The Leaders Of The Church

3:1-7 There is a saying which everyone must believe--if a man aspires to the office of overseer in the Church, it is a fine work on which his heart is set. An overseer must be a man against whom no criticism can be made; he must have been married only once; he must be sober, prudent, well-behaved, hospitable and possessed of an aptitude for teaching. He must not over-indulge in wine, nor must he be the kind of man who assaults others, but he must be gentle and peaceable, and free from the love of money. He must manage his own house well, keeping his children under control with complete dignity. (If a man does not know how to manage his own house, how can he take charge of the congregation of God?) He must not be a recent convert, in case he becomes inflated with a sense of his own importance, and so fall into the same condemnation as the devil did. He must have earned the respect of those outside the Church, that he may not fall into reproach and into the snare of the devil.

This is a very important passage from the point of view of Church government. It deals with the man whom the King James and Revised Standard Versions call the bishop, and whom we have translated overseer.

In the New Testament there are two words which describe the principal office-bearers of the Church, the office-bearers who were to be found in every congregation, and on whose conduct and administration its welfare depended.

(i) There was the man who was called the elder (presbuteros, Greek #4245 ). The eldership is the most ancient of all offices within the Church. The Jews had their elders, and they traced their origin to the occasion when Moses, in the desert wanderings, appointed seventy men to help him in the task of controlling and caring for the people ( Numbers 11:16 ). Every synagogue had its elders, and they were the real leaders of the Jewish community. They presided over the worship of the synagogue; they administered rebuke and discipline where these were necessary; they settled the disputes which other nations would have taken to the law-courts. Amongst the Jews the elders were the respected men who exercised a fatherly oversight over the spiritual and material affairs of every Jewish community. But more nations than the Jews had an eldership. The presiding body of the Spartans was called the gerousia ( Greek #1087 ), which means the board of the elder men. The Parliament of Rome was called the senate, which comes from senex, which means an old man. In England the men who looked after the affairs of the community were called the aldermen, which means the elder men. In New Testament times every Egyptian village had its village elders who looked after the affairs of the community. The elders had a long history, and they had a place in the life of almost every community.

(ii) But sometimes the New Testament uses another word, episkopos ( Greek #1985 ), which the King James and Revised Standard Versions translate bishop, and which literally means overseer, or superintendent. This word, too, has a long and honourable history. The Septuagint, the Greek version of the Hebrew scriptures, uses it to describe those who were the taskmasters, who were over the public works and public building schemes ( 2 Chronicles 34:17 ). The Greeks use it to describe the men appointed to go out from the mother city to regulate the affairs of a newly founded colony in some distant place. They use it to describe what we might call commissioners appointed to regulate the affairs of a city. The Romans use it to describe the magistrates appointed to oversee the sale of food within the city of Rome. It is used of the special delegates appointed by a king to see that the laws he had laid down were carried out. Episkopos ( Greek #1985 ) always implies two things; first, oversight over some area or sphere of work and second, responsibility to some higher power and authority.

The great question is: What was the relationship in the early Church between the elder, the presbuteros ( Greek #4245 ), and the overseer, the episkopos ( Greek #1985 )?

Modern scholarship is practically unanimous in holding that in the early Church the presbuteros ( Greek #4245 ) and the episkopos ( Greek #1985 ) were one and the same. The grounds for that identification are: (a) Elders were everywhere appointed. After the first missionary journey, Paul and Barnabas appointed elders in all the Churches they had founded ( Acts 14:23 ). Titus is instructed to appoint and ordain elders in all the cities of Crete ( Titus 1:5 ). (b) The qualifications of a presbuteros ( Greek #4245 ) and of an episkopos ( Greek #1985 ) are to all intents and purposes identical ( 1 Timothy 3:2-7 ; Titus 1:6-9 ). (c) At the beginning of Philippians, Paul's greetings are to the bishops and the deacons ( Philippians 1:1 ). It is quite impossible that Paul would have sent no greetings at all to the elders, who, as we have already seen, were in every Church; and therefore the bishops and the elders must be one and the same body of people. (d) When Paul was on his last journey to Jerusalem, he sent for the elders of Ephesus to meet him at Miletus ( Acts 20:17 ), and in the course of his talk to them he says that God has made them episkopoi ( Greek #1985 ) to feed the Church of God ( Acts 20:28 ). That is to say, he addresses precisely the same body of men first as elders and second as bishops or overseers. (e) When Peter is writing to his people, he talks to them as an elder to elders ( 1 Peter 5:1 ), and then he goes on to say that their function is oversight of the flock of God ( 1 Peter 5:2 ), and the word he uses for oversight, is the verb episkopein ( Greek #1983 ) from which episkopos ( Greek #1985 ) comes. All the evidence from the New Testament goes to prove that the presbuteros ( Greek #4245 ) and the episkopos ( Greek #1985 ), the elder and the bishop or overseer, were one and the same person.

Two questions arise. First, if they were the same, why were there two names for them? The answer is that presbuteros ( Greek #4245 ) described these leaders of the Church as they personally were. They were the elder men, the older and respected members of the community. Episkopos ( Greek #1985 ), on the other hand, described their function, which was to oversee the life and the work of the Church. The one word described the man; the other described his task.

The second question is--if the elder and the bishop were originally the same, how did the bishop become what he did? The answer is simple. Inevitably the body of the elders would acquire a leader. Someone to lead would be essential and would inevitably emerge. The more organized the Church became, the more such a figure would be bound to arise. And the elder who stood out as leader came to be called the episkopos ( Greek #1985 ), the superintendent of the Church. But it is to be noted that he was simply a leader amongst equals. He was in fact the elder whom circumstances and personal qualities had combined to make a leader for the work of the Church.

It will be seen that to translate episkopos ( Greek #1985 ) by the word bishop in the New Testament now gives the word a misleading meaning. It is better to translate it overseer or superintendent.