Dissertation Leak #2

What I've been writing while I haven't been writing

Section 1.2.3 – Responses from Biblical Scholars

In the traditional Catholic understanding, the ministerial priesthood was founded in the event of the Last Supper—the apostles are the first priests, and the rite Jesus commands these men to keep is the first Eucharistic sacrifice. But after Vatican II, biblical scholars reexamined and challenged this traditional understanding.

Section 1.2.3.1 – The Origins of Christian Priesthood

Raymond Brown (1970) was among the first Catholic biblical scholars to acknowledge that, historically speaking, there is no evidence to support this view. For Brown, this conclusion doesn’t pose a challenge to the theological reality of a ministerial priesthood, it just encourages new attention to the historical development of the ministerial priesthood over the course of the first few centuries of the Church. Why doesn’t the New Testament ever refer to a Christian as a priest? It couldn’t have done so, he hypothesizes, until two historical thresholds had been reached: Christians had to come to see themselves as a new religion distinct from Judaism, and Christians had to understand that religion as having a sacrifice at which a priesthood could preside. Brown’s most significant contribution to the discussion is his caution against the traditional Catholic tendency to ground the ordained priesthood in Last Supper narratives:

The fact that we cannot so simply associate priesthood with the Last Supper context and that we have to understand it as an evolving concept opens us to the understanding that when the Christian priesthood did emerge, it represented more than the heritage of presiding at the Eucharist. The priesthood represents the combination or distillation of several distinct roles and special ministries… In fact, some of those other roles that funneled into the formal priesthood (as it emerged somewhere in the course of the 2nd century) have colored the basic understanding of what a priest should be more than have the task of celebrating the eucharistic sacrifice and the OT background with which that task was associated.

Despite Brown’s warning, a scholarly consensus emerged in the 1990s that the historical ministerial Christian priesthood developed at the same time as the idea that the Eucharist was a Christian sacrifice. Roger Beckwith remained in disagreement, pointing out, “the two conceptions did not arise together. The idea of the offering of a sacrifice comes first, in the Didache and 1 Clement, and the idea that the officiants are priests not until about a hundred years later, in Tertullian and Hippolytus.”

Beckwith’s dissent was validated in 2015 when Bryan A. Stewart published his dissertation on the historical origins of the ministerial Christian priesthood.