Talk:High priest

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I fear such comparisons have fairly little merit on the whole, simply mapping the function of a high priest in one religion against another fairly high position in another is likely to do little for enlightenment and much for misunderstanding. The role of such a person varies as much between different religeons as the names do, and it could cause confusion to attempt to consisely map it out like this with no further information.

For Christianity specifically, as that is the religion I am the most familiar, even though popes etc. could be considered to have the same leadership powers of a high priest, most Christians, catholic or otherwise would be loath to classify anyone, bar Aaron, Melchisideck or Christ himself as a high priest. This is because a high priest in Christian (and I presume at least pre-Talmud jewish also) beliefs, a priest is someone who can enter the holy of holies and communicate with god, worship him, and ask for forgiveness on behalf of the people. However in Christianity, attributing this role to an individual is this is seen as at least slightly heretical since one may already do such things directly through Christ himself.

I rewrote the paragraph on Christianity so it would not be "a high priest is" but rather "a high priest could sometimes be compared to" (I also removed the confusion between Catholicism and Christianity as a whole). I suspect some of the other religions (most specifically islam) will need similar modification. user:scarlet

I was searching for the Tarot High Priestess card and was redirected to high priest which does not have a High Priestess link

[edit] High Priestess vs. High Priest

I think it is arbitrary and offensive that High Priestess redirects to this page, where all the links about High Priestesses are relegated to the bottom of the list. I think that this page should be split into separate disambiguation pages for High Priest and High Priestess to avoid giving priority to the masculine page. Does anyone else have strong feelings about this? - AdelaMae ^{(talk - contribs)} 00:23, 8 December 2006 (UTC)