Acts 13:3

τότε probably indicating a new and special act of fasting and prayer. But is the subject of the sentence the whole Ecclesia, or only the prophets and teachers mentioned before? Ramsay maintains that it cannot be the officials just mentioned, because they cannot be said to lay hands on two of themselves, so that he considers some awkward change of subject takes place, and that the simplest interpretation is that the Church as a whole held a meeting for this solemn purpose (cf. πάντες in). But if the whole Church was present, it does not follow that they took part in every detail of the service, just as they may have been present in the public service of worship in Acts 13:2 (see above) without λειτουργ. τῷ Κ. equally with the prophets and teachers (cf. Felten and also Wendt). There is therefore no reason to assume that the laying on of hands was performed by the whole Church, or that St. Luke could have been ignorant that this function was one which belonged specifically to the officers of the Church. The change of subject is not more awkward than in Acts 6:6. Dr. Hort is evidently conscious of the difficulty, see especially Ecclesia, p. 64. No doubt, on the return of the two missionaries, they report their doings to the whole Church, Acts 14:27, but this is no proof that the laying on of hands for their consecration to their mission was the act of the whole Church. That prophets and teachers should thus perform what is represented in Acts as an Apostolic function need not surprise us, see Gore, u. s., pp. 241, 260, 261. A further question arises as to whether this passage conflicts with the fact that St. Paul was already an Apostle, and that his Apostleship was based not upon his appointment by man, or upon human teaching, but upon a revelation from God, and upon the fact that he had seen the Lord. It is certainly remarkable that both Barnabas and Saul are called Apostles by St. Luke in connection with this first missionary journey, and that under no other circumstance does he apply the term to either, Acts 14:4; Acts 14:14, and it is possible that the title may have been given here in a limited sense with reference to their special mission; see Hort, Ecclesia, pp. 28, 64, 65. But at the same time we must remember that in the N.T. the term ἀπόστολος is never applied to any one who may not very well have satisfied the primary qualification of Apostleship, viz., to have seen the Lord, and to bear witness to His Resurrection, see Lightfoot, Galatians, p. 95 ff. (as against the recent statements of McGiffert, Apostolic Age, p. 653): “We have no reason to suppose that this condition was ever waived, unless we throw forward the Teaching into the second century,” Gwatkin, “Apostle,” Hastings' B.D.: see further, Lightfoot, Philippians, p. 350, additional note on the Didaché. This we may accept, except in so far as it bears upon the Didaché, in which the Apostles (only mentioned in one passage, Acts 11:3-6) may be contrasted rather than compared with the Apostles of the N.T., inasmuch as they are represented as wandering missionaries, itinerating from place to place, in days of corruption and gross imposture, and inasmuch as the picture which the Didaché reveals is apparently characteristic of a corner of Church life rather than of the whole of it; Moberly, Ministerial Priesthood, p. 176; Bright, Some Aspects of Primitive Church Life, p. 34, and the strictures of Bigg, Doctrine of the Twelve Apostles, pp. 27, 40 ff. It may of course be urged that we know nothing of Barnabas and of the others, to whom Lightfoot and Gwatkin refer as to their special call from Christ, whilst in the case of St. Paul we have his own positive assertion. But even in his case the laying on of hands recognised, if it did not bestow, his Apostolic commission, and “the ceremony of Ordination when it was not the channel of the grace was its recognition,” Gore, u. s., pp. 257 267, 383, 395, etc., and see especially the striking passage in Moberly, Ministerial Priesthood, pp. 107, 108.