Brain Glutton, it was not my intention to attempt to sell the Protestant “ain’t no such thing as a bishop, unless you mean an office and not an order” pitch. Rather, I was trying to describe what appears to students of primitive-church polity to have been the evolution of the episcopal role. And AFAIK the idea of distinct orders goes all the way back to the time of the Pastoral Epistles. (When was that? Grist for another debate – but no later than about 120 AD even on the latest dating.) And I don’t think there was ever any question that some people were set apart for and by holy orders – the only problem lies in identifying how they evolved, as tomndebb said:
I have a rather long quote from an (Anglican) author I placew a lot of reliance in, which I won’t type in.
But in summary paraphrase, it amounts to this: the Apostles (the Twelve, Barnabas and Paul, and those they commissioned) appear to have chosen presbyteroi/episkopoi for each local church and to have ordained them with full powers of the clergy (what we would now regard as restrained to the bishop). One of their number was named as the overseer of the local church – the episkopos par excellence.
In time the “other” presbyteroi came not to have the power to ordain, and to minister the other sacraments only in accord with the directions of the episkopos, and in his absence or as his assistants. (Note that to this day Orthodox and Eastern Rite Catholic priests confirm, and Roman Rite Catholic priests retain both the capacity and the faculty to confirm under extremely special circumstances involving Eastern Rite Catholics unable to receive the sacrament from an Eastern Rite priest. Only Anglican priests may never confirm.) As you note, celebration of the Eucharist, reconciliation of the penitent, and anointing of the sick are the province of priests, and they will be the normal ministers of baptism, and preside at marriages. (All sacramentalist churches agree that the “ministers” of marriage are the couple taking their vows; the priest’s function is to preside, to pronounce God’s blessing and the church’s over the marriage, and ordinarily to function as agent of the state in legalizing the wedding.)
Presbyterians and Methodists claim that this early union of roles indicates no distinction between bishop and elder. (I prefer to look at it as similar to the condition obtaining before Vatican II, when the “deacon” at a High Mass was ordinarily not a vocational deacon but an assisting priest. Similarly, all presbyteroi were also ordained episkopoi, perhaps in one ordination to both orders. With time and church growth, the proper role of each sorted itself out, and the multiple episkopoi/presbyteroi of the local church became one bishop and several priests, with priests placed in charge of “suburban” churches held to be under the bishop of the metropolis. A vestige of this remains in the College of Cardinals, where the Pope has seven “cardinal bishops” with Vatican/Curia duties and titular sees in the ancient Roman suburbs. (These men are distinct from the ordinary national cardinals such as Archbishops of New York, Baltimore, Chicago, Sydnew, Westminster, etc., who, though senior bishops, are “cardinal priests.”)
Typically, Protestant churches other than the Presbyterian, Methodist, Anglican (if you insist on calling us Protestant), and Lutheran (whose theology of the clergy role I don’t understand well enough to take a stab at explaining), choose their own pastors, ordinarily from men who have felt a call to be trained, and they are ordained by the local church and by other pastors of that denomination, with no effort to establish the apostolic succession.
ñañi, I won’t attempt to get into the Catholic viw of Anglican orders – it’s one of those nasty, pre-ecumenical movement stories of each side calling the other one names, as tomndebb can attest. Suffice it to say that Leo XIII considered that he had evidence, since discredited, that the Anglican line of succession had been broken, and so ordered that Anglican priests converting be re-ordained. Beyond that it gets into sacramental theology and our differences of language, into fables spun by polemicists, and all sorts of Pitworthy issues.