As described previously, the office of apostle was considered a conduit of the will and word of God from the heavenly realm to the congregations on earth. The office of apostle was so important that the apostolic church developed the doctrine of apostolic succession as a standard for ordaining bishops.

The idea of apostolic succession is simple: Catholic and Orthodox teaching claims that all of the bishops were appointed first by an apostle, as in the case of Timothy, who was appointed bishop of the church in Ephesus by Paul. Most metropolitan sees of the ancient church trace their bishops from the beginning of the church, as in Antioch, where, as mentioned earlier, Simon Peter is traditionally recorded as the first, and Ignatius the second, having succeeded in Antioch while Peter was still overseeing the congregations in Rome. After this first generation, all subsequent bishops, to be considered legitimate in the whole church, were appointed by bishops that had been selected by apostles.

The same Ignatius, writing just before his martyrdom in A.D. 107, says “your bishop presides in the place of God.” But although the bishops of the ancient churches, including the Anglicans, claim to be successors of the apostles, they do not to claim to have been given the direct communication channels from God the original apostles had. Though they were often godly and holy men, and many of them worked wonders in their time, the bishops of the early church also confessed to being sinners, and less than infallible.

To be a bishop in the pre-Constantinian Roman empire, as Fox's Book of Martyrs indicates, was often a sentence of death, especially in Rome, where the first martyr in another wave of persecution mentioned by Fox is often “the bishop of Rome.”