Why an office clerk and a cleric share the same ancestor word
Clerk once meant a person ordained to ministry. In the Middle Ages almost nobody but priests could read or write, so the words for churchmen and for literate record-keepers grew from one Latin root, clericus. Dig further and the Greek source means something odder: belonging to an inheritance.
Clergy are the leaders of established religions, typically presiding over rituals and teaching doctrine. The Greek klerikos, behind the Latin clericus, referred to the Levitical priests of the Old Testament, whose only inheritance was said to be the Lord himself rather than land. Old French clergié carried the sense of learning. The word even travelled into Arabic, mainly in Lebanon through French, as kleriki, meaning a seminarian. Priest has its own lineage, from the Greek presbyter, an elder.
Titles differ widely. Christianity has deacons, pastors, bishops and a pope; Islamic leadership includes imams, muftis and mullahs; Judaism has the rabbi, or teacher, and the hazzan, or cantor. Christian clergy are ordained, set apart for ministry, and a distinction runs between ranks and offices. A cardinal is nearly always a cleric, yet cardinal is not a type of cleric, and an archbishop is simply a bishop in a senior post. In the Anglican tradition, holy orders are treated as part of the person rather than a job: a retired archbishop reverts to plain bishop but never stops being one. Of 38 national Anglican churches, fifteen permit women bishops, though only five have actually consecrated any.
Buddhist clergy, the Sangha, began as a single community founded by Gautama Buddha in the 5th century BC, living under shared rules called the Vinaya and wandering as beggars for most of the year. As the faith spread it diversified. Contact with the Tibetan Bon religion produced Tibetan Buddhism, while exchanges with Confucian and Taoist monks between roughly 200 and 900 AD shaped Chinese Ch'an. Monks who once lived purely on alms took up manual labour, which remains central in Zen.
Theravada schools in Thailand, Burma, Cambodia and Sri Lanka stayed conservative and still generally forbid monks from farming. Their female monastic lineages died out in the 14th and 15th centuries. In North America, married Zen priests may hold secular jobs, and Naropa University in Colorado offers an accredited Master of Divinity for Buddhist clergy.
Source: Clergy
