Even before the third century, the Didache also commands: “you
will give the firstfruits to the prophets, for they are your high-priests (archiereis)”
taking Paul’s argument in 1 Cor 9 one step further. Where Paul was content to
allow the priestly imagery to work out an analogy with Christian leadership,
the Didache goes further by explicitly designating one such Christian
leader, the prophet, as a “high-priest”. Although it seems to advance the priestly
imagery (which Paul was happy to employ) in more concrete terms (calling the
prophets “highpriests”), such explicit designation will not occur again until
Tertullian nearly a century later. For this reason, many scholars have
suggested that these lines are a later interpolation into an earlier text. (See
for example, Noll, 275-277; and J.P. Audet, La Didache, 105-110. Rordorf
and Tuilier, on the other hand, argue that this allusion to the giving of
first-fruits “est égalementcaractéristique des milieux judéo-chrétiens du Ier
siècle de notre ère” (95)) The argument for a later interpolation runs
something like this: since we know that priestly designations did not develop
until the early third century, any priestly designations we find in
earlier texts must be later interpolations.
Although this presents an interesting problem, it is not enough,
in my opinion, to force the conclusion that 13.3 is late. The difficulty with
such a conclusion is that, if it is the hand of an interpolator, one would expect
the designation of “priest” to be applied to the bishop since (as I have shown
in my earlier chapters), this is the office first designated as such. A later interpolator
would be attempting to bolster such a designation in his own day. This is
precisely what the author of this pericope does not do. The application of
“priest” to the prophet, an office that receives very little attention by the
third century, rather than the bishop, makes no sense. Thus, it seems more
likely that 13.3 is original and demonstrates that the priestly image was still
a working analogy, yet its application was not yet firmly decided upon. The
Didache attaches it to prophets, but only a single time, and no other text of
the second century follows suit in calling the Christian prophet a
“high-priest”. Not much more can be said here except that the Didache
represents an anomaly of explicit priestly nomenclature for Christian
leadership. In this sense, while the Didache advances Paul’s correspondence
between Christian leadership and priestly service, the church’s failure to
seize upon the prophet-priest connection indicates that this understanding was
not widespread. (Brian Alan Stewart, "'Priests
of My People': Levitical Paradigms for Christian Ministers in the Third and
Fourth Century Church" [PhD Dissertation; University of
Virginia, May 2006], 240-42)
