From Synagogue to Church
Public Services and Offices in the Earliest Christian Communities

This important work engages with a long historical debate: were the earliest Christians under the direction of ordained ministers, or under the influence of inspired laypeople?

James Tunstead Burtchaell (Author)

9780521891561, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 11 March 2004

396 pages
22.8 x 15.2 x 2.4 cm, 0.6 kg

"Burtchaell's reading of the history of the debate is...convincing....he correctly challenges the idea that ritual and structure are alien to true religion, suggesting that true religion is also found in the institutional expressions of community, even in Christianity." James C. Hanges, Critical Review

This important work challenges an entrenched scholarly consensus, that at the beginning it was inspired leaders - not ordained officers - who dominated the church. James Burtchaell illustrates that the traditional argument on behalf of clerical authority had read history backwards, and found the apostles to be the first bishops. In this study, Burtchaell reads history forwards, and demonstrates that first century Jews knew only one form of community organization, that of the synagogue. The three-level structure of offices in the synagogue - president, elders, and assistant - emerges, in the author's estimation, as the most plausible antecedent for the Christian offices which stand forth clearly in the second century. Burtchaell's conclusion is that ordained office is a foundational element in Christianity, but that, while the officers presided from the first, they rarely led. Thus, while Jesus' brother James presided as the ordained chief of the mother church in Jerusalem, it was Peter - Jesus' inspired veteran disciple - whose voice carried most authority. This revisionist historical account of Christian origins creatively subverts the established positions on church order, and thus opens up the arguments to new and larger conclusions.

Preface
1. The Reformation: challenge to an old consensus
2. The nineteenth century: a new consensus is formulated
3. The early twentieth century: the consensus is disputed
4. The last fifty years: the consensus restated, rechallenged, reused
5. A search for a new hypothesis
6. Jewish community organization in the later Second Temple period
7. The officers of the synagogue
8. Community organization in the early Christian settlement
9. A conclusion
Index auctorum
Index locorum.

Subject Areas: History of religion [HRAX]