Charismatic Fellowship or tradition- bound hierarchy: Studying the roots of Church Government with focus upon the Pauline and the Johannine source material

This paper is looking at authority and leadership in the earliest stages of Christianity, and is built up under the following research question: With basis in the Pauline and the Johannine text corpus, how might we define authority and leadership in the primitive church? The source material which is presented and analyzed is mainly biblical texts, 1 Corinthians, Galatians, The Pastoral Letters, The Gospel of John and the first letter of John. The method is Biblical exegesis and the theory is Max Weber´s model about the three pure types of legitimate authority. The secondary literature is from Meeks, MacDonald, Holmberg, Dunn and Campenhausen. The main part of the thesis is based on the Pauline material, but the tradition from John and Peter are used as means to compare. The thesis is also touching briefly the second century movement Montanism. Keywords are authority, prophets and false teachings, apostle, tradition, the use of metaphors and institutionalization vs. individualizing. This paper is written within the master program The Religious Roots of Europe