There is an interesting discussion going on here about women apostles in the early church. While Church tradition regards some women as "equal to the Apostles", it does not provide precedent for women to be priests. Still, I question the argument that "References to some women as 'apostles' by early Church writers are obviously not referring to the apostolic office, such as those who called Mary Magdalene 'apostle to the apostles,' because she was the first to tell them of Christ's resurrection. That was a poetic usage."

When Orthodoxy speaks of Photini, the Samaritan Woman at the Well, as "equal to the Apostles" this is not poetic usage. Orthodoxy is not saying that Photini was one of the original Apostles. Orthodox tradition recognizes another category: women who are equals in apostolic (but not priestly) ministry. Orthodoxy recognizes other categories as well: confessors, martyrs, holy women, prophets, etc.

I want to make the point that the ordinance of the Priesthood is not derived from the Apostles, though apostolic succession through the laying on of hands is part of the proper ordination of priests. The priesthood, according to St. John Chrysostom, "is ranked among heavenly ordinances. And this is only right, for no man, no angel, no archangel, no other created power, but the Paraclete himself ordained this succession..." (On the Priesthood, 1977, St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, p. 70).

That St. Paul does not list the sacerdotal priest among the orders of the Church should not surprise us. If Hebrews represents the Apostle's thought, the priesthood of the Old Testament was once and for all fulfilled in Jesus Christ, God's chosen High Priest, who was also God's spotless Lamb. The priest in the Church is the continuous link to the priesthood established by God in the order of Melchizedek. It represents something much older than the Apostolic ministry and should be guarded. Guarding it requires not confusing this extraordinary and particular office with the office of elder (presbyteros) which is not specific to blood sacrifice and to the work of the altar.

The distinction has to do with blood. All the things of God are realized in Jesus' Blood. All suffering, which many religions attempt to explain apart from Christ, or to avoid through asceticism or philosophy, are made meaningful by His Blood. All worldly striving is shown to be futile by His Blood. The Apostle Paul refers to the Blood of Jesus no less than twelve times in his writings because God makes peace with us through the Blood of the Cross. It is to HIS atoning sacrifice that the priesthood points as a sign. If it is made to point to anything else, it becomes a broken sign.

If the priesthood is indelible as an ontological reality, what is the eternal verity reflected in this Form? It can’t be the Apostles or apostolic ministry. It can only be the eternal Christ, who is one with the Father and the Spirit. Christ is the eternal Form of priest and the eternal truth signified.

We can appreciate why the New Testament writers would use the word 'presbyteros' instead of 'hieros' with its pagan associations. However, the writer of Hebrews does not regard 'presbyteros' to be the correct term when speaking of Christ as God’s High Priest. Instead he uses the term 'hieros' (Hebrews 7.26). The Greeks didn't invent the priest, afterall, they encountered it among the Egyptians in its more original Afro-Asiatic context.

Why should this matter to Christians? It matters because, from the beginning, the priesthood points to Jesus Christ and is therefore Christological.

For related information, go here and here.

Alice C. Linsley

The key reference points in the Afro-Asiatic cosmology are east, where the sun appears to rise, and north, represented by the polar star. The polar or North Star never changes its place in the sky. When you face it, you are always facing north. So east and north are the primary astronomical and religious points of reference and are associated with divine arousal (east) and divine judgment (north).

Among Abraham's people the sun was the emblem of the Creator. The glory and sovereignty of the Lord God were exemplified in the sun's journey from east to west and over all the earth's surface. We see this in Psalm 113:3 which says, "From east to west the name of the Lord is praised." And in Psalm 19:6, which says "He places in the heavens a tent for the sun, who is like a groom coming forth from the chamber, like a hero, eager to run his course. His rising-place is at one end of the heaven, and his circuit reaches the other; nothing escapes His heat."

Genesis reveals that the sun was the emblem of the Creator among Abraham's people. They would have conceived of God as the Great Chief. Since chiefs among them had 2 wives, and the chief made his circuit between the two wives, so the Afro-Asiatics conceived of God as having two wives: dawn and dust. This is why none of the chiefs placed their wives on an east-west axis except for the braggart Lamech who arrogantly posed himself as God's equal. Gaster noted this, explaining that the names of Lamech's 2 wives, 'Ada' and 'Tzilla', suggest dawn and dust (The Schocken Bible, Vol. 1, p. 28).

Imagine if the writers of the Bible had been from the Paleo-Siberian culture, where there are long periods of darkness and long periods of daylight. Were that the case, we would find a theological perspective that reflects that phenomenon. However, such a perspective would not be a one with which all people could relate.

The cosmology that we find in the Bible pertains to the perspective of Afro-Asiatic peoples. It is from them that Jews, Christians and Muslims receive the tradition of facing east in prayer. The temple in Jerusalem was aligned to track the sun's light and the pyramids in Egypt faced the east.

The cosmology of the Afro-Asiatics is also represented in the Egyptian Ankh. The loop at the top symbolizes the sun. The cross bar represents the sun's daily journey from east to west. The Ankh has affinity to the Agadez cross of Niger (shown below at left) and to the Sign of Tanit (TNT) of Carthage (shown at right.)

A similar image with the TNT inscription was found in the temple of Eshmun near Sidon. It dates to about the 5 century B.C. Assignment of the name 'Tanit' is guess work, however, since no one knows how TNT should be transliterated.

All the images shown here have the solar symbol over a horizontal bar representing the east-west movement of the sun. The sun is shown at the mountain top at the sacred center (high noon - as James explains, "In Him there is no shadow..."). We already know that mountains were a meeting place between God and man. Consider the many incidents of biblical heros ascending mountains and there experiencing theophanies.

The horned altar is another image signifying God's sovereignty over the earth, only here representation of the sun has disappeared, showing that the Hebrews rejected the old solar representation of God. That the sun was not to be worshipped is evident in Psalm 148:3, which says "Praise Him, sun and moon, praise Him, all bright stars." In the horned altar, God's presence is evident in the negative space since God cannot be presented as something created.

That the horned altar and the symbols of Agadez and TNT share a common cosmology is evident when one compares the altar and the so-called sign of Tanit. The upright horns are similar to those on the Tanit symbol shown at right.

Interestingly, the metal working chiefs of the Inadan who live in the Air Desert surrounding Agadez, maintain 2 wives in separate households on a north-south axis, as did the chiefs of Abraham's people. They speak a secret language which they call TeNeT (National Geographic, Aug. 1979, p. 389)

There is little doubt that the Inadan are related to Abraham's African ancestors. They are able to recite an unbroken line of descent through King David.

Tiktaalik roseae is a genus of extinct lobe-finned fish from the late Devonian period, with features like those of four-legged animals. It is an example of an ancient sarcopterygian fish which adapted to a swampy oxygen-poor water habitat. The creature lived about 370 million years ago and is regarded by macro-evolutionists as a transition in the evolutionary Tree of Life from fish to tetrapod.

What I find so exciting about this discovery is the critical method and logistics of the exploration over four summers in the Alaskan Arctic. Tiktaalik was discovered through a well-conceived methodically launched project to find a predicted specimen and demonstrates the predictive capacity of palaeontology. Ahlberg and Clack’s review explains Tiktaalik's importance:

The Nunavut field project had the express aim of finding an intermediate between Panderichthys and tetrapods, by searching in sediments from the most probable environment (rivers) and time (early Late Devonian). Second, Tiktaalik adds enormously to our understanding of the fish-tetrapod transition because of its position on the tree and the combination of characters it displays.

Watch the featured video here. Ignore the arrogant headline: "Evolution is a fact; Quran and Bible are False". Harvard's claim to being an institution of critical thinking certainly isn't upheld by this ignorant headline.

Here macro-evolutionist, Martin Brazeau, gloats:

"Creationists haven't said a lot about Tiktaalik, and it's no surprise. However, a few responses have trickled out and they more or less run in the same vein.I thought this was a rather telling remark on Tiktaalik posted over on Dembski's blog. We're treated to an excerpt of the pre-transformation version of the DI's original response that goes:

I especially like Crowther’s last sentence which I present in its original form (bold type included): “There’s a problem with the Darwinist position that runs even deeper than this, however: If Darwinian evolution is an undisputed fact, as its chief defenders routinely claim, why is this fossil find being billed as such an crucial piece of evidence?”

Icing on the cake! I love it!!!

What I love even more is all this rhetoric and absolutely no reference to the actual fossil material. So, I'll take that as meaning that these guys have nothing to say about its transitional status. The real icing on the cake is all this puff and no real substance.

Unfortunately, the media's response to the discovery is not quite the same as the palaeontological community's interpretation of it. Therefore, by responding to these articles, creationists and their ilk are just blowing smoke. The importance of Tiktaalik has nothing to do with proving the fish-tetrapod transition. That's pretty much taken care of by a wealth of data from the past 100 years."

You have to wonder why macro-evolutionists even care what creationists think. Do they harbor a certain fear that maybe their scheme actually points to a Creator?

I believe in the scientific approach and have applied it over 30 years to the book of Genesis. I have methodically gathered data and have done extensive analysis of the kinship pattern of Abraham's people. About 10 years ago I too was able to use the data to predict certain patterns and beliefs among Abraham's Afro-Asiatic ancestors. My findings are based on science. I began as a skeptic and ended up convinced that the people of Genesis 4, 5 and 11 are historical. It is impossible to back write an authentic kinship pattern into a literary text.

Alice C. Linsley

The book of Genesis is used by young earth creationists to calculate the age of the earth, but Genesis can’t be used this way. Genesis doesn’t tell us how old the earth is. Bishop Usher’s calculations, based on the genealogical information, is flawed because he didn’t understand that some of the segments are telescopic, and that Adam and Eve are mythological first parents. He also didn’t realize that the kinship pattern revealed in Genesis 4 and 5 is the kinship pattern of Abraham’s African ancestors who lived only about 8000 years ago.

Genesis is regarded as irrelevant by macro-evolutionists (most of whom have never studied the text) because they think that it requires belief in six consecutive 24-hour days of creation. St. Augustine, an African bishop, believed each “yom” was an unspecified eon of time since this use of the word yom is found elsewhere in the Bible (as in the phrase "the day of the Lord").

At the risk of getting slammed by both macro-evolutionists and young earth creationists, I will briefly state what Genesis does tell us.

Genesis tells us that God created in an orderly fashion over a period of time and according to a plan. It is the work of science to discover that order and that plan. It is not the work of Bible scholars, although scholars of faith will have a fairly good idea about the plan. They will be waiting at the top of the mountain when the scientists finally arrive there.

Diagram copyright 2000 Alice C. Linsley

Alice C. Linsley

Hermann Gunkel (1862-1932) produced three excellent commentaries on Genesis: Creation and Chaos (1895), Commentary on Genesis (1901), and The Legends of Genesis (1901). This last work introduced Gunkel's Commentary on Genesis.

In his writings on Genesis, Gunkel poses serious questions about the work of Julius Wellhausen, whose source hypothesis held pervasive influence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Wellhausen regarded Genesis as a compliation of narratives projected backward into pre-Mosiac times at the time of the Monarchy. He argued that the material therefore reflects the life and times of the Monarchy and presents an erroneous picture of the earlier time of the Patriarchs. Gunkel, on the other hand, insisted that the Patriarchal sagas are reliable because they were orally transmitted from before the time of Moses.

Both men took an evolutionary view of human history, regarding Pre-Israelite societies as pre-literate and developing to literacy. Since their time, anthropologists have come to recognize a flaw in this scheme. They have identified literate societies which include sub-cultures that rely on oral transmission of their sacred stories and never commit them to writing.

Wellhausen wasn't interested in the archaeological discoveries of his time that shed light on the sophisticated Afro-Asiatic civilization in Canaan, but Gunkel recognized that the finds of biblical archaeology revealed that Canaanite culture was not an anomaly, but consistent with the larger ethnological and linguistic heritage of the Afro-Asiatics who had been around for centuries before the time of Moses.

The Afro-Asiatic Dominion extended from the Atlantic coast of modern Nigeria to the Indus River Valley. The Afro-Asiatic peoples were linked by rulers who intermarried and controlled the water ways and the caravan routes. Abraham's territory between Hebron and Beersheba corresponded to a caravan route. As W.F. Albright notes in his Introduction to Gunkels' The Legends of Genesis: "Abraham turns out to have been a caravan leader, and the very name 'Hebrew' refers to donkey caravaneering" (p. x).

Gunkel's historical-critical method was embodied in his first major work, Creation and Chaos in the Beginning and at the End of Time. In this work, Gunkel focused on the history of the tradition behind Genesis chapter one and Revelation chapter 12. It was Gunkel’s view that these constituted "myth" and that they could only be understood by tracing the development of the biblical literary form back to the pagan roots from which the myth was derived. Gunkel insists that "The more independent a story is, the more sure we may be that it is preserved in its original form" (Legends, p. 45).

Gunkel's work on Genesis is valueable because he rationally justifies his view that many of the legends of Genesis pre-date the time of Moses and the time of the Monarchy. He appreciates the primitive layer of narrative for its own merits, resisting the modern temptation of pyschological analysis of character and theme. He writes, "In very many situations where the modern writer would expect a psychological analysis, the primitive story-teller simply presents an action" (Legends, p. 60).

Gunkel's theory is that the older legends are brief because they represent the oral tradition of preliterate people and would have been told in "not much over half and hour" (Legends, p. 47).

Gunkel identifies the following categories of legends:

At Students Publish Here, there is a delightful story written by a girl named Hannah Mulliken. She tells the story of the Flood from the perspective of twin mice born on Noah's ark. This is a story your children and grandchilren would love to hear!