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)
