Note 5 — Chapter V · ORGANIZATION AND ECONOMICS

This economic development, too, may have been Jewish, as it was heathen.5 It is certainly also Christian. The “prophets” are represented in the Acts (xi, 27) as at work already in the days of Claudius; and they were an established class at the time of the writing of First Corinthians (xii, 28), standing next to “apostles” and above “teachers.” That passage is obviously post-Pauline, if we are to think of Paul as spending only a few years in his eastern propaganda. But the prophets are ostensibly numerous in the earliest days of the church,6 and seem to have subsisted alongside of “apostles” at the outset. All along they must have found some subsistence: in time they are “established.” The eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth sections of the Teaching, which are our best evidence of the progression, show a gradual triumph of the economic factor, registering itself in the additions. The fifteenth section divides in two parts, an economic and an ethical, the economic coming first:—