Question: Is an evangelist really a patriarch?

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Question: Is an evangelist really a patriarch?

Introduction to Question

In a report of a discourse given by Joseph Smith between June 26 and July 2, 1839, Willard Richards wrote that “An Evangelist Is a patriarch even the oldest man of the Blood of Joseph or of the seed of Abraham, whereever the Church of Christ is established in the earth, there should be a patriarch for the benefit of the posterity of the Saints as it was with Jacob. in giving his patriarchal blessing unto his Sons &c.”

This quote is often connected to the text of Ephesians 4:11–14

11 And he agave some, bapostles; and some, cprophets; and some, devangelists; and some, epastors and fteachers;

12 For the aperfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the bedifying of the body of Christ:

13 Till we all come in the aunity of the faith, and of the bknowledge of the Son of God, unto a cperfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ:

14 That we henceforth be no more achildren, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of bdoctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive;

Thus, Joseph Smith is assumed to be mapping the organization of the modern Church as it existed in mid-1839 to the ancient Church established by Christ.

Some have questioned whether evangelists really are patriarchs, given that the typical referent of the word “evangelist”—including its Greek counterpart—is a missionary rather than one who pronounces blessings on people’s heads.

This article gives at least one bit of evidence that might be used to substantiate the teachings of Joseph Smith on this point.

Response to Question

S. Kent Brown wrote:

In its earliest sense, on the other hand, from a badly preserved inscription from the isle of Rhods, the noun euvangelistes refers to “one who proclaims oracular sayings,” That is to say, this person declared future events that were hidden from those in the mortal world, beyond human view. This is precisely the function of a modern patriarch—to tell individual church members the things they otherwise could not see about their own futures from God’s point of view, thus opening a window onto what that person may experience and become. Such declarations come not to congregations or to the church as a whole but to individuals, one by one, person by person.

To add evidence to the view that an evangelist is a patriarch, Richard Lloyd Anderson notes that “Paul, the most successful missionary on record, never calls himself an evangelist…Philip is called an evangelist many years after any of his known missionary journeys (Acts 21:8), and Timothy is told to do the work of an evangelist in the context of correcting and guiding the Saints who are in danger of apostasy, not of preaching to outsiders who do not have the truth (2 Tim. 4:2–5).”

It is clear that the evidence we have from the early Church and archaeology on this matter is quite fragmentary which, as Richard Lloyd Anderson stresses, reminds us of the need for modern revelation in excavating and restoring to our knowledge the best understanding regarding it.

We might well remember that this teaching of Joseph Smith does not announce itself as coming from revelation and comes from a second-hand source. That does not necessarily mean that it didn’t come from revelation and that it is unreliably documented, but it can give us at least a little reason to be skeptical of efforts to defend the teaching at all costs. It might have been Joseph’s best reading of the New Testament texts and/or other sources.