Citations:ecclesiast

specifically equated with "a priest" or preacher

 * 1928, Theodore Schroeder, Al. Smith, the Pope, and the Presidency: A Sober Discussion of the Church-state Issue:
 * In the historic conflict, it has often happened that persons who had been ordained Roman ecclesiasts, supported the divine right of kings and emperors, without recognition of the Pope's supremacy. Sometimes they even asserted the supremacy of such a "godly" State over the Pope and his Church. Of course, such ecclesiasts never had the papal approval. Neither did they long retain the papal recognition for their clerical claims, at least not without repentance. So far, I have never found even one Roman Catholic ecclesiast who opposed every, even indirect, form of "divine" control over civil governments. In other words, I have never found even one Roman Catholic priest who advocated the theory that the authority of civil government rested wholly and exclusively upon the upon the consent of the purely human judgment of the governed.
 * 2007, Gabriel Audisio, Preachers by Night: The Waldensian Barbes (15th-16th Centuries) (ISBN 900415454X):
 * As we have seen, the Waldensians took the apostolic lives led by their barbes as proof that they spoke the truth, just as, contrariwise, it proved the priests who lived unworthy lives had no power. Again, Monet Rey gives the most precise explanation of the matter in 1494:
 * The ecclesiasts had and possessed too great wealth and more goods than they needed; it was for that reason that they committed many bad actions; [...]
 * 2010, J. Thibodeaux, Negotiating Clerical Identities: Priests, Monks and Masculinity (ISBN 0230290469):
 * ... when ecclesiasts preached the universality of the Christian soul and a common bond among all Christian Frankish men.

a priest, nun, other church official

 * 2015, Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys: A Woman Survivor’s True Story Of Auschwitz (ISBN 1786251795):
 * The priests and nuns in the camp proved that they had real strength of character. One rarely met that except in deportees who were animated by faith in an ideal. Apart from the clerics, only the active members of the underground, or the militant communists, had that spirit. Many of the ecclesiasts were executed shortly after they arrived.

"a member of the clergy" (mentioned as or in connection with scholars)

 * 1991, Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, page 261:
 * ... in the figure of Nicholas the ecclesiast is represented as a far more proficient manipulator. Here the instruments of manipulation are other forms of clerical culture — astrology to be sure but also, and most tellingly, the mystery plays to which allusion is made throughout the Tale.
 * 2012, John Hostettler, Dissenters, Radicals, Heretics and Blasphemers: The Flame of Revolt (ISBN 1904380824):
 * He sent out his “poor priests” to preach to the lay people whom he believed could understand the bible better than the ecclesiasts and scholars who wanted to reserve it to themselves. “Christ”, he said, “did not write his teachings on tablets of stone or on parchment but in the hearts of men”. He considered confession was wrong since priests, he said, had no special authority nor the power to forgive sins; and he argued that priests should not hold political office[.]

probably "a member of the clergy"

 * 1882, Harper's New Monthly Magazine, volume 64, page 341:
 * The present defender of clerical interests is quite a different order of ecclesiast from the fiery and passionate Dupanloup, Bishop of Orleans.
 * 1891, The Missionary Herald, volume 87, page 236:
 * The church made little or no progress [...]. Churches and convents increased, as also did fast and feast days. Ceremonies were multiplied, and the ecclesiasts were embroiled in perpetual dispute with Greeks and Nestorians upon doctrinal points of little significance. The ecclesiasts were, in a great measure, ignorant, and the masses almost entirely so. The bishops and priests were engaged among tnemselves in intestine wars over position and rank.
 * 2013, Tony Philpott, Faithless: A Journey Out of Religion (ISBN 1908308524):
 * Could it be that God himself doesn't like contact with the fair sex – or could it be that the ecclesiasts never wanted him to talk to women? It is now 2013. We have come a long way from menstrual milk curdling, we've left behind the idea of female witches, and we've even gone on to allow girls to be altar servers at Mass. But no female priests – that particular glass ceiling is of the tempered, bulletproof kind.

possibly something along the lines of "an ideologue / adherent of a [certain] philosophy"

 * 1918, George Robert Bird, Tenderfoot Days in Territorial Utah, page 218:
 * ... whether that call be voiced by a Hebrew of the Hebrews, like Isaiah, or a Christian like Athanasius, who gloried in standing "contra mundum," or an ecclesiast like Torquemada, opponent of all heretics, or a Brigham Young against a modern world. Religion, if it is to live, must live right up against the world in which it lives, and mellow it with good living. It will surely die if it hides itself in monastic cloisters, beneath a nun's garments, ...

unsorted or unclear

 * 1945, Lewis Browne, The Wisdom of the Jewish People (Jason Aronson):
 * ..., especially an ecclesiast and theologian and a founder of monasteries.
 * 1958, American Academy for Jewish Research, Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research:
 * Indeed information culled from Contra Celsum, or for that matter from any work of a celebrated Greek Church Father, may have reached the masses without even the necessity of the work being first translated into Latin. Appreciative preachers may have derived the information for generations by hearsay from an ecclesiast of former days capable of reading it in the Greek original. This is especially true in our case, for the piece of information in question is a parable, ...
 * 1972, Charles A. Moser, A History of Bulgarian Literature 865-1944:
 * ... the churchman, who for so many years has preached long-suffering to the people, promising them that by this means they will save their souls. In "Borba" Botev goes further in analyzing the unholy alliance between the wealthy and the church, whose representatives he terms a "pack of wolves in sheep's clothing" concerned only with expounding the "sacred stupidity" expressed in the phrase "Fear God, respect the Czar." Such ecclesiasts are not all weaklings, like the dissolute monks ...
 * 1978, Jacob Neusner, American Judaism, Adventure in Modernity: An Anthological Essay, KTAV Publishing House, Inc. (ISBN 9780870686818), page 37:
 * Never before in Jewish history had the laity expected the rabbi to act as pastor and counselor, nor considered it necessary for the rabbi to be a "preacher." Fundamentals of religion were left to the elementary teachers in the Jewish schools. The rabbi was the judge, the scholar, the academic philosopher, and, in the medieval community, an ecclesiast, serving under the control of the autonomous lay council. Now the spirit of emancipation was sweeping across western Europe, ...
 * 2016, Stephen Becker, Juice: A Novel, Open Road Media (ISBN 9781504026888):
 * This third reaction is in the nature of a cordial though distant curtsy to evil, an acknowledgment of its presence but not of its importance, an awareness that without a modus vivendi—mutual respect and mutual concessions, with the negotiations usually conducted by an ecclesiast—humanity and evil will destroy each other. None of these reflections had ever passed through the mind of Frank Farrow; yet, born of a Jewish mother and an Irish father, he had become not an ecclesiast...