SCRIPTURE
1The saying is sure: whoever aspires to the office of bishop desires a noble task. 2Now a bishop must be above reproach, married only once, temperate, sensible, respectable, hospitable, an apt teacher, 3not a drunkard, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, and not a lover of money. 4He must manage his own household well, keeping his children submissive and respectful in every way— 5for if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how can he take care of God’s church? 6He must not be a recent convert, or he may be puffed up with conceit and fall into the condemnation of the devil. 7Moreover, he must be well thought of by outsiders, so that he may not fall into disgrace and the snare of the devil. (1 Timothy 3:1-7, NRSV)
WHAT
My denomination has bishops. In fact, the original name of the Methodist Church when it was formed in 1784 in Baltimore was “The Methodist Episcopal Church,” meaning it had bishops. (The Greek word for bishop which we encounter in this passage is episkopē, which also appears as episkopos in other New Testament passages.)
My denomination has bishops. But unlike many of my colleagues, I never aspired to be a bishop, nor even a district superintendent. I appreciate those who do aspire to and hold these offices. But I have never personally desired to be a bishop or district superintendent because these offices seem so heavily administrative. And full of “people problems.”
Yet Paul says to Timothy:
The saying is sure: whoever aspires to the office of bishop desires a noble task. (1 Timothy 3:1, NRSV)
Paul then goes on to list not the duties but the personal qualifications to be an episkopē.
Recall from our Background Commentary that Paul’s major concern in this letter is to equip Timothy to confront false teaching in the church in Ephesus. And while that false teaching may have found fertile ground in some of the influential women in Ephesus (see previous two commentaries), it seems to have originated in the leaders of the church, perhaps even in the episkopē. So Paul is spelling out the qualifications to be such a leader. “There’s nothing wrong with having bishops,” Paul seems to be saying. “We just need the right people, something we lack in Ephesus right now.”
The Greek word translated here as “bishop” as we just saw is the word episkopē. It is often translated as “overseer,” one who has a balcony, or high level view of things. The Greek root word literally refers to “personal visitation,” but in the sense that in such a visitation, one is making an inspection in order to provide needed care and attention. That’s why the word also appears in Luke 19:44 when Jesus is talking about a “visitation from God.”
“They will crush you to the ground, you and your children within you, and they will not leave within you one stone upon another; because you did not recognize the time of your visitation (GREEK: episkopē) from God.” (Luke 19:44, NRSV)
In Philippians, a letter Paul co-authored with Timothy, he uses a related word episkopos:
Paul and Timothy, servants of Christ Jesus, To all the saints in Christ Jesus who are in Philippi, with the bishops (GREEK: episkopos) and deacons… (Philippians 1:1, NRSV)
While both terms are related to oversight and leadership, episkopos specifically denotes a role within the Christian community, whereas episkopē has the broader meaning of oversight or visitation, something an episkopos does. In other words, having the role of an episkopos derives from having the responsibility of episkopē.
The words episkopē and episkopos were not originally Church words. They had a long history outside the Church. William Barclay catalogues the following uses of the concept imbedded in these words:
· The Septuagint, which is the Greek version of the Hebrew Scriptures, uses it to describe those who were the taskmasters, who were overseers for the public works and public building schemes (2 Chronicles 34:17).
· The Greeks used it to describe the men appointed to go out from the founding city to regulate the affairs of a newly established colony in some distant place.
· They also used it to describe what we might call commissioners appointed to regulate the affairs of a city.
· The Romans used it to describe the magistrates appointed to oversee the sale of food within the city of Rome.
· It was used of the special delegates appointed by a king to see that the laws he had laid down were carried out.
So originally episkopē and episkopos always implied two things: 1) oversight over some area or sphere of work, and 2) responsibility to some higher power and authority.
Professor Barclay goes on to ask what he calls “the great question”: what was the relationship in the early Church between the elder, the presbuteros, and the overseer, the episkopos? And surprisingly he concludes: they were one and the same thing. They were not originally two distinct offices. He offers the following as evidence:
· Elders, or presbuteros, were appointed everywhere. After the first missionary journey, Paul and Barnabas appointed elders in all the churches they had founded (Acts 14:23). Titus is instructed to appoint and ordain elders in all the cities of Crete (Titus 1:5).
· The qualifications of a presbuteros and of an episkopos are essentially identical (1 Timothy 3:2-7; Titus 1:6-9).
· In Philippians 1:1, Paul’s greetings are to the bishops (episkopos) and the deacons (diakonos). It is quite impossible that Paul would have sent no greetings at all to the elders (presbuteros), who, as we have already seen, were in every church; and therefore the bishops and the elders must be one and the same body of people.
· When Paul was on his last journey to Jerusalem, he sent for the elders (presbuteros) of Ephesus to meet him at Miletus (Acts 20:17), and in the course of his talk to them he says that God has made them episkopoi (plural of episkopos) to feed the Church of God (Acts 20:28). That is to say, he addresses precisely the same body of leaders first as elders and second as bishops or overseers.
· When Peter is writing to his people, he talks to them as an elder to elders (1 Peter 5:1), and then he goes on to say that their function is oversight of the flock of God (1 Peter 5:2) – and the word he uses for oversight is the verb episkopein, from which episkopos comes.
So Professor Barclay concludes that all this New Testament evidence proves that the elder (presbuteros) and the bishop or overseer (episkopos) were one and the same person in local churches originally.
Naturally, Professor Barclay points out, two questions arise. First, if they were the same, why were there two names for them? He answers that presbuteros, or elder, described these leaders of the Church literally as they were personally. They were the elder men, the older, more experienced, and respected members of the community. Episkopos, on the other hand, described their function, which was to oversee the life and the work of the Church. The one word described the individual; the other described the work.
The second question is: if the elder and the bishop were originally the same, how did the bishop become a separate office? Professor Barclay answers that it was inevitable that the body of the elders would acquire a leader:
“Someone to lead would be essential and would inevitably emerge. The more organized the Church became, the more such a figure would be bound to arise. And the elder who stood out as leader came to be called the episkopos, the superintendent of the church. But it is to be noted that he was simply a leader among equals. He was in fact the elder whom circumstances and personal qualities had combined to make a leader for the work of the church.”
Professor Barclay, in his own translation of the New Testament, uses the word “overseer” rather than “bishop.” He believes that the word “bishop” has so much baggage in our modern context that it obscures what was happening in the church to which Paul is writing.
Interestingly, in my denomination of The United Methodist Church – unlike other denominations that have bishops such as the Episcopal Church or the Roman Catholic Church – the office of bishop is not a distinct order of ministry. These latter denominations have three orders of ministry – deacon, elder, and bishop. One is ordained to each order separately. The United Methodist Church has two orders of ministry – deacon and elder. Bishops are considered elders who have been set aside for leadership of the larger body. In the UMC, one is ordained a deacon or an elder, but not a bishop. Bishops are already ordained elders and they remain so. This seems to me to be a view very much aligned with Professor Barclay’s view of the early Church’s leadership.
Paul spends the bulk of this passage specifying the qualifications, not the duties, of an overseer, or episkopē. This is undoubtedly because he believes that good leadership will get at the root of the problem of false teaching that Paul is addressing. Observing that Paul concludes this passage by saying that the outside world is watching the church and its leaders (“he must be well thought of by outsiders”), N. T. Wright says:
“The higher you go up in an organization the more the world outside looks at you -- at your personal character, your lifestyle, your family life -- and will judge the organization itself by what they see of you. That’s why these instructions matter. If someone is to hold office within the church, their life must reflect what the church is all about.” (Emphasis mine)
It was helpful for me to make a list of the characteristics Paul gives for a bishop/overseer, and compare how various English translations view the underlying Greek words. Some of these Greek words were deeply embedded in the culture of the day, often being expounded upon by philosophers of the age, but they are almost unintelligible to us at this distance in time and place. That’s why making such comparisons can be helpful to the modern interpreter. The two columns on the right are British English translations for comparison:
Regarding the “husband of one wife,” there has been debate in the Church over the years whether this refers to divorce and remarriage (and even death of a spouse and remarriage) or polygamy. The former is having more than one wife but at different times. The latter is having more than one wife at the same time. You may be aware that there was great consternation in England when the marriage of Prince Charles and Princess Diana was on the rocks back in the 1990s. Traditionalists feared divorce and remarriage to Camilla was coming for Charles, the future King, and they asked how the Head of the Church of England – the boss of the bishops! – could be the husband of more than one wife! Alas, Diana was killed in a car accident as we all know and the point became moot even though Charles did eventually marry the now Queen Camilla.
I am convinced Paul was concerned that bishops are not polygamous. So what is being ruled out is a person in a position of leadership who has two or more wives at the same time. This is all the more interesting, as Bishop Wright observes, because it implies that there were some, perhaps many, people in the early Christian churches who did have two or more wives – just as there are some converts in churches in Africa today, for example, who have come from a background where polygamy is normal. Despite the book of Genesis being clear on one man, one woman in marriage, polygamy is never-the-less common in the Old Testament, even among heroes such as Kings David and Solomon.
Despite the fact that officially, ancient Judaism taught a high respect for marriage of one man and one woman, surprisingly, in the first century, some Jews still practiced polygamy. They could justify the practice from the Old Testament. In the “Dialogue with Trypho,” in which Justin Martyr discusses Christianity with a Jew, it is said that “it is possible for a Jew even now to have four or five wives.” The Jewish historian Josephus wrote: “By ancestral custom a man can live with more than one wife.” So polygamy was definitely around, even among Jews and perhaps Christians, when Paul wrote this letter.
In much later days, a 4th-century Syrian Christian text known as the “Apostolic Canons” laid it down: “He who is involved in two marriages, after his baptism, or he who has taken a concubine, cannot be an episkopos, a bishop.” Alas, throughout the history of the Church, especially when the Church taught celibacy for clergy, many bishops had concubines.
So for these reasons, I think polygamy and not divorce, and certainly not death of a spouse, is on Paul’s radar as he writes to Timothy. And he is certainly not opposed to bishops who are single, as some believe.
Lest we think that there is a “higher standard” for leaders of the Church than for those in the pew, Bishop Wright comments:
“The reason (leaders) must keep to these standards is because this is what God longs to see all his children being like. The leaders must, as it were, be on the leading edge of that new humanity which the church is supposed to be. Because we’re all ‘on the way’, rather than having ‘made it’ into the complete new humanity God desires, it’s important that there are role models, especially that leaders should play that sort of part.” (Emphasis mine)
Next, Paul will turn to another category of church leader, the deacons.
APPLY
The qualifications for church leadership Paul lays out here and in the upcoming passage about deacons are what God longs to see in ALL of his children, demonstrating what the humanity of the “NEW creation” that followed Jesus’ resurrection is supposed to be.
PRAYER
I am not a bishop, Lord, as you well know. But I believe the qualifications Paul lays out for being one apply to me as well as all your children. Help me to live such as to demonstrate what the humanity of the “NEW creation” that you inaugurated in Jesus’ resurrection is supposed to be. In Christ. Amen.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. What is the literal meaning of the root words for the Greek word episkopē? Why would that word be applied to a Church office?
2. What evidence does Professor William Barclay give for his conclusion that the elder, the presbuteros, and the bishop/overseer, the episkopos, were originally one and the same office in the early Church? How did those roles become distinct?
3. Comment on N. T. Wright’s statement: “The higher you go up in an organization the more the world outside looks at you -- at your personal character, your lifestyle, your family life -- and will judge the organization itself by what they see of you. That’s why these instructions matter.” Do you agree or disagree that this is what happens and why? Should this be what happens?
4. After reading Bob’s commentary, and reflecting on the text, what do you think Paul originally meant in writing that a bishop/overseer must be “the husband of one wife” (ESV, NIV, REB, KJV) or “married only once” (NRSV)?
How can you apply these insights in your life?