopted, though many distinguished scholars still defended the seven letters, while others refused to accept even Cureton’s three in the brief form. This controversy was almost ended by Zahn, who, in his Ignatius von Antioch (1873), showed very successfully that Cureton’s three Syriac letters were epitomes of the three in what were called the Short Recension. This opinion was supported by the late Dr. Lightfoot’s elaborate work, Apostolic Fathers, part II., S. Ignatius, S. Polycarp (1885). The result of these two works has been that in Germany, France and England the seven letters, in the shorter form published by Ruinart in 1689, are generally accepted as the genuine remains of Ignatius. Many critics still refuse to accept the letters in any form as genuine, but their criticism is mainly of the subjective and unconvincing kind. The only writer whose book deserves serious consideration and who dissents from the conclusions of Zahn and Lightfoot is Bruston, who, in his Ignace d’Antioche (1897), refuses to admit the genuineness of the Epistle to the Romans and combines his critical opinions with the theory that Ignatius was not the Bishop of Antioch but a deacon in the Church there.

Many scholars are of the opinion that the letters of Ignatius were known to Lucian and that he used his knowledge in writing his story De Morte Peregrini. They think that the imprisonment of Peregrinus, the visits paid to him by delegates from the Churches of Asia Minor, and the letters written by him to the Churches which were received with reverence, were all incidents suggested by the letters of Ignatius. The idea seems to me somewhat far-fetched; the points which Lucian seizes and makes use of may easily have been suggested by a general observation of usages common to early Christianity and need not be attached to any particular person however famous; but compare Lightfoot, S. Ignatius, S. Polycarp, i. pp. 331 ff.

CHAPTER VI.

THE FALL OF THE PROPHETIC MINISTRY AND THE CONSERVATIVE REVOLT

The prophetic ministry of the apostolic and immediately sub-apostolic times passed away in the course of the second century, and its overthrow was a much greater alteration of the organization of the churches than the institution of a three-fold ministry, important as that was. The difference may be seen from two extracts. “Every prophet,” says the oldest ecclesiastical manual, “who speaketh in the Spirit, ye shall neither try nor judge; for every sin shall be forgiven, but that sin shall not be forgiven.”Didache, xi. 7. That comes from a time when the prophetic ministry was the great controlling power. “Wretched men,” says Irenaeus, “who wish to be false prophets . . . holding aloof from the communion of the brethren”; and the test of being in communion with the brethren is “to obey the elders who are in the Church.”Irenaeus, Contra Haereses, III. xi. 9 and IV. xxvi. 2. That comes from the end of our period.

The change between the time when the prophet was not to be judged, but to be obeyed, and when disobedience to his commands was believed to be “an unpardonable sin”; and the time when the test of a true prophet was obedience to the office-bearers of the local church, whose superior he had once been, amounted to a revolution. It was so, and the overthrow of the supremacy of the prophetic ministry rent the Church in twain.

CHAPTER VII.

MINISTRY CHANGING TO PRIESTHOOD

During the third century, it may be said during the middle third of that century, there are clear traces of a general change insinuating itself into men’s minds and finding expression in language, in the way of thinking of the Church and of the relation of the ministry to the Church. This is commonly spoken of as the change of the ministry into a mediating priesthood, standing between the people and God. But this manner of regarding the whole silent movement gives a very inadequate and one-sided representation of the real meaning of the change, and of the conceptions which it embodied. The idea that the ministry is a priesthood was there, but the main thought was much more the power of the priest than his mediation. The power and the authority of the ministry and especially of the chiefs of the ministry over the Christian people was the central conception. It finds expression in Cyprian’s repeated quotation of the Old Testament text: “And the man that doeth presumptuously, in not hearkening to the priest that standeth to minister there before the Lord thy God, or unto the judge, even that man shall die; and thou shalt put away the evil from Israel. And all the people shall hear and fear, and do no more presumptuously.”Deut. xvii. 12, 13; Cyprian, Epist. iii. 1 (lxiv.); iv. 4 (lxi.); xliii. 7 (xxxix.); lix. 4 (liv.); lxvi. 3 (lxviii.). It is this change and what it implies that concerns us now.

It may be briefly expressed by saying that the two separate conceptions of local “Church” and of “Church universal” became more precise, and that precision of thought was given by new ideas about the relation in which the office-bearers stood to the community. The Church was defined by the ministry in a way that it had not been in earlier times.

So far as the local “church” is concerned the Christian thought, which in earlier times had dwelt upon the picture of saints and brethren living together the Christian life, now dwelt upon the controlling power of those who governed. The Church, which was in earlier days a “brotherhood of saints,” became a community over whom a bishop presided. It was defined, not so much by the manner of life led by its members, as by the government which ruled over them. The train of thought was reversed. It was no longer—people worshipping and some of them leading the common devotions, saints believing and some among them instructing and admonishing; it became—teachers who imparted and pupils who received, priests who interceded and sinners who were pardoned through the intercession, rulers who commanded and subjects who were bound to obey.

The thought of the universal visible Church underwent an analogous transformation. It was no longer the wide brotherhood of all who professed the name of Jesus, and lived the life of new obedience demanded from His disciples. It became a federation of local churches, who believed in the same verities, the truth of which was guaranteed by legitimate rulers, and whose members yielded an implicit obedience to the bishop at the head of every local “church.” It was the federation of churches which excluded heretics and rebels.

In the earlier days the local Christian communities were companies of men and women who called themselves the brethren and the saints or holy persons, and these words expressed the relations in which they stood to each other and to the world around them. Fellowship as with brothers, and a fellowship united in holiness, were the main thoughts present to the minds of the earliest Christians when the word Church was used to denote either the individual community or the wide brotherhood of believers.

The idea in the minds of Christians united together in a local community was that they were called upon to live a new and a holy life. They had marked out for themselves what was meant by this holy life, with its duties to be lovingly fulfilled and sins to be resolutely shunned; and this chart of the Christian life is to be found in manuals like the Didache with its two ways, all of which treat of the private as well as of the communal life. There was also a feeling throughout the churches that, while for the ordinary and lesser sins to which men are prone, there must be confession, sorrow, and certain external signs of sorrow, and while for others there was to be suspension for longer or shorter time from the Holy Supper, some sins were so very heinous that those who committed them had placed themselves outside the communion of the brethren so long as life lasted. No limits were placed on the forgiveness of God, but Christians believed that if any of their number fell into sins of more than ordinary gravity, no amount of penitence, however sincere, entitled the Church to permit these fallen brethren to return to the inner fellowship of the Christian brotherhood. Such sinners had to manifest a life-long repentance, and could never hope to be more than catechumens. Tertullian has given a list of these deadliest sins, but it is not likely that such lists were always the same, for there is no trace of any settled rule or theory. Only, each Christian community felt that it must keep itself pure and merit its title of “the saints.”Compare Tertullian, Against Marcion, iv. 9. The Canons of Basil, though very much later than the period now described, retain ideas which may enable us to conceive the attitude of the early Christian society. They declare that a murderer must be excluded from the society for twenty years; a homicide for ten years, which are to be spent in the following way—two years in mourning, three years admitted to the meeting for exhortation, and five years admitted among the faithful but not allowed to come forward and partake of the Holy Communion. For one who has been baptized and has lapsed from the faith, the penitence must be life long, and the penitent is to be allowed to communicate only when he is on his deathbed. Compare Riedel’s Kirchenrechtsquellen des Patriarchats der Alexandrien (1900), pp. 243, 244. The sins named by Tertullian are:—Idolatry, blasphemy, murder, adultery, fornication, false-witness and fraud. Ordinarily those who were guilty of such heinous sins had to remain for life in the condition of catechumens, and could never hope to be re-admitted to the inner circle of believers. If, however, a brother, believed to have the prophetic gift, spoke on behalf of a penitent, and announced that it was the will of God that he should be pardoned, then, and then only, an exception was made.Hermas, Mandata, iv. 3; Visiones, iii. 7; Tertullian, De Pudicitia, 21.

All the Christian communities, although they felt that they belonged to one great Church, were not linked together by any distinctive polity, however indefinite. All the churches of Christ, Tertullian tells us, were one great Church, because they gave each other the salutation of peace, because they regarded each other as brethren, and because they practised the interchange of familiar hospitality.Tertullian, De Praescriptione Haereticorum, 20:—“They then (the apostles) in like manner founded Churches in every city, from which all the other Churches, one after another, derived the tradition of the faith and the seeds of doctrine, and are every day deriving them, that they may become Churches. Indeed it is on this account only that they will be able to account themselves apostolic, as being the offspring of apostolic Churches. . . . Therefore the Churches, although they are so many and so great, comprise but the one primitive Church founded by the apostles from which they all spring. In this way all are primitive, and all are apostolic, whilst they are all proved to be one, in unity, by their salutation of peace (communicatio pacis), and title of brotherhood, and bond of hospitality (contesseratio hospitalitatis)—rights which no other rule directs than the one tradition of the self-same mystery.” That was what bound them together, and made them feel and be one; not any external polity, however slight. They maintained a close fellowship by means of intercommunication, by the interchange of letters and messengers, and by their hospitality towards all Christian travellers who passed their way. This constant intercourse no doubt led to a similarity in the rules for holy living and in modes of dealing with backsliders; but there was nothing of a common polity to unite them as the various parts of civil society are united within one state. No doubt the advice of one Church was frequently asked, and acted upon by another in matters of difficulty and in times of trial. We have an example of such a thing in the letter of the Roman Church to the Corinthian, which goes by the name of the First Epistle of Clement. No doubt such advice was received and attended to in proportion as the Church, offering its advice or appealed to for its counsel, had showed itself worthy of deference by its brotherly conduct and by its eminence. No Church in those early centuries showed such generosity to its poorer brethren as the Roman Church; besides it inhabited the world’s capital; it was believed to inherit the traditions of the two greatest of the apostles—St. Paul and St. Peter. It held the position of the wise and generous elder brother in the brotherhood of churches, but there was no acknowledged ecclesiastical pre-eminence.Clement, 1 Epist. v. 4-6; Ignatius, Epistle to the Romans, preface; Eusebius, Hist. Eccles. II. xxv. 8; IV. xxiii. 10; V. xxiii., xxiv.; VII. v. 2; Irenaeus, Against Heresies, III. i. iii.; Tertullian, De Praescript. 24; Scorpiace, 15; Against Marcion, IV. 5.

The situation, therefore, may be thus expressed: there were thousands of churches, most of them single congregations, which nevertheless were one Church, not because they had agreed in any formal way to become one, not because there was any polity linking them together in one great whole, but because they had the unmistakeable feeling that they belonged to one brotherhood:

They lived in the immediate presence of eternity, on the threshold of the blessed and real life which awaited them, when the period of their probation in this world was ended; and every Christian community had the feeling that it was its business by a strict discipline to preserve, in the pure life of the members of the little brotherhood, a foreshadowing of the life which awaited them when the Father should call them home to Himself. Meanwhile they were in the presence of a hostile and evil world-power, which was under the dominion of sin, and which manifested itself to them in the persecuting pagan state. That was the first stage. Doctrine could scarcely be said to exist, and doctrinal divisions were therefore almost impossible. No doubt their teachers and leaders occasionally warned them against strange teachings, but these were limited to individuals or to small companies, and hardly impressed the imagination.

When the Gnostic teachers gathered their followers into companies large enough to attract attention, and above all when Marcion, with his organizing genius, had established Marcionite Christian communities almost everywhere, the situation became changed. The Christians were now divided among themselves. The Christian brotherhood was set over against, not simply the pagan state, but also against false brethren who did not accept the traditions of the apostles nor the common simple verities of the faith. Christianity now implied more than a life lived in the presence of God and Christ; it meant a doctrine to be protected by a creed or a form, more or less fixed, of intellectual beliefs. The possession of a common form of creed in which the simple verities of the faith were stated could not fail to give the “great” Church accepting it something more of an outward polity, The succession of office-bearers in the churches was the guarantee for the correctness of the tradition suggested by Irenaeus, urged by Tertullian, and apparently accepted by all who were neither Gnostics nor Marcionites, nor any of the smaller separate bodies of Christians. Tertullian in the De Praescriptione, as may be seen in the quotation given in the note,See above, p. 268. links the common tradition, its guarantee in the succession of office-bearers, the name of brethren, the salutation of peace, and the bond of hospitality all together, and there are, though in a very indefinite kind of way, the beginnings of a polity.

Still the existence of the creed did not give the churches which accepted it an homogenous external polity in any thing like the modern sense. The creed was the law for the individual local church, and the local church was not joined to the other churches in a definite federation, still less in a corporate union. The old thought of St. PaulCompare above, p. 24.—fellowship (κοινωνία)—still prevailed. The churches refused to have fellowship with professing Christians and with communities of professing Christians who did not accept the same verities that they did, and they had fellowship and intercommunion with societies who accepted these verities. The increased powers given to office-bearers, when they were made the guarantee of the orthodox faith, were powers to be exercised within the communities over which they presided, and did not give them any rule outside the local churches they governed, whether these were large or small. Still the fact that it was recognized that all Christians had a common set of convictions, which could be expressed in a more or less definite way in propositions, gave the whole brotherhood of churches something of a polity; and the thought that in times of doubt or difficulty guidance could be got from what Tertullian called “apostolic” churches, or churches where the original apostles had actually taught,Compare Tertullian, De Praescriptione, xx., xxxii. and especially xxxvi. gave these churches and their office-bearers a certain pre-eminence which claimed and received the deference of all the rest.

The separation and secession of the Montanists, in the wider meaning of the term,That is the Montanism which included men like Tertullian. Compare above p. 238. still further altered and made more precise the conception of the Church. It must always be remembered that the Montanists were not driven out, but separated themselves from the main body of Christians. They claimed to represent the apostolic Church; and their claim was based quite as much on the persuasion that they had preserved the prophetic ministry in the position within the churches in which it had been placed by the apostles, as on their belief that they were preserving the character of the true church by their strictness of discipline. To the succession of office-bearers, descended from the secondary ministry of apostolic times, they opposed the succession of prophets representing the superior ministry of the apostolic days. The Montanist movement had this result that men who professed to live according to the commandments of Jesus, who adhered to the traditional teaching of the churches, who had the three-fold ministry, were nevertheless found outside. They had separated on the question of the power of the office-bearers at the head of the local churches; they had insisted that the time-honoured prophetic ministry should retain its old supremacy; they had especially declared that in the case of heinous sins it belonged to the prophetic ministry, and not to the bishops, to declare whether such sins could receive the churches’ pardon.Tertullian, De Pudicitia, 21:—“The power of loosing and binding committed to Peter had nothing to do with the capital sins of believers; and if the Lord had given him a precept that he must grant pardon to a brother sinning against him even seventy times seven-fold, of course He would have commanded him to ‘bind’—that is to retain—nothing subsequently, unless perchance such sins as one may have committed against the Lord and not against a brother. For the forgiveness of sins committed in the case of a man is a prejudgment against the remission of sins against God. What now about the Church—your psychic Church? For in accordance with the person of Peter, it is to spiritual men that this power will correspondingly appertain, either to an apostle or else to a prophet. For the Church itself is, properly and principally the Spirit Himself. . . . And accordingly the ‘Church,’ it is true, will forgive sins; but the Church of the Spirit, by a spiritual man; not the Church which consists of a number of bishops. For the right and arbitrament is the Lord’s, not the servant’s; God’s Himself and not the priest’s.” Tertullian’s argument is that the power was given to Peter because he was inspired of the Father to confess Christ. He was a spiritual man. Cf. Döllinger, Hippolytus and Callistus (Eng. Trans.), pp. 116 f. Their opponents had joined issue with them on these two points. They asserted that a true prophet would submit himself to the “elders who were in the succession,” and that, while the Montanist prophets had positively refused to admit of the church’s pardon being extended to heinous sinners,Tertullian tells us (De Pudicitia, 21), that the new prophecy, speaking in the name of the Spirit had said “The church has the power to forgive sins; but I will not do it lest they commit others.” yet these sinners might be pardoned on confession and signs of sincere repentance. The great majority of the members of the churches had followed the office-bearers, and the Montanist movement had failed to arrest the course of the local ministry on the path they had chosen to pursue. It was only natural that an unsuccessful revolt would strengthen the position of the ministry which it had conspired against. All these things combined to place the office-bearers in a position of authority they had never before occupied, and to give peculiar powers to the bishops who were the chief office-bearers. The tendency was to think that the churches were summed up in their bishops, and these officials thus acquired a new position with reference to the whole Church.

The most potent cause producing this change of sentiment with regard to the character of the ministry and its relation to the Church was the attempt to come to some accommodation with the world lying round the Christian communities in order to justify the plea that Christians were entitled to the toleration extended to all other religions. This consideration was always accompanied by the other that the Church wished to keep hold on crowds of adherents, who in the years of peace from persecutionThat is in the years between the persecution under Severus and that under Decius. were flocking to join it, and who could not be retained if the old hard conditions or, perhaps one ought to say, the earlier high standard of Christian life, were insisted upon. These two motives invariably acted together, and are to be found working in such churches as those of Rome and Corinth in the beginning of the third century.Earlier in the Corinthian Church, if we are to believe Eusebius. Compare his Hist. Eccl. IV. xxiii. 6. The first practical consequence of these ideas was to alter the thought and conditions of penitence. In the earlier times, as has been said, when a Christian fell into such grievous sins as idolatry, murder, adultery, fornication and some others, he could never be received again into full communion, but had to remain in the position of a catechumen, permitted to wait in the ante-chamber but never admitted within the family abode until death was at hand. Gradually the practice was softened to the extent that, on due manifestation of sorrow, a second trial of the full Christian life was allowed, but a second fall was not to be forgiven.This statement appears to be borne out by what Tertullian says in his tract on Repentance:—“In the vestibule God has stationed repentance the second to open to such as knock; but now once for all, because now for a second time; but never more, for the last time it had been in vain” (7). In all probability this remained the general rule till the third decade of the third century, when Calixtus, the bishop of Rome, introduced a change which met with the fierce opposition of Tertullian and Hippolytus.Tertullian’s attack is to be found in his work on Modesty (De Pudicitia), and Hippolytus’ in his work against Heresies (Philosophumena), ix. 6, 7. It has been commonly said that the bishop of Rome attacked by Tertullian was Zephyrinus; compare Langen, Geschichte der röm. Kirche, i. 217 ff., and Döllinger, Hippolytus and Callistus (1876), Eng. Trans., p. 117; but see Harnack, Herzog’s Real-Encyclopaedie, x. 656, and in the Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte (1876-77), p. 582. He, or rather the Roman Church of which he was the head, entered on a policy of relaxation.There is no doubt that as Döllinger says (Hippolytus and Callistus (Eng. Trans.), p. 117) the power of a bishop in the beginning of the third century was anything but absolute, being limited by both the elders and the laity. “No one who knows the life of the Church at that time will believe that Callistus introduced a practice previously unknown in Rome against the will of his presbytery (session).” It was asserted that the church, through its office-bearers, was entitled to proclaim God’s pardon for any sins, however heinous, due signs of sorrow being accepted by the office-bearers as sufficient.Calixtus openly claimed this power to pardon, because he was the successor of St. Peter, to whom Christ had given power to remit sins (Tertullian, De Pudicitia, 21). It was announced by an edict posted up in the church, that pardon would be bestowed on these terms for all sins of the flesh, and that penitents would be restored to Church communion. It appears to be almost certain that this innovation contained two things; the first being the general statement of the power of the Church exercised through its office-bearers to restore all persons to Church communion, no matter how heinous the sin had been into which they had fallen, and the second being the resolution on the part of the Roman Church to make use of this general power in respect to sins of the flesh. Of course there was no attempt to coerce other churches to follow the example of the Roman Church, and many churches did not.As late as the beginning of the fourth century the Spanish Church insisted on visiting certain sins with perpetual excommunication, while the council of Ancyra held about the same time in the east set a limited penalty on the very sins for which the council of Elvira had decreed a perpetual excommunication—so impossible is it to make general statements about ecclesiastical usages in the early centuries. Some North African churches kept to the old practice on to the time of Cyprian,Cyprian, Epistle, lv. 21 (li.). but it is undoubted that the Roman example was largely followed. The statements in Hippolytus and Tertullian seem to warrant the conclusion that this relaxation from the older sternness was made because without it large numbers of Christians could not be restrained from going back to heathenism.Compare Tertullian’s phrases in the De Pudicitia:—“A profitable fickleness . . .”; “easier to err with the majority” (1); his statement of sins for which it is proper to provide repentance (7), etc. Compare Hippolytus on Heresies, ix. 7. Although the account of Hippolytus must be taken with some caution as the statements of a bitter opponent, yet it seems clear that Calixtus expected to detach many from the churches of his opponents in Rome by this policy of relaxation from the old strictness; and that his policy was successful. There must have been four or five different bodies of Christians in Rome at this time, each esteeming itself to be the Church of Christ.

There was no doubt a thoroughly evangelical element in this manifesto of the Roman Church.An interesting parallel might be drawn between the evangelical root in the sixteenth-century doctrine of indulgence and the evangelical basis of this manifesto. Compare my Luther, p. 62. It was based on the evangelical truth that God has commanded to his ministering servants to proclaim that He is not willing that any should perish, that His promises in Christ can be trusted in by the most heinous sinners and backsliders. But in all the circumstances of the times and of the case, it took a very unevangelical shape, and was worked out by Cyprian into the beginnings of the mediaeval doctrine of penance. In the shape it took it inevitably led the people to regard the office-bearers of the Church, and especially the bishops, as if they were in God’s place, and it ascribed to the bishops the power of actually pardoning and not simply of proclaiming the pardon of God.The proclamation of Calixtus, as quoted by Tertullian, was: I remit to such as have discharged repentance, the sins of adultery and fornication (De Pudiatia, 1) On the other hand, the Church lost her old idea that she was the company of the saints or the actively holy people; and the new feeling grew that the Church was the institution within which God had placed the means of acquiring holiness, and that these means were at the disposal of the bishops or the heads of the Christian communities, and could be reached only through them. Hence the office-bearers, and more especially the bishops—the men who had already been declared to be the guardians of the essential Christian verities—now came to be regarded also as the keepers or guardians of that peace of God which comes from the pardon of sin. They were the persons to whom it was necessary to go in order to know with certainty the truths of the Christian religion, and only through them could be acquired that saintly character which was desirable, but which was no longer a necessary condition of membership within the Christian Church. So the beginnings of a wide gulf were dug between the clergy and the laity, and the conception began to grow that the one duty of the laity in the presence of the clergy was that of simple obedience. Add to this the ever-present expectation that the day was approaching when the Church was to enter into an affiance with the hitherto persecuting state and to find a peaceful shelter under its protection; the growing conviction that the action of all the various Christian Churches ought to be as harmonious as possible, and that whatever step was taken by one ought to be taken by all; and the feeling that the Christian Churches ought to be divisions of a well-drilled army marching in step towards the earthly paradise of an affiance with, and therefore of a conquest over, the hitherto persecuting power, and it is possible to have some estimate of the changes which the conception of the Church and of the ministry were undergoing in the middle of this third century. At the same time it is easy to make too much of the power exercised by the bishops of the first half of the third century. The bishops of these days were not the great potentates that one is apt to imagine them to be from the language and phrases used by many modern historians. They, all of them, had to carry their people, and, above all, their elders or presbyters with them, in any change they suggested.

Canons which belong to the early part of the third century, like the Canons of Hippolytus, may say little about the rights and much about the duties of the laity. They may concern themselves with the layman’s duty to pray in private, to come to Church regularly, to offer the firstfruits, and may enjoin his wife to be careful to prepare the oblations. They may prohibit him from taking any part in public worship or from presiding even at an agape. They may appear to leave him no rights in the Church whatsoever save that of choosing his pastor. But we know that long after this few things were done in any local church without their being approved by a council of the whole people and clergy, plebs and ordo; and that this congregational meeting existed and exercised its powers from the days of St. Paul to those of Cyprian. The modern associations connected with the word “bishop” impose upon us, and the misleading phrase “monarchical bishop” adds to our illusions. The fact was that this “monarch” was in the vast majority of cases the pastor of a congregation of a few score of families, that no imperial legislation had as yet compelled the payment of tithes by law, nor had conferred a high social position upon any pastor or bishop who happened to be at the head of the Christian societies in cities which had been the provincial centres of the imperial cult.Compare below, p. 352 ff. When Christianity became the recognized religion of the Roman Empire; when imperial edicts confirmed ecclesiastical legislation; when imperial troops were employed to hunt down Marcionite, Montanist or Donatist nonconformists, the state of things became different. But until we get to the middle of the fourth century the Christian pastors were too dependent on their people to be great potentates and irresponsible rulers. It was the theory that was changing—that is the important thing to be remembered.

This new theory of the position and authority of the office-bearers in the Christian churches was so novel, and so opposed to the old traditions of primitive Christianity, that an extra-ordinary sanction was needed to support it, and in the nature of things the sanction had to come down from the earliest days. It is here that the idea of an “Apostolic Succession,” in the modern Roman and Anglican sense, first makes its appearance. It is a conception which had its origin in the brains of leaders of the Roman Church, and although it was adopted and defended by Cyprian, it has never ceased to be associated with Roman claims and to fit most naturally into Roman theories. To understand it one must remember, what is continually forgotten, that the great men who built up the Western Church were almost all trained Roman lawyers. Tertullian, Cyprian, Augustine, to say nothing of many of the most distinguished Roman bishops, were all men whose early training had been that of a Roman lawyer—a training which moulded and shaped all their thinking, whether theological or ecclesiastical. The framework of Roman law supported their thoughts about Christian organization and about Christian doctrines. They instinctively regarded all questions as a great Roman lawyer would. They had the lawyer’s craving for regular precedents, for elaborate legal fictions to bridge time and connect the present with the past. They had the lawyer’s idea that the primary duty laid upon them was to enforce obedience to authority, and especially to that authority which expressed itself in external institutions. Apostolic succession, in the dogmatic sense of that ambiguous term, is the legal fiction required by the legal mind to connect the growing conceptions of the authority of the clergy with the earlier days of Christianity. It served the Christian lawyer in much the same way that another curious legal fiction assisted the pagan civilian. The latter insisted that the government of the Emperors from Augustus to Diocletian was the prolongation of the old republican constitution; the former imagined that the rule of bishops was the prolongation through the generations of the inspired guidance of the original apostles who were the planters of the Church.

A legal fiction has generally some historical basis to start from, The basis of the fiction in civil law was the fact that the emperors, while wielding almost absolute personal authority, did so in accordance with republican forms inasmuch as they were invested by the senate with almost all the offices which under the republic had been distributed among a number of persons. The fiction in ecclesiastical government had also its basis of fact. The apostles had founded many of the churches, and their first converts or others suitable had become the first office-bearers. There had been a succession of leaders, the characteristics of leadership, as has been explained, undergoing some striking changes in the course of the second century. All these successions of office-bearers could be traced back to the foundation of the churches in which they existed, and therefore to the missionaries, whether apostles or apostolic men, who had founded them. This was the historical thread on which, in the end, was strung the gigantic figment called apostolic succession—a strange compound of minimum of fact and maximum of theory.

The beginnings of the theory are easily discernible, and have been already explained. Irenaeus seized upon the undoubted fact of successive generations of office-bearers going back to the apostolic founders of certain churches in order to find a guarantee for the true Christian doctrine. To make assurance doubly sure, he added a theory to his fact—this, namely, that these office-bearers who were in the succession had a charisma veritatis. According to the ideas of the time there was a minimum of fact in the added theory, for many of the pastors of these primitive churches were prophets and had the charisma. This made it easier to suppose that what belonged to some pastors personally was the property of all officially. The result was that Christian leaders had a short and easy method of dealing with Gnostics and others.Compare above, p. 224 ff. Moreover, when the leaders became the guardians of sound teaching they acquired additional magisterial powers within the communities over which they presided. But neither Irenaeus, nor Tertullian who adopted and extended his theory, ever claimed that the leaders of the churches who were in the succession stood in the same position to the churches of the end of the second and beginning of the third centuries as that held by the apostles in the middle of the first. If they believed that the apostles were the mediators between Jesus and the Church they were also firmly convinced that the Holy Spirit was imparted to the whole membership, and was not the peculiar possession of the leaders of the communities because they were in the succession from the apostles. The idea appeared earliest in the Roman Church. So far as I am aware, the earliest claim of this kind was made by Hippolytus in his struggle with Calixtus in Rome; and Calixtus, the head of one of the rival factions, was not slow to adopt the same arrogant position. The former made use of the idea of an apostolic succession to strengthen his position when he tried to show that his rival was a heretic; and the latter used it to warrant him in issuing decrees which relaxed the ancient discipline in the hope of attracting to his own congregation men who felt the rules of Christian living laid down by Hippolytus too hard for their weakness. These were the edifying surroundings from amidst which came the first full statement of the claim to apostolic succession.“But none will refute these (heretics), save the Holy Spirit bequeathed unto the Church, which the apostles having in the first instance received, have transmitted to those who rightly believed. But we, as being their successors, and as participators in this grace, high-priesthood, and office of teaching, as well as being reputed guardians of the Church, will not be found deficient in vigilance, or disposed to suppress correct doctrine,” Refutation of all Heresies (Philosophumena), I., proemium. Hippolytus attacks Calixtus in IX. vi. vii. He says of his discipline:—“For he is in the habit of attending the congregation of any one else, who is called a Christian; should a man commit any transgression, the sin, they say, is not reckoned to him, provided only he hurries off to the school of Calixtus,” IX. vii. Calixtus is the bishop of Rome whom Tertullian attacks in his De Pudicitia, and whose proclamation he quotes:—“I remit, to such as have discharged repentance, the sins of adultery and fornication” (1). The theory may be older in the Roman Church than this its first distinct statement.Harnack, whose careful chronological investigations have led him to believe that the Roman list of bishops or pastors may be trusted from Anicetus (about 155 A.D.) or from Soter (about 166), while no Oriental list can be trusted before the third century, regards this as an indication that the theory of apostolic succession in its beginnings at least had become established in Rome at a comparatively early date. Compare Die Chronologie der altchristlichen Literatur, pp. 144-230; and his History of Dogma, Eng. Trans. (1894-99). ii. 70 n.

From the time that this doctrine of apostolic succession comes into being in the West on to its full statement by Cyprian, its use is the same. It is appealed to as the ground for the assumption of powers of command on the part of the bishops or pastors. It is interesting to notice that while the idea of a succession is to be found in the East, it took an altogether different shape from the formal legal Roman dogma. There is no mention of an apostolic succession of chief pastors in the first six books of the Apostolic Constitutions. It does not appear in the definition or description of the Church which is given in the first book.Apostolic Constitutions, I. i. Yet the office of bishop or pastor is dwelt upon at length. He is always looked upon as the minister of a congregation, and frequently of a very small congregation,Ibid. II. i. but that does not prevent the authors heaping up phrases to describe his importance and the respect which is due to him from his people.The bishop is told to sustain the character of God among men, “as being set over all men, over priests, kings, rulers, fathers, children, teachers, and in general over all who are subject” to him; Apostolic Constitutions, II. xi.; “It is thy privilege (O bishop), to govern those under thee, but not to be governed by them” (II. xiv.); the laic is to “honour him, love him, reverence him as his lord, as his master, as the high-priest of God, as a teacher of piety; for he that heareth him heareth Christ; and he that rejecteth him rejecteth Christ” (II. xx.); “the bishop, he is the minister of the word, the keeper of knowledge, the mediator between God and you in the several parts of your divine worship; he is your ruler and governor; he is your king and potentate; he is, next after God, your earthly god, who has a right to be honoured by you” (II. xxvi.); and so on in Oriental luxuriance of phrases. It is not that there was no sense of the continuity of office in the East:—“It is also thy duty, O, bishop, to have before thine eyes the examples of those who have gone before, and to apply them skilfully to the cases of those who want words of severity or of consolation” (II. xxii.). The elders, “the counsellors of the bishop”—his Kirk-Session—“sustain the place” of the apostles of the Lord.“Let also a double portion (of the firstfruits) be set apart for the elders, as for such as labour continually in the word and doctrine, upon the account of the apostles of our Lord, whose place they sustain, as the counsellors of the bishop and the crown of the Church (II. xxviii.). The formal legal Roman mind needed a precedent, in the shape of this legal fiction, for the unwonted domination which the chief pastors were beginning to claim. The Oriental, accustomed to arbitrary government, did not feel that usurpation of power required to be cloaked under legal fictions. Yet in the East we find a trace of a succession. Clement of Alexandria conceives the number of the apostles continually recruited from age to age by the enrolment of men who have attained to a “gnostical perfection,”Speaking of those who attain to “gnostical perfection,” Clement says (Stromata, VI. xiii.):—“Luminous already, and like the sun shining in the exercise of beneficence, he speeds by righteous knowledge through the love of God to the sacred abode, like as the apostles. . . . Those then also, who have exercised themselves in the Lord’s commandments, and lived perfectly and gnostically according to the Gospel may be now enrolled in the chosen body of the apostles. Such an one is in reality an elder of the Church, and a true deacon of the will of God if he do and teach what is the Lord’s; not as being chosen by men, nor regarded as righteous because a presbyter, but enrolled in the eldership because righteous. And although here upon earth he be not honoured with the chief seat, he will sit down on the four-and-twenty thrones, judging the people, as St. John says in the Apocalypse. For in truth the covenant of salvation, reaching down to us from the foundation of the world, through different generations and times, is one, though conceived as different in respect of gifts.” and who are, therefore, the true teachers of the Church, for the Christian Neo-Platonist of Alexandria was as familiar with the thought of a succession of inspired teachers,The Neo-Platonists believed that the true philosophy was preserved to the world through a succession of divinely inspired teachers. as the minds of the Roman lawyers who built up the Church in the West were saturated with legal precedents and the need for the visible continuity of government even though a legal fiction had to be invented to show it. The great Alexandrian conceives the continuity of the Church to exist in the succession of Christian generations, and to be made evident by the appearance among them from time to time of saintly men of apostolic character who are known to God, and whose supreme importance in preserving the true character of Christianity will be revealed in the future. This he deems to be a much better guarantee than a succession of office-bearers, chosen and ordained by fallible men.

Although the conception that the heads of the Christian churches were the successors of the apostles, in the sense that they possessed the gifts and the powers of the original apostles (now thought of as Twelve only), was really the creation of the Roman Church, it is intimately connected with Cyprian of Carthage,The best edition of Cyprian’s works is that of J. Hartel (1868-71) in the Vienna Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, where the letters are to be found in the second volume. The numbering of the letters in this edition is the same as in the Oxford edition of 1682; Migne’s edition has a different numbering. In our quotations Migne’s numbering is given in brackets. A very suggestive account of Cyprian’s work in constructing the polity of the Church is given by Albrecht Ritschl in his Die Entstehung der altkatholischen Kirche, 2nd ed. (1857), pp. 555-73. Otto Ritschl, his son, has written Cyprian von Karthago and die Verfassung der Kirche (1885)—a careful and elaborate work. Other monographs on Cyprian are:—Rettberg, Thascius Caecilius Cyprianus, Bischof von Carthago, dargestellt nach seinen Leben und Wirken (1831). Fechtrup (Roman Catholic), Der Heilige Cyprian; sein Leben und seine Lehre (1878). Pearson’s Annales Cyprianici are valuable; they are published in Fell’s (Oxford) edition of Cyprian’s works (1682), and have been republished in Pearson’s Minor Theological Works (1884). The latest book on Cyprian is from the pen of Dr. Benson, the late archbishop of Canterbury, who was the author of the article on Cyprian in the Dictionary of Christian Biography. The book is entitled Cyprian, his Life, his Times, his Work (1897). From one point of view it is impossible to praise this book too highly; but it has very grave defects. It displays fine scholarship, unwearied research, and an historical imagination which enables the author to reconstruct the secular society of the times when Cyprian lived. The framing is excellent; but the portrait framed is scarcely so good. The author exhibits to us a pious, suave, courteous, far-seeing ecclesiastical statesman, whose letters and speeches were seasoned with a sarcastic humour; but the real Cyprian had other characteristics which are either hidden out of sight or relegated to an obscure background. We see nothing whatever of the prophet whom the Spirit inspired in dreams and visions when moments of difficulty in life or in ecclesiastical policy arose, and whose dread of demons changed spiritual sacraments into magical rites; little of the canonist who measured the deep promptings of the heart’s repentance by stereotyped expressions, and paved the way for the degradation of sorrow into the mechanism of penance; little of the fiery Roman African who launched envenomed phrases at ecclesiastical opponents; and nothing of the ruthless Roman lawyer who condemned a Christian martyr, who had survived the tortures which had covered her poor body with blood, to eternal perdition (for this he thought he could do as a successor of the apostles), when she crossed the path of his ecclesiastical policy. Then a curious colour blindness or perhaps an amiable propensity to see all things ecclesiastical through the coloured glass of the modern institutions of the communion over which he so worthily presided, prevents the author from seeing the ecclesiastical situation which existed in the middle of the third century. Dr. Benson had evidently great difficulty in stating an opponent’s argument fairly, and seldom succeeds in doing so. He had no acquaintance with the organization of any branch of the Protestant Church save his own, and yet makes continual allusion to other organizations. We have such phrases as “Presbyterian Teutonism” (this is applied to the greatest living authority in early Church history; Dr. Harnack of Berlin); “heavy pages,” “laborious pages” (phrases which mean that an opinion Dr. Benson does not like is supported by a plentiful supply of quotations from Cyprian’s writings), “Calvinism” (used at random, for Calvinists agree with Cyprian and Augustine on the matter discussed); and many others of the same kind. They are useful to warn the unwary reader of the bias in the book. who gave it definiteness as a dogmatic idea. This great ecclesiastical statesman, like Gregory I., has left behind him a collection of letters which reveal the working of his mind, and enable us to see how his thoughts took sharper outline in a controversy which he had to maintain with his own office-bearers in Carthage, and how he aimed at and partly succeeded in giving the Christian Church a polity which enabled it to be one in practical activity as it was one in devotional conception.

Thascius Cyprianus was the most eminent of the many distinguished converts whom Christianity was drawing from the learned and wealthy classes during the second third of the third century, during that long period of “peace” which preceded the outbreak of the Decian persecution in 250 A.D. He was a Roman whose ancestors had settled in Africa. Such men were called Roman Africans. They belonged to a race which had given the capital some of its most distinguished lawyers, and which furnished to the Church such men as Tertullian, Minutius Felix, Cyprian, Lactantius and Augustine. By training and profession he was a pleader, and therefore of the highest social standing.“Far from any shade of unreality resting on them, the teachers of oratory were courted leaders in society. The publicity in life, the majesty of national audiences, the familiarity of the cultivated classes with the teaching of the schools, required the orator to be not only perfect in the graces of life, but to be versed in ethical science; to be armed with solid arguments as well as to be facile of invention; not less convincing than attractive; in short to be a wit and a student, a politician and an eclectic philosopher. At the age of nearly thirty Cicero was still placing himself under the tuition of the Rhodian Molon. Augustine’s fourth book on Christian doctrine shews us that five centuries and a changed religion did not abate the value placed on technical perfection. No statesman’s name had for generations commanded such reverence as was paid in Cyprian’s times to the life and memory of Timesitheus the Rhetorician, whose daughter the young African Emperor had espoused, and whose honour and universal cultivation had for a brief interval restored purity to the Court, dignity to the senate, and discipline to the camps of Rome”; Benson, Cyprian, his Life, his Times, his Work, pp. 2, 3. His wealth was great; his house, with its “gilded ceilings” and “mosaics of costly marble,”Cyprian, Ad Donatum, 15:—“Auro distincta aquearia of pretiosi marmoris crustis vestita domicilia.” and his gardens, were famous in the city of palaces. He became a Christian in middle life, drawn by the persuasion of the intellect as well as by the pleadings of the heart. We may see the path he trod towards conversion in his Treatise to Donatus and in the Book of Testimonies he wrote for a friend. After a brief space of time he probably became a deacon; he was certainly an elder when Donatus, the Bishop of Carthage, died. The Christians at Carthage resolved that the most distinguished Christian in the city, although two years had scarcely passed since his baptism, should be their bishop. His reluctance only increased their ardour. “A crowded brotherhood besieged the doors of his house, and throughout all the avenues of access an anxious love was circulating.”Pontius, Life and Passion of Cyprian, Bishop and Martyr, 5. Cyprian yielded and was ordained, the bishop, the Papa, the spiritual Father of the Christian community in Carthage. We must forget many of the associations which the word “bishop” inevitably brings with it to understand his position. He was simply the chief pastor of the Christian congregation at Carthage and of its outlying mission districts. He had no diocese and never exercised diocesan rule. He had no cathedral, not even a church. His congregation met in the audience hall of a wealthy Carthaginian burgher.Benson, Cyprian, his Life, his Times, his Work, p. 41 and note. It was the man who made the position he occupied one of such commanding importance as it soon attained to.It may be useful to give the principal dates known proximately about Cyprian. He was baptized probably in the spring of 246 A.D.; became a member of the Session of Carthage in 247 A.D.; and was consecrated bishop some time after June in 248 A.D. It is not quite certain that he was a deacon; the evidence lies in the phrase used by his biographer Pontius, who was a deacon:—“Erat sane illi etiam de nobis contubernium viri justi et laudabilis memoriae Caeciliani” (Life, 4); and in the sentence in sect. 3:—“quis enim non omnes honoris gradus crederet tali mente credente.” The outbreak of the Decian persecution being imminent, Cyprian retired from Carthage to his unknown hiding-place in January 250 A.D.; the persecution began in April of the same year. It raged fiercely until November, and was then relaxed; but it was not considered safe for Cyprian to return. He came back to Carthage in 251 A.D., some time after Easter. Then followed a series of councils at Carthage where the African bishops met under the presidency of Cyprian;—the first in April 251 A.D.; the second in May 252 A.D., the third in September 253 A.D., the fourth in the autumn of 254 A.D., the fifth in 255, and the sixth and seventh in 256; in 257 Cyprian was banished to Curubis; he returned to Carthage in 258 and was martyred there in September 258.

CHAPTER VIII

THE ROMAN STATE RELIGION AND ITS EFFECTS ON THE ORGANIZATION OF THE CHURCH

The Decian persecution, instead of stamping out Christianity, strengthened it. When it was over the Christian churches, pruned of their weaker members, felt stronger than ever, and pressed forward more earnestly in the path of organization and consolidation. The grouping of churches round definite centres became more conspicuous, the gradations of rank among bishops began to assume a more distinct form, a large number of bishops began to be more than simple pastors of congregations, and the lower classes of office-bearers were multiplied. The “great” Church, in short, assumed more than before the appearance of an organized whole.

The apostle Paul had taught his mission churches the secret of mutual support which might come from building up groups of churches arranged according to the provinces of the Roman Empire; and two churches, in the two chief centres of the Empire, Rome and Alexandria, early manifested a genius for attracting within their respective spheres of influence the weaker churches around them. Both were eminently fitted to be the protectors and guides of their fellow Christian communities. They both occupied commanding positions; they were wealthy and could assist poorer churches; and they were generally models of Christian generosity to their weaker brethren. The early pre-eminence of Alexandria and of Rome can be accounted for in the most natural ways. When the local church came to be almost identified with the personality of its chief pastor, the pre-eminence of the church was merged in the wide influence—almost rule—of its bishop. Perhaps the chief pastor of the Church in Alexandria was the first to stand forth as the undoubted leader of the great majority of Christians and of all the confederated churches of the vast and wealthy province of Egypt and the surrounding lands. In the fourth century and in the beginning of the fifth Athanasius and his successors wielded a personal power and were called Popes, long before the bishop of Rome had attained equal influence in the West. But if the growth of the influence of Rome was slower everything combined to make it surer, more lasting, and of much wider extent. The Church in Rome belonged to the capital of the civilized world. The Roman Empire, down to the time of Diocletian, was, in legal fiction at any rate, the rule of a town-council over the world, and this naturally suggested the commanding influence of a single kirk-session over all the other churches. This suggestion, never wholly realized, loomed before the Roman Church from a very early time; but its partial realization was much later than our period. What presents itself from the middle of the third century onwards to the time of Constantine is the increasing tendency in the churches to form groups more or less compact round central churches occupying commanding positions in the Empire, and the churches of Rome and Alexandria are distinguished examples of such great centres of groups of churches.

The instrument in effecting this grouping was the council or synod. Nothing could be more natural than that the leaders of Christian churches should meet to talk over the affairs of the communities under their charge, and the earliest known instance of this was the journey of Polycarp to visit Anicetus at Rome in 154 A.D.Eusebius, Hist. Eccles. V. xxiv. 16. This, however, could scarcely be called the beginning of councils. They, i.e., the councils, are frequently traced back to the meeting at Jerusalem, when the apostles, the elders, and the whole Church assembled to consider the question of receiving into “fellowship” the uncircumcised Gentile converts of Paul and Barnabas. But since, so far as we know, more than one hundred years elapsed without the example of the Church in Jerusalem being imitated, it can scarcely be urged that this meeting was regarded as the precedent which was followed. Most historians see the real beginnings of the councils in meetings “of the faithful,” held frequently and in many places in Asia Minor, when the difficulties created by the Montanist movement (160-180 A.D.) demanded consultation; and the anticipations of councils may be found in that frequent intercourse by means of letters and special messengers which was such a marked feature of the early life of the Christian communities.

It is not easy to know what these earliest councils were like or who formed their members. They were most probably informal meetings of the pastors, elders, deacons and people, and it is likely that all present were permitted to take part in the conference and have a voice in its decisions. The prevailing troubles were talked over and the best way of meeting them. Whatever resolutions were come to had no legal force, but they naturally led to common action within the communities represented. Eusebius gives a graphic account of these earliest gatherings. An elder who had strong views on the Montanist movement found himself in Ancyra where Montanist sympathizers abounded, and where some active partisans had exerted considerable influence on the people. He and a fellow-elder had conferences with the people in the church, which lasted for days. The whole question was debated with earnestness in presence of the people, who were intensely interested in the matter. At length, after long discussions, the Montanist champions were driven away and their sympathizers silenced: The elders of Ancyra begged the visitor to write down his arguments for their use in case the question should be brought up again. It is added that the faithful in many places had frequent conferences which doubtless resembled those at Ancyra.Compare Eusebius, Hist. Eccles. V. xvi. 4, 10; xix. 2. The technical words used, “brother-hood,” “faithful,” imply that all Christians, lay and clerical, took part in the discussion and settlement of the matter discussed. Such were these earliest synods.

We next hear of them in the Easter controversy (about 190 A.D.). Eusebius, writing more than a hundred years later, calls them “Synods and Conferences of bishops,” but when he quotes contemporary evidence, such as that of Irenaeus, the technical terms used mean that the opinion of the whole Christian “brotherhood” was expressed. Letters were written in the name of the παροικίαι and of the brethren of Gaul;Eusebius, Hist. Eccles. V. xxiii. 2; xix. 2. and “brethren” or the “brotherhood” is the word which even in Cyprian denoted the laity,Cyprian, Epistles, xvi. 2 (ix.); xviii. 1, 2 (xii.); xx. 2 (xiv.); xlvi. 2 (xliii. ). while παροικία in these early days “was neither a parish nor a diocese, but the community of Christians living within a city or a district, regarded in relation to the non-Christian population which surrounded it.”Hatch, The Organization of the Early Christian Churches (1881), p. 190.

Tertullian, writing about 210 A.D., speaks as if it were a common practice to hold councils regularly throughout Greece, and praises the double advantage that accrued from such meetings—the handling of the deeper questions of Christian life for the common benefit and the bringing vividly before the minds of the people the fact of the universality of Christianity.Tertullian, De Jejunio, 13:—“Aguntur praeterea per Graecias illa certis in locis concilia ex universis ecclesiis per quae et altiora quaeque in commune tractantur, et ipsa repraesentatio totius nominis christiani magna veneratione celebratur.” Afterwards synods were held in Africa, the earliest recorded being about 220 A.D.,The synod at which Agrippinus presided and which declared that baptism administered by heretics was void; compare Cyprian, Epistles, lxxi. 4 (lxx.); lxxiii. 3 (lxxii.). and gradually they spread over the Christian world.

APPENDIX

Sketch of the History of Modern Controversy About the Office-bearers in the Primitive Christian Churches

The history of modern discussions about the nature of the government and the office-bearers in the earliest Christian Churches begins with Dr. Lightfoot’s Essay on the Christian Ministry, published in 1868, in his Commentary on the Epistle to the Philippians. This essay has been recently republished, but unfortunately the valuable dissertation on the terms bishop and presbyter has not been appended to the republished essay.

In his dissertation on the words bishop and presbyter, Dr. Lightfoot begins by examining the previous history of the words.

Episcopus in classical Greek was used to denote the Athenian commissioners appointed to take over and regulate a new territorial acquisition, the inspectors appointed by Indian kings, the commissioner appointed by Mithridates to settle the affairs of Ephesus, magistrates who regulated the sales of provisions, certain officers in Rhodes whose occupation is unknown, and perhaps the officials of a club or confraternity. In the Septuagint the word was used to mean inspectors or taskmasters, captains or presidents, the commissioners appointed by king Antiochus when he resolved to destroy the Jewish religion. From this survey Dr. Lightfoot argued that the primary meaning in the word was inspection, and that it contained two subsidiary thoughts, responsibility to a superior power, and the introduction of a new order of things.

Presbyter or elder, both name and office, was distinctly Jewish, Dr. Lightfoot thought. It was a common practice certainly to call the governing body the aged (senate, gerousia, aldermen), but all through Jewish history there are elders; these elders were mainly civil officials, but the synagogues of the Dispersion had religious elders belonging to them. It was not unnatural, therefore, that when the Christian synagogue took its place by the side of the Jewish; a similar organization should be carried over from the old dispensation into the new.

These two names, episcopus, with its Greek, and elder, with its Jewish history, mean in the primitive Christian Church absolutely the same thing; this can be proved from Scriptural and patristic evidence. The “elders” of Ephesus were also “bishops” (Acts xx. 17, 28), and the identity of the names is shown in 1 Peter v. 1, 2; in 1 Tim. iii. 1-7 and v. 17-19; and in Tit. i. 5-7. The same identity is observed in the First Epistle of Clement (42, 44). With the beginning of the second century a new phraseology began and the words took their modern significations; by the close of that century the original meanings seem to have been forgotten. But in the fourth century, when the fathers of the Church began to examine the records of the primitive times, they perceived the original meanings, and Jerome, Chrysostom, Pelagius, Theodore of Mopsuestia and Theodoret all recognized the original identity of episcopus and presbyter.

The question then arises, how it came to pass that in the end of the second century everywhere the original college of presbyters or bishops had given place to a different organization, in which we find one president called generally the bishop, and frequently the pastor, and under him a college of elders or presbyters and a band of deacons? This is the question which Dr. Lightfoot set himself to answer in his essay on the Christian Ministry. He first collects his facts, which are these. That the change from a Church government where the rulers were a college of presbyter-bishops to the type in which there is one president with a college of presbyters under him is first apparent in Asia Minor. We get the information from Ignatius, who was himself at the head of the Church in Antioch, and who gives us the name of two other presidents in that region—Polycarp at Smyrna and Onesimus at Ephesus. The change came later in Macedonia and Greece; for the Church at Philippi was ruled by a college of presbyter-bishops during the time of Polycarp. Corinth had the new constitution before 170, and from some various considerations we may fix the date of the introduction of the new organization into Greece about the time of Hadrian. The same date may be assigned to the new organization of the churches in Crete. The early history of a single presidency in the Roman Church presents a perplexing problem. Neither Clement nor Ignatius allow us to see the presidency of one man in the early Roman Church, and the evidence to be gathered from Hermas is too uncertain to be relied upon. There are lists of so-called bishops of Rome from St. Peter and Linus, but these belong at the earliest to the end of the second century; and the names they give may only be those of men known to strangers to be prominent in the Church of the Capital. We know absolutely nothing of the Church in Africa before the time of Tertullian, but the institution of the single ruler was established in strength in his time. In Alexandria there is evidence to show that up to the middle of the third century the bishop was not only nominated but apparently ordained by the twelve presbyters out of their own number. In Gaul the earliest bishop recorded was Pothinus, the immediate predecessor of Irenaeus. It is to be observed, however, that it is scarcely reasonable to suppose that the three-fold ministry only began to exist when we can prove that a “bishop” is actually mentioned, for there are many things which witness that the three-fold ministry was not regarded as a novelty at the close of the second century.

Having stated his facts, Dr. Lightfoot proceeded to construct a theory of the origin of this three-fold ministry, or, to put it otherwise, to give an explanation how the two-fold ministry of the primitive Church became a three-fold ministry in the third century.

He notes the gradual and uneven development of the three-fold order. He accepts the statements of Jerome, “that one presbyter was elected that he might be placed over the rest as a remedy against schism, and that each man might not, draw to himself and thus break up the Church of Christ.” The dissensions between Jew and Gentile, the disputes occasioned by the Gnostic teachers, the necessity for preserving a united front in times of trial and persecution, were the causes for the gradual change which gave a single and permanent head to the college of presbyter-bishops which had ruled the Christian communities in the earliest times.

This statement, facts and theory, was generally accepted by all save certain Anglicans, who were too much in love with a theory to care to look closely at historical facts. It may be said to have represented the ideas of competent scholars in England and in Germany until the late Dr. Hatch published his celebrated Bampton Lectures in 1881.

Dr. Hatch was one of the most original and erudite students of early Church History that England has produced. These lectures and his articles in the Dictionary of Christian Antiquities, were the result of extensive reading, with the view of constructing a scientific history of the beginnings of Canon law—a work which the author’s premature death prevented him from accomplishing.

Dr. Hatch set himself to investigate the origins of ecclesiastical organization from a comparative review of the political, social and religious assemblies and confraternities in society contemporary with the beginnings of Christianity. He was not the first to do this. Renan had directed attention to the confraternities of pagan times and instituted a parallel between them and the organization of the early Christian societies. Heinrici had carried on the same kind of investigation in two learned articles published in the Zeitschrift für wissenschaftliche Theologie, in 1876-7, and in his Commentary on the First Epistle to the Corinthians, published in 1879. But Dr. Hatch brought to the work a wealth of material more abundant than had been collected by any of his predecessors, and grouped it in a much more skilful way. His idea was that the term episcopus came into the Christian Church from the heathen confraternities, and was used for the leaders in the Gentile, as the term presbyter was used in the Jewish, Christian societies. If the Gentile Christian churches are to be alone considered, Dr. Hatch thought that the presbyters whom we find in them had an origin quite spontaneous and independent of the example of the Jewish communities. He derived the Christian presbyters from the common practice of a council of elderly men which superintended most of the confraternities which abounded in the early centuries of our era.

Dr. Hatch seems to have thought that the office as well as the name episcopus was distinct from that of presbyter from the beginning, but he did not make this opinion very emphatic. His idea was that the episcopus filled an administrative and financial office, and its duties in both respects came from the position of the episcopus as the leader of the worship, and therefore the receiver of the “gifts” of the people, who gave them after the service to the officiating minister, by whom they were distributed to those to whom they were due. Dr. Hatch thus disputed the identity of presbyter and episcopus, at least in Gentile Christian societies. He agreed with Dr. Lightfoot, however, in declaring that all the Christian churches were originally governed by a plurality of office-bearers, none of whom had a pre-eminence over his fellows. In attempting to account for the fact that in course of time we find this government by a plurality of office-bearers of equal rank superseded by a three-fold ministry, in which the local Church was governed by one episcopus, a college of presbyters and several deacons, Dr. Hatch followed Dr. Lightfoot’s argument. He adduced the general tendency in all societies to have a president at their head, and the natural tendency when once a single president had been appointed for power to grow in his hands; the specific tendency in the Christian societies of the second century to believe that the coming of the Lord was at hand, and the consequent endeavour to represent each society as having at its head one who would represent the Lord until He came; and lastly the need felt in times of danger, whether from persecution or from speculation, to have one head who could be obeyed by all. He declared that his explanation of the change was exactly that made by Jerome.

Dr. Hatch’s Lectures, at once original and erudite, attracted a great deal of attention both in this country and abroad. They were the object of some grossly unfair and almost virulent attacks on the part of High Church Anglicans, and these attacks continue. In Germany the Lectures made a very great impression, all the more so that the distinguished Church historian, Dr. Adolf Harnack, then a professor at Giessen, now at Berlin, was so struck with the book that he translated it into German and published it with elaborate notes of his own. With this translation modern German critical research into the organization of the primitive Church may be said to have begun.

While Dr. Hatch had denied Dr. Lightfoot’s starting point, the identity of episcopi and presbyters, he had done so mainly by insisting on a difference in origin and perhaps in work; but he had not made very clear the real relation between the episcopus and the presbyter, nor had he explained why it was that when the three-fold ministry emerged the superior officer was called episcopus and not presbyter. Dr. Harnack, in his “analecta” to his translation set himself to supply these defects. He insisted in a much more thoroughgoing way than Dr. Hatch that the two offices of episcopus and presbyter were distinct in their origin, and represented two distinct types of organization which could never throughout their whole history be completely identified. The former, along with the deacons, were administrative officers, and had mainly to do with the distribution and reception of the offerings of the worshippers, and through these with the worship of the congregation, while the presbyters were from the first and always men who had charge of the discipline and morals of their fellow Christians. In his “analecta,” Dr. Harnack attempts to trace this clear distinction down through sub-apostolic literature. This translation was published in 1883. In the same year appeared the Didache, issued by Bishop Bryennios—a venerable relic from primitive times, which shed a light on many things hitherto obscure in primitive Christianity. The appearance of the Didache was the occasion of a very thorough-going resifting of the earliest literature bearing on the organization and worship of the primitive Church. As a result of this we have now the completed hypothesis of Dr. Harnack about the beginnings and growth of the Christian organization, which is as follows. While we have traces of at least four separate roots of organization in the primitive Church, which may be called the “religious,” the “patriarchal,” the “administrative” and the “aristocratic,” it may be said that a completely organized congregation possessed at the end of the apostolic age: (1) “prophets and teachers,” who were awakened and taught by the Spirit, and who spoke the “Word of God”; (2) a circle of “presbyters” or “elders,” select old men, but perhaps not yet elected “old men,” who in all emergencies which affected the congregation could guide them, and whose special duty it was to watch over the life and behaviour of the members of the community, and who therefore comforted, admonished and punished; they also formed the court of .arbiters before whom all cases of dispute between members of the Christian society were brought and judged; (3) the administrative officers—“episcopi” and deacons who possessed the “gifts” of government and public service, and who had to act especially in public worship and in the care of the poor; the “episcopi” were also members of the circle of “presbyters.” But besides these there were also in the congregations many varied “gifts” (1 Cor. xii.); and each individual “gift” or talent which was useful to edify, in the widest sense of the word, the members of the society, was considered a “gift” of the Spirit; but only those who possessed in peculiar measure the “gift” of speaking the “Word of God,” the apostles, prophets and teachers, held a special rank in the congregation. That was the first stage in the organization.

The second stage arose during the second century, when the basis of organization was thoroughly altered and the alteration was mainly due to the gradual dying out of the “charismatic” element. It shows three elements. (1) The “prophets and teachers” either gradually died out or probably the calling led to so many abuses that these men lost their original pre-eminence, and their places were taken by the “episcopi.” (2) The worship and other things made it more and more necessary for one man to be at the head of the administration—the “episcopi” coalesced into one “episcopus” or “pastor.” (3) The college of “presbyters” lost much of its earlier standing and became more an advising college supporting the “episcopus” or “pastor.” Thus the organization became a three-fold order of ministry—“episcopus” or “pastor,” presbyters or “elders,” and deacons—and these officials formed a consecrated body of men set over the laity. This change came with varying degrees of rapidity in the various parts of the empire, and we find transitional forms. One of the most important parts of the change was that the duty of edifying the people by sermon and hortatory address passed for the most part to the “episcopus” or “pastor,” and in a lesser degree to the “elders”; but on into the third century there were, surrounding the “pastor,” laymen who not merely edified the congregation by exhortations, but who instructed it in the faith. Such gifted individuals, along with members who bore eminent testimony to the faith in peculiar holiness of life or in suffering, such as the confessors, virgins and widows, held a place of special honour within the congregation alongside of the clergy.

The first half of the third century saw the final form of organization adopted, and it is characterized by attributing a sacerdotal character to the clergy, who had this character fixed upon them by a solemn service, by a comprehensive adoption of the complicated forms of heathen worship, of the temple service, and of the priesthood, with a corresponding idea of the magical power of priestly actions, by strictly and thoroughly including within the clerical order everything of ancient dignity and rule, and by the complete extinction of the old “charismatic” gifts of edification, or their relegation to a very subordinate place.

These views of Dr. Harnack will be found stated at length with his proofs in his second volume of the Didache, in his Sources of the Apostolic Canons (Texte und Untersuchungen, II. i. ii. v.), and in an article contributed to the Expositor, 1887, January-June, p. 321. In the same number, on pp. 1 and 97, will be found two articles by Dr. Sanday summarizing and criticising Dr. Harnack’s positions.

Dr. Harnack’s theory was at once adopted by many distinguished students of early Church History in Germany, such as Weizsäcker and Sohm, and has been assented to by many Americans, such as Dr. Allen in his Christian Institutions (1898); but it has also met with a good deal of opposition. The hypothesis is marked by all Dr. Harnack’s originality of view, and is illustrated by a wealth of references which perhaps he alone could give. It fascinated me at first, and it was only after reading and re-reading the evidence that I was obliged to come to the conclusion that it was untenable. Its leading opponents are Seyerlen (Zeitschrift für praktische Theologie, 1887, pp. 97 ff. 201 ff., 297 ff.), Loening, Loofs and lastly Schmiedel.

Dr. Loening (Die Gemeindeverfassung des Urchristenthums, 1889) is Professor of Law in the University of Halle, and the author of a valuable work on Church Law. He has a lawyer’s demand for exact evidence and a lawyer’s love of precedents. He holds that there was little or no organization in the Christian communities during strictly apostolic times.Dr. Loening belongs to that school of New Testament critics who are furthest removed from the traditional ideas about the date and authorship of the New Testament writings. He does not believe that we can accept the account given in the Acts of the Apostles as trustworthy history for apostolic times. Therefore while he accepts the account of the election and setting apart of the Seven, he refuses to admit that Paul and Barnabas saw “presbyters” appointed in the Churches founded during their first mission journey, and to accept the fact of the existence of “presbyters” in the primitive Christian Church in Jerusalem. He holds that Rom. xvi. 3-15 is not part of the Epistle to the Romans, but a letter to the Church at Ephesus, and to be taken as evidence for the organization of the Churches in further Asia and in Greece. He does not believe in the Pauline origin of the Epistle to the Ephesians or of the Pastoral Epistles. He dates the former at 70-90 A.D. and the latter at sometime during the first quarter of the second century; while he relegates the date of the Acts of the Apostles to the beginning of the second century. He makes up for this incredulity by accepting with unquestioning faith the gossip of Hegesippus and such writers. What we find are little societies of Christians meeting and worshipping together in house churches; we see no traces of office-bearers in the proper sense of the word; we have various terms applied to men because of the work they do, but no word of office. In the last genuine Epistle of St. Paul, that written to the Philippians, we meet for the first time with real office-bearers who are called “bishops and deacons.” This epistle and these names must be the starting point of investigation into the origins of primitive Christian organization. After a rapid criticism of the statements of Dr. Hatch and Professor Harnack, he comes to the conclusion that no real proof has been brought forward to enable us to explain these names from the titles of the officials of heathen confraternities; as little have they any connexion with the organization of the synagogue. We can learn nothing about “bishops and deacons” save from the ordinary uses of the Greek words and their special use in Christian literature. It would almost seem, thinks Dr. Loening, that the Apostle Paul used these special words to show that the organization of the Christian societies founded by him had no connection with Judaism on the one hand, nor with heathenism on the other. When we examine patristic and sub-apostolic literature there is a much closer connexion between the function of teaching and these office-bearers than Harnack allows; indeed, Dr. Loening is inclined to question Dr. Harnack’s opinion that the “bishops and deacons” of the Didache were the officials who had specially to do with the worship as distinct from the instruction. He finds that the Poimenes of the Epistle to the Ephesians, the Hegoumenoi of the Epistle to the Hebrews, and the Episcopi of the Didache, meant the same kind of officials, and that there was a close union between teaching and oversight in the last quarter of the first century. But what of the “presbyters”? Dr. Loening asserts strongly that the “presbyters” in the Gentile Christian communities had no connexion whatever with officials in Greek city life, social or political. The name comes from Judaism; but the Christian presbyters have nothing in common with the Jewish presbyters but the name. Although he does not accept the Acts of the Apostles as a testimony for the organization of the churches in the earliest days of Christianity, yet it is a trustworthy witness for the organization which prevailed in the beginning of the second century. That book, the First Epistle of St. Peter, and the Apocalypse, all show that there were “presbyters” in the Gentile Christian communities in Palestine, in Syria, and in Asia Minor, and that that office had been established in these parts for some time. Where did it come from? From Judaism, says Dr. Loening; and his proof is that it, he thinks, brought with it “ordination,” which was a distinctly Jewish institution. He finds this in the Pastoral Epistles, and further declares that in these epistles we see the Jewish term “presbyter” and the Gentile term “bishop” applied to one and the same set of office-bearers. Thus Dr. Loening arrives at the conclusion of the identity of “presbyter” and “episcopus,” with which Dr. Lightfoot started. But he has a difficulty to encounter from his rejection of the authority of the Acts of the Apostles, and from his placing the Pastoral Epistles at such a late date. Dr. Harnack had said, standing on the same critical ground as Dr. Loening, that if the Gentile Christian organization had taken elders from the Jewish, these officials would surely have appeared earlier than the last years of the first century, which is the earliest date which the critical theories about certain New Testament writings permit. Dr. Loening gets round this objection by supposing, on the authority, or at least on what he calls the authority, of Hegesippus, that there was no organization at all in Jewish Christian communities until after the death of James, and that the Jewish Christian Church was first thoroughly detached from Judaism and furnished with an organization of its own when Symeon became its head. His refusal to accept the trustworthiness of the Acts of the Apostles, and his full credence of all the gossip of Hegesippus, justifies Loofs’ sarcasm that Loening is an ideal “modern critic,” because the only sources of information that are not to be accepted uncritically are the canonical Scriptures. Coming to the question of how the single president of a Church emerged from the college of “presbyter-bishops,” Dr. Loening has a theory which is all his own. The thick veil which covers the change from the two-fold to the three-fold order of the ministry can be lifted, he thinks, by the aid of the Epistles of Ignatius. With these to guide us we can gather that while in Rome and Macedonia there was still a collegiate constitution, there was in Antioch and Asia Minor a three-fold ministry; but the “bishop” was not considered a successor of the apostles but a representative of Jesus Christ and of God. The change did not come from the colleges of “presbyter-bishops” taking to themselves a permanent president, for there is no evidence of any such movement, nor did it follow any analogy of heathen gilds or civic constitutions, for no such analogies present themselves. It came from an imitation of the position of Symeon at the head of the Jewish-Christian community at Pella. Symeon, of the natural family line of our Lord, was the representative of Jesus; and Ignatius got the “ecclesiastical precedent” required there, and that is why he considers the “bishop” or permanent president of the college of “ presbyter-bishops” the successor of the Lord. Ignatius seized on this idea, and his enthusiastic support of it made the conception widely known. Besides, it was useful in the circumstances of the second century, and so the practice spread throughout the Church. Only the main thought of Ignatius—that the permanent president represented Christ—was departed from, and the “bishop” was looked upon as the successor of the apostles. Then came Cyprian with his sacerdotal ideas, and the simple president changed into the hierarchical bishop through the idea of an ordination which gave a “charismatic” character to an office held for life.

The theory of Professor Loofs of Halle is given in an elaborate article published in the Studien und Kritiken for 1890 (pp. 619-658). Professor Loofs is the most distinguished of the younger Church historians of Germany, and is an eminently sane and scientific worker and thinker.

Professor Loofs agrees with all our authorities that there was in apostolic and in sub-apostolic times a “charismatic ministry” of “apostles, prophets and teachers,” and that they were in no sense the office-bearers in local Churches; but he thinks that some authorities have drawn too hard and fast a line between the two classes of ministry. As to the office-bearers in local Churches, the controversy concerns these points : Whence comes the name “episcopus,” and what were the original functions of the men so called? What was the origin of the “presbyteri,” and what was their relation to the “episcopi”? At what time did the guidance of the community fall into the hands of one episcopus, and how did it come about? These questions exhaust the points in dispute.

He has not much belief in the relation of the name “episcopus” to the officials of heathen confraternities or to civil officials; the references given by Dr. Hatch and Dr. Harnack do not prove their contention. He does not think that the word is a direct term of distinct office in the New Testament writings any more than poimen (pastor) or hegoumenos; in the address to the Epistle to the Philippians episcopi are merely those members of the brethren who take an active oversight, and diakoni are those who render active assistance. When we get beyond the New Testament writings and come to the Didache, the episcopi are undoubtedly the officials of the congregation who preside over the public worship, but the question is whether they did this and nothing else, and whether this was their original work. He thinks that they were more than merely the presiding officers at public worship and what that included, for they are continually called poimenes, and “to shepherd” surely means more than to preside at worship and distribute the offerings. And he is of opinion that originally they were simply prohistamenoi, and gradually became the presidents of the public worship. It is difficult to say whether they taught, but 1 Thess. v. 12 seems to imply that teaching was from the first associated with leading the congregation.

Then as to the “presbyters”—excluding for the sake of argument the Acts of the Apostles, the Apocalypse and the Epistle of James—the first fairly debatable places where they are mentioned are in the First Epistle of St. Peter and the First Epistle of Clement. The presbyters or elders mentioned in these epistles are undoubtedly office-bearers; and it is impossible to prove that the “presbyters” in the Gentile Christian Churches were not the same as in, and taken from, the Jewish Christian Churches, unless it can be shown that the office they held in the one was different from what they held in the other, or that there was a period when there were no “presbyters” in the Gentile Churches, and to prove this more is needed than the argument of silence from St. Paul’s epistles. If “presbyters” were in Gentile Christian Churches then they were exactly the same as “episcopi”; and “presbyter” is the name of the office, while “episcopus” tells us that this official exercised the function of “oversight.” This can be proved without reference to the presence of the word “presbyter” in writings disputed on critical grounds. The testimony of Jerome is not to be set aside lightly; it is unquestionable that Clement calls “episcopi” “presbyters”; even if the word “episkopountes “ be rejected in 1 Peter v. 2, “presbyters” are called “pastors” in that epistle, and “pastor” is a common equivalent for “episcopus”; the “presbyters” of Ephesus are called “episcopi” (Acts xx. 17, 28), and this evidence is quite independent of the date or historicity of the book; and there is finally the witness of Tertullian (Apol. 39) and of Irenaeus. All this is much stronger evidence for the identity of the words than anything that Hatch or Harnack has brought forward against the conception. But this does not settle the question whether the “presbyter” and the “episcopus” were identical from the first, or when the term “presbyter” came into the Christian organization. All the probabilities are that it came from the Jewish Church; Christianity came out of Judaism, and that gives an antecedent probability. This does not mean that they got the word from Palestine; Jewish synagogues abounded all throughout the Roman Empire, and converts must have come from them into the Christian Churches. But there is no need to suppose that all Christian congregations got hold of the word in the same way; some may have got it from others, and some may have taken the idea and the function from the civil and social organizations around them; we need not suppose any monotonous uniformity of derivation. At all events, the word and the function were within the Christian congregations, and if St. Paul says nothing about “presbyters,” he recognizes “prohistamenoi,” who were much the same. But of course it is quite unnecessary to suppose that the organization of Christian congregations took from the very first the form it afterwards assumed in apostolic and post-apostolic times. There is a growth which takes time. It is much more credible to believe that the terms “presbyteri,” “prohistamenoi” and “episcopi” all mean the same thing than to accept any of the more recent reconstructions. Thus it will be seen that Professor Loofs reaches exactly the same position as Dr. Lightfoot. In all that has been said, it is presupposed that there was at the head of each local Church a number of “presbyter-bishops,” and the next question is, How did the three-fold ministry arise? Dr. Loofs answers that we really do not know. We are in absolute ignorance about two things which might give us light on the question if we could learn something about them—the relation of the “House Churches” to the body of Christians in the town to which they belonged, and what provision was made for the instruction of candidates for baptism, and by whom this instruction was given. But while we can give no certain answer to the question, something can be said both negatively and positively. We can say negatively that the change from the one to the other did not come by any sudden alteration which gave rise to contentions; there is no word of such contention in the whole round of primitive Christian literature; the change came naturally, so naturally as to make it seem that there was no change. We can say positively that there is great likelihood that the channel of the change was the relation of the officials to the conduct of public worship, and more especially in their relation to the Eucharist. What happened there while a college of “presbyter-bishops” was at the head of the congregation we do not know; but it is manifest that there could not be a collegiate superintendence of the Lord’s Supper. Did the “presbyter-bishops” take it in turn to officiate, or was one of their number appointed to undertake this service usually? We do not know. But it did become the duty of one man to superintend the ad-ministration of the Eucharist; we see this in Justin Martyr; and the man whom Justin calls the προεστὼς is plainly the forerunner of the single episcopus. This, however, is not all that is needed to account for the change which did come about; and probably something has yet to be done in the line of following up Harnack’s idea that the single president was supposed to inherit the spiritual gifts of the charismatic ministry. Once, however, the single bishop became the rule, the growth and the importance of the higher order can easily be traced.

The theory of Professor Schmiedel on the origin and growth of the ministry in the primitive Christian congregations is to be found in the article on Ministry in the Encyclopaedia Biblica. It is easily accessible. I have recently described and criticised it in an article contributed to the first number of the Hibbert Journal. It may be sufficient to say that the whole of the recent discussions in Germany on the origin of the Christian Ministry are condensed in the article.

The article Church, contributed by the Rev. S. C. Gayford to Hastings’ Bible Dictionary, is one of exceptional interest. It is a very exhaustive account of the Churches of the New Testament, based on a searching analysis of the documents of the New Testament. Unfortunately the author confines himself almost exclusively to the canonical writings. The article is marked by two things which are treated in a fresh clear way—a description of the gradual growth of organization to be seen within the Churches during apostolic times, and a clear account of the prophetic ministry. The article is in every way worthy of attention and of study.