O
onemangang
Guest
Did you give up on using Scripture and Early Church Fathers to refute Catholic Truth?
Lets see what Snow left out, shall we?
VATICAN PROPAGANDA notwithstanding, Peter was never “bishop of Rome.”** In the five narrative books with which the New Testament begins-the four gospels and the Acts of the Apostles-Peter is given prominence, a prominence that would later be interpreted as his “primacy” over the other bishops of the primitive Church**. But the early Church communities had a congregational structure, like the synagogues from which they sprang. The word bishop (episkopos, or superintendent, in Greek) was at first interchangeable with the word elder (presbyteros, from which we derive our word priest) and did not signify rule over others.** After the death of the apostles, who had been the chief witnesses to Jesus’s life and teaching, and under the pressure of bizarre heresies and the consequent need to establish a voice of orthodoxy within each community, the Churches of the late first century began to single out an episkopos to take doctrinal charge of each local Church.** The Christian community at Rome, however, seems not to have adopted this strategy till toward the middle of the second century. The first man who can be designated “bishop of Rome” with historical certainty is Anicetus, who stands eleventh in the Vatican’s somewhat fanciful list of early “popes” and who served from 155 to his death c. 166.But Peter did die at Rome, crucified during the first widespread persecution of Christians-under the emperor Nero-and his bones surely lie beneath the high altar of Saint Peter’s Basilica. Rome’s possession of these bones, along with those of the other great martyr of the primitive Church, Paul-a rabbi converted to the new form of Judaism that would become Christianity and a missionary of such overreaching devotion that he was belatedly given the title “apostle”-would become in the generation after Anicetus the foundation of the Roman Church’s universal prominence.By the time of Ireneus of Lyons, who wrote in the last quarter of the second century, Rome had become the pilgrimage center of the Christian world on account of its shrines to the two martyred apostles, who were now imagined to have founded the Roman Church by shedding their blood, and ** Rome’s bishop was seen-at least by some-as final arbiter in disputes throughout the Christian world.** For Ireneus, as no doubt for many others, the Church of Rome was already “the great and illustrious Church,” and “every [other] Church-that is, the faithful everywhere-must resort to this Church on account of its pre-eminent authority, in which the apostolic tradition has been preserved without interruption.” Thus, within 150 years of Jesus’s crucifixion, within 75 years of the last of the New Testament writings, there was a well-attested tradition that the Church of Rome in the person of its bishop was the most reliable bulwark against doctrinal error and the last court of appeal in any matter that could not be settled locally. If the “Petrine succession”-the monarchical succession of the long line of popes from the apostle Peter-is little more than wish fulfillment,**it must be admitted that the roots of the Roman bishopric are ancient and most venerable, springing from the soil of the post-apostolic age, the age in which the Church as a whole took on a form of organization it would preserve to our day.Though in this early period the Roman Church was often seen as the common standard of orthodoxy, its orthodoxy was too flexible for many less elastic Christians. The bishop of Rome was often criticized for being too easygoing toward heretics and too forgiving toward sinners.**His critics favored purer priests, segregation by economic class, and lifelong penance for public sin.
**For all the honor and status accorded Rome in the Church’s early centuries, it was never imagined as unique among Churches, only primus inter pares, first in honor among equals. Other Churches, especially those with ancient bishoprics (like Antioch, Ephesus, Corinth, Alexandria, and Carthage), behaved more or less as Rome did, sending letters of encouragement and admonishment to younger, less distinguished Churches, offering monetary support, excommunicating when necessary. **But all the bishops were seen as successors to Jesus’s apostles, sharing apostolic responsibility for all the Churches and sharing also the apostolic power, which was unitary and indivisible, because it descended ultimately from Jesus, the Way.******Nor was criticism a one-way street that could be employed only by a greater Church against a lesser. In the midst of a raging controversy about whether it was necessary to rebaptize penitents who had lapsed during persecution, the African Churches, gathered under their unrelenting metropolitan bishop Cyprian, “the pope of Carthage,” condemned the more flexible position of Stephen, bishop of Rome, in three overwrought synods, accusing Stephen of “set[ting] himself up as a bishop of bishops” and “exercis[ing] the powers of a tyrant to force his colleagues into obedience.” Stephen replied serenely that he was Peter, the living representative of the first Peter, to whom Jesus had promised: "You are Peter [Rock in the Greek of the New Testament] and upon this Rock will I build my Church.
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