Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 5.djvu/714

Rh 700 CHRISTIANITY Epistles to Timothy we even find traces of a plan for giving a special education and training to young men who were set apart to prepare themselves for the office of elders who were to teach. In the post-apostolic Church we find another office quite distinct from the eldership, the office of deacon. The deacons in the post-apostolic church were officers who waited upon the bishop, and many have thought that the election of the seven men was really the election not of elders but of deacons; but there seems no reason to suppose this. The real warrant for the existence of the diaconate consists in the fact that the office and duties of the deacon correspond very nearly to those of the &quot;ministers&quot; of the synagogue, and also in the many scattered references in the New Testament to the existence of &quot; young men &quot; (one of the technical terms for the synagogue deacons), who waited upon the apostles. To sum up then, the office-bearers in the early Christian community were men selected by the voice of the congregation, and confirmed by the apostles, to administer the charities of the community; and to this primitive function there was added soon after the duty of oversight, leadership, or rule, and somewhat later the duty of providing for the proper teaching of the people. The The relation of the apostles to these office-bearers and apostles, to the Christian community is a problem not without diffi culties. Apostle primarily denotes one who is sent on a special mission, and in the Septuagint is used to translate the Hebrew Shaluach, meaning one who has a special com mandment from God. The word was in common use among the Jews to denote a special messenger and more especially messengers sent on foreign missions. Thus the Jews who were sent from Palestine to stir up the foreign synagogues against the Christians are called apostles. All these ideas help to show us what the Christian apostles were. It should be remembered, however, that the term apostle is used in its Christian sense in two ways at least, in a wider and in .a narrower sense. In the narrower and more strictly techni cal sense the apostles were the eleven whom Christ chose to be special witnesses for Him because they had been with Him from the beginning, together with Matthias, selected by the apostles to fill the place of Judas before the descent of the Holy Spirit, or as some with more probability think, Paul, who was selected for this place by Christ Himself. On the other hand, many others are called apostles who did not belong to this company, Barnabas, for example (Acts xiv. 14), Andronicus and Junias (Rom. xvi. 7), and others (2 Cor. viii. 23; Phil. ii. 25). This vagueness in the New Testament use of the term makes it somewhat difficult to speak with anything like precision of the relation in which the apostles stood to the office-bearers and members of the early Christian community. But one or two statements enable us to see what were the functions of the apostles strictly so called. It is said, for example, that Christians are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief corner-stone (Eph. ii. 20), and the capacity of the apostles to act in this way as & foundation is explained by passages which seem to say that the qualifications for apostleship were to have been with the Lord from the beginning, to have seen and recognized Christ after the resurrection, to have been witnesses of the ascension, and to have been gifted with peculiar spiritual gifts. And we may say generally, that just as the prophets of the Old Testament were the links between their own generation by their speech, and between future generations by their writings, and the Saviour that was to come, so the apostles were the links between the first generation of Christians by their presence and influence, and between all succeeding generations of Christians by their writings, and the Saviour who had come. They were to serve as the connection between the first generation of Christians and Jesus, and were to have no successors but the writings of the New Testament canon, which has taken their place and done their work for all succeeding generations. The relation of the apostles, therefore, to the primitive church was altogether unique, as indeed is implied in their name ; and when they act or give official advice apart from their apostolic office, which they did in certain cases, they do so as elders chosen to act along with the other elders who did not possess apostolic gifts. If these views are correct the autonomy of the early Christian communities was complete during the lifetime of the apostles, and was quite independent of the apostolic office and authority. This thought has an important bearing on the history The growth of the growth of the Christian government. In the 5th of the epis- and 6th centuries we find that the government was episcopal, c P ate - and that the principles on which it rested were very different from those which lay at the basis of the government of the Christian community during the apostolic times. The identity of the terms bishop and presbyter within the apostolic church is now so universally admitted by scholars that the sole question really is, When did bishops begin to exist as separate and superior officers 1 and the dispute becomes one of historical facts rather than dogmatic theories. According to one account the episcopate became the form of the government about the year 70 A.D., to meet and supply in a legitimate way a want which, if not supplied, might have caused the ruin of Christianity; and according to another and more probable theory, the episcopate in the strict sense of the word was not established until the 3d or 4th century. It arose during a panic, and was really a false development of the primitive government, and sanctioned neither by scripture nor by the necessities of the times. Of course the discussion is very much mixed up with the question whether the apostolic office was or was not a permanent one in the Christian church. According to the one theory, the year 70 A.D. may be taken as the turning point. In that year Jerusalem was destroyed and the Jewish church of Jerusalem rudely shaken, and by this time John only of the apostles re mained alive, and he had already left Jerusalem. It was at this time, according to several scholars, that the episcopate arose to take the place of the apostolate and preserve the church from breaking up into several small sects when no longer governed by the apostles and not yet in full posses sion of the New Testament canon. Apart from the his torical evidence to be urged in support of this theory, its chief strength lies in the mere assumption that the presby- terian rule of the apostolic church was unfit to carry on the government when unsupported by the authority of the apostles, and had to be supplemented by an episcopate. When examined, the historical proofs for this state of affairs are not very satisfactory. We certainly soon find men who are called bishops distinct from the other elders, and are superior to them ; but the name and the duties which belong to them appear to be not so much those which pertain to a bishop in the episcopal sense of the term, but rather those which are performed by a minister or preaching elder in the modern Presbyterian organiza tion. In the early church the first convert, the best speaker, he whom the apostle had made his friend during his brief stay, would naturally be elected to preside at the meetings of the college of the elders who ruled the affairs of the community, and to represent it at conferences with other communities, and would naturally be invested with the name which denoted special oversight. And the extension of the church would naturally involve a further development of this process. When one church be came too small, another was built, and a presbyter sent from the first congregation to work there under the super intendence of his bishop, and so on until the minister or