You should familiarize yourself with Lampe before dismissing him sight unseen. The significance of his work is precisely that he marshaled an array of evidence unparalleled by previous efforts. Papal supremacy and succession are historical truth claims. If the only evidence for such claims are bare assertion by those not contemporaneous to the events, then those claims cannot be taken seriously as proof. Irenaeus at best is providing late, biased, and demonstrably erroneous testimony, again, not through ill will, but through the limits of circumstance. All of which makes an extremely poor factual foundation for making a claim of global authority.
Peace,
SR
I may not be dismissing Lampe so much as your interpretation of him. Either way, I’m happy to look at the scholarship, especially if it is as good a collection of primary sources as it seems.
But don’t wave that blanket “bias” charge. It’s a lousy cop-out and terrible form for a historian. Every man is who he is and looks at things a certain way.
And don’t forget SR, that your claim against Petrine primacy rests not only on Irenaeus but on a whole tissue of assumptions from the interpretation of “Petros” on down to every disputed passages in the Fathers.
Oh it’s real easy to not see any factual evidence when you’ve already conveniently dismissed everything inimical to your case, n’est-ce pas?
And he is far from being alone among scholars and authors, even Catholic ones. .
• Klaus Schatz [Jesuit Father theologian, professor of church history at the St. George’s Philosophical and Theological School in Frankfurt] in his work, “Papal Primacy ,” pp. 1-4, finds:
“New Testament scholars agree..., The further question whether there was any notion of an enduring office beyond Peter’s lifetime, if posed in purely historical terms, should probably be answered in the negative.
That is, if we ask whether the historical Jesus, in commissioning Peter, expected him to have successors, or whether the authority of the Gospel of Matthew, writing after Peter’s death, was aware that Peter and his commission survived in the leaders of the Roman community who succeeded him, the answer in both cases is probably 'no.”
“....that does not mean that the figure and the commission of the Peter of the New Testament did not encompass the possibility, if it is projected into a Church enduring for centuries and concerned in some way to to secure its ties to its apostolic origins and to Jesus himself.
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.” (page 1-2)
[Schatz goes on to express that he does not doubt Peter was martyred in Rome, and that Christians in the 2nd century were convinced that Vatican Hill had something to do with Peter's grave.]
"Nevertheless, concrete claims of a primacy over the whole church cannot be inferred from this conviction. 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." (page 3, top)
•Catholic theologian and a Jesuit priest Francis Sullivan, in his work From Apostles to Bishops (New York: The Newman Press), examines possible mentions of “succession” from the first three centuries, and concludes from that study that,
“the episcopate [development of bishops] is a the fruit of a post New Testament development,” and cannot concur with those (interacting with Jones) who see little reason to doubt the notion that there was a single bishop in Rome through the middle of the second century:
Hence I stand with the majority of scholars who agree that one does not find evidence in the New Testament to support the theory that the apostles or their coworkers left [just] one person as “bishop” in charge of each local church...
As the reader will recall, I have expressed agreement with the consensus of scholars that available evidence indicates that the church of Rome was led by a college of presbyters, rather than a single bishop, for at least several decades of the second century... Source and more .