Leadership structures in the earliest church

Garrison (#364):

You [JB] said:
“In Hurtado-style reconstructions of the Pauline world of ‘authority’, which analyze ‘all the data relevant data’, there is nothing that looks like Roman Catholicism in there.”

That assumes that Hurtado’s reconstructions are accurate and is, again, an argument from silence.

I don’t have any question that Hurtado’s reconstructions are accurate. Perhaps you’d care to interact with them on a point-by-point basis and show me where they’re not.

Anyhow, it’s not just Hurtado who’s writing about that period. Bryan cited F.F. Bruce, and I cite him extensively on the transistion from the Synagogue leadership structure to that found in the early church in the eastern half of the church, before the year 100. Notice that there’s not an “argument from silence” in these links, but rather, an analysis of what “Second Temple Judaism” held as a leadership structure, and how the early church picked that up (as evidenced within Paul’s letters and Acts, for example):

Elders Chairs Prologue Florilegia

Elders Teachers Chairs 1

Elders Teachers Chairs 2

Elders Teachers Chairs 3

Elders Teachers Chairs 4

This is all quite a different leadership model from that which was found in Rome, in the form of the Roman concept of paterfamilias and the household structure which is attested, again, throughout the New Testament and 1 Clement.

I wouldn’t expect you to read all of these links, but on the other hand, you’d learn a lot if you did.

Also, demonstrate *with direct evidence* from the NT and the Fathers how Hurtado’s synthesis of early Church worship, Christology, etc. is contradictory to Catholicism

Here is a summary that Hurtado produced on the topic of “worship in the New Testament church”, for “The New Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible”, ed. Katharine Doob Sakenfeld (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2006-2009), 5: 910-23.