Priesthood in the Old Testament

by Louis Weil

from To be a priest, pp. 63-69,
edited by Robert E. Terwilliger and Urban T. Holmes, Seabury Press, New York, 1975.
Republished on our website with the necessary permissions.

Louis Weil is professor of liturgies at Nashotah House and has previously served on the faculty of the Seminario Episcopal del Caribe. He is the author of numerous articles in the field of liturgical studies.

Testament does not answer all the questions the Church asks about the nature of the ordained priesthood. Holy Scripture does not supply us with even a rudimentary liturgical form for ordination, nor does it offer a clear structure for holy orders, nor a developed rationale for such designated office within the life of the Church. Rather, what the New Testament does offer, and what is critically important to our developing concept of ministry—whether ordained or lay—is an expression of the underlying phenomenon of particularized office within the Body of Christ.

The New Testament Church acted under the imperative of its experience of the risen Lord and the outpouring of the power of the Holy Spirit. This action was often spontaneous, as the early community found itself obliged to deal with new situations. The regularization of the structures of office, the normative designation of persons to perform specific ministries within the Church’s life, was to come later as the need arose for the clarification of responsibility and authority. During the earliest stages, as the New Testament makes evident, such regularization had not yet emerged. Rather, the Church dealt with its internal life and its mission to the world with flexible means, living in the hope of the immediate return of Christ.

It was out of such a flexible framework, however, that a normative pattern began to form. Long before the Church became an institutionalized force in secular society, with the implicit acknowledgement that the Second Corning was not imminent and that the Church was probably here to stay for a while, a threefold pattern for the ordained ministry had come to be generally accepted. It was a structure which emerged under the guidance of the Spirit and was rooted in the New Testament evidence. Thus it is fair to suggest that although the ministry as it later developed was generated out of the early Church’s zeal to do the work given it by God, the New Testament itself knows of no cultic Christian priesthood, no clearly designated office of sacerdotal responsibility. It will be the purpose of this essay to delineate, in a rudimentary way, what the New Testament does suggest about the ordained ministry and more particularly about the ordained priesthood.

It has often been noted that the New Testament does not employ a priestly vocabulary in speaking of those who minister in the Church The New Testament never applies the Greek word hiereus (priest) to the men and women who minister, but only to Christ. Since by the close of the second century the word came to be so applied, we must attempt to see what insight the emergence of this vocabulary gives us into the relation which the Church saw to exist between the ministry of its designated officers and the priestly work of Christ.(1) When the New Testament speaks of priesthood, it is either in regard to that of Christ or else to that of God’s people, as in the celebrated passage in which the Church is addressed as “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a consecrated nation, a people set apart to sing the praises of God.” (1 Peter 2:9) The latter is the priesthood of a holy life to which all Christians are called by virtue of their baptism; it is the life of holiness like that to which the Jewish people saw priests to be called.(2) This priesthood of God’s people is not to be confused with the ministerial priesthood. The priesthood of the Church is not expressed primarily in regard to cultic worship, but rather in its corporate life of holiness. Tillard notes that the “spiritual sacrifices” which God’s people are called to offer are not to be understood as ritual acts. He continues:

To see in the “royal priesthood” the power which every Christian possesses by the very fact of his baptism to take an active part in the ritual cult and especially in the eucharist as a fully accredited member, is to falsify the thought of the text. Here we are in another setting, that of holiness of life. This holiness derives from Christ. Rather than being a matter of participation in the priesthood of Christ, it is much more a matter of the effect of that priesthood, of its repercussion in and through the life of Christians.(3)

A failure to distinguish between the priesthood of the Church and that of the ministerial priesthood—a classical problem of Reformation theology—can only obscure the special role of the ordained ministry in the service of the whole Church. It is because of the unique priesthood of Christ that the Church is able to offer spiritual sacrifices which are acceptable to God since, as the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews writes, “the blood of Christ, who offered himself as the perfect sacrifice to God through the eternal Spirit, can purify our inner self from dead actions so that we do our service to the living God" (Hebrews 9:14). The role of the ordained ministry, as it emerges from the New Testament documents, is to serve God’s people in the building up of the body, to teach and to celebrate the signs by which the faithful are perpetually renewed in their vocation.

Such a ministry of service, however, takes many diverse forms in the New Testament, nor are those forms always clearly distinguished between persons whom we would identify as ordained as contrasted with others not ordained. The New Testament gives evidence of various persons who assisted the apostles: Were they clergy or laity? In some instances their function was authorized by prayer and the laying on of hands. Such, for example, was the selection of seven men to assist the Twelve in some of the practical aspects of the ministry in Jerusalem. We read that the seven were presented to the apostles “who prayed and laid their hands on them” (Acts 6:6). Similarly in Antioch, the Holy Spirit indicated to the prophets of the Church there that Barnabas and Saul should be set apart for a special work. “So it was that after fasting and prayer they laid their hands on them and sent them off” (Acts 13:3).4 Although these examples should not be interpreted as a fully developed rite of ordination, there can be no question that we see in them a clear action of designation for some specific work of ministry.

Yet there are other examples of persons who assisted the apostles and for whom there is no evidence of such ministerial designation. The last chapter of the Epistle to the Romans refers to the fact that Christians met in the home of Prisca and Aquila and also in the house of Gaius (Romans 16:5, 23). Again, in the Epistle to the Colossians, greeting is sent to the community which met in the home of Nympha. It would, of course, be foolish to make too much of such passages. Yet we do know that Christians normally met in private houses and there formed the nucleus of their community. The focus of such gatherings was the celebration of the Eucharist, “the breaking of bread” which characterized the life of the small fellowship from the beginning.(5) Although it is probably reasonable to suppose that when an apostle was present at such a gathering he would have presided and thus, in all likelihood, offered the eucharistic blessing over the bread and wine, it is nevertheless evident that given the itinerant lives of the apostles, many eucharistic gatherings took place at which no apostle was present. The New Testament evidence simply does not support the imposition of a fully developed system of “cultic delegation”—that is foreign to the very climate of the texts. In the absence of an apostle, perhaps the most likely person to have presided at the Eucharist would have been the host in whose home the faithful had gathered. Father Raymond Brown, the distinguished Roman Catholic biblical scholar, has pointed out that there is scarcely a hint in regard to this question in the New Testament. The New Testament writings nowhere speak of the disciples, apostles, or presbyter-bishops in regard to the presidential role in the Eucharist. Rather, this role emerged gradually in the Church’s life and fused with other types of ministry.(6)

The office of liturgical presidency touches on one of the most significant dimensions of the development of the ordained priesthood in the Church. There is nothing really surprising about the absence of a priestly vocabulary in regard to the Christian ministry since, during the time of the earliest years of the Church’s life, the Jewish priesthood remained intact, and there was no attempt on the part of the Church to absorb the characteristics of that cultic ministry. The word ‘priest’ was indelibly related to the Jewish cultic framework. Further, the celebration of the Eucharist, even allowing for its origin in the Passover meal, or at least in a fellowship meal deeply imbued with the spirit of the Passover, was not directly related to the Jewish priestly activity. It is important for us to remember the twofold aspect of the Passover in Jewish religious practice: First, the cultic or sacrificial act performed by the priests involved the pouring out of the blood of the slain animal at the foot of the altar.(7) The other aspect of the Passover was the meal which commemorated God’s saving act in the Exodus. This latter was a family or fraternal meal, presided over by the father of the family or the leader of the fellowship. As Tillard comments:

This second panel of the Passover diptych thus required no Levitical priestly quality in the person presiding. The priestly act was antecedent to it. One can, accordingly, understand that in the celebration of the Memorial of the Lord, when the first Christians proclaimed that his Death had been the perfect and unique Sacrifice, they were not spontaneously inclined to ascribe to the one who presided the title or the character of ‘priest’. The priestly quality of the mystery thus ‘commemorated’ belonged, for them, as the Epistle to the Hebrews later made explicit, to the historical event of the death of Jesus and to his entry into the sanctuary of God through his own blood.(8)

In this light it is easy to see why the early Church did not apply the priestly vocabulary of the Jewish Levitical priesthood to the role of liturgical leadership in its own eucharistic celebrations. The association of such a vocabulary with Jewish sacrifices, which for Christians had been fulfilled in the unique self-sacrifice of Christ, would have served more to confuse than to proclaim their faith. It is the assertion of this fulfillment which lies at the heart of the Epistle to the Hebrews.

Although the transition within the Church to the use of a priestly vocabulary in regard to the sacramental ministry lies outside the scope of this paper, it is relevant to our concern to note that this development seems to have come about under the influence of the institutions of the Old Testament. The first evidence we have comes from Tertullian, who, toward the end of the second century, uses a full priestly vocabulary when he writes of baptism and the ministers who perform it. Interestingly, his writing emphasizes the typological relationship between the Old Testament figures and their fulfillment in the Christian rites. What we see here is that the Christian community had come to understand its designated ministers as the fulfillment of those of the Old Testament, and thus, appropriately, to take up the priestly vocabulary associated with that cultic ministry. In his reference to laymen in the same treatise, Tertullian also brings before us the vivid distinction which had emerged in the Church’s consciousness between those who are ordained and those who are not, and the normal responsibility of the former in regard to the sacramental actions.(9) In Tertullian’s writing, the bishop is seen as the high priest (summus sacerdos)—the fullness of all priestly ministry, the one by whose authority all such ministry is performed.

The significance of this evolution for the Church’s understanding of the Eucharist can hardly be exaggerated. Whereas, as we have noted, the Jews did not understand the Passover meal as a narrow priestly or sacrificial act, for Christians the Eucharist came increasingly to take on sacrificial significance. Its centrality in the Church’s life as the anamnesis of Christ’s sacrifice gave to those who presided over it a profound association with Christ’s own sacrificial offering, and they came appropriately to be called “priests.” In spite of the Levitical antecedents in Jewish religion, this Christian priesthood was a new thing, a ministry related to the unique priestly self-offering of Christ. Thus it may be seen truly to have its origins implicit in the New Testament documents. The Church lives in its celebration of the victory of Christ’s death and resurrection: the Church was generated out of those events. The New Testament proclaims that mystery, and the faithful make explicit its abiding power in their continuing celebration of the Eucharist. The ordained priest in his presidential role carries a particularly powerful symbolic association with Christ himself.

The special relationship which exists between the ordained priest and the sacraments in terms of the “building up of the Body of Christ,” although not explicitly developed in the New Testament writings, lies nevertheless beneath the phenomenon of the designated ministry as a fundamental dynamic. As we have already observed, the New Testament speaks of many different forms of ministry. Raymond Brown sees the antecedents of the priestly ministry as fourfold: the disciple, the apostle, the presbyter-bishop, and the celebrant.(10) In regard to the last of these, given the silence of the New Testament in regard to the presidential role, Brown writes of the regularization of the consent of the community for those who manifested this charism. Here we see the way in which ordination emerged naturally out of the experience of the young Church: there was an awareness that those who would act in the name of the apostles should receive some explicit sign of their relationship to the ministry of the apostles. Such a sign, rudimentary as it may have been in the earliest stages, was a natural act of the Church toward those who would minister from the very beginning. Whatever cultural or practical factors may have influenced the Church’s understanding of the ordained ministry, it recognized the need “for specific, designated, empowered individuals in the body to assure the continuity of the authority and power of the risen Lord in the Church.”(11) These individuals were seen to bear the authority of “holy order,” a designated office bearing a particular relation to the life of the whole body, whatever particular form of ministry the person “in orders” might be called to fulfill.

Among the varied forms of ministry of which the New Testament speaks, there appear two fundamental underlying dynamics: episcope and diakonia, oversight and service. Not surprisingly, two forms of ministry emerged as particularly important from the New Testament period: episcopate and diaconate. These two forms of ministry serve to remind us of the two aspects of New Testament ministry: responsibility for the good of God’s people, and faithfulness in their service. The acceptance of a priestly vocabulary did not contradict those underlying dynamics, but simply served to emphasize their relation to the priestly offering of Christ, who is himself the model and source of all ministry among his members.

Notes

1. Cf. J. M. R. Tillard, “What Priesthood Has the Ministry?” One in Christ (1973), vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 237-269, where a detailed discussion of this question may be found.

2. Cf. J. H. Elliott, The Elect and the Holy (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1966), p. 185, where it is indicated that the passage from 1 Pet can be interpreted only against its Old Testament background; cf. Lev 19:2; 21:8,

3. Tillard, op. cit, pp. 249-250.

4. Cf. similar examples in 1 Tim 4:14; 5:22; 2 Tim 1:6.

5. Cf. Acts 2:42.

6. R. E. Brown, Priest and Bishop (New York: Paulist/Newman Press, 1970), pp. 40 ff.

7. Roland de Vaux, Ancient Israel: Its Life and Institutions (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), vol. 2, pp. 484 ff.

8. Op.cit., p. 256.

9. On Baptism, 17:1-2.

10. R.E.Brown, op.cit., pp. 21-43.

11. William R.McCarthy, “The Three-fold Ministry and the Holy Spirit” (seminar paper pesenteed at Nashtoh House).

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