Subject: was timothy an apostle |
Bible Note: Hi, Jalek... After asking a Greek Orthodox elder and a Russian Orthodox elder, followed by a bit of reading, I think that I have an answer. In the Eastern Orthodox Church (EOC) tradition, apostles were simply those "sent out by Christ" to spread the gospel. Since Paul ordained Timothy and Titus, they were considered de facto apostles. On the other hand, apostles receive a special kind of veneration in EOC teaching. In many respects, it sounded a lot like the Roman Church's teaching of apostolic authority by transmission by the means of laying on of hands. In that sense, it seemed that they thought that every ordained person was directly connected to the original ordination by Christ. However, they would not explicitly affirm this, reserving some sort of special place for the original apostles. I am left with the opinion that their thinking about this question is more a matter of traditional teaching than it is what we would think of as being based in Scripture. What is more, both men were pretty clear that sola Scriptura was a doctrine that they embraced only insofar as it did not interfere with the explicit teaching from their tradition. That would seem to be a point of similarity among those who grant apostleship to people since the establishment of the primitive church. In Him, Doc |