Call No Man

Jesus said, "be not ye called Rabbi," and "call no man your father upon the earth," and "neither be ye called masters" (Matthew 23:8-10). Paul said Christ "gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers" (Ephesians 4:11), and called himself "a teacher of the Gentiles" (1 Timothy 2:7). People set these against each other, and some conclude that any man called pastor is breaking a command of Christ. The two passages are not in conflict. They are talking about two different things, and the difference is the whole point of this letter.

What Jesus was looking at

Read the chapter, not the verse. Matthew 23 opens with the scribes and Pharisees who "love the uppermost rooms at feasts, and the chief seats in the synagogues, and greetings in the markets, and to be called of men, Rabbi, Rabbi" (Matthew 23:6-7). That is the target: the man who wants the seat, the greeting and the name. Then the three prohibitions, and then the sentence that explains all three: "But he that is greatest among you shall be your servant. And whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased" (Matthew 23:11-12).

The words matter. "Rabbi" is a title of honour, "my great one." The word in verse 10, "masters," is kathēgētēs in the Greek, a guide or leader, used nowhere else in the New Testament. Jesus is forbidding His people to take honorifics that set them above their brothers, because "all ye are brethren." He had said the same thing in a different way a few chapters earlier: "Ye know that the princes of the Gentiles exercise dominion over them… But it shall not be so among you: but whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister; And whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant" (Matthew 20:25-27). Minister there is diakonos, a table-waiter. Servant is doulos, a slave. That is the shape of greatness He allows.

What He was not forbidding

He was not forbidding the work, and the apostles knew it. James, His own brother, wrote "be not many masters" (James 3:1), and the word he used is didaskaloi, teachers, the same word as Ephesians 4:11. He is not banning teachers; he is warning that teaching is a heavy thing to want. Paul calls himself a teacher without blushing, and calls the Corinthians his children: "in Christ Jesus I have begotten you through the gospel" (1 Corinthians 4:15). Elisha, watching Elijah taken up, cried "My father, my father" (2 Kings 2:12), and nobody rebuked him. The word was never the sin. The claim was.

And the church was not left without order. Paul greets "the bishops and deacons" at Philippi (Philippians 1:1), tells the Ephesian elders that "the Holy Ghost hath made you overseers" (Acts 20:28), and says in one breath, "If a man desire the office of a bishop, he desireth a good work" (1 Timothy 3:1). Office and work in the same sentence: episkopē, the oversight, and ergon, the labour. He tells the Thessalonians to "know them which labour among you, and are over you in the Lord… and to esteem them very highly in love for their work's sake" (1 Thessalonians 5:12-13). Hebrews says "Obey them that have the rule over you" (Hebrews 13:17). There are people over you in the Lord. What they may not do is lord it.

Ephesians 4, read slowly

Two things in the Greek of Ephesians 4:11-12 are worth knowing, because both are hidden by the English. First, "pastors and teachers" share one article: some pastors-and-teachers. It is one gift with two names, the man who feeds the flock by teaching it, not two ranks. Second, the King James puts commas where the Greek has none: "For the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ." Read with the commas, the gifted men do all three things. Read as Paul wrote it, the gifted men do one thing, they fit the saints, and the saints do the ministry, and the body is built. The word for "perfecting" is katartismos, the word for mending a net or setting a bone. The pastor's job is to put the saints in working order. The ministry is theirs.

Every name in the list is a name for work. Apostle is a sent man. Prophet is a spokesman. Evangelist is a bringer of good news. Pastor is a shepherd, the plain word for a man with sheep. Teacher is one who teaches. Not one of them is a rank, and not one of them is a name you put in front of your own.

What Paul called himself

Which is exactly what Paul did with them. He had every title the church could give. Here is what he wrote instead. "Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle" (Romans 1:1), and the word is doulos, a slave, a man who is owned. "We preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord; and ourselves your servants for Jesus' sake" (2 Corinthians 4:5): your slaves. "Who then is Paul, and who is Apollos, but ministers by whom ye believed" (1 Corinthians 3:5): diakonoi, waiters at table. "Let a man so account of us, as of the ministers of Christ" (1 Corinthians 4:1): hypēretai, under-rowers, the men on the lowest bench of a galley. And then the line that settles the question: "Not for that we have dominion over your faith, but are helpers of your joy" (2 Corinthians 1:24). The man who wrote the list in Ephesians 4 never once called himself a leader. He called himself a slave, a waiter and an oarsman, and said he did not lord it. Peter, writing to elders as "also an elder," said the same: "Neither as being lords over God's heritage, but being ensamples to the flock" (1 Peter 5:1-3). The one man in the New Testament who is named for wanting the top is Diotrephes, "who loveth to have the preeminence" (3 John 9), and it is not a compliment.

Where the titles came from

It is often said that titles crept in with Constantine. The truth is earlier and less tidy. Ignatius of Antioch, on his way to the lions around the year 107, was already writing "Do nothing without the bishop" (To the Philadelphians 7), with one bishop over each city and elders and deacons under him. That is a generation after the apostles, not three centuries, and it is inside the period some charts mark as pure. What Constantine's century added, from 313 and especially after 380, was the state's furniture: rank, precedence, and the titles that go with them. "Pope" is not from the Roman Pontifex Maximus; it is papa, a child's word for father, used of many bishops before it settled on one. "Reverend" is later still. "Pastor" as a name in front of a man's name is mostly a Protestant habit of the last few centuries. None of this is in Scripture. Neither is a prohibition on a shepherd being called one. What is in Scripture is the seat Jesus forbade, and every one of these words can be worn either way (see how the drift happened).

Where this lands

Christ gave the church shepherds and teachers, and He forbade them the chief seat in the same breath. Both are His. The word pastor is not a sin, and the word brother is not a safeguard; Diotrephes was somebody's brother. What Jesus asked for was a man who could be given the oversight and still take the towel. He showed them what He meant the night before He died, on His knees with a basin: "If I then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet; ye also ought to wash one another's feet" (John 13:14). He kept the title. He did the work. That is the order, and it has never changed (see why the apostles called themselves servants).

Related: Servants and Chosen, Did the Gifts Stop?, Did the Church Get It Wrong for 1,800 Years?, Lordship, and The Rod and the Staff. Scripture from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub; the words of Christ are marked in purple. Greek from the Berean interlinear. Ignatius quoted from the public-domain Ante-Nicene Fathers in our library.