also, very generally, teachers and presidents in the Sunday service, whereas the presbyters were a board of administration and discipline. The bishops might be presbyters, but the presbyters were not necessarily bishops. Farther on [about the end of the first century] the presbyters had commonly assumed teaching and ceremonial functions, and so had become assimilated in office to the bishops. In the third stage, one in the group of officers acquired a sort of monarchical authority in the congregation, and so became a bishop in the later sense.

Harnack is at one with Hatch in the importance which he assigns to the adminstration of charities in the early Church, and the great influence which he assumes to have been exercised upon Christian organization by the institutions of heathen society. He differs by the larger stress which he places upon the charismatic ministry, or the ministers extraordinary, like apostles, evangelists, and prophets, whom he regards as having engrossed largely the teaching function in the Church for a considerable interval after the original apostles had passed off the stage. He differs also by supposing that the peoẞúrepo had at first no distinct official standing, being simply the elderly men of the congregation who would naturally have an influential voice in matters of common concern. His scheme implies a somewhat slower evolution of the Christian ministry towards its ultimate type than is assumed by Hatch.

In considering the merits of Hatch's theory we cannot escape the conviction that it involves certain improbabilities and difficulties. We find no adequate ground for reducing, as he does, the relative influence of Jewish institutions as models to the first Christians. For a couple of decades the Church was very closely connected with Judaism. Practical necessity must have brought about within this interval at least an incipient organization, the general

basis and framework for the future constitution. Moreover, when the Church extended her borders into the Gentile world, the chief agents of the extension were those who had been trained from childhood in Judaism and who naturally therefore were more dominated by Jewish than by Gentile patterns.

The facts which are cited by Hatch do not sufficiently sustain his theory; at any rate, various critics affirm that his Gentile éíσKOTоs, the supposed prototype of the Christian official, is a rather shadowy and uncertain personage. "The proof," says Heron, "which he offers in support of his theory seems to us to be altogether inadequate. As Dr. Sanday has pointed out, the few allusions that are found to TíσкоTоι in connection with associations or temples are insufficient to prove that such use of the term was anything but occasional and rare; and M. Waddington infers from a study of the inscriptions that the Christian use of the term was derived, not from Greek associations, but from its occurrence in Syria or Palestine." 1

Another objection to Hatch's theory is found in the difficulty of reconciling it with the tenor of New Testament representation, not to say also of post-apostolic literature. We find here no proper warrant for making the management of charities in so emphatic a sense the peculiar function of the primitive bishop, or for distinguishing between bishops and presbyters as to official standing. In fact, any one who believes in the genuineness of the Acts and the Pastoral Epistles cannot easily accept the theory of Hatch. As for Harnack's version of the theory, he admits that it cannot stand, if the Acts and the Pastoral Epistles are writings of the first century.

1 Church of the Sub-Apostolic Age, pp. 202, 203.