4.1. Leadership Was of Two Kinds 108
4.1. Leadership Was of Two Kinds108
On the one hand, there were itinerants, such as the apostle Paul and others, who founded churches and exercised obvious authority over the churches they had founded. On the other hand, when the itinerant founder or his delegate was not present, leadership on the local scene seems to have been left in the hands of “elders,”109 all expressions of which in the New Testament are plural. Thus Paul founded the church in Corinth, and it is to him that they owe their allegiance — so much so that he rather strongly denounces other “apostles” who teach foreign doctrines on his turf (cf. 2 Cor 10:12-18).
In the same vein Paul delegates Timothy, and apparently later Tychicus, to straighten out the mess in Ephesus created by some false teachers, who in my view were elders who had gone astray.110 Timothy is not the “pastor”; he is there in Paul’s place, exercising Paul’s authority. But he is to replace the fallen elders with new ones who will care for the church and teach when Timothy is gone (1 Tim 5:17-22; 2 Tim 2:2; 4:9). The elders in the local churches seem to have been composed of both episkopoi (overseers) and diakonoi (deacons), who probably had different tasks; but from a distance there is little certainty as to what they were (except that episkopoi were to be “capable teachers,” 1 Tim 3:2).
Unless Revelation 2-3 provides an exception, there is no evidence in the New Testament of a single leader at the local level who was not at the same time an itinerant. The status of James in Jerusalem is at once a more vexed and complex issue. In an earlier time, as evidenced by both Luke and Paul, he appears to have been one among equals. But as the others moved on and he stayed, he apparently emerged eventually as the predominant leader, but in what capacity one is hard-pressed to determine. In any case, he was not native to Jerusalem — a kind of “permanent itinerant”? — and probably exercised the kind of leadership that Paul did over his churches.