An Office without an Origi(/e)n: Redescribing the Priesthood in Early Christianity

[MrMacSon]

An Office without an Origi(/e)n: Redescribing the Priesthood in Early Christianity

Kevin McGinnis, Stonehill College, for SBL 2020

The redescribing project has often involved the necessary move of calling into question commonly assumed presuppositions that have long underwritten scholarship on early Christianity. This paper addresses common misconceptions about the origins of the Christian priesthood that continue to shape modern scholarship. I use the example of Origen of Alexandria as someone who is frequently labeled a priest without question or qualification to argue that the Christian priesthood was not a Christian office that naturally developed through a process of apostolic succession, but one that evolved incrementally over time roughly from the middle of the third century to the end of the fourth century.

This redescriptive project contextualizes the Christian appropriation of the “priesthood” as a strategic move to claim traditional forms of religious authority through a process of mythmaking that imaginatively connected Christian offices to the Israelite priesthood. In doing so, it not only calls into question traditional scholarship on the Christian priesthood, but also problematizes the category of “priest” as it is generally conceptualized. Additionally, through redescribing the Christian priesthood and its “origins”, this paper also highlights the problematic usage of common myths of the Christian priesthood in debates over the priesthood in various Christian communities today.

https://www.sbl-site.org/meetings/abstr ... x?id=54529

[andrewcriddle]

Outside of the post-modernist language this is not a startlingly new claim.
Origen was an ordained presbyter.
This does not mean he should be regarded as a Christian priest in the sense in which the post-Nicene church understood the concept.

Andrew Criddle

[MrMacSon]

Origen was an ordained presbyter.

On what basis do you say that, Andrew?

[andrewcriddle]

Origen was an ordained presbyter.

On what basis do you say that, Andrew?

Eusebius Church History book 6

4. At this time Origen was sent to Greece on account of a pressing necessity in connection with ecclesiastical affairs, and went through Palestine, and was ordained as presbyter in Cæsarea by the bishops of that country. The matters that were agitated concerning him on this account, and the decisions on these matters by those who presided over the churches, besides the other works concerning the divine word which he published while in his prime, demand a separate treatise. We have written of them to some extent in the second book of the Defense which we have composed in his behalf.

Andrew Criddle