Priesthood in the History of Religions

by Joseph Kitagawa

from To be a priest, pp. 45-53,
edited by Robert E. Terwilliger and Urban T. Holmes, Seabury Press, New York, 1975.
Republished on our website with the necessary permissions.

Joseph Kitagawa is Dean of the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. His published work in the history of religions has also served to increase interest in that field.

According to Webster, the term “priest” is the contracted form of “presbyter” (Greek, presbyteros, “older” or “elder”; akin to Sanskrit, , “leader,” often referred to a leader of a herd of cattle). This term is used to describe, on the one hand, a general category of cultic practitioners who perform sacrificial, mediatorial, interpretive, and ministerial functions; and on the other, those who have clearly defined sacerdotal status, especially in Judaism and Christianity. Interpreted in the broader sense, the priest shares many qualities with other types of religious functionaries, specialists, sacred persons, and holders of religious authority which have been recorded in the long religious history of the human race. Today, historians of religions acknowledge various categories of religious leadership: founder of a religion, reformer, prophet, seer, diviner, teacher, saint, priest, shaman, medicine man, witch doctor, etc., even though it is readily acknowledged that their functions sometimes overlap.

There are various perspectives for the study of religious leadership. Historians of Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, or Buddhism for example, would attempt to articulate the meaning of the priesthood as understood by their respective religious communities. On the other hand, scholars of the history of religions (also known as comparative religions, or the general science of religions), which aims at an understanding of religious history of the human race as a whole, would delineate the general meaning of religious leadership in the entire history of religions. In so doing, however, historians of religions are not unaware of the uniqueness of each religious tradition.

For the most part, historians of religions accept three presuppositions about man: (1) the fact of the eternally human, that is, men and women of all ages and ethnic backgrounds share the common quality of being human; (2) the fact of human corporateness, that is, man exists as man-in-society-and-culture; and (3) the fact of universal human need for salvation or enlightenment. Historians of religions also assume that all religions have three dimensions: (a) theoretical: e.g., symbol, concept, doctrine, dogma; (b) practical: e.g., cultus, worship, prayer, meditation; and (c) sociological: e.g., religious community, cult association, and various types of religious leadership, sacerdotal or otherwise.

The beginnings of religious leadership are clouded in the mist of prehistory. Many scholars assume that there was a time when people experienced a unity of the various dimensions of life which are now seen separately, as, for example, economics, art, and religion. Once upon a time, so writes Gerardus van der Leeuw: “Song was prayer; drama was divine performance; dance was cult.”(1) Thus, in early pre-civilized societies there was no need for special religious functionaries as such, because all members participated in group activities which were religious and nonreligious simultaneously. Gradually, however, as prehistoric men advanced from the stage of food-gathering to hunting and fishing and to that of agriculture, they developed various forms of hunting or fertility cults that were performed by special individuals who could invoke supernatural power in controlling weather, charming animals, or healing the sick. It must have taken a long time, however, before the cultic functionaries became recognized as such.

We learn from archaeologists that agriculture and stock breeding developed as early as the eighth millenium B.C. in the Iranean Plateau. This marked the beginning of the so-called “food-producing revolution,” which stimulated the rise of self-sustaining villages. The transition from the neolithic village pattern to a more advanced phase of the city and state was a long process. Around 3500 B.C., the first great civilization emerged in the Mesopotamian plain. Soon other civilizations arose in Egypt, Crete, India, China, Mexico, Peru, and Palestine. All these civilizations were based on fairly large societies with centralized authority, elaborate culture, organized cults, rituals, symbols, and various types of religious leadership. Probably the earliest significant religious leader ever recorded was the king, like those of ancient Egypt and China. The king was not a religious genius, but he was the instrument of divine power. In fact, the Egyptian king was not only the one recognized priest of all the gods, but was considered as one of the gods. Thus, when the Egyptian said that “the king was Horus, he did not mean that the king was playing the part of Horus, he meant that the king was Horus, that the god was effectively present in the king’s body during the particular activity in question.”(2) At the same time, it was taken for granted that regardless of who might bring sacrifice, every sacrifice was really offered by the king, who was the priest par excellence. In some of the ancient civilizations the king delegated parts of his functions to the priests and the magistrates. This was the case with the priests in the Old and Middle Kingdoms in Egypt. In ancient Rome, the king divided his triple dignities—as judge, as priest, and as commander of the army—between the consuls and the rex sacrorum. Likewise, in ancient Greece, specialists in religion were recognized side by side with the magistrates as offices needed for the preservation of harmony and good order. Thus, after listing the duties of the civil magistrates, Aristotle writes in his Politics:

Another set of officers is concerned with the maintenance of religion; priests and guardians see to the preservation and repair of the temples of the gods and to other matters of religion. One office of this sort may be enough in small places, but in larger ones there are a great many besides the priesthood; for example, superintendents of public worship, guardians of shrines, treasurers of the sacred revenues. Nearly connected with these there are also the officers appointed for the performance of the public sacrifice, except any which the law assigns to the priests.... They are sometimes called archons, sometimes kings, and sometimes prytanes.(3)

In other civilizations the priest even competed with the king or overshadowed the throne. The most extreme case was Tibet where the Dalai Lama ruled as the de facto divine king until recent years. According to Georges Dumezil, the early Indo-European societies in India, Persia, and Europe were characterized by a hierarchically ordered, tripartite social strata—those of priests, warriors, and cultivator-herdsmen. The most important among the three was the stratum of priests, which was charged with sacral functions as much as the maintenance of juridical sovereignty.(4) Subsequently, Indian society developed the four main castes and numerous subcastes. Chief among them was the priestly caste called the Brahman; it enjoyed a virtual monopoly of religious functions but never attained political power.

Historically, as stated above, the priest often inherited or shared many of the functions of other types of religious leaders. For example, ancient Rome, where the erection of bridges was considered a sacred act, the term pontifex meant “builder of bridges,” signifying that the priests originated from primitive engineers who applied “bridge medicine.”(5) We are also told that the Cananite word which meant “priest” in Ugaritic (khn) and in Hebrew (kohen), signified “inspired sooth-sayer (kahin) among the ancient Arabs.(6) In some cases priests are “called” by God as individuals, while in other cases priests come from hereditary priestly families, classes, or tribes. The training for the priesthood also varies greatly according to different religious traditions. While the priesthood is often associated with sacrifice, an important act of mediation between men and the divine being, such an understanding of the priesthood is not applicable to those religions which do not believe in offering sacrifice.

Even this brief discussion demonstrates two major problems in defining the priesthood as we find it in the history of religions. First, those who are designated as priests in various religious traditions have been engaged in such a wide spectrum of activities that it is difficult to pinpoint the unique character of the priesthood. Second, in some religious traditions there are those who are not so designated but act as though they were priests; e.g., the imam in Islam and the rabbi in Judaism. Nevertheless, it is safe to conclude that various types of religious leadership are involved in some kinds of priestly functions, and that the religious community itself may be characterized by its priestly nature. Thus, by examining some of the classical forms of priesthood in contrast to other types of religious leadership in various religious communities, we may delineate certain general characteristics. In this task, we depend heavily on Joachim Wach’s concept of the classical. Wach insists that this concept is not based on reduction from the wealth of the historical data; rather, he states: “The phenomena which we designate as classical represent something typical; they convey with regard to religious life and experience more than would be conveyed by an individual instance.”(7) Following this insight, we will attempt to select a few classical forms of priesthood that we find in the history of religions.

In the so-called primitive religious communities, Robert Lowie astutely depicts the nature of a classical form of priesthood by comparing it with that of the shaman or medicine man. According to his observation, a shaman acquires his status through a personal communication from supernatural beings, whereas “the priest need not have this face-to-face relationship with the spirit world but must have competence in conducting ritual.”(8) In other words, “Shamans are essentially mediums, for they are the mouthpieces of spirit beings. Priests are intermediaries between people and the spirits to whom they wish to address themselves.”(9) While there are such exceptions as the inspired priests of Tonga who speak for the god or gods in the first person, in the main, ecstasy is not associated with the priest. Unlike the shaman or the medicine man who operates according to the influence of the spirit, the priest in the primitive religious communities stands for the ordered manifestation of the divine power in fixed times and places.(10)

In Hindu tradition, the priesthood is invariably understood in terms of caste. That is to say, Hinduism, which affirms that every aspect of life is ultimately determined by and related to the eternal cosmic law (dharma), accepts the caste system as a part of the cosmic hierarchical structure. Historically, as early as the sixth century B.C. there was a hereditary priestly class or caste, even though the practice of priestly functions was not restricted to the Brahmans, the members of the priestly caste. The main priestly functions were the carrying out of the great sacrifices and the domestic rites. In the course of time the Brahmans developed the ten great divisions and many more subdivisions, some of which include nonpriestly activities. Nevertheless, the sacramental view of the universe which has sustained Hinduism throughout the ages acknowledges the prerogatives and duties of the priestly caste. At the same time, the sacramental view also recognizes that all men’s work is sacrifice. Accordingly, as Coomaraswamy points out, Hinduism affirms that “every function, from that of the priest and the king down to that of the potter and scavenger, is literally a priesthood, and every operation a rite.”(11) In short, the ideal of Hinduism is to keep in balance the unique place of the priestly caste and the priesthood of all members. The so-called priesthood in Buddhism has undergone many phases of change historically. As E. J. Thomas once stated, the Buddhist movement began originally “not with a body of doctrine, but with the formation of a society bound by certain rules.”(12) Early Buddhism took it for granted that the four subgroups—monks (bhikkhu), nuns (bhikkuni), laymen (upasaka), and laywomen (upasika)—constituted the Buddhist community. Soon the Buddhist community came to be divided along the cultic and doctrinal lines into Theravada (the tradition of the Elders), Mahayana (the Great Vehicle) and Esoteric (Tantric) traditions. In the Theravada tradition, which was established in South and Southeast Asia, the monastic communities became all-powerful, whereby the bhikkhu came to be regarded not only as monks striving for their own enlightenment but also as priests in the sense of conducting liturgies, preaching and teaching for the spiritual welfare of the laity. In the Mahayana and Esoteric traditions, which penetrated East Asia, the monastics and the laity were understood to share the same path of the Buddha with different functions within the Buddhist community. And since the Mahayana and Esoteric traditions developed rich pantheons, the monastics took on full priestly functions, such as offering incantations addressed to the Buddhist deities and reading scriptures for every conceivable occasion.

It is interesting to note that both China and Japan developed multi-religious systems which were patronized as well as controlled by the respective governments. In China, Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism were seen as three facets of the same truth. Taoism and Buddhism had elaborate systems of priesthood serving the religious needs in a technical sense of the term, of the people. Equally important are the nonecclesiastical priestly functions of (a) the Emperor as the Son of Heaven and the head of the national family; (b) the head of the household who was held responsible for family cults, especially in reference to the veneration of the ancestors; and (c) the literati (Ju) who were charged to transmit the sacred traditions of the past to the present and the future generations. The significance of the nonecclesiastical priestly functions in China was eloquently described by Confucius in his statement about the literati (Ju) as follows:

A Ju lives with the moderns but studies with the ancients. What he does today will become an example for those in the generations to follow. When he lives in times of political chaos, he neither courts favors from those in authority, nor is boosted by those below.... Although he lives in danger, his soul remains his own, and even then he does not forget the sufferings of the people.(13)

In Japan, Buddhism, the indigenous Shinto (the Way of the kami or gods), and to a certain extent Confucianism, constituted a multireligious system. The uniqueness of Japanese religious tradition was its acceptance of the sacredness of the national community, which was reigned over by the imperial family by virtue of its solar ancestry.(14) Thus, the emperor was regarded as Goth the manifest kami and the chief priest, to whom the Shinto and Buddhist priests were subservient.

We cannot adequately deal with the checkered history of the Jewish religious leadership. It is interesting to note, however, that the earliest priests were primarily guardians of the sanctuary and its treasures; they had nothing to do with sacrifices, which were offered by Noah, Abraham, Jacob, and other patriarchs. Meanwhile, Israelite priesthood gradually developed from a popular to a royal priesthood, which was an uneasy fusion between the tradition of the Yahwist Levites and the ancient pagan tradition of the “sons of Aaron.” Later biblical legislation recognized that only the priests had the prerogative of offering sacrifice in the Temple; they were also entrusted with the Torah. Probably the most striking phenomenon recorded in the biblical accounts is the tension between the two types of religious leadership—the priest and the prophet. What we learn from the utterances of Hosea, Isaiah, and Jeremiah, for example, is not only the corrupt state of the priesthood, which was no doubt true, but the fact that the priest and the prophet had different kinds of calling. “The priest stands for the ordered, the prophet ... for the occasional representation of power and of mankind.”(15) Interestingly enough, the effort to homologize the prophetic and priestly ideals, as recorded in Deuteronomy, found its actual embodiment in the person of Ezekiel, who was both a priest and a prophet. After the rebuilding of the Temple the chief priest gained prominence in national life, but with the destruction of the Temple by the Romans the priesthood virtually lost all its influence among the Jews in the Diaspora. In its stead the legitimation of the rabbinate as another type of religious leadership took place, especially after the establishment of a fixed curriculum for the rabbis by the Mesopotamian and Palestinian academies.(16)

The priesthood in the Christian tradition is an important facet of the development of religious leadership in the religious history of the human race. An intriguing question to ask is how early Christianity, which had no living Jewish model of the priesthood, came to make frequent use of such symbolic expressions as those of the sacrifice and the high priest in explanation of the role of Christ in the New Testament. Moreover, all believers are said to share Christ’s high priesthood (Ephesians 2: 18), and the Church as his body is to be understood in terms of a royal priesthood (1 Peter 2:5; Revelation 5:10). Probably Christianity, which began as an apocalyptic sect within Judaism, shared the agony of the Jews over the loss of the Temple of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, and interpreted the life of Jesus and his community by idealizing and appropriating the symbols of the Temple priesthood and the sacrifice. On the other hand, early Christianity in the Hellenistic world, living as it was surrounded by the mystery cults, expressed its beliefs in terms of the myth of the hero, initiation rites, baptism, and sacred meal, all of which were ingredients of its cultural climate.(17) Then, with the development of the clerical hierarchy and of eucharistic theology, the office of the presbyter, which in early Christianity had no priestly connotations, came to be interpreted in sacerdotal terms based on the principle of participation in Christ’s priesthood. The Protestant reformers, however, rejected the model of Levitical priesthood for the clergy and stressed the Priesthood of all believers.

Among all the major religions of the world, Islam, which began both as a religion and an empire simultaneously, never developed ecclesiastical offices comparable to the priesthood in other religious traditions. Also, it is to be noted that there is no office that succeeds the prophet-hood of Muhammad. On the other hand, it was assumed that any public religious rite was to be led by the chief of the community, and the name imam (leader in prayer) was applied to the sovereign who conducted services in the mosque in the capital. With the expansion of Islam and the increase of mosques and the salat (public prayer), it became customary for the local congregations to appoint the imam and also the khatib (preacher) if there was a Friday sermon. Neither one is a sacerdotal office, however. Nevertheless, it was taken for granted that the whole Islamic community, called Ummah, was nothing short of a soteriological community, and that all aspects of the life of the Muslims were guided by the holy law (Shari'a).

In retrospect, it becomes evident that there is no simple definition of the term “priesthood,” because its functions vary greatly according to different times and different religious traditions. It is also significant to note that there is a major religion like Islam which does not recognize any kind of sacerdotal office, and that in Chinese tradition the literati historically played a nonecclesiastical priestly role. Also, the kingship in many cultures had the dimension of the chief priest. The most fascinating lesson we learn from the history of religions is the soteriological character of the religious community as such, which is often expressed in terms of the “priesthood of all believers.” All offices of religious leaders and functionaries, including the priesthood, are legitimatized by their respective religious communities, which ultimately play the priestly role of mediating between concrete human existence and the sacral reality, no matter how it is called. In this sense, the community, such as the Islamic Ummah, Buddhist Samgha, and Christian Ecclesia, is not simply a society of like-minded people. Throughout history, religious man has known that community “is something not manufactured, but given.... It need be founded upon no conviction, since it is evident. We do not become members of it, but ‘belong to it.’”(18) Only in this context can the priesthood and other types of religious leadership be properly understood.

Notes

1. G. van der Leeuw, Sacred and Profane Beauty: the Holy in Art, trans. David E. Green (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1963), p.ll.

2. H. and H. A. Frankfort, et al., The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946), pp. 64-65.

3. Great Books of the Western World, 9. Aristotle: II(Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952), p. 526.

4. Cf. Georges Dumezil, Les dieux des Indo-Europeens (Paris: Presses Universaires de France, 1952); and L’ ideologie tripartie des Indo-Europeens (Brussels: Latomus, 1958).

5. G. van der Leeuw, Religion in Essence and Manifestation, trans. J. E.Turner (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1938), p. 219.

6. James Hastings, ed., Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, vol. 10 York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951), p. 307.

7. Joachim Wach, Types of Religious Experience: Christian and Non-Christian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), p. 51.

8. Cited in William A. Lessa and Evon Z. Vogt, Reader in Comparative Religion: An Anthropological Approach (Evanston: Row, Peterson and Co., 1958), p. 413.

9. Ibid., p. 411.

10. G. van der Leeuw, op. cit, p. 219.

11. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Hinduism and Buddhism (New York: Philosophical Library, 1943), p. 27.

12. E. J. Thomas, The History of Buddhist Thought (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1933), p. 14.

13. Lin Yutang, ed. and trans., The Wisdom of Confucius (New York: Random House, 1938), p. 6.

14. See J. M. Kitagawa, “The Japanese Kokutai: History and Myth,” History of Religions, vol. 13, no. 3 (February, 1974), pp. 209-26.

15. G. van der Leeuw, op. cit., p. 219.

16. Max Weber, Ancient Judaism, trans. and ed. Hans H. Gerth and Don Martindale (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1952), pp. 391-400.

17. Norman Perrin, The New Testament: An Introduction (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), pp. 41 and 51.

18. G. van der Leeuw, op. cit., p. 243.

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