During the time of the apostles, were the local churches headed by single bishops (as Catholics claim), or by co-governing elders (as many Protestants claim)? Catholic apologist Dave Armstrong has a recent blog post in which he points out some interesting biblical evidence on this question: that the seven “angels” of Revelation 2 and 3 have long been understood, even by Protestant scholars, as referring to the seven bishops of the churches of Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea.
In my book The Early Church Was the Catholic Church, I make a similar point: reading the “angels” as bishops is the best interpretation of the biblical data. As the Evangelical scholar Colin J. Hemer explains, there are basically five ways of interpreting this passage:
A choice is generally offered between (1) heavenly guardians of the churches, and (2) human representatives of them, generally their bishops. Three other principal variants deserve consideration: (3) that the “angels” are personifications of the churches; (4) that they are literally human “messengers”; and (5) that the term is used in some complex and elusive way or at differing levels, so that we cannot expect to assign it a lexical equivalent that tells the whole story.
Jesus’ warning to these “angels” about their possible imprisonment and apparent spiritual lukewarmness (see Rev. 2:5, 10) suggests that we’re not to understand these to be literal angels (option 1). They’re also not personifications of the churches (3), since Jesus explicitly says that “the seven stars are the angels of the seven churches and the seven lampstands are the seven churches” (Rev. 1:20). The stars/angels are clearly connected to the lampstands/churches, but they’re not the same thing.
So unless we’re going to give up on interpreting the passage (5), that leaves us with theories (2) and (4): that the “angels” are bishops or else some kind of messengers for the local churches. But they don’t appear to be simply messengers: they’re being praised or rebuked for the state of each of their churches.
What English readers may not realize is that the word for angel in the New Testament is ággelos, which means “messenger.” As Pope St. Gregory the Great explained, “the word ‘angel’ denotes a function rather than a nature. Those holy spirits of heaven have indeed always been spirits. They can only be called angels when they deliver some message.” In other words, when God sends one of the heavenly spirits (like Gabriel) to deliver a message, we call that spirit a “messenger,” or “angel.”
Why does that matter? Because the Septuagint translation of Malachi 2:7 (“the lips of a priest should guard knowledge, and men should seek instruction from his mouth, for he is the messenger of the Lord of hosts”) refers to the priest as an ággelos, angel/messenger. The one delivering the message of God has an angelic mission to the Church. So reading the seven “angels” (or “seven messengers”) as the seven bishops makes the most grammatical and contextual sense.
This is a good reminder that (1) the structure of the Church (in which there’s one bishop per local church) dates to the time of the apostles and (2) we should pray for our bishops, who have been entrusted the task of being messengers of the good news of the Gospel.