Word Finder - presbyter

definition

A priest or minister in various churches.

definition

An elder of the Presbyterian church.

definition

An elder of the congregation in early Christianity.

His position is one of great honour and influence, but he remains a simple presbyter, without any special rule or jurisdiction.

A third theory, advanced by Professor Witherow and others, is that the modern elder is intended to be, and should be, recognized as a copy of the scriptural presbyter.

But apparently it soon became desirable and perhaps necessary to specialize the work of teaching by setting apart for that duty one presbyter who should withdraw from secular occupation and devote his whole time to the work of the ministry.

In 1537 he was invited to Denmark by Christian III., and remained five years in that country, organizing the church (though only a presbyter, he consecrated the new Danish bishops) and schools.

He set himself in opposition to Novatian, a presbyter of Rome, who advocated their permanent exclusion from the church; and it was his influence which guided the tolerant measures of the Carthaginian synods on the subject.

On his way to Greece (apparently in the year 230) Origen was ordained a presbyter in Palestine by his friends the bishops.

The Meletian schism was complicated, moreover, by the presence in the city of another anti-Arian sect, stricter adherents of the Homousian formula, maintaining the tradition of the deposed bishop Eustathius and governed at this time by the presbyter Paulinus.

He was the son of a deacon, Calpurnius, and the grandson of a presbyter named Potitus.

These were written, according to Tertullian (De Baptismo, 17) by a presbyter of Asia, who was deposed from his office on account of his forgery.

The word iriCrK07r03 or overseer may be of Gentile origin, just as presbyter may have been borrowed from the Jews.

There is strong proof that presbyter and episcopus are two names for the same office.

Thus St Ignatius in writing to the Romans never refers to any presiding bishop, and somewhat earlier Clement of Rome in his epistles to the Corinthians uses the terms presbyter and episcopus interchangeably.

The bishops of the Methodist Episcopal Church, on the other hand, derive their orders from Thomas Coke, a presbyter of the Church of England, who in 1784 was ordained by John Wesley, assisted by two other presbyters, "superintendent" of the Methodist Society in America.

An identical rite existed among the 12th century Cathars, and in the Celtic church of Gildas every presbyter was a Peter.

The first, by a bishop or presbyter whose name is not known, is addressed to Abircius bishop of Hierapolis, and was written in the fourteenth year after the death of Maximilla - i.e.

At Antioch in 379 he was ordained presbyter.

As regards the John mentioned in the Apocalypse, he is now identified by a majority of critics with John the Presbyter, and further the trend of criticism is in favour of transferring all the Johannine writings to him, or rather to his school in Asia Minor.2 For an independent discussion of the authorship of the Fourth Gospel, see JOHN, GOSPEL OF ST.

The Asiatic story then died away, but the name remained, and the royal presbyter was now assigned a locus in Ethiopia.

After this victory Presbyter John - for so he was wont to be styled - advanced to fight for the Church at Jerusalem; but when he arrived at the Tigris and found no means of transport for his army, he turned northward, as he had heard that the river in that quarter was frozen over in winter-time.

This letter, professing to come from "Presbyter Joannes, by the power and virtue of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, Lord of Lords,"claimed that he was the greatest monarch under heaven, as well as a devout Christian.

Within them was found the Fountain of Youth; the pebbles which give light, restore sight, and render the possessor invisible; the Sea of Sand was there, stored with fish of wondrous savour; and the River of Stones was there also; besides a subterranean stream whose sands were of gems. His territory produced the worm called "salamander," which lived in fire, and which wrought itself an incombustible envelope from which were manufactured robes for the presbyter, which were washed in flaming fire.

The occasion of the letter was a case of embezzlement, the guilty individual being a presbyter at Philippi.

Irenaeus has confused John the apostle and John the presbyter.

He was not ordained presbyter until 365, and his ordination was probably the result of the entreaties of his ecclesiastical superiors, who wished to use his talents against the Arians, who were numerous in that part of the country and were favoured by the Arian emperor, Valens, who then reigned in Constantinople.

He studied successively under the Arians, Paulinus, bishop of Antioch, Athanasius, bishop of Anazarbus, and the presbyter Antonius of Tarsus.

John or Matthew or any other of the Lord's disciples spoke," and " what Aristion and the presbyter John, the Lord's disciples, say."

But Irenaeus was at most fifteen when thus frequenting Polycarp; writes thirty-five to fifty years later in Lyons, admitting that he noted down nothing at the time; and, since his mistaken description of Papias as " a hearer of John " the Zebedean was certainly reached by mistaking the presbyter for the apostle, his additional words " and a companion of Polycarp " point to this same mistaken identification having also operated in his mind with regard to Polycarp. In any case, the very real and important presbyter is completely unknown to Irenaeus, and his conclusion as to the book's authorship resulted apparently from a comparison of its contents with Polycarp's teaching.

If the presbyter wrote Revelation and was Polycarp's master, such a mistake could easily arise.

The Alexandrian Clement, Tertullian, Origen, Eusebius, Jerome and Augustine only tell of the Zebedean what is traceable to stories told by Papias of others, to passages of Revelation and the Gospel, or to the assured fact of the long-lived Asian presbyter.

If the dead man was John the presbyter - if this John had in youth just seen Jesus and the Zebedean, and in extreme old age had still seen and approved the Gospel - to attribute this Gospel to him, as is done here, would not violate the literary ethics of those times.

The facts of the problem would all appear covered by the hypothesis that John the presbyter, the eleven being all dead, wrote the book of Revelation (its more ancient Christian portions) say in 69, and died at Ephesus say in loo; that the author of the Gospel wrote the first draft, here, say in 97; that this book, expanded by him, first circulated within a select Ephesian Christian circle; and that the Ephesian church officials added to it the appendix and published it in 110 -120.

As a presbyter of the church at Rome under Bishop Zephyrinus (199-217), Hippolytus was distinguished for his learning and eloquence.

As monk in the neighbouring monastery of Euprepius, and afterwards as presbyter, he became celebrated in the diocese for his asceticism, his orthodoxy and his eloquence; hostile critics, such as the church historian Socrates, allege that his arrogance and vanity were hardly less conspicuous.

So long as each church had its own bishop the presbyters constituted simply his council, but with the growth of diocesan episcopacy it became the custom to put each congregation under the care of a particular presbyter, who performed within it most of the pastoral duties formerly discharged by the bishop himself.

The reason of this will appear more clearly in the sequel; it is enough to observe at present that, before our English word was formed, the original idea of a presbyter had been overlaid with others derived from pre-Christian priesthoods, so that it is from these and not from the etymological force of the word that we must start in considering historically what a priest is.

It is sufficient to remark here that the presentation of the sacrifice of the mass came to be viewed as the essential priestly office, so that the Christian presbyter really was a sacerdos in the antique sense.

A Persian tradition says that he had previously been a Christian presbyter, but this is certainly incorrect.

In point of fact the quondam advocate never disappeared in the Christian presbyter.

It is certain that he was settled in Carthage in the second half of 197, the date of his writing his Apologeticus and (shortly afterwards) his two books Ad nationes; we also know that he became a presbyter in Carthage and was married.

The objection raised by the Aquitanian presbyter Vigilantius (c. 400) to the belief that the souls of the martyrs to a certain extent clung to their ashes, and heard the prayers of those who approached them, appeared to his contemporaries to be frivolous;.

It may have been he who, as a "presbyter christiani ritus," conducted negotiations with Valens before the battle of Adrianople; but that he headed a previous embassy asking for leave for the Visigoths to settle on Roman soil, and that he then, for political motives, professed himself a convert to the Arian creed, favoured by the emperor, and drew with him the whole body of his countrymen - these and other similar stories of the orthodox church historians appear to be without foundation.

Arius had received his theological education in the school of the presbyter Lucian of Antioch, a learned man, and distinguished especially as a biblical scholar.

But Alexander too was active; by means of a circular letter he published abroad the excommunication of his presbyter, and the controversy excited more and more general interest.

The presbyter John, whom Papias quotes, says distinctly that "he neither heard the Lord nor accompanied Him" (Eusebius, loc. cit.); and this positive statement is fatal to the tradition, which does not appear until about two hundred and fifty years afterwards, that he was one of the seventy disciples (Epiphanius, pseudo-Origen De recta in Deum fide, and the author of the Paschal Chronicle).

Aedesius returned to Tyre, where he was ordained presbyter.

There are many theories as to the origin of the office of presbyter in the Christian Church.

The Canons of Hippolytus which belong to the end of the 2nd century distinctly lay it down that "at the ordination of a presbyter everything is to be done as in the case of a bishop, save that he does not seat himself upon the throne.

The presbyter shall in all things be equal with the bishop, save in the matter of presiding and ordaining, for the power to ordain is not given him."

Cyprian bestows the highest sacerdotal terms upon the bishops of course, but his references to the priestly character of the office of presbyter are also most definite.

Together with these somewhat gnostic ideas, Cerinthus, if we may trust the notices of Gaius the Roman presbyter (c. 290) and Dionysius of Alexandria (c. 340), held a violent and crude form of chiliasm.