Die Amtsterminologie im Neuen Testament und in der Alten Kirche (review)

J. Ysebaert provides lexicographical notes on all the passages using terms for church office in the first two centuries (and in some cases through the fourth century). His conclusions are often conventional but with some new arguments for them. At the same time he presents some new interpretations of the organizational development of the early church, finding much more uniformity in this development than other recent students have.

Ysebaert concludes that “apostles” normally meant, even in the New Testament, the Twelve and Paul, and denies the meaning “missionary,” contra much modern study (pp. 27, 222, and passim). “Elders” and “bishops” were synonyms in the New Testament, he contends, and the position that they were not so originally lacks any foundation (p. 123 and frequently). The synonymity was partial, for presbyter sometimes included bishops and deacons (an interpretation that I find doubtful).

The apostles and other founders of churches, he argues, appointed in their lifetime monarchical bishops, a claim he finds best attested at Rome (p. 123). The colleges of presbyters each had a president from the beginning (e.g., pp. 101, cf. 222). Each local community had a single leader without a name (dubious, it seems to me); Ignatius shows the emergence of “bishop” as the title for that person. What is new in Ignatius is not the emergence of a monarchical bishop but reserving the title of bishop exclusively for the community leader. The treatment of 1 Clement (pp. 90–92) is problematic for Clement’s usage, since he takes presbyteroi as a comprehensive term for bishops and deacons yet as equivalent to the prohegoumenoi, while he interprets the analogy to the high priest, priests, and Levites of the Old Testament as meaning there was a monarchical leader in addition to the presbyter-bishops and deacons in the congregation, ignoring Clement’s use elsewhere of the title high priest for Christ.

More attention proportionately is give to deacons and deaconesses, because less is known about the former and the presence of the latter is not sufficiently recognized. “Deacon” is a title in Philippians 1.1 (p. 126) and is an official title for Phoebe in Romans 16.1 (pp. 126–128). Deaconesses existed from the New Testament forward. J. N. Collins’s important book on Diakonia is cited in a footnote on p. 220 but does not enter the discussion in the chapter on deacons. The examination of the deaconesses among the Paulianists in canon 19 at Nicaea (pp. 139–141) would have profited from my paper on “Attitudes to Schism at the Council of Nicaea,” Schism, Heresy and Religious Protest, ed. Derek Baker (Cambridge: University Press, 1972), pp. 57–63. Ysebaert adopts a cultural explanation for the ancient church’s limitation of women to no office above that of deacon (p. 150).

The discussion of the selection and installation of church officers (pp. 151–192) offers for this reviewer the most problematic part of the book. Ysebaert does not know all my work on the laying on of hands, and the philological focus of the book means he does not deal with all the arguments advanced in the articles that he does use. He rejects my derivation of the laying on of hands from its Jewish usage for an act of blessing. Jesus’ disciples presumably knew the Hebrew linguistic distinction between laying on hands and leaning upon something, but it does not follow from this that the use of the latter terminology in the appointment of Joshua by Moses means that the same significance attached to Christian ordination. In fact, the sequence of development of the concept of ordination follows a different path, as I traced in my dissertation. Christians and Jews in their understandings of ordination, as on so much else, developed different aspects of their common heritage. Concerning the laying on of hands and ordination practices, Ysebasert takes the later views as a guide to earlier meanings (e.g., p. 157); he should have been as critical here as he...