Office Charisma in Early Christian Ephesus

Abstract

By tracing the backgrou7u1 of three kinds of early Christian leadership offices that appeared in Ephesus in the second century, and by examining what issues a contemporary writer made about them, propositions about the emergence of office are derived. Extemal relations appear to result in the merging of different leadership structures. Subgroup/subgroup relations help consolidate pre-existing offices. Mediating structures are critical to the transfonnation of personal into office charisma. And an involvement of office holders in some prima7y activity of a group ma1ces any claim of an office salient to group members. In his description of office charisma, Max Weber (1978:1139-1141) speaks of the reversal of genuine charisma into its opposite; originally the holder of would be ennobled by virtue of his own actions (1978:1139) and a personal following, but with office legitimacy comes by virtue of inheritance or a ritualized acquisition of the office, irrespective of the personal or genuine charisma of the individual (Weber 1978:1139-1 141). The incumbent of an office that is the locus of charisma, in contrast to the personal of the holder of that office, follows procedures that toward the kind of authority that Weber (1978:217S218) terms legal, wherein rules follow the logic of instrumental reason, where an abstract system of law that may be applied to cases develops, where holders of authority are themselves subject to an impersonal order, where members of an organization obey the law as members, and where members obey their superior not because of the latter's person but because of the order that those superiors represent. I say tend toward, since Weber's depiction is that of a pure type rather than any real case. Office is important in the continuation of religious entities beyond the time of their founding figures and in the maintenance of formal religious organizations. Apart from peculiarly religious phenomena, office is vital in business organizations that survive their founding entrepreneurs and in politiS cal organizations that survive their founding revolutionaries. In the modern govS ernmental world, office is essential to the effectiveness of nonSpolitical, civil service offices. In democracies, where a large sector of the public prefers governance by someone other than the politician who ends up holding officef it