Thursday, March 16, 2023

Robert Lee Williams, "Bishop as High Priest"

  

Bishop as High Priest

 

Hippolytus speaks of the bishop in succession from the apostles as a high priest for the Church in continuity with Irenaeus and Clement of Rome. The comparison of bishop and high priest is suggested by the order of entries in the Chronicle. The original order in the group of lists, apparently determined by Mommsen from the table of contents in Liber generationis I, showed the list of high priests for the Jews to be followed by that of the Roman bishops. (Mommsen, Chronica Minora, 1:90) Similar to Irenaeus, Hippolytus sees the Church as a “spiritual nation” (Campenhausen, Ecclesiastic Authority, 175) in continuity with Israel. In the Apostolic Tradition, begun some years before the Chronicle, episcopal ordination represented a continuation of God’s plan for “the righteous race of Abraham” (Trad. ap. 3.2, 5). The bishop was the representative of the Church to God, “to propitiate your (God’s) countenance,” and the representative of God to the Church, “by the Spirit of high-priesthood to have authority to remit sins” (2.5-6). This perspective of the bishop as high priest is an extension of what we read a century earlier from Rome in 1 Clement. God gives his “royal Spirit” to Jesus and the apostles and subsequently to the person “whom you (God) have chosen to be bishop” (Trad. ap. 3.4-5). This is the same sequence we find in God’s appointment of bishops in 1 Clement, God to Jesus to apostles to bishops (1 Clem. 42). (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], 172-73)