RE: Theosis is an interesting idea

Those links aren't working for me - the server could be misbehaving. I'll have to try again later. Meanwhile, ...

So I assume from your early comments that LDS does assume that the eleven apostles identified in the gospels did receive such authority, and possibly some others - maybe those identified in Acts.

There's definitely no documents providing any chain for the early church authorities. There's not even any convincing evidence that any of them had ever even heard of the gospels until the middle of the 2nd century.

The information we have about Christianity in the first century is very strangely contradictory and confusing when interpreted through the beliefs of modern Christians. If you take the New Testament and ignore the "traditional" order of the books, and instead group them by authorship and date, you find very curious patterns - Paul seems to know nothing about any earthly life and teachings of Jesus, for example.

The best picture I can form of the first two centuries of Christianity suggests that most of the details of its central doctrines came together in the middle of the 2nd century around the group in Rome. Prior to that, there seems to be almost no organization whatsoever, beyond local groups who had wildly varying practices and beliefs. Prior to that, there's no really compelling evidence that the various individuals and groups that identified themselves as "Christian" (or were later identified by the church as "Christian") were related to one another at all.

It seems as if the various restoration movements - most of whom claim that somewhere in the "early church" the "true" message got lost - are in the strange position of trying to reconstruct their "true" message from documents that were primarily produced by the very apostates they're attacking.

So much of what various Christian groups seem to think they know about the "early church" comes from Acts. But the Marcionite version of Luke didn't have the tail end that leads into Acts, and some scholars now think that Acts was first composed and Luke was revised specifically to undermine the Marcion heresy.

It's also interesting, given the widespread acceptance of the "two-source hypothesis", that so little attention is given by Christian thinkers to the influence of the Q document on the gospels. When you look at the parts of Matthew and Luke that are believed to have come from Q, it's almost as if there were two or three different original sources for what became Christianity - a "Son of Man" cult, an apocalyptic counter-culture movement, and a "kingdom" movement, for want of better terms. Mark glues them all together and then Acts pulls a sleight-of-hand to convert them from mythology to history.