about ordination then, like other instances of silence, proves too much, if it is to be taken as equivalent to ignorance. It can be accounted for easily enough on a moment's consideration of one quite crucial fact. The Didache is a manual of directions for the local church. It does not presume to dictate to the prophets : 1 while forms of prayer are provided for the local ministers, the prophets are not bound by them. It says, therefore, nothing about the functions which do not belong to the local church with the local officers. Now all the evidence of the apostolic documents leads us to believe that the function of the laying-on of hands did not belong to the local officers, but to apostles and apostolic legates and also, as appeared, to certain prophets and teachers, the associates of apostles. As, therefore, we find the prophets in the Didache performing that 'liturgy' which is assigned to them also in the Acts,2 what is more reasonable than to suppose that to them would have belonged as well that 'laying-on of hands' which in the same passage of the Acts is also assigned to them? We may well believe then that in the communities represented by the Didache, the bishops and deacons would have been elected by the whole body but ordained with laying-on of hands by some one of the prophetic 'high-priests' on their occasional visits. In what has been said above we have been treating these 'apostles' and 'prophets' with all respect, as if they were of the same order of men as Barnabas and Silas, Timothy and Titus, only a generation or two later in date. But in fact the atmosphere of the Didache suggests suspicion. It appears to be as likely as not that their conduct will prove them to be 'false prophets': the chapters which describe them are redolent of the idea of fraud. It is almost impossible to believe that their contemporaries Ignatius 1 x. 7, xi. 7, II. • Acts xiii. 2. and Clement would have recognised them as quasiapostolic men. We are disposed, therefore, to think that in these ambiguous persons we have to do with the circulating missionaries of some out of the way group of Judaic churches, which were not merely uninstructed in their doctrine but had also fallen out of the fellowship of the apostolic churches; and that they were as questionable in authority as they often were in character. Nevertheless, the type of organization represented in the Didache remains highly interesting, because, even if the particular specimen must be regarded as debased, it illustrates as no other document does a condition of things which may have been not uncommon in the subapostolic period. evangelists. The picture which is here given us of churches in cf. the ministry of the subapostolic age still governed by a local body Eusebius of bishops,1 while the higher authority in the word and sacraments remained with men who exercised an 'ambulatory' ministry, may be compared with the picture that Eusebius draws of the activity of evangelists in immediate succession to the Apostles. He describes how they went among the heathen, laying the foundations of the faith in unfamiliar places, and appointing others as pastors to whom they entrusted 'the husbandry' of those just brought within the pale, while they themselves went forth into new fields; how they had still many extraordinary powers working in them; and how it would be 'impossible for him to enumerate by name all those who in the first succession to the Apostles became pastors or evangelists in the churches over the whole world.'2 We have only to suppose that these missionaries with their miraculous gifts not only founded churches but also for a time, like the 1 Who are of course equivalent to presbyters though they are not called by the latter name. See App. Note K, p. 362. * Euseb. iii. 37. 1-4. These evangelists are described as TÙY #PŃTηY TÁ‡LV TĤS TÔV ἀποστόλων ἐπέχοντες διαδοχής. Prophets cease, as Apostles to whom they succeeded, supervised them on occasional visits, and we have a picture, with merely the substitution of the title evangelist, very like that which the Didache presents. And it must not be forgotten that the earliest recorded traditions of the Syriac Church pointed back not, like those of Asia and of the West, to twelve Apostles, but to seventy-two, as having founded the successions of the priesthood in their communities.1 It only remains to add that the Didache is the only document outside the New Testament which presents us with prophets exercising any ministerial function such, to hold as such. It is true that later we have bishops like the ministry. Ignatius and Polycarp who in fact are prophets— but they exercise their functions not as prophets but as bishops. The power of prophecy had not died out when Hermas saw his visions, or when Irenaeus wrote against heresies, or when Ammia and Quadratus prophesied; 2 but the prophets held no official rank. So far as they had in early times been among the chief ministers and teachers of the Church, their 'highpriestly' functions and their teaching 'chair' passed to the bishops.3 1 See above pp. 112 n., 198 n.. Iren. II. xxxii. 4, v. vi. 1, Euseb. v. 17. 3. See App. Note H, p. 349. The high-priesthood ascribed by Hippolytus to the bishops seems, in the important passage from the preface to the Ref. Omn. Haer. quoted at the end of App. Note G, p. 348 below (but see his ordination prayer on p. 133) to be specially connected with teaching authority: he speaks of a 'grace of high-priesthood and teaching' which the bishops hold in succession to the Apostles. So Polycrates describes St. John as a 'priest, wearing the mitre, and witness and teacher' (ap. Euseb. H. E. iii. 31. 3). So again the kabédpa of the bishops was first of all the chair of the teacher. Thus in Irenaeus the office of the bishop is conceived of primarily as carrying with it the 'charisma veritatis certum' (IV. xxvi. 2), and this coincides with Hegesippus' view of the episcopal succession. And in the Clementines (Ep. Clem. ad Iac. 2) St. Peter says: Κλήμεντα τοῦτον ἐπίσκοπον ὑμῖν χειροτονῶ, ᾧ τὴν ἐμὴν τῶν λόγων πιστεύω kavédpav. It is also noticeable that the right of extempore eucharist seems to have passed to the bishop, as in Justin Martyr Apol. i. 67; cf. Did. x. 7. The attempt of Harnack, Die Quellen der sogenannten apostolischen Kirchenordnung (Texte und Untersuchungen Band ii. Heft 5, 1886) p. 57, to see in the office of reader a continuation in some sense of the prophetic office rests on no adequate grounds. No doubt at a time in which illiterate bishops were contemplated (as in the Apostolic Church Order 16; Apostolic Constitutions, repeated from the Didascalia, ii. 1. 2), the readers held an office of considerable importance, so that it is hardly surprising that in If we ask the question, how these 'apostles' and 'prophets' of the Didache were appointed to their office, we cannot obtain an answer. We do not know exactly what were the ideas of the community in which they circulated. Even in the case of their prototypes in the New Testament we were not able clearly to ascertain whether the possession of acknowledged supernatural gifts was ever allowed to be a substitute for 'official' ordination. We were led to believe rather that the laying-on of apostolic hands would have given formal recognition to the call and authority which the divine charisma had already made evident. But the gift of prophecy may be easily simulated. And the prophets of the Didache at least afford us evidence that the continuity of the Church tradition could not have been allowed to rest upon prophets, nor an ambulatory prophetic ministry to become permanent in the Church, without widespread disorder.1 As it is, we have evidence that the transition to the localized episcopate was in great part effected by the last survivors of the Twelve Apostles. Apost. Ch. Order 19 the reader ranks above the deacons and is said to 'exercise the position of an evangelist.' But when the prayer for the ordination of a reader in Apost. Const. viii. 22. 3 invokes upon him the 'prophetic spirit,' or when (ib. ii. 28. 5) it is laid down that the reader is to receive 'one portion in honour of the prophets,' there cannot be any real doubt that it is the Old Testament prophets who are in the writer's mind: it is to be noted that in each of the two passages the prophetic reference is an insertion of the author of the Constitutions, and is absent from the earlier document (in one case the Didascalia, in the other the Church Order of Hippolytus) which served him for the basis of his own work. So again when the western writers on church offices, from Isidore down into the later middle ages, regard the reader's office as a continuation of that of the prophet, the context makes it abundantly clear that they are thinking of the Old Testament: Isidore de Eccl. Off. ii. 11 (Hittorp p. 23 [ed. 1591 p. 20]) 'lectorum ordo formam et initium a prophetis accepit,' repeated by Rabanus Maurus de Inst. Cler. i. 11 (op. cit. p. 317 [269]) and by (pseudo-) Albinus Flaccus de Div. Off. (op. cit. p. 70 [60]). 1 The same suggestion of spiritual expediency would have promoted the transition from the state of things which we find in the Didache to that which we find in Ignatius Letters, which in a later age led to the drawing tight of diocesan restrictions: see above p. 149 n.3 on the wandering bishops from Ireland and elsewhere. This wandering ministry gave every opportunity for imposture, and we ought not perhaps to be surprised to find a similar danger and similar abuses in the subapostolic age. As to the bearing of such dangerous periods on the security of the apostolic succession, enough perhaps was said in the second chapter, pp. 93, 94. III. St. John institutes episcopate, III About the time when the prophets and teachers of the diocesan whom the Didache speaks were going on their journeys among the churches which acknowledged them, St. John was living at Ephesus; and Polycrates, who was bishop there within the second century, speaks of him 'who lay upon the Lord's breast' as having become a priest, wearing the mitre, and witness and teacher' before he fell asleep in Ephesus.1 What then was the nature of St. John's activity during this last period of his life? A tradition which cannot be set aside connects with his name not only the writing of the fourth Gospel but also the establishment of episcopacy in its later sense. 'Listen,' says Clement of Alexandria, 'to a legend, which is no legend but very history, which has been handed down and preserved about John the Apostle. When on the death of the tyrant he returned from the isle of Patmos to Ephesus, he used to go away when he was summoned to the neighbouring districts as well, in some places to establish bishops, in others to organize whole churches, in others to ordain to the clergy some one of those indicated by the Spirit.' 2 The reference here is to bishops in the later sense: and Clement means that St. John ordained one bishop in each place, for the history which he goes on to narrate turns on the conduct of one of those appointed bishops who 'presided over' a certain city, which St. John visited once and again on 1 ap. Euseb. Η. Ε. iii. 31. 3: ἐγενήθη ἱερεὺς τὸ πέταλον πεφορειὼς καὶ μάρτυς καὶ διδάσκαλος. * Quis Dives 42. These last words vividly recall the apostolic age, cf. 1 Tim. i. 18, Acts xiii. 2. They seem to convince us that St. Clement reproduces the usage [of the apostolic age] faithfully' (Simcox Early Ch. Hist. p. 183). See Lightfoot Ignatius i. 380 on Clement's special means of knowledge through his 'Ionian' teacher. |