its never used as an office of the NT church ...
The word doesnt't even appear in the Pauline epistles, where the qualifications for elders and deacons reside.
Are you sure your aren't employing YOPIOS?
It's too bad English doesn't have a word which means exclusively "hieraeus," as distinct from "presbuteros," but it doesn't. The original derivation and application of the word "priest" in English was to Christian presbyters.
And the Old Covenant is inferior to the New because its sacrifice and priesthood were only an image of the New covenant's sacrifice and priesthood, both of which flow through Christ.
Yes, the Septuagint uses that priestly root word to refer to Melchizedek in Genesis 14:18, as “priest of the God Most High”.
Nice precedent for understanding 1 Peter 2, I’d say!
HF
Dear dartuser,
I feel so sorry for you since you are probably using a Bible that does not have the correct translations. Priest was one of the words that was changed as far as I know.
When your translation is checked against the Duoay Rheims, the Latin and the Greek, as well as the Jerusalem Bible, you will see the word priest.
Christ is the high priest in the old sense, and the only one. Christian priests are just ministers of Christ. We believer they received their authority from the Apostles through the successors of the apostles, the chief priests whom we call bishops. The power to ordain came from the Apostles, who selected priests and deacons and passed on the ordination power to some of them, called bishops. Now this is the schematic. How it worked out historically is hard to see because of the scarcity of sources, and the writers of the New Testament, as in so many cases, do not bother with such details. We do know that by the time of Ignatius that that was the way he saw things and we assume it was the norm.