The Original Bishops: Office and Order in the First Christian Communities by Alistair C. Stewart (review)

Alistair Stewart (formerly Stewart-Sykes) is a well-known scholar on church-order literature of early Christianity. In this volume he goes back to the very origins of patterns of order within Christianity as found in the first generations of Christianity reflected in the New Testament and the immediate post–New Testament environment. The aim is to trace the emergence of the monoepiscopate, that is, the situation of having one office holder responsible for more than one congregation and having subordinate office holders under him (and not just a term for a leader over a single congregation). Quite possibly for the first time in my academic experience, I have read a ground-breaking work of seismic or Copernican significance before a consensus about its paradigm-altering importance has emerged. It is exciting to be at the birth of what promises to be a revolution in the way we think about episkopos and presbyteros at the dawn of Christianity.

This is not to say that Stewart’s work is unheralded. Indeed, he is at pains to trace the prior scholarship, whether it is contrary to him or points in his direction, but he has taken it much farther than anyone previously and brought it together in an intellectual tour-de-force. The work is therefore incredibly dense with detail, and yet one of the most appealing features of the volume is the clarity of expression and the ways in which the reader is guided through the labyrinth of facts and arguments. I was constantly delighted at just how easy it was to follow the complexity of information laid out before me.

At its heart, Stewart’s argument goes against the prevailing consensus that the terms episkopos and presbyteros as found in the New Testament and the immediately succeeding Christian literature are synonymous, that monoepiskopoi emerged from among the ranks of the prebyteroi, who were the collegial leaders of the earliest Christian communities, and that the presbyteroi had their origins in the Jewish synagogues. The definition of terms is key here, and the reader is guided through the twists and turns of how terms changed meaning over time and varied between different communities. Stewart’s argument is that from Christian origins, each domestic congregation was presided over by an episkopos, who primarily had economic responsibilities of patronage or brokerage and hospitality for providing the resources needed by that community in its liturgical life (and the diakonoi who assisted him had that same economic role). When the episkopoi of a city gathered to coordinate their efforts, they were known as a college of presbyteroi kata polin (for each town). Eventually, from this college of presbyteroi, each of whom was an episkopos in his own congregation, the monoepiskopos emerged towards the end of the second century. What complicates this picture is the fact that some individual congregations in Asia had presbyteroi (distinguished from the presbyteroi kata polin), who were senior individuals who offered patronage (as found in 1 Timothy, since the patronage role of episkopoi was changing by this time into a teaching one). Such presbyteroi might have been heads of households, which had combined into one congregation under a single episkopos, and who still exercised their patronage role. Stewart argues that this type of presbyteros was the Neanderthal of church order and did not long survive with the other ministries of episkopoi, presbyteroi kata polin, and diakonoi.

The evidence surveyed is widespread, from the New Testament literature in the first chapter—which seeks to undermine the prevailing consensus that episkopoi and presbyteroi were synonymous terms—to the situation in Rome at the time of Hippolytus, and to Antioch and the churches of Asia at the time of Ignatius. The work ends with a consideration of why the monoepiskopos emerged. Here is my nagging question about who had liturgical presidency of the congregation if the episkopos was a financial officer/patron.

This is a masterpiece and must...