Synopses & Reviews
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 2. THE HIERARCHICAL ANTITHESIS. If we could consider the bishops to be the successors of the apostles, in the sense in which Church tradition affirms their succession, the question concerning the origin of the episcopate would admit of a very simple solution. But the bishops were certainly not the immediate successors of the apostles, and before there were eirlaicoiroi in the technical sense, there were the jrpecrpvrepoi and BiaKovoi. The statements contained in the Acts of the Apostles seem to pre-suppose, as a matter of course, that in addition to the apostles there were also presbyters at the head of the first Christian churches, after the analogy of the Jewish synagogue. In the case of the Church of Jerusalem, we are only told that when a special administration of alms became necessary, there were appointed Bio.kovoi, chosen, in accordance with a proposal made by the apostles, to discharge that function (vi. 1). This church therefore already possessed presbyters; and in the case of the churches abroad, we read of the appointment of presbyters as the first measure taken by the apostles in arranging for their being carried on (xiv. 23). It is very natural to assume that when the apostles founded a Christian Church, they also settled the first arrangements required for its organisation. Still ? even if we are in no danger of thinking that the whole constitution of the Church must have been of apostolic institution?we cannot too carefully guard against admitting more pre-suppositions than the nature of the question allows. When we consider how weak the first beginnings of the earliest churches were, and of how few members they consisted, we see that, even had the founders conceived a complete plan of organisation, their choice must have been extremely limited in making their ar...
Synopsis
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