[1] By analogy, that is; for the wider sense of “apostle” in the Apostolic age need not be identical with a sub-apostolic use of the term (see below, 4 fin.).
[2] The tendency is already visible in the Lucan writings. An anologous process is seen in the use of “disciple,” applicable in the apostolic age to Christians at large, but in the course of the sub-apostolic age restricted to personal “disciples of the Lord” or to martyrs (Papias in Eus. iii. 39, cf. Ignatius, Ad Eph. i. 2).
[3] In the Edessene legend of Abgar, in Eus. i. 12, we read that “Judas, who is also Thomas, sent Thaddaeus as apostle—one of the Seventy,” where simply an authoritative envoy of Jesus seems intended. For traces of the wider sense of “apostle” in Gnostic, Marcionite and Montanist circles, see Monnier (as below).
[4] The above is substantially the view taken by J.B. Lightfoot in his essay on “The Christian Ministry” (Comm. on Philippians, 6th ed., pp. 239, 252 f.), and by T.M. Lindsay, The Church and the Ministry (1902), pp. 224-228, 278 ff. Even C. Gore, The Church and the Ministry (1889), pp. 119 ff., while inferring a sacerdotal element in Irenaeus’s conception of the episcopate, says: “But it is mainly as preserving the catholic traditions that Irenaeus regards the apostolic succession” (p. 120).
[5] See Lightfoot’s essay for Cyprian’s contribution, as also for that of the Clementines, which fix on the twofold position of James at Jerusalem, as apostle and bishop, as bearing on apostolic succession in the episcopate.
APOSTLE SPOONS, a set of spoons, usually of silver or silver gilt, with the handles terminating in figures of the apostles, each bearing their distinctive emblem. They were common baptismal gifts during the 15th and 16th centuries, but were dying out by 1666. Often single spoons were given, bearing the figure of the patron or name saint of the child. Sets of the twelve apostles are not common, and complete sets of thirteen, with the figure of our Lord on a larger spoon, are still rarer. The Goldsmiths’ Company in London has one such set, all by the same maker and bearing the hall-mark of 1626, and a set of thirteen was sold at Christie’s in 1904 for £4900.
See William Hone, The Everyday Book and Table Book (1831); and W.J. Cripps, Old English Plate (9th ed., 1906).
APOSTOLICAL CONSTITUTIONS (Διαταγαὶ or Διατάξεις τῶν ἁγίων ἀποστόλων διὰ Κλήμεντος τοῦ Ῥωμαίων ἐπισκόπου τε καὶ πολίτου. Καθολικὴ διδασκαλία), a collection of ecclesiastical regulations in eight books, the last of which concludes with the eighty-five Canons of the Holy Apostles. By their title the Constitutions profess to have been drawn up by the apostles, and to have been transmitted to the Church by Clement of Rome; sometimes the alleged authors are represented as speaking jointly, sometimes singly. From the first they have been very variously estimated; the Canons, as a rule, more highly than the rest of the work. For example, the Trullan Council of Constantinople (quini-sextum), A.D. 692, accepts the Canons as genuine by its second canon, but rejects the Constitutions on the ground that spurious matter had been introduced into them by heretics; and whilst the former were henceforward used freely in the East, only a few portions of the latter found their way into the Greek and oriental law-books. Again, Dionysius Exiguus (c. A.D. 500) translated fifty of the Canons into Latin,[1] although under the title Canones qui dicuntur Apostolorum, and thus they passed into other Western collections; whilst the Constitutions as a whole remained unknown in the West until they were published in 1563 by the Jesuit Turrianus. At first received with enthusiasm, their authenticity soon came to be impugned; and their true significance was largely lost sight of as it began to be realized that they were not what they claimed to be. Vain attempts were still made to rehabilitate them, and they were, in general, more highly estimated in England than elsewhere. The most extravagant estimate of all was that of Whiston, who calls them “the most sacred standard of Christianity, equal in authority to the Gospels themselves, and superior in authority to the epistles of single apostles, some parts of them being our Saviour’s own original laws delivered to the apostles, and the other parts the public acts of the apostles” (Historical preface to Primitive Christianity Revived, pp. 85-86). Others, however, realized their composite character from the first, and by degrees some of the component documents became known. Bishop Pearson was able to say that “the eight books of the Apostolic Constitutions have been after Epiphanius’s time compiled and patched together out of the didascaliae or doctrines which went under the names of the holy apostles and their disciples or successors” (Vind. Ign. i. cap. 5); whilst a greater scholar still, Archbishop Usher, had already gone much further, and concluded, forestalling the results of modern critical methods, that their compiler was none other than the compiler of the spurious Ignatian epistles (Epp. Polyc. et Ign. p. lxiii. f., Oxon. 1644). The Apostolical Constitutions, then, are spurious, and they are one of a long series of documents of like character. But we have not really gauged their significance by saying that they are spurious. They are the last stage and climax of a gradual process of compilation and crystallization, so to speak, of unwritten church custom; and a short account of this process will show their real importance and value.