Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (23 page)

Antioch and Jerusalem seem to have found their models for ministry in the organization of the Jewish Temple and its hierarchy, as one might expect from Christian centres so much resonating with the Palestinian past. The Church elsewhere had spread in more Hellenized settings mainly through the work of Paul and his sympathizers, and all sorts of patterns of ministry emerge from casual references in various epistles and in Acts. Talk of
charismata
, gifts of the Spirit, is frequent, and these gifts were not confined to the Apostles, posing problems in regulating them (see pp. 101-2). Paul and his admirers list gifts of the Spirit more than once, and comparing such lists as those in I Corinthians 12 and Ephesians 4, it is clear that they vary. They should not be considered as rigid technical terms, merely as ways of organizing a mission which constantly demanded improvisation without much possibility of guidance from the past.

Gradually, however, the similar situations which the work of mission produced tended towards standardization of language. The words
presbyteros
(elder) and
episkopos
(overseer) are found scattered throughout the epistles and Acts, but it is quite clear that at this early stage they often described the same people interchangeably: so, for instance, in Acts 20 Paul is said to have addressed himself to the
presbyteroi
of Ephesus, but to have told them that the Holy Spirit had made them pastors or bishops (
episkopoi
) over their Church. There is a useful comparison to be made with another effort at improvising oversight in mission conditions: John Wesley's structuring of Methodism in eighteenth-century Great Britain and North America, where a mobile 'itinerant' ministry grew up alongside a settled and locally based one, called local preachers. A similar stage can be detected in the late-first-century Church: a mobile ministry included those known as apostles and prophets, the local ministry in particular places consisted of a grade known interchangeably as bishops or presbyters, together with a separate grade of deacons, who assisted in performing the Eucharist, the central Christian ritual act, and also in the day-to-day running of church affairs.

It was perhaps not surprising that a mobile and a local ministry should sometimes come into conflict: they represented two different ways of presenting authority handed down from the Apostles, and each form of minister might have their own charisma. This tension is represented in the
Didache
(see p. 120), which lays down instructions for detecting false prophets who might turn up in a community, and also reminds its readers that the local ministry should be given just as much honour as the mobile ministry: 'despise them not: for these are they which are honoured of you with the prophets and teachers'.
⁵²
It does not take much imagination to see why a community should have felt it necessary to commit such thoughts to writing. How would this tension be resolved? Ultimately the mobile ministry disappeared from the mainstream Church, leaving the local ministry as the only accepted form.

This was probably inevitable as the Church began to settle down around local centres which had their own traditions and way of life, and as wandering teachers with dangerous charisma brought with them the sort of variety of belief and teaching which one finds in the gnostic literature. Despite the comparative brevity of its history, the 'Catholic' Church took its cue from Paul in talking a great deal about 'tradition', continuity. This theme was prominent in an influential document of about 100 CE, a letter sent to the Church at Corinth. Arguments at Corinth had led to the congregation dismissing their leaders and appointing others. Clement, a leader of the Church in Rome, wrote to protest in the most solemn terms, not because the congregation was deviating in any way in belief, but simply because it was endangering a God-given line of authority from the Apostles, who first preached the Gospel which they received directly from Jesus, himself 'sent from God'. Break this link, said Clement, and the appointed worship of God is endangered; by implication, succession is the only way of making sure that doctrine remains the same in Corinth and in Rome and throughout the whole Church. In a creative misquotation, Clement called in aid the prophet Isaiah and made him the mouthpiece for God's pronouncement 'I will establish their bishops in righteousness and their deacons in faith.'
⁵³
This is the first surviving formulation of an idea of apostolic succession in Christian ministry. The Corinthians listened and restored their old leaders, so it was also the first known occasion that a Roman cleric had successfully influenced the life of another Church: a moment with much significance for the future of Christianity generally.

Clement actually took as given the twofold order of bishop/presbyter, which can also be seen in the
Didache
, even though most sources are agreed in regarding him as Bishop in Rome. Another tract from Rome, not much later than the time of Clement, the book by Hermas known as the
Shepherd
, also talks of a collegiate ministry of presbyter-bishops, even though the final version of the
Shepherd
was written when Hermas's brother Pius was Bishop of Rome. This suggests that a twofold and threefold view of ministry could coexist; yet the elevation of one leading bishop figure above other presbyters was virtually complete by the end of the second century. One powerful force in this development was the prestige enjoyed in all parts of the Church by the seven letters written to various Churches and to Bishop Polycarp of Smyrna by Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch. They relate to his journey from Antioch to Rome following his arrest just after 100 CE and were written in the certain expectation (indeed joyful hope) that he would die as a martyr.
⁵⁴

In these letters Ignatius spoke much of his concern at what are recognizable as forms of gnostic belief, including docetic views of Christ's Passion. To combat this, he emphasized the reality of both Christ's divinity and his humanity, which he saw best expressed in the Church's continuing celebration of the Eucharist. But how could this doctrine be guaranteed? Ignatius pointed to what he saw as a standard of doctrine set by the beliefs affirmed by the Church in Rome, which he knew would be the city of his martyrdom; it is worth noting that he made no mention of the Bishop of Rome, simply of the Church. He linked with this the role in each community of the bishop, who should be the one person in every place responsible for handing on the faith and guarding against deviation. The bishop, after all, presided at the Eucharist and should be the automatic source of authority: 'You must all follow the bishop as Jesus Christ [followed] the Father . . . Let no one do anything apart from the bishop that has to do with the Church. Let that be regarded as a valid Eucharist which is held under the bishop or to whomever he entrusts it. Wherever the bishop appears, there let the congregation be; just as wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the whole [
katholike
] Church.'
⁵⁵

The cynical might say that it was easy for Ignatius to take this line, since there was already one bishop in Antioch and his name was Ignatius. Noticeably, a letter written by his correspondent and fellow martyr Bishop Polycarp of Smyrna does not claim that Polycarp had a similar status as monarchical bishop in his city Church: it describes a collegiate grouping of presbyters there with a grade of deacons and an order of widows.
⁵⁶
But in this contest of martyrs, it was Ignatius's passionate account of a monarchical episcopal ministry which set the pattern for the future. That may be because he was deliberately talking in priestly language familiar to converts to Christianity from outside Judaism, who were used to the round of civic religion in the temples of Mediterranean cities.
⁵⁷
His arguments in any case combined with a discussion of apostolic succession by yet another reputed martyr, Clement of Rome. The advantages of a monarchical leadership were clear: it was much more straightforward for one person to act as a focus for the Church in this way, to resist any widening of its beliefs, just as it made more sense for one person to preside over a community's Eucharist than it did for a committee to do so. If Churches started taking this line on the nature of ecclesiastical authority, it is easy to see why the alternative authority embodied in the mobile ministry should come to seem unnecessary and even a threat to the good order of the Church.

It must be significant that there is no surviving debate about the gradual domination of Church affairs in each community by one man in apostolic succession (monarchical episcopacy), with the notable exception, as we have seen, of gnostic texts. The early Christians were not afraid to commit their disagreements with each other to writing, and their disagreements have survived, but not in this case. Soon, big churches had many presbyters under the bishop's authority: deacons were the bishops' assistants, occasionally themselves rising to be bishops, but never being made presbyters. Much later, the distinctive role of the deacon diminished, and late in the Roman Empire there were already examples of the diaconate being used as the first step in a successful clerical career through the order of presbyters, up to the rank of bishop, just like the various career grades in the Roman civil service.

Amid these developments of a 'Catholic' episcopate in the second century, the episcopal leaders of certain cities stood out as especial figures of authority, what would later be called patriarchs: in the East the predictable centres of Antioch and Alexandria (equally predictably by this stage, not Jerusalem). In the West was Rome. Here in the imperial capital one of the two great martyrs of the first generation who had died there, Christ's Apostle Peter, was later credited not only with having died there but also with having been the city's first monarchical bishop.
⁵⁸
In early centuries Peter and Paul were given more or less equal veneration in Rome, and in early Christian art they were commonly paired together, but in Rome manifestly the balance has now drastically shifted towards Peter. The pope occupies the episcopal throne of Peter; he holds sway in the Catholic Church from a miniature state centring on a vast basilican church built above Peter's shrine. Although Paul is honourably enshrined in a major basilica (San Paolo fuori le Mura), it is sited in a formerly malaria-infested plain, a mile beyond the walls of Rome, and the average tourist could be forgiven for not noticing that the Apostle of the Gentiles had much to do with the city. That was the case long before the catastrophic fire which destroyed most of the historic interest of Paul's shrine-church in 1823 - and it is significant that much of the previous fascination of that church lay in the fact that, in contrast to the strenuous construction history of St Peter's Basilica, no one had bothered to rebuild or much alter St Paul's-outside-the-Walls since its first enlargement in the 380s. Its neglect in the late medieval period was not the least among the scandals of fifteenth-century Rome.
⁵⁹

Paul's epistles are the oldest surviving documents in the Christian tradition. They shaped the theology of the Christianity which survived as mainstream, and the theology of the Latin West especially reflects Paul's preoccupations, which had brought him into serious conflict with his fellow Apostle Peter (see pp. 105-6). Tensions between the two are also reflected in early apocryphal Christian books.
⁶⁰
By contrast with Paul's literary achievement, we have already noted Peter as being credited with two short epistles in the New Testament which are so different in character that at least one of them cannot be by him, and in any case no one has regarded either of them as especially significant in the life of the Church. Yet Peter has taken the limelight in Rome. The fading of Paul from popular devotional consciousness and from much share in the charisma of Rome is one of the great puzzles of Christian history, but it is obvious that part of the answer to the puzzle lies in a vast expansion of the power and prestige of the Bishops of Rome.

Some time in the 160s a shrine was built for Peter at the place of his burial, perhaps to commemorate a hundred years passing since his death. The remains of it, directly under the high altar of the present basilica, were recovered during the twentieth century in a sensational series of archaeological investigations.
⁶¹
The shrine was a modest structure, but its very existence in a public urban cemetery speaks of a community determined to stake its claim to an open existence in the capital. It is unclear whether Peter had actually played the role of bishop in the Church in Rome, even if he did indeed die in the city, and the names traditionally provided for his successor bishops up to the end of the first century are no more than names. They are probably the result of later second-century back-projection to create a history for the episcopal succession in the era when episcopal succession had become significant. Even in the second century, the evidence suggests that Bishops of Rome were part of a team of presbyters who might also be considered as having the authority of bishops, in a diverse and loosely organized city Church, and what particular prestige and authority were enjoyed by the Church in Rome was a matter of its collective identity.
⁶²

The second-century Roman Church's numbers were substantial, but still it formed a tiny proportion of the city's population, and at that time and for some decades to come it revealed its origins as a community of immigrants by the fact that its language was not Latin but Greek. There is one survival of Greek in the liturgy of the Western Church: a Greek prayer so venerable (though not to be found in the text of scripture) that even after the Church in Rome changed to Latin, Western congregations continued to chant it. The threefold
Kyrie Eleison, Christe Eleison, Kyrie Eleison
('Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy') is so intensely used in Orthodox liturgy that its repetition can almost sound like a mantra; in the Western Church its appearance is much more restricted, but it is one of the fixtures in the preparatory sections of the Eucharist, the inspiration for much sacred music over the centuries. It is a powerful reminder of the era when the 'Catholic' Church throughout the Mediterranean was united by a common language.