THE RISE OF THE PAPACY
The Jesus movement, what was soon called “Christianity,” had spread
from Jerusalem through large metropolitan centers such as Alexandria,
Antioch, and Rome, where the Christian congregations were headed by
powerful bishops. In theory, all bishops were equal in the light of the
Apostolic succession, but some were clearly more equal than others, and
Rome was the most equal of all. It had a true claim to the Apostolic suc-
cession in both Peter and Paul, who early carried the Gospel there; it was,
moreover, no mere provincial capital but the head of the empire. As the
churches emerged from the catacombs into their privileged position as the
Great Church under the Christian emperor Constantine, the episcopate
began to conform ever more closely to the Roman administrative system.
Bishops of provincial capitals became metropolitan archbishops with juris-
diction over their episcopal peers in lesser cities and towns, so that the
eventual organizational chart of the Christian Church resembled that of the
Roman Empire that housed it.
Though the evidence is unmistakable that the bishop of Rome was indeed
accorded a kind of primacy of honor among his episcopal and archepiscopal
peers, the questions of absolute primacy never arose in the early Church. The
presence of many venerable and flourishing centers of Christianity, each ruled
by a bishop who stood in a direct and equal line of descent from the apostolic
tradition would have rendered such claims nonsense. Absolute primacy arose
only when multiplicity had been reduced to polarity. When Rome and
Constantinople, where Constantine had transferred the imperial capital in 330
CE, each stood alone at the head of a separate spiritual, cultural, and political
tradition. Rome did intervene in the affairs of other churches from the begin-
ning; no one protested, and there are even examples of the Roman church
being appealed to in certain cases. It is only in the fourth century that the bish-
ops of Rome, who bore the unofficial title of “pope,” began to insist on the right
of final jurisdiction based on Peter's position vis-á-vis the other Apostles.
The so-called Petrine argument, that Peter was the head of the Apostles and
that the bishop of Rome, as his episcopal successor there was the head of the
Church, was deeply resisted in the Eastern Church from beginning to end.
There was no argument over the Gospel testimony that Peter was indeed the
head of the Twelve and that Jesus had vested a special authority in him. But
such an enactment made Peter the first Christian bishop and not merely the
bishop of Rome. What Jesus had done was to endow Peter with the episcopal
authority, which he shared with the other Apostles: every church had a “Peter”
sitting upon its episcopal throne. “Peter is the teacher of the universe,” is the
way one Eastern bishop put it, “the pope is only the bishop of Rome.”LECTURE ELEVEN