Replies

The Primacy of Peter of Gregory is not the same primacy of Peter of Rome today. It is a very different worldview.

Klaus Schatz [Jesuit Father theologian, professor of church history at the St. George’s Philosophical and Theological School in Frankfurt] on Priesthood, Canon, and the Development of Doctrine in his work, “Papal Primacy”:

. if we ask in addition whether the primitive church was aware, after Peter’s death, that his authority had passed to the next bishop of Rome, or in other words that the head of the community at Rome was now the successor of Peter, the Church’s rock and hence the subject of the promise in Matthew 16:18-19, the question, put in those terms, must certainly be given a negative answer.

"If one had asked a Christian in the year 100, 200, or even 300 whether the bishop of Rome was the head of all Christians, or whether there was a supreme bishop over all the other bishops and having the last word in questions affecting the whole Church, he or she would certainly have said no." (pages 1-3)

Before the second half of the second century there was in Rome no monarchical episcopacy for the circles mutually bound in fellowship. Peter Lampe's extensive work, "From Paul to Valentinus," chapter 41, pages 397

The New Testament contains no explicit record of a transmission of Peter's leadership; nor is the transmission of apostolic authority in general very clear. Furthermore, the Petrine texts were subjected to differing interpretations as early as the time of the Church Fathers. - http://www.prounione.urbe.it/dia-int/arcic/doc/e_arcic_authority2.html

The late Catholic priest and major Biblical scholar Raymond Brown (twice appointed to Pontifical Biblical Commission) states,

“The claims of various sees to descend from particular members of the Twelve are highly dubious. It is interesting that the most serious of these is the claim of the bishops of Rome to descend from Peter, the one member of the Twelve who was almost a missionary apostle in the Pauline sense – a confirmation of our contention that whatever succession there was from apostleship to episcopate, it was primarily in reference to the Puauline tyupe of apostleship, not that of the Twelve.” (“Priest and Bishop, Biblical Reflections,” Nihil Obstat, Imprimatur, 1970, pg 72.)

The Catholic historian Paul Johnson (educated at the Jesuit independent school Stonyhurst College, and at Magdalen College, Oxford, author of over 40 books and a conservative popular historian,) writes in his 1976 work, “History of Christianity” :

Eusebius presents the lists as evidence that orthodoxy had a continuous tradition from the earliest times in all the great Episcopal sees and that all the heretical movements were subsequent aberrations from the mainline of Christianity.

Looking behind the lists, however, a different picture emerges. In Edessa, on the edge of the Syrian desert, the proofs of the early establishment of Christianity were forgeries, almost certainly manufactured under Bishop Kune, the first orthodox Bishop.

In Egypt, Orthodoxy was not established until the time of Bishop Demetrius, 189-231, who set up a number of other sees and manufactured a genealogical tree for his own bishopric of Alexandria, which traces the foundation through ten mythical predecessors back to Mark, and so to Peter and Jesus.

Even in Antioch, where both Peter and Paul had been active, there seems to have been confusion until the end of the second century. Antioch completely lost their list; “When Eusebius’s chief source for his Episcopal lists, Julius Africanus, tried to compile one for Antioch, he found only six names to cover the same period of time as twelve in Rome and ten in Alexandria. http://reformation500.wordpress.com/2010/01/14/historical-literature-on-the-earliest-papacy/

Eusebius, while invaluable, also only sincerely believed and recorded as fact (Church History I.13) the “Legend of Abgar,” a story of a correspondence between the Lord and the local potentate at Edessa. Relative to this, Lightfoot writes of him, “A far more serious drawback to his value as a historian is the loose and uncritical spirit in which he sometimes deals with his materials. This shows itself in diverse ways. He is not always to be trusted in his discrimination of genuine and spurious documents.”

Roger Collins ((M.A., D. Litt., F.R.Hist.S., F.S.A. Scot., English medievalist at Edinburgh), writing of the Symmachan forgeries”, describes these “pro-Roman” “enhancements” to history:

So too would the spurious historical texts written anonymously or ascribed to earlier authors that are known collectively as the Symmachan forgeries. This was the first occasion on which the Roman church had revisited its own history, in particular the third and fourth centuries, in search of precedents. That these were largely invented does not negate the significance of the process...

Some of the periods in question, such as the pontificates of Sylvester and Liberius (352-366), were already being seen more through the prism of legend than that of history, and in the Middle Ages texts were often forged because their authors were convinced of the truth of what they contained. Their faked documents provided tangible evidence of what was already believed true...

“It is no coincidence that the first systematic works of papal history appear at the very time the Roman church’s past was being reinvented for polemical purposes.” (Collins, “Keepers of the Keys of Heaven,” pp 80-82).

Also from Johnson,

With Cyprian, then, the freedom preached by Paul and based on the power of Christian truth was removed from the ordinary members of the Church, it was retained only by the bishops, through whom the Holy Spirit still worked, who were collectively delegated to represent the totality of Church members. They were given wide powers of discretion, subject always to the traditional and attested truth of the Church and the scriptures. They were rulers, operating and interpreting a law. With Bishop Cyprian, the analogy with secular government came to seem very close. But of course it lacked one element: the ‘emperor figure’ or supreme priest…

There is no evidence that Rome exploited this text [Mt. 16:18] to assert its primacy before about 250 – and then, interestingly enough, in conflict with the aggressive episcopalian Cyprian – but what is clear is that in the second half of the second century, and no doubt in response to Marcion’s Pauline heresy – the first heresy Rome itself had experienced – Paul was eliminated from any connection with the Rome episcopate and the office was firmly attached to Peter alone…

The Church survived, and steadily penetrated all ranks of society over a huge area, by avoiding or absorbing extremes, by compromise, by developing an urbane temperament and erecting secular-type structures to preserve its unity and conduct its business. There was in consequence a loss of spirituality or, as Paul would have put it, of freedom… (A History of Christianity, by Paul Johnson, see pp. 51- 61, 63. [transcribed using OCR software])

Ratzinger asserted, Even stated, we are fairly certain today that, while the Fathers were not Roman Catholics as the thirteenth or nineteenth century world would have understood the term, they were, nonetheless, ‘Catholic,’ (Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology: Building Stones for a Fundamental Theology, trans. Sister Mary Frances McCarthy, Theolgische Prinzipienlehre ]San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987], p. 141.)