- What’s the earliest mention of a Pope (Not nessarily with that title but showing a Bishop of Rome and his athority) outside of the bible and from someone secular if that’s the right word.
Though not exactly secular, the first non-Catholic that I am aware of that at least seems to allude to the bishop of Rome and his authority is Tertullian, a former Catholic turned Montanist, who, writing about 220 in his treatise
On Modesty is not very happy about what seems to have been an edict unilaterally issued by the bishop of Rome abrogating the previous church-wide discipline of not pardoning believers who committed the sin of adultery or fornication but who later repented:
I hear that there has even been an edict set forth, and a peremptory one too. The Pontifex Maximus — that is, the bishop of bishops — issues an edict: I remit, to such as have discharged (the requirements of) repentance, the sins both of adultery and of fornication. O edict, on which cannot be inscribed, Good deed! And where shall this liberality be posted up? On the very spot, I suppose, on the very gates of the sensual appetites, beneath the very titles of the sensual appetites. There is the place for promulgating such repentance, where the delinquency itself shall haunt. There is the place to read the pardon, where entrance shall be made under the hope thereof. But it is in the church that this (edict) is read, and in the church that it is pronounced; and (the church) is a virgin! (chapter 1)
. . .
I now inquire into your opinion, (to see) from what source you usurp this right to the Church. If, because the Lord has said to Peter, Upon this rock will I build My Church, to you have I given the keys of the heavenly kingdom; or, Whatsoever you shall have bound or loosed in earth, shall be bound or loosed in the heavens, you therefore presume that the power of binding and loosing has derived to you, that is, to every Church akin to Peter, what sort of man are you, subverting and wholly changing the manifest intention of the Lord, conferring (as that intention did) this (gift) personally upon Peter? (chapter 21)
I could be wrong but, though Tertullian refers to the unnamed bishop in question as a “Psychic” and does not mention the bishop’s city, I am only aware of the Catholic bishop of Rome ever claiming such personal petrine authority in the Church. Elsewhere, in his treatise
On Monogamy, Tertullian refers to Psychics as those who held, as Catholics hold, that lay believers are permitted to remarried after the death of their spouse. Tertullian, then a Montanist, wrote against granting such permission.
I know this isn’t exactly what you asked for but an earlier example of the exercise of papal authority can be found in the Easter Controversy of about 195, when, according to early-fourth-century church historian Eusebius, Victor, the bishop of Rome (now known as Pope Victor I), excommunicated the Churches of Asia Minor for observing Easter on a day different from day agreed upon by the rest of the Churches. He was persuaded to lift his excommunication but the incident shows that the bishop of Rome at least believed that he himself had papal authority, had personal, universal jurisdiction over the whole Church. Many bishops argued with him that he should not have excommunicated the Churches of Asia Minor but none of them seems to have argued that Victor, as bishop of Rome, did not have the personal authority to excommunicate them. See
book 5, chapters 23-25History of the Church,.
