Unless Professor Einstein’s theory of relativity can be translated into any useful kind of time-travel, most of our clues about life in the early church will have to come from ancient letters and ancient prayer texts. A prayer text from a dusty library may yield, for example, an understanding of what “presbyters” actually did. We have such a prayer from the early third century from the hand of Hippolytus of Rome. While our modern prayers derive a great deal from his, some of the practices of the ancient church have fallen away. In his day, bishops were chosen by the people, and the other bishops merely consented. Presbyters, by contrast, seem to have been chosen by the bishops. This makes sense, since it allowed the bishops to hand-pick their most trusted advisers.
It seems that bishops were at first reluctant to share their presiding at the Eucharist with presbyters. In fact, by the time of the fourth-century church’s growth spurt in Rome, the bishop sent deacons out with fragments of the host from his Eucharist to drop into the chalices of the presbyters at the outlying eucharistic celebrations. We still have a vestige of this fermentum in the Mass today, a reminder of the early bishops’ desire to give a powerful sign of the unity of all celebrations of the Eucharist with their ministry, and a clue to their reluctance to delegate a sacramental ministry to the presbyters. –Rev. James Field, Copyright (c) J. S. Paluch Co.