Apostolic, Apostolical, belonging or relating to the apostles, or traceable to the apostles. Thus we say, the apostolical age, apostolical character, apostol- ical doctrine, constitutions, traditions, etc. The title, as one of honor, and likely also to imply authority, has been falsely assumed in various ways. Thus the pretended succession of bishops in the prelatical church- es has been called Apostolical Succession. See Suc- cession. The Roman Church calls itself the Apos- tolical Church (q. v.), and the see of Rome the Apos- tolic See (srdi's ojiiisti)Iic(i). The pope calls himself the Apostolical Bishop. At an early period of the church every bishop's see was called by courtesy an apostolic Bee, and the term implied, therefore, no pre-eminence. The first time the term apostolical is attributed to bishops is in a letter of Clovis to the council of Or- leans, held in 511, though that king does not in it expressly denominate them apostolical, but apostolicd sede dignissimi, highly worthy of the apostolical see. In 581 Guntram calls the bishops assembled at the council of Macon apostolical pontiffs. In progress of time, the bishop of Rome increasing in power above the rost, and the three patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch, ami Jerusalem having fallen into the hands
of the Sar; n<, the title apostolical was restrained to
the pope and his church alone. At length, some of the popes, and St. Gregory the Great, not content to hold the title by this tenure, began to insist that it be- longed to them by another and peculiar right as the successors of St. Peter. In 1049 the council of Rheims declared that the pope was the sole apostolic- al primate of the universal church. Hence a great number of apostolicals : apostolical see, apostolical nuncio, apostolical notary, apostolical chamber, apos- tolical brief, apostolical vicar, apostolical blessing,
I etc., in all of which phrases the name apostolical is identical with papal. — See Elliott, Delineation of Ro- manism, bk. iii, ch. v ; Bingham, Orig. Eccles. bk. ii, ch. j ii and xvii ; Hook, Ch. Dictionary, s. v.
Apostolic Age, that period of church history i which extends from the day of Pentecost to the death of the last surviving apostle (John).
With the rise of Rationalism in Germany the au- thenticity of several books of the New Testament, and consequently the history of the apostolical age, became a matter of doubt, and the subject of critical investigation. The first who undertook to reconstruct the history of the apostolical age was Semler, who, in a number of treatises, insisted on a distinction being made between that which is of permanent value in the primitive history of Christianity and that which is temporary and transitory, and pointed to the great I influence which the opposition between Jewish Chris- tianity and the Pauline school had upon the for- [ mation of the church. Under the treatment of Sem- | ler the early Christian Church was eviscerated of all | life, and nothing left but a dry abstraction. The j same may be said of the works of Professor Planck, of ! Gottingen (especially his Geschichte der christlichen Gesellschaftsverfassung), though they are in some re- spects valuable. From the degradation of the apos- tolic age by these and many other writers of similar views, it was rescued by the theologians of the new evangelical school, especially Neander (Geschichte der Pflanzung tmd Leitung der christlichen Kirche durch die Apostel, Hamburg, 1832, 4th edition, which reviews all the works that had been published since the appear- ance of the first edition), who shows throughout as deep piety as critical acumen. In the mean time, however, an entirely new view of the apostolic age was devel- j oped by Professor F. C. Baur and his disciples, the so- called Tubingen School (q. v.), the first and most im- portant manifesto of which was the Life of Jesus by Strauss, while the entire theory was most completely I exhibited in Baur's Paulus (ler Apostel Jesu Christi (1845, Svo), and in Schwegler, Nachnpostolisches Zeital- | ter (Tubingen, 1846, 2 vols.). This school rejected ' the authenticity of most of the books of the New Tes- ; tament, and regarded them only as sources of infor- mation for the "Post-apostolic Age." The essential points of this new theory are : (1) that, in the minds J of Christ and the first apostles, the new religion was j only a development or perfection of Judaism, and the same with what was later called Ebionism ; (2), that j Paul, in opposition to the other apostles, founded Gen- tile Christianity, quite a distinct system ; (3), that Ebionism and Paulinism were reconciled in the 2d cen- tury by a number of men of both parties who then wrote Luke's Acts of the Apostles and several of the apostolical epistles; and on the basis of this reconcili- ation the Christian Church was built. (For an ac- count of it, see Schaff, Apostolic AgQ., § 36; London Eclectic Review, June, 1853.) Sec Tubingen School. The subject called forth a very animated discussion and a numerous literature, and the theologians of Tu- bingen gradually became more moderate in their de- structive criticism. The work of Ritschl on the Or- igin of the Old Catholic Church (Entstehung der alt hatholischen Kirche, Bonn, 1850) deserves especial credit j in this respect. Among the works on the orthodox ; side which were called forth by this discussion were 1 those of Baumgarten (Die Apostel geschichte, Brunswick, j 1852, 2 vols.), Trautman (Die apostolische Kirche, 1848), j and G. V. Lechler, D is apost lische und nachapostolische i Zeitalter (Stuttgardt, 1857, 2d ed.). ! As the critics of the Tubingen school greatly dif- fered in their views respecting the authenticity of the \ several books of the New Testament, the question arose what parts of the history of the apostolic age can be established with certainty by the books of the New Testament considered separately ? The Tubin- gen school did not reject the authenticity of the Epis-