Thursday, March 16, 2023

Robert Lee Williams Apostolic Succession

  

Absence of “Succession” in the New Testament?

 

Luke knows succession terminology, but he never applies it to Christian leaders. He uses διαδοχος, “successor,” in an institutional sense in naming Festus “successor” of Felix as governor in Caesarea (Acts 24.27). In the only other use of such terminology, where the participle διαδεξαμενοι is employed in Stephen’s speech (Acts 7.45), Jewish forefathers receive the tent of testimony, with no relation to any office or institutional position.

 

Ehrhardt proposes that Luke saw no reason to use succession terms in his account of the Church. (Ehrhardt, Apostolic Succession, 33) This observation is pertinent with respect to the process of institutionalization. Luke’s record is concerned more with expansion of Christianity and beginnings of churches than with continuity with the churches. Even where he mentions leaders in Jerusalem (Acts 6.1-6; 11.1-18; 15.4-22; 21.17-18). Antioch (13.1-4), Iconium, Lystra, Derbe (14.23), and Ephesus (20.17-38), the leaders are only in the first generation of the church’s existence. He would no doubt be sensitive to issues of succession if he were speaking of church developments twenty-five years later. By such time there would have emerged patterns regarding the transfer of leadership not from an itinerant apostle or evangelist to a resident group of leaders (cf. Acts 14.23; 20.28) but from the first resident leaders to subsequent ones replacing them (cf. 1 Clem. 42).

 

Similarly the Pastorals refer to appointments of resident leaders by itinerant individuals (2 Tim 2.2; Titus 1.5) without interest in succession terminology. Again, the churches involves are in the first generation. Ehrhardt’s viewpoint on the Pastorals is thought-provoking. He is confident that “in the Pastoral Epistles the attempt was made to establish a succession after St. Paul through Timothy,” though he can not determine “what sort of succession was envisaged.” (Ibid., 34) Ehrhardt fails to distinguish continuity of function from succession, which is a continuity of office. The Pastorals provide officials to continue protecting their churches (Titus 1.5, 7, 9-14; cf. 2 Tim 2.2) but not to continue the office or position held by the apostle or his lieutenant. Titus and Timothy are not to appoint leaders to succeed Paul as an apostle or them as his assistants, “delegates,” as they are sometimes called. However, we have seen reason earlier in this chapter to conclude that the appointments noted in the Pastorals (1 Tim 3.1-5; 5.22; Titus 1.5-9; ? 2 Tim 2.2) refers to overseers, monepiskopoi, each of whom is to take responsibility for an entire city’s house congregations. This responsibility is evidently being transferred from the apostle’s assistant to one of the “elders” in each city, that is, an overseer of one of the house congregations in the city. The newly appointed monepiskopos, then, is from “apostolic” appointment—at least “apostolic” one step removed—but is not “succeeding to” the office of apostle since such involves, by definition, itinerancy. He is the overseer of the house churches in the city by apostolic appointment. He assumes the apostle’s role to that extent in the city but does not “succeed to apostleship.” The situation is equivalent to that sequence read in Irenaeus: Peter and Paul “founded” the church in Rome, then they “committed into the hands of Linus the office of the episcopate,” and only then was there “succession” within the episcopate, next, to Analectus and “in the third place from the apostles, Clement” (Haer. 3.3.3). (Robert Lee Williams, Bishop Lists: Formation of Apostolic Succession of Bishops in Ecclesiastical Crises [Gorgias Studies in Early Christianity and Patristics 16; Piscataway, N.J.: Gorgias Press, 2005], 58-59)