Paul Bradshaw: Presbyters in Early Christianity

In concert with the claims made in Alistair Stewart’s 2014 book, The Original Bishops, this paper acknowledges three uses of the Greek term presbyteroi in the Christian literature of the first two centuries: (a) old men in general; (b) as a collective term for the leaders of individual house-churches; and (c) to refer to the senior members of an individual house-church who formed an advisory council around its leader, an episkopos, but who were not as yet subordinate ministers to him. It rejects, however, a fourth category invented by Stewart, which he called kata polin presbyteroi, selected episkopoi who together exercised some authority across a whole city and not just within their local house-church.