44 Irenaeus: Life, Scripture, Legacycommunity would receive the incoming correspondence to be circulated around the
various house-groups. So the martyrs of Lyons sent their commendation of Irenaeus,
called “presbyter” of his diocese, to Eleutherus.^48
In Clement, Corinthians, whose contents Irenaeus clearly knew well, the author
was anonymous, and made no reference to his possession of any office of sole bishop,
let alone that of προεστώς. But nevertheless here was a figure that related to the pres-
byterate when it met together with “the whole church.” The foreign secretary, writing
to external churches on behalf of the presbyterate as a body, might appear to issue his
own commands and exhortations, and Irenaeus could now well play up the role of this
figure. He accordingly deprives Clement of his proper, secretarial anonymity in his
determination to reconceptualize the nature and functions of his office so as to fit his
scholastic model.
Unlike in the case of Justin, the secretary existed as the official spokesman to exter-
nal churches with the entrusted ministry to write official letters to them apart from the
local congregations from which they hailed. The evidence from Clement’s Corinthians,
once again, points to a presbyterate composed of the presbyter bishops of individ-
ual congregations who assembled together on some occasions as “the whole church.”
This was particularly the case when a presbyter-bishop was ordained, like Timothy,
“through prophecy along with the imposition of hands of the presbyterate.”^49 P a u l ’s
genuine 1 Corinthians points to how urban Christians met “as the whole church,”^50
perhaps by hiring a lecture room, for issues of discipline or to greet Gaius as “guest of
the whole church.”^51
Clement specifically refers to the presbyter-bishops at Corinth as “having been
appointed [κατασταθέντας]... with the whole church expressing their approval
[συνευδοκησάσης τῆς έκκλησίας πάσης] .”^52 Clearly, they were not appointed or ordained
by one group alone in isolation, even though the act of ordination was not by the sec-
retary alone but by all the presbyters coming from their individual congregations at
a public meeting of the whole. This was why no presbyter who had “offered the gifts
blamelessly” could be deposed by a single congregation or group of them, with the
additional reason that the apostles had appointed the original presbyters. The practice
of this kind of presbyteral ordination was clearly an aid to unity in the loose confed-
eration of house-groups that constituted the Church of Rome for a least most of the
second century.
We find this practice reflected behind the corrupt text of the Hippolytan Apostolic
Traditi on, the text of which has been incorporated into the Apostolic Constitutions and
in the so-called Canons of Hippolytus and the Testamentum Domini. As it stands, the
text reflects a situation in which a single bishop is being created over the whole com-
munity, but that this has required some revision of the original ordination rite: “Let a
bishop who is chosen by all the people be ordained and, when he has been nominated
and all have so resolved, let the people gather with the presbyterate and with those
bishops who have made themselves present. With the consent of all, let them lay their
hands upon him and let the presbyterate stand at their side in silence.”^53 Here in Verona
Latin (that in contrast with SAE omits references to deacons) clearly distinguishes
between those who hold the office of bishop and those who form the presbyterate. One