Dear Rev. Know-It-All,

I found your column the other week (July 29th) very offensive, especially that chart pointing out the relative ages of the various Christian Churches.

Yes, you heard me!  Churches!  No matter what that fellow in Rome says!

The early church was unstructured until Rome got its hands on the Church sometime around 300 AD.

Apostolic succession is just some nonsense invented in the dark ages to keep power in the hands of a few old men.

Your thinking on this issue is just not in the spirit of our times!

Philip A. Mignon
 
 

Thanks for the compliment. 

Have you never heard the proverb, “He who is married to the spirit of the times soon finds himself a widower?” 

Has it never occurred to you that Christianity flows organically from the Hebrew world of the first century?

Fr. Richard Neuhaus, in his review (First Things, Feb. 1, ‘05) of the book Why the Jews Rejected Jesus (By Rabbi David Klinghoffer, published by Doubleday, 2005) makes the point that there were five million, perhaps six million, Jews scattered through the Roman Empire at the time of the destruction of Jerusalem around 70 AD.  Two centuries later, give or take, there were only a million or less.

Though some would have perished in the Roman-Jewish wars, the great bulk of Jews lived outside the Holy Land and would have gone on with their lives.  What become of those millions?

Fr. Neuhaus makes the point that they probably became Christians, not considering it a new and different religion but an acceptable form of their Jewish Faith.  Thus, they blended into and greatly enriched the Greco Roman world they inhabited.

If you know any traditional Jews, you know that theirs is not a freeform religion.  It is structured both liturgically and socially.  These Jews, scattered through the Roman Empire, presumably were the soil in which early Christianity was planted and grew.  They continued to guide their lives by their own religious structures, considering these structures to be God given, a part of Sacred Tradition, a Jewish idea that we orthodox Christians cherish.

The particular aspect of the Catholic Church that you find so irritating, apostolic succession, is really quite Jewish.

If you have lived in our beloved Skokie, Illinois for any amount of time, some enthusiastic young Hasidim would have approached you and asked if you are Jewish.  Had you been Jewish, they would have invited you to a Sabbath dinner or given you Kosher matzoh or some such.  They are Lubavitcher Hasidim.

The Lubavitch movement in Judaism sends out schlichim.  Rebbe Schneerson would send ordained young Rabbis and their wives to a new place as his emissaries to live an orthodox Jewish life in a place where it is lacking.  They leave home not for a few months or years, but for their whole life to settle in a new place.  They set up shop in distant and strange lands to bring Jews back to Judaism.

The word shliach, (plural: schlichim) comes from the Hebrew verb sh-l-ch, meaning to send.

In Greek, the verb to send is apostolein, whence comes the word “apostle.”

In Hebrew, Shclichim: in Greek, Apostle: in English, missionary.  Getting it? 

The Halachic, that is a legal Jewish definition of schliach is: an agent or emissary who is empowered by another to act in his stead.

Sounds pretty much like what we Catholics mean by apostolic succession. That the pope wears a white beanie, and bishop wear red ones.  Well, that’s just a human tradition. 

The papacy and episcopacy resting on apostolic succession, now that’s established by Jesus.  They go back to the structures of the Old Testament.  The apostolic succession is as Jewish as a noodle kugele, one more example of the seamless nature of the Old and New Testament, the old and new Israel.

As I have said elsewhere, dear reader, you are free to worship God in your way and I am free to worship Him in His.

Sincerely,

Rev. Know-It-All
 

Editorial Note:
this question refers to to the Q&A
Aren't all denominations "Churches" and equal?
published on July 29, 2007