APOSTOLIC SUCCESSION PART 1: THE OLD TESTAMENT

My general premise is that the New Testament is not a replacement but the fulfillment of the Old. Many of the things we see in the New have direct parallels  to those things which went before but now in the New are greater and more perfect then that which came before.

As our Lord  put it, "Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished." - Matthew 5:17-18

So if the New Covenant is a continuation of that which came before it then we would expect it to not look like a completely new thing but to have strong similarities to what came before.

As St. Augustine put it "The New Testament lies hidden in the Old and the Old Testament is unveiled in the New." 

With this in mind I plan on answering each of the questions in three parts.

1. What is the foundation in the Old Testament.

2. How is it manifested in the New Testament.

3. And what evidence do we see of this in the Early Church.

 

APOSTOLIC SUCCESSION PART 1

I hope to start with Apostolic Succession because if we can't show that the Apostles' authority to some degree carried on after their deaths then it does not matter what kind of authority Peter had in relation to the other twelve.  But on the other hand if the authority of the Apostle's did carry on then it goes a long way in showing that if Peter had a special authority then it too might have carried on.

In the book of Numbers we read, 

"Give him some of your authority so the whole Israelite community will obey him." - Numbers 27:20

"Moses did as the Lord commanded him. He took Joshua and had him stand before Eleazar the priest and the whole assembly. Then he laid his hands on him and commissioned him, as the Lord instructed through Moses." - Numbers 27:22-23

In Deuteronomy we learn that with the Laying of Hands came a special gift of wisdom.  

"Now Joshua son of Nun was filled with the spirit[a] of wisdom because Moses had laid his hands on him. So the Israelites listened to him and did what the Lord had commanded Moses". - Deuteronomy 34:9

Again in Numbers we have the following account, 

"So Moses went out and told the people what the Lord had said. He brought together seventy of their elders and had them stand around the tent. Then the Lord came down in the cloud and spoke with him, and he took some of the power of the Spirit that was on him and put it on the seventy elders. When the Spirit rested on them, they prophesied—but did not do so again. - Numbers 11:24-25

Though it does not explicitly say they had hands laid on them but there is good reason to believe they had because there seems to be a clear parallel between the two accounts, in both accounts people are singled out for leadership, given authority, have some of the power transfered to them and after recieve a gift. As we will see Jewish custom seems to back this up as well. 

In The life and times of Jesus the Messiah by Alfred Edersheim, a famous Jewish convert to Anglicanism, he points out that the members of the Sanhedrin of Second Temple Judaism were originally ordained by the laying on of hands. Whenever they would ordain they had three men present and at least one of the men ordained had to be able to trace his ordination through Joshua to Moses. This seems to be supported by other Jewish scholars as well,

On the site "myjewishlearning.com" we have the following, While the use of rabbi as a formal title does not appear until the Mishnah (a first-century compendium of laws and teachings that, together with the Gemara, makes up the Talmud), the first rabbi in Jewish history is often considered to be Moses, who is referred to in the Talmud as Moshe Rabbeinu — Moses, our teacher. At God’s command, Moses ordains Joshua as his successor to lead the Jewish people and render judgments, a process he effects by laying his hands upon him. According to a sequence laid out in the first chapter of Pirkei Avot (which is part of the Mishnah), the line of authority was directly transmitted from Joshua down to successive generations all the way to Hillel and Shammai, two leading sages of the Mishnaic period — thereby establishing a direct link between the rabbis of the Talmud and Moses. Though this chain was disrupted in the wake of the destruction of the ancient temple in the first century of the Common Era, the modern use of the word semichah (literally, “laying of the hands”) for rabbinic ordination implies some kind of continuity between the rabbis of today and the earliest sources of Jewish communal authority.

So we have a Jewish custom of succession through the Laying of Hands right down to the time of our Lord. Furthermore after the destruction of the Second Temple there seems to be a belief that before the construction of the Third Temple that the Sanhedrin would be redeemed and restored. They they base it on Isaiah 1: 25-26  "I will restore your leaders as in days of old, your rulers as at the beginning." In Vision for the Church: Studies in Early Christian Ecclesiology Michael Goulder points out the Apostolic College of the New Testament is clearly a redeemed Sanhedrin. 

I don't mean this to be the bulk of the scriptural evidence for apostolic succession, that will come in part two when we examine the New Testament. But I just mean to lay out some background for the practice.