Did Jesus Use a Pulpit?

There are no pulpits in the Bible. Somehow, Jesus managed without a pulpit in his sermon on the mount or any of his other discourses. Even in the synagogues there is no evidence that Jesus, Paul or the rabbis would have used anything approaching our contemporary conception of a pulpit.

The first reference to a pulpit is found in a letter of Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, in the mid 3rd century. Cyprian makes several references to ordination as it relates to the pulpitum of his church building. In fact, this is one of the first references to any sort of formal development of the building of churches. Michael White, says,
"The term seems to refer to a slightly raised dais or platform at one end of the assembly hall where the clergy sat. In one instance the honor of ordination is symbolized in ascending the pulpitum in the loftiness of the higher place and conspicuous before the whole people. The phrase "to come to the pulpitum" even becomes the technical term for the ordination of a reader in the church at Carthage (White Vol.2, 23).

By the ninth century the pulpit appears in a lateral (sometimes elevated) position in the basilican cathedrals of the day. This move represented the less prominent place of preaching in the congregation and the heightened emphasis upon liturgical aspects of worship (Dargan, 109).

Eventually, pulpits became extremely ornate in their construction. Carved stairways, intricate ornamentation, and grand canopies describe the pulpit as a piece of art in the pre-reformation european cathedral. John Throop describes preaching in one such pulpit at the Trinity Church in Stratford-on-Avon. "To reach the marble pulpit in that church," he said, "I had to climb nearly 12 feet up a long flight of circular steps. I couldn’t tell whether the breathlessness that followed was from being up so high, or being in a pulpit from which, hundreds of years ago, holy and articulate preachers, perhaps even the Bard himself, preached Gods Word (Throop, 48)."
The reformation led not only to a renewed emphasis upon the sermon but to the repositioning of the pulpit in the center of the sanctuary. This better symbolized the reformation emphasis upon the centrality of God’s Word.
by Kenton C. Anderson


Today many churches don't have pulpits or move them from time to time. Is this wrong? Nowhere in the Bible does it say, "Thou Shalt Not Remove Thy Pulpit." Some think it does. But then again this is a matter of preference and not doctrine or the Bible. To say it is more than that is to say more than the Bible does. Many Pastors say more than the Bible does on certain matters anyway, isn't that sad. This is for another blog post.

I trust the power is in the Word and not in the furniture. What about you?