The Doctrine on the Church Hierarchy According to the 1st Century Christian Written Records and the Apostolic Fathers Epistles

Abstract

An exhaustive picture of the structure of the church hierarchy in the first century of Christianity, the time of origin and the functions of the individual degrees of the hierarchy is a serious subject for church-historical research. In addition to the canonical books of Holy Scripture of the New Testament, the sources for this question are the writings of the first century and the epistles of the apostolic men. Although these writings are not quantitatively rich, the material they contain is quite sufficient for documenting the Orthodox teaching on church hierarchy in apostolic times. If each of these monuments of church writing separately does not have the fullness of information about the church hierarchy at that time, then all of them as a whole, complementing and clarifying each other, create a fairly complete picture of the state of the church hierarchy in the first century of Christianity.