The cultural and historical location of the concept of ςιαςοϰή in second century claims about the apostolic succession has been widely debated. In England, under the influence of Ehrhardt, the term is generally taken to be used by analogy with the sacerdotal succession of Jewish high priests, and to derive from the influence of James the Just on Jewish Christianity. In Germany, on the other hand, following Campenhausen, ςιαςοϰή has been understood in terms of continuity of doctrine, in which references to James in the sources are regarded as pure legend constructed to make the point of such continuity in a picturesque way. Both Ehrhardt and Campenhausen, and their respective followers, regard the ςιαςοχή of teachers in the literature of the Hellenistic philosophical schools as quite incidental, without any close relation to the Christian usage. In this article I will argue the contrary, that there are in fact integral connections between the Hellenistic literature of the philosophical successions, and the development of the idea of the apostolic succession in the late second century, where perhaps the true origin of the Christian concept is to be found.

The proliferation of new monastic orders in the twelfth century presented the Church with a dilemma which had previously challenged the theologians of Christendom: the flowering of diversity within the unity of the faith. Just as theologians had had to resolve contradictions among the writings of the Fathers – the primary authorities for the interpretation of the Bible, and hence the elucidation of God's truth as it was perceived – so, in the new climate of monastic revival, ecclesiastical leaders had to come to terms with the existence of a variety of new interpretations of the Rule of St Benedict, and indeed that of St Augustine – the primary guides to the living of a true Christian life.

Wills have become one of the most widely used sources for students of the English Reformation. There has been an ever increasing literature tracing testators' religious beliefs, the role and influence of scribes and clerics, the various copies and manifestations of a particular testament and the often formulaic character of this legal document. Little attention has been paid by students of wills to the polemical and propagandistic qualities of such documents and rightly so, for most testators exhibited greater concern for property than polemics.

It is well known that following the Elizabethan religious settlement of 1559 English Catholic and Protestant polemicists turned to the Church Fathers, and particularly to St Augustine, for source material with which to bolster their doctrinal arguments. Augustine's works were, of course, the basis for so many Reformation controversies, yet the theological disputes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were entirely different from those of the Early Church. Further development and refinement of doctrine had created a wide gulf between the two periods. Early modern polemic was therefore relying on patristic sources which at times were patently inappropriate. It might therefore be thought that there would be little to be gained from an examination of its use of the Fathers, particularly as there was no reason for bitterly opposed polemicists to take a restrained, objective, or even particularly discerning approach to the patristic sources in order to refute the ‘errors’ of the other side. Historians of the English Reformation have indeed shown little interest in the seventeenth century's preoccupation with St Augustine, the most widely cited of the patristic writers. Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote that in this period ‘the true meaning of St Augustine was the object of as much unprofitable speculation as has ever been expended on the equally inscrutable mind of God’. Those historians who have dealt briefly with polemical technique in this period have suggested that seventeenth-century uses of patristic texts were likely to be primitive. J. C. H. Aveling argued that both Catholic and Protestant writers were afflicted by the same weaknesses: their understanding of source texts was undermined by a ‘cult of great erudition’ which was essentially shallow.

‘For a bishop to live at one end of the world, and his Church at the other, must make the office very uncomfortable to the bishop, and in a great measure useless to the people.’ This was the verdict of Thomas Sherlock, bishop of London from 1748 to 1761, on the provision which had been made by the Church of England for the care of its congregations overseas. No Anglican bishopric existed outside the British Isles, but a limited form of responsibility for the Church overseas was exercised by the see of London. In the time of Henry Compton, bishop from 1675 to 1713, Anglican churches in the American colonies, in India and in European countrieshad all sought guidance from the bishop of London. By the 1740s the European connection had been severed; the bishop still accepted some colonial responsibilities but the arrangement was seen as anomalous by churchmen on both sides of the Atlantic. A three-thousand-mile voyage separated the colonists from their bishop, and those wishing to seek ordination could not do so unless they were prepared to cross the ocean. Although the English Church claimed that the episcopate was an essential part of church order, no Anglican bishop had ever visited America, confirmation had never been administered, and no church building in the colonies had been validly consecrated. While a Roman Catholic bishopric was established in French Canada at an early date, the Anglican Church overseas had no resident bishops until the end of the eighteenth century. In the words of Archbishop Thomas Seeker, this was ‘a case which never had its parallel before in the Christian world’.

German Pietism and cognate movements in the Reformed world, especially in the Netherlands, the Rhineland, Switzerland and Hungary, continue to be one of the most strenuously contested and assiduously worked fields not only of modern church history, but of the history of religious belief and practice not ecclesiastically orientated. Their bibliography is augmented by some 300 contributions a year by scholars from Finland to the United States, though the bulk of the work is German, and much of the rest is presented in German. A brief survey (which must necessarily exclude the literature relating to Austria and Salzburg) can do no more than sample what has been happening in this area since the Second. World War, and suggest its connexions with the older work, some of which remains of first class significance. Fortunately the journal Pietismus und Neuzeit (now published at Gottingen by Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht) has since its inception in 1974 carried not only papers of high quality, but a bibliography of the year's work. This was the achievement, until his untimely death in 1990, of Klaus Deppermann, and aimed strenuously to be complete. His successors have been daunted by the magnitude of this task, and do not promise to compass all the non-German literature; but no doubt will trace most of what is really important.