In my essay The Biblical Evidence for an Ordained, Ministerial Priesthood in the New Covenant from the Last Supper Accounts, I discuss the use of ποιεω (Heb: עשׂה) in the Last Supper accounts in the Synoptics and 1 Corinthians, and how this, and other priestly, sacrificial language in the accounts supports the existence of an ordained, New Covenant priesthood.
Jean Galot, a French Catholic priest and scholar, wrote the following about Jesus’ choosing of the Twelve and how Mark’s use of ποιεω, and its Old Testament background, offers further support for an ordained, New Covenant Priesthood:
Mark takes pains to emphasize that there is something of a creation in the initiative of Jesus. He says: “He made Twelve of them . . . He made the Twelve” (3:14, 16). The event that happens there is not, then, only the choice of twelve men one by one; it is the constitution of the group, a group that bespeaks a new creation. The verb “to make” suggests by association the verb that appears in the Genesis account of the first creation, and again in Isaiah (43:1; 44:2) with reference to the establishment of God’s people. This association is even more significant in view of the fact that the verb occurs twice in Mark and that the idiom is unusual (Lagrange also thinks that the text of Mk 3:14 “has probably been altered”, but h has no reasons to offer in support of this position, except the strangeness of the idiom [Evangelie selon saint Marc [Paris, 1920], p. 54). We discern in the use of it in the evangelist’s intention to acknowledge that, in the establishment of the new people, Jesus exercises a creativity similar to God’s own (The intention on the part of the evangelist has been emphasized by G. Schmahl, “Die Berufung der Zwölf”, TTZ [1972]: 210: “The use of epoiesen standing alone is a clear allusion to Gn 1:1 ‘In the beginning God created [epoiesen in the LXX] heaven and earth’”. “The action of Jesus matches the creative action of God.” Moreover, due to the parallel with the two Old Testament texts in which Yahweh is called the “creator of his people” [Is 43:1; 44:2], “by the significant action of gathering the group of the Twelve, Jesus presents himself as the creator of the new people of God”).
Note more specifically that the Semitic usage of the verb “to make” with person as objects occurs three times in the Old Testament. In 1 Kings 13:33 and 2 Chronicles 13:9 we have the phrase “to make priests”, and in 1 Samuel 12:6 the statement: “[the Lord] made Moses and Aaron.” The expression “to make a priest” or “to make priests” reappears in the New Testament (Heb 3:2; Rev 5:10). The verb used by Mark is particularly apt to point to the creation of the new priesthood, even if the word ‘priest’ does not appear in the account.
The will to create is expressed in a special way in the case of Simon, James, and John: the names assigned to them suggest that they acquire a new personality (Mk 3:16-17) (It would be difficult to subscribe to the view of V. Taylor who maintains that the name was intended to describe Peter’s character, not his office [The Gospel According to Mark [London, 1957], p. 231]. The imposition of a name is intended to bring forth a new reality in the person. Lagrange comments: “Thus Simon becomes the cornerstone of the edifice which Jesus has initiated” [Marc, p. 59]). And a new personality for the Twelve is indicated in Luke’s account: “ . . . he named them ‘apostles’ “ (6:13). It is generally known that the Hebrew mind sees a great significance in names: to give a man a new name is to bestow a new reality upon him, to fashion or refashion his personality anew. Even if we admit that Luke may have referred to the Twelve as “apostles” before they were actually called by this title (J. Dupont believes that Jesus may have given to the Twelve the name of apostle, but “nothing in the gospel allows us to assert that he did so in fact” [Le Nom d’apôtre a-t-il été donné aux Douze par Jésus?”, Orient Chrétien 1 (1956):445]. However, Luke’s utterance is so clear that it must have been furnished to him by one of his sources. Therefore, it is not just a redactional interpretation. Thus, the position we have taken remains the plausible one), the fact remains that Jesus intended to “send them out”, as Mark says, that is, to make them his own envoys, his apostles. Apostleship was bestowed upon them together with the constitution of the group. (Jean Galot, Theology of the Priesthood [trans. Roger Balducelli; San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005], 72-73)
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