Spirit; they had authority to remit and retain sins, and a special gift of the Holy Ghost to enable them to discharge that solemn function; they were empowered to found Christian societies throughout the world, making believers members of such societies by baptism; and a commission to found a society necessarily implies authority to organise it, to appoint its officers, and to deliver the regulations by which it is to be governed. All this belonged to the apostolic office, which therefore comprised in itself powers much more extensive than those which were afterwards distributed between bishops, priests, and deacons. But we search in vain for the formal union of the three orders in the persons of the Apostles. And, be it observed, the theory requires such a formal devolution of the orders; for no one can transmit to another an office with which he has not been himself formally invested: he may create for the first time a new office, or he may empower others to do certain acts, as, for instance, to preach, or to ordain,—which he has heretofore reserved to himself; but to make over an office to another requires that the person making it over have been himself, by competent authority, formally invested with it, and empowered by the same authority to transmit it. If we are to believe that the Apostles evolved out of themselves, or out of their own commission, the three offices in question, proof must be given of their having themselves been formally invested with the offices. But of this no sufficient proof is offered. That the twelve were appointed to be Apostles of Christ, is declared in Scripture; but when and where they were ordained bishops, priests, and deacons, nowhere appears. Moreover, this implicit enfolding of the polity of the Church in the single apostolic office is at variance with the precedent furnished by the elder dispensation, to which, however, we are directed as the pattern of the Christian episcopate: the high priest, priest, and Levites corresponding, it is said, with the bishops, priests, and deacons. Neither in Moses, the law-giver of the old covenant, nor in Aaron, the first high priest, was the Mosaic polity embodied, or its offices concentrated, to be shed off in succession, as need should seem to require: the whole of that polity was delivered by God to Moses in the form in which it was to remain, the subordinate offices being as distinctly defined, and appropriated to certain persons, as the high priesthood itself was. It was not left to Moses, or to Aaron, to institute, when they should think fit, first the office of the inferior priesthood, and then that of the Levites: the draught of the ecclesiastical constitution proceeded in every part alike, directly from God, and the office of the Levites, and that of the high priest, stood on the same footing of divine institution. This discrepancy between the two cases would, no doubt, be of little argumentative value, were there sufficient evidence that Christ did really unite in the Apostles the threefold ministry of the Church, with directions to separate from themselves each in turn as it was called for: in the absence of such evidence, however, it adds to the inherent improbability under which the supposition labours. But, not to dwell longer upon a theory which is more fanciful than solid, we may observe that not only is there no scriptural proof of the concentration of the three offices in the apostolate, but there was no need for any such formal delivery by Christ of a scheme of Church government: the theory is superfluous, as well as unsupported. It betrays, in fact, a misapprehension of the true historical basis upon which the polity of the Church was, under apostolic sanction, erected; at least in those earlier stages of it with which alone we are now concerned. That basis was the Jewish synagogue. The connexion between the Church and the Synagogue is a point of such importance, that some remarks upon the origin and nature of the latter institution will not be here out of place. The synagogue was an extra-legal institution. Its origin is to be assigned to a comparatively late period of Jewish history; no trace of it being discoverable until after the Babylonish captivity. That Moses enjoined the priests and elders of Israel to read the law in the hearing of the people every seventh year at the feast of tabernacles; that it was the office of the priests and Levites to declare the meaning of the law to those who, in doubtful cases, consulted them;t that the Levites, scattered throughout Judea, were the ordinary teachers of the people, where religious teaching was in request;-thus much is either declared, or implied, in the books of the Old Testament: but Vitringa has shown, in his learned work upon the Synagogue, that the data thus furnished are insufficient to warrant the conclusion, that places of public worship, other than the temple, existed previously to the seventy years' captivity. The disordered state of the Jewish commonwealth, under the judges, and many of the kings; the frequent lapses of the people into idolatry; the desuetude into which the reading of the Scriptures had fallen, - as evinced by the surprise of Hilkiah, the high priest, at finding in the temple the book of the law, and the consternation of Josiah at hearing its contents, from which we may gather the extreme ignorance of the mass of the people, are inconsistent with the supposition that, at that time, the custom of assembling to hear the law read and expounded prevailed. To a period, therefore, subsequent to the captivity, we must assign the first establishment of synagogues, strictly so called. And the captivity itself sufficiently accounts for their rise. Deprived of the temple services, the pious Jew, "by the waters of Babylon," endeavoured to supply their place by such public exercises of religion as yet remained within his reach. These were, necessarily, of a character different from the temple worship, and consisted in social prayer and praise, and, when opportunity offered, hearing from the mouth of a prophet the Word of God. Thus more than once it is mentioned in the prophecies of Ezekiel that the spirit of God fell upon the prophet as "the elders of Judah sat before him;" doubtless for the purpose of receiving religious instruction at his mouth.* And that this had become a common practice, not only with the elders of the captivity, but with the people at large, may be gathered from the reproof addressed to them by God through the same prophet:-"They come unto thee as the people cometh, and they sit before thee as my people, and they hear thy words, but they will not do them."+ Restored to their own country, the Jews continued the custom of these weekly assemblies, the homiletic services of which would be the more valued when the gift of prophecy was finally withdrawn. Indeed, the religious assembly convoked by Nehemiah to celebrate the rebuilding of the wall of Jerusalem, presents an exact counterpart of what afterwards became the stated worship of the synagogue. The congregation being assembled, Ezra the scribe ascended a pulpit of wood, which had been erected for the purpose, and taking the book of the law, read portions thereof in the hearing of the people. Inasmuch, however, as many of the latter had lost their familiarity with the ancient Hebrew language, certain Levites stood beside Ezra, and gave the sense of the passages as they were read. The people, finally, when Ezra blessed the Lord, responded with their Amen, and, bowing their heads, worshipped. The elements of the synagogical worship are here all present; but we do not find that any building was set apart for the celebration of the religious ceremony. It is to the extra-Palestine Jews, who began to multi * Ezek. xiv. 1.; xx. 1. Nehem. viii. + Ibid. c. xxxiii. 31. ply after the captivity, and who could not resort to the temple for religious purposes, that we are probably to assign the first erection of buildings for the celebration of the weekly sabbath assemblies. The precedent thus set appears to have been speedily followed by the Jews of Palestine: synagogues multiplied throughout Judea; and, in Jerusalem alone, in our Lord's time, there existed, as historians tell us, 480 of these structures.* From what has been already said, the nature of the synagogical worship may be collected. The institution was an extra-legal one; that is, it had no necessary connexion with the temple, or the Levitical worship. Its services, instead of being sacrificial and typical, were homiletic and verbal. A priest, as such, had in the synagogue no function to discharge. He was not indeed excluded from its offices; but no preference was shown him, except in one point:-he was ordinarily called upon to pronounce the solemn benediction which formed part of the religious services. If, however, it happened that no priest was at the time present, one of the ordinary officers of the synagogue (the as nie, or legatus ecclesia) might perform this act. With respect to the persons who might teach and expound, the greatest liberty prevailed. While this office properly pertained to the Archisynagogi, or rulers of the synagogue, and could not be exercised without their permission, it was commonly delegated by them to any properly qualified member of the assembly who might intimate his wish to discharge it. Hence it excited no surprise when our Lord, in the synagogue of Nazareth, "stood up for to read;"§ the sacred volume was delivered to Him as a matter of course, though he had no official connexion with that particular synagogue. In like manner, when Paul and Barnabas entered the synagogue at Pisidia, and took their seats upon the doctors' bench, the rulers of the synagogue sent to them, who, in all probability, were perfect strangers, a permissive message,-"if they had any word of exhortation for the people," to "say on." I The form of government which prevailed in the synagogue was not everywhere the same. In the more populous cities it was conducted on the Presbyterian model; a college or senate of persons, skilled in the law, being invested with the chief authority; while in the smaller villages, where there were not learned men in sufficient number to form such a senate, the synagogue was placed * See Vitringa, de Synag. Vet. libr 1. p. 2. c. 12. + Vitringa, lib. iii. p. 2. c. 20. under the presidency of a single doctor of the law, who bore the title of, or teacher.* Hence may be reconciled the varying statements of Scripture, which sometimes speaks of the "rulers" and sometimes of "the ruler" of the synagogue:"† in the one case, alluding apparently to a corporate governing body; in the other, to an individual holding the same office. The former, however, was the ordinary and regular form of government proper to the synagogue; as, indeed, there is only one passage of Scripture (Luke, xiii. 14.) which appears to imply that there existed any other. The members of the presiding senate were sometimes called 'Agrovváyayoi, rulers of the synagogue; but their proper Jewish appellation was, or elders: in the New Testament, these appellations are applied to them indiscriminately. To teach and to rule were the two chief duties of their office; the term ruling comprising the regulation of all matters connected with the public worship of the synagogue, the care of the poor, and the administration of discipline. The mode of exercising discipline was either by excommunication or by scourging: to both which practices the writers of the New Testament make frequent allusions. Besides its governing college of elders, the synagogue had its inferior officers, known by the name of Chazzan and Scheliach Tsibbor. In the ancient synagogue, the office of the latter seems to have been one of dignity; for he acted as the spokesman or representative of the congregation in reciting the appointed forms of prayer. The functionary first named corresponded with the apparitors of modern churches, and his duties were pretty much what theirs are. Of this order of officers was the 'Tangers, or minister, to whom our Lord, after He had closed the book from which He had been reading, returned it to be deposited in its place. § Such is a brief sketch of the origin and constitution of the Jewish synagogue; an institution which, under the providence of God, had, in the lapse of ages, gradually established itself wherever there were Jews, and the design of which evidently was, that it should form the groundwork of the polity of the Christian church, and present an existing historical fact with which Christianity might connect itself. The worship of the synagogue formed the point of transition between the symbolical services of the temple and the verbal services of the new economy; and, by habituating Vitringa, lib. ii. c. 9. † Acts, xiii. 14.; Luke, xiii. 14. |