This fact is now admitted by nearly all denominations, even Episcopalians.  In the work entitled “Episcopacy Tested by Scripture,” published by the Protestant Episcopal Tract Society, New York, the author, one of their able advocates, makes the following admission concerning the title bishop in the New Testament, “that the name is there given to the middle order or presbyters; and all that we read in the New Testament concerning bishops, including of course the words overseer and oversight, which have the same derivation, is to be regarded as pertaining to that middle grade”—­the presbyters or elders.  Page 12.

The noted historian Waddington, also an Episcopalian, makes the same admission in the following words:  “It is also true that in the earliest government of the first Christian society, that of Jerusalem, not the elders only, but the ‘whole church’ were associated with the apostles; and it is even certain that the terms bishop and elder or presbyter were, in the first instances, and for a short period, sometimes used synomously, and indiscriminately applied to the same order in the ministry.”  Church History, Part I, p. 41.  The italicizing is mine.

The well-known historian Milman, also an Episcopalian, in his History of Christianity, says, “The earliest Christian communities appear to have been ruled and represented, in the absence of the apostle who was their first founder, by their elders, who are likewise called bishops, or overseers of the church.”  Page 194.

Kurtz, in his Church History, says:  “To aid them in their work, or to supply their places in their absence (Acts 14:23), the apostles ordained rulers in every church, who bore the common name of elders from their dignity, and of bishops from the nature of their office.  That originally the elders were the same as the bishops, we gather with absolute certainty from the statements of the New Testament and of Clement of Rome, a disciple of the apostles. (See his first epistle to the Corinthians, Chaps. 42, 44:52.) 1.  The presbyters are expressly called bishops—­compare [the Greek especially] Acts 20:17 with verse 28, and Titus 1:5 with verse 7. 2.  The office of presbyter is described as next to and highest after that of apostle (Acts 15:6, 22).  Similarly, the elders are represented as those to whom alone the rule, the teaching and the care of the church is entrusted (1 Tim. 5:17; 1 Pet. 5:1, etc.)....  In [several] passages of the New Testament and of Clement we read of many bishops in one and the same church.  In the face of such indubitable evidence, it is difficult to account for the pertinacity with which Romish and Anglican theologians insist that these two offices had from the first been different in name and functions....  Even Jerome, Augustine, Urban II. (1091) and Petrus Lombardus admit that originally the two had been identical.  It was reserved for the Council of Trent to convert this truth into a heresy.”  Pages 67, 68.  Chrysostom, Theodoret, and others also admitted the same.