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The 6th Article of Faith can be interpreted along a continuum. On one extreme you might have a super strict interpretation that holds that Jesus had deacons, teachers, priests, and elders quorums, the whole bit, and on the other side, which I\u2019m more partial to, is that Article of Faith 6 is true in a general sense, with a lot of room for variation for the particulars. There are fundamental offices, like the Quorum of the 12, but beyond those basics there\u2019s a lot of flexibility.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n One one hand, given that these offices and what they mean have changed quite a bit even within this dispensation (eg. the Presiding Patriarch, Stake Seventies, etc.), I\u2019m open to a lot of variation across dispensations, so in looking for connections between the early Christians and the restored Church I don\u2019t feel a strong obligation to try to force a square peg into a round hole if that\u2019s what the situation is.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n On the other hand, I\u2019m also fine with a particular scholarly opinion on this or that not being drawn in concrete either given that the reliable primary source data that we have on immediate post-resurrection\/Pauline Christianity is so incredibly sparse by any standard. Like the myriad creative constellations you can draw from the same few points in the sky, so too can you use these few reliable data points to tell a billion different stories. It\u2019s true that some are more plausible than others given valid criteria and the evidence, but there are still a vast number of options, so the possibility space remains huge.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n For example, I know some scholars hold that the lineal transmission of priesthood and office authorities was a later development, and that\u2019s a reasonable academic position to take; however, there are enough allusions to such a thing in the New Testament and ambiguous things like \u201cthe laying on of hands,\u201d that I\u2019m putting it in the category of objectively plausible in some context or another even if Paul\u2019s early letters don\u2019t rely on a line of ordination authority for justifying his authority. Of course, even assuming some ordination, which offices and titles in particular were priesthood offices or entailed some transmission of authority is fuzzy, especially during the time period right after Christ but before The Great Apostasy that we Latter-day Saints are most interested in.<\/span><\/p>\n So with that, below is my attempt to systematically compare priesthood offices with their analogues in the early Church. One of the benefits of teaching a class at a university is having access to their library, so I’ve been looking into the literature on early Christian Church offices and structure. Obvious caveat, this is not my area of expertise, but I haven\u2019t seen a good systematic take, so this is my attempt. If anybody with more training has any direct, contradictory evidence that any of the below is wrong let me know.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n As another caveat, I\u2019m not invoking some kind of appeal to scripture here. The restored Church\u2019s claims are not based on <\/span>sola scriptura<\/span><\/i> about the early Church community, so while this is a fun exercise I don\u2019t want to make the New Testament, early Church connections out to be more important than they are.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n President of the Church<\/b><\/p>\n There isn\u2019t much to say here that Catholics haven\u2019t already said. A very reasonable reading of the gospels and Acts places Peter in a position of authority over the apostles, making him the preeminent non-God authority figure on earth, so it\u2019s reasonable to believe in some kind of Peter-like figure over the whole Church; here the analog is the President of the Church.<\/span><\/p>\n First Presidency<\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I can\u2019t chapter and verse the genesis of this idea, but the connection between Peter, James, and John as a trio that were especially set apart from the 12 (e.g. the Mount of Transfiguration) as the “First Presidency” has been made in Church rhetoric before.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Apostle<\/b><\/p>\n The Quorum of the 12 was clearly a thing in the early Church, as evidenced by the fact that Judas was replaced to restore the group to its original size. However, later Paul refers to himself as an apostle, and some argue that the title apostle was being used more generically at that point. For example, if Paul had been called and ordained as a member of the 12 to replace one who had died, it seems like he would have mentioned that, but he never does. To get a little edgy and speculative for a minute, maybe Paul\u2019s later life was actually post-Apostasy and by then the formal apostleship and complete Q12 had already been taken from the earth or was in the process thereof, so the term had begun to mean different things (again, edgy, but I\u2019m not dismissing the possibility).\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Romans 16 famously (if not somewhat arguably) uses the term \u201capostle\u201d when referring to Junia (probably a woman\u2019s name) and several other individuals. Maybe these were the replacements for the other members of the 12 who died, who knows, but the general consensus is that he was using the term apostle as distinct from a member of the 12 apostles.<\/span><\/p>\n We have experience with this in the Latter-day Saint context, as the office of apostle is technically distinct from membership in the Quorum of the 12, and there are cases in our history when people have been apostles without having been in the Quorum of the 12.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Still, here he may have been using it even more generically, and in later Christianity the term apostle was undoubtedly used in this more general sense. Given that there is some evidence that a woman was referred to as an apostle, \u201cconservative\u201d Latter-day Saints that want to hold that everybody Paul referred to as apostles were set apart to that priesthood office face a catch-22, since that argument would imply that women were not only given the priesthood, but also the apostleship, but ironically this implication would be obviated with \u201capostle\u201d was used as a more general term given to people who were sent out, which is what I believe the consensus is.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Seventy<\/b><\/p>\n This is a group\u00a0 that is mentioned clearly in the New Testament but kind of disappears with the early Church. As far as I can tell Seventies weren\u2019t really much of a thing during the Pauline-era or Clement-era Church, but they were originally assigned to undergo proselytizing duties.<\/span><\/p>\n I wonder if the seven assistants to the 12 called in the NT have some kind of connection\u2013historical, theological, whatever, to the seven presidents of the 70 that are the next-highest position after apostle, but I haven\u2019t seen anything explicitly making that connection.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n High Priest<\/b><\/p>\n This title has its roots in Judaism more than the early Christian Church, although early Christians would respectfully refer to the title \u201chigh priest\u201d in homilies even if it wasn\u2019t, as far as we can tell, a thing in the early Christian community.<\/span><\/p>\n Elder<\/b><\/p>\n My understanding is that in the very, very early Church \u201celder\u201d (<\/span>presbuteros<\/span><\/i>) was interchangeable with bishop, but eventually the bishop title began to be used by the top leader, with a committee of elders, patterned after the organization of Jewish synagogues, under him. In that sense \u201cElder\u201d in the Latter-day Saint context is apropos as assistants to the bishops that still hold leadership roles.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Patriarch<\/b><\/p>\n Given the function of patriarchs in the Church the Latter-day Saint connection here is clearly to the Hebrew patriarchs who gave their children blessings more than to the later Christian use of the term to refer to high-ranking bishops.<\/span><\/p>\n Bishop<\/b><\/p>\n Bart Ehrman makes the point that when Paul appealed to local churches he typically appealed directly to the church members, not to their leaders, suggesting that during the Pauline-era at least the very high Church leaders such as Paul and the 12 often spoke directly to the \u201claity,\u201d that were largely based out of homes and at this point the multiple layers of administration had not developed.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Still, there are multiple cases in the New Testament of individuals being placed in charge of local congregations, so here the use of \u201cbishop\u201d as being in charge of a congregation is actually closer to the Latter-day Saint office than the Catholic one, where over time the bishop came to be set over multiple congregations and priests.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Priest<\/b><\/p>\n I suspect that the Latter-day Saint priest is tied more to the Jewish priest than the early Christian\/Catholic one. For one, the early Christian priest, as distinct from a bishop, was a much later development, although in all three contexts the priest is the one who performs the periodic ritual; for us the sacrament, for Catholics the Eucharist, and for Jews the sacrifices.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n There is a Catholic structural parallel in that the priest is immediately under the bishop in our sense like it is in the Catholic sense, but given that the Catholic sense developed hundreds of years after Christ, and that \u201cbishop\u201d in an LDS context is very different functionally than a bishop in a Catholic context, I think I\u2019m safe chalking up this parallel to happenstance.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Teacher<\/b><\/p>\n This is a Latter-day development. I don\u2019t believe there\u2019s a reference to a \u201cteacher\u201d in terms of an discrete office in the Old or New Testaments, although a teacher as a general role is clearly a thing.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Deacon<\/b><\/p>\n In addition to apostle, bishop, and elder, this another position that is well documented in early Christianity. However, \u201cconservatives\u201d face a similar problem with the apostleship above, since there is a case in the New Testament of Paul (somewhat arguably, but my understanding is that the consensus is stronger on this one than it is for Junia above) referring to a woman as a deacon (Phoebe in Romans 16), and 1 Timothy arguably also refers to women deacons. While later and possibly post-Great Apostasy, there is also Roman correspondence (Pliny) at the turn of the century that makes reference to female women deacons.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n There has been a lot of ink spilled on whether these deacons were \u201cordained\u201d or whether the term was also being used in a more general sense. Even if there was some kind of setting apart by the laying on of hands, was it in a priesthood office context or as, say, a non-priesthood helper, like ordaining a Sunday school teacher?<\/span><\/p>\n (The Vatican actually commissioned a study on this since their deacons are not priesthood-ordained, so some have suggested that the Catholics could split the baby on female ordination by allowing female deacons but not ordain them to the priesthood). It is very clear that later on in Christianity female deaconesses were a thing, but for our purposes only the earliest, pre-Great Apostasy records are the most relevant, but in general the function of the deacon as an assistant for priests and other hierarchs has well-established precedent in early Christianity.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The 6th Article of Faith can be interpreted along a continuum. On one extreme you might have a super strict interpretation that holds that Jesus had deacons, teachers, priests, and elders quorums, the whole bit, and on the other side, which I\u2019m more partial to, is that Article of Faith 6 is true in a general sense, with a lot of room for variation for the particulars. There are fundamental offices, like the Quorum of the 12, but beyond those basics there\u2019s a lot of flexibility.\u00a0 One one hand, given that these offices and what they mean have changed quite a bit even within this dispensation (eg. the Presiding Patriarch, Stake Seventies, etc.), I\u2019m open to a lot of variation across dispensations, so in looking for connections between the early Christians and the restored Church I don\u2019t feel a strong obligation to try to force a square peg into a round hole if that\u2019s what the situation is.\u00a0 On the other hand, I\u2019m also fine with a particular scholarly opinion on this or that not being drawn in concrete either given that the reliable primary source data that we have on immediate post-resurrection\/Pauline Christianity is so incredibly sparse by any […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10403,"featured_media":48483,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2970,2907],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-church-leadership-and-policies","category-new-testament"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/christ_ordaining_the_apostles-scaled.webp","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48480","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10403"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48480"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48480\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50300,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48480\/revisions\/50300"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48483"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}