The Evolution of the Papacy. Francis Ambrose Ridley 1949
Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. – Matthew, Chapter XVI, Verse 18
In the year 49 prior to the origin of the Christian Era, Julius Cęsar, the military governor of Gaul, crossed the boundary into Italy, the River Rubicon, and staged his March on Rome, an event which was destined effectively to install the Roman Empire of the Cęsars, the ‘Fascist’ era of the ancient world, to employ a modern terminology which is, in this instance, not only dramatic, but which also conveys an impressive and, up to a point, accurate historical analogy.
A year later, Cęsar broke the power of the effete senatorial oligarchy which misgoverned the Roman Republic, in the decisive Battle of Pharsalia (48 BC).
The secular Roman Empire, whose historical ghost, according to the classical definition of Thomas Hobbes (1588 – 1679), the ecclesiastical Roman Empire of the Papacy was destined to become, had definitely arrived upon the stage of history.
Julius Cęsar, its effective founder, did not long survive his historical creation. Upon the ill-fated Ides of March (44 BC), he fell before the daggers of the beaten senatorial oligarchy. But his nephew and successor Augustus (Octavian) Cęsar, a far abler political brain than the great soldier Julius, again defeated both the oligarchy and his own rival Mark Anthony, and built up the imperial edifice on permanent foundations (44 BC – AD 14).
The Empire of the Cęsars, starting with a demagogic dictatorship like its modern Fascist antitypes, had become the totalitarian empire ‘over all persons and causes supreme’ which it remained down to the end of classical antiquity, and, in its Eastern Byzantine form, down to the end of the Middle Ages (AD 1453).
In the reign of Tiberius Cęsar, the immediate successor of the great Augustus, a new religion arose in the oriental province of Palestine, not, to be sure, a very surprising occurrence in an age of cultural and religious syncretism, when new religions were apt to shoot up like mushrooms after rain. This new religion started as a Judaic heresy, and its founder, at least if we are to credit the Gospel narratives with an historical basis, was a Galilean wandering preacher named Jesus, accepted by his followers under the title of ‘The Christ’ – ‘The Anointed One’ – the promised Messiah or Deliverer whom the Jewish scriptures had long foretold.
According to his evangelical biographers, the would-be Messiah received his earthly reward in a painful execution by means of crucifixion at the hands of the Roman administration. In which there is nothing improbable or surprising in the then troubled state of what was Rome’s most turbulent province. Even though the Evangelists were certainly not mirrors of Boswellian accuracy when they sat down to write the story of the origins of Christianity.
However, whatever may be the truth with regard to its titular founder, the Christian Church at least is an historical fact, of portentous dimensions, and it soon spread far, if at first not particularly fast, nor did it neglect Rome, the capital of the Universal Empire, to which every known form of credulity and superstition gravitated irresistibly, as Tacitus was soon to testify.
The Church of Rome can hardly be later in its inception than the first century of the Christian propaganda, it is not improbable that its foundation can be ascribed to the earliest decades of that propaganda. For Rome, ‘The Eternal City’, the unchallenged mistress of the Mediterranean world, drew all cults and creeds towards her like an irresistible magnet. To make one’s way in the Roman world, one had first to make one’s way in and to Rome, for in those days it was literally true that ‘all roads led to Rome’.
The approximate dating of the foundation of the ‘Church of Rome’ depends actually upon our critical assessment of two early documents, one religious and one of a secular nature – Paul’s ‘Epistle to the Romans’ and Tacitus’ Annals. For if the former or any part of it was actually written by Paul, then there was a Christian congregation in Rome prior to AD 64. Whilst Tacitus described how Nero (AD 54 – 68) persecuted the Christians AD 64, which leads to the same conclusion.
But no one can say with certainty whether Paul wrote any of the voluminous literature which a later generation ascribed to him, and the Roman historian Tacitus, writing half a century later from hearsay, may have confused some early Jewish messianic sect with the Christians, of whom he must gave heard in the second century when he actually wrote. We cannot say.
Similarly with regard to the foundation by Peter of the Roman Church, an assumption founded upon legend only; an ancient legend it is true, but one obviously motivated by self-interest, and in any case entirely unsupported by any evidence beyond tradition.
It is only in the second century, wherein Christianity first appeared in a form recognisably similar to its later forms, that we first emerge from the realm of conjecture and meet the Church of Rome in the flesh. About AD 130, the ‘Church of God which is in Rome’ had occasion to write a business letter to the ‘Church of God which is in Corinth’. The letter is actually unsigned, but a very ancient tradition ascribes it to the Elder (Presbyter) Clement, whom his contemporary, the Prophet Hermas, [1] declared was in charge of the foreign correspondence of the Roman Church.
This information, meagre as it is, sheds a good deal of light on the internal administration of the now certainly existing Church of Rome. For Clement, who wrote perhaps the first non-biblical document of Early Christianity which we possess, his ‘Epistle to the Corinthians’, was not apparently Bishop of Rome, but a simple Elder. Moreover, another early Christian writer, the author of the ‘Muratorian Fragment’ (late second century), tells us that not Clement but Pius was Roman bishop in the days of Hermas, who, according to our authority, was himself the brother of Bishop Pius.
Evidently, the earliest form of Church government possessed by the Roman Church, like that of the other Christian Churches of the earliest period, was (in modern phraseology) Presbyterian rather than Episcopal in form. Indeed, the scientific study of early Church history undoubtedly demonstrates the mythical character of the Doctrine, of the Apostolic Succession.
The earliest Roman ‘bishops’ are shadowy figures, chairmen of Church Boards of Elders, rather than bishops in the modern sense of the word. It is a far cry from the shadowy Pope Pius I, who was not even allowed to write the letters of his own Church, to his ‘infallible’ successor Pius XII.
The latter half of the second century witnessed great changes in the organisation of Christianity. As Alfred Loisy has conclusively demonstrated in the concluding chapters of his remarkable book The Birth of the Christian Religion, the second half of the second century witnessed the effective consolidation of Church organisation and dogma in reply to the contemporary growth of gnostic heresies. In particular, there was a rapid growth of the power of the bishops as part of the centralising process, the loose Presbyterian organisation of Early Christianity gave way to rigid Episcopal control. It is arguable that Christianity itself might have disappeared without the change.
The Church of Rome shared in this evolution. There as elsewhere, the Elders gave way to the bishop and the bishops of the World-Capital, Rome, were obviously no ordinary bishops. They began to assert themselves. In the later second century, one Roman bishop tried, not very successfully, to lay down for the benefit of the Eastern Churches hard and fast rules for the date and observance of Easter. In the following (third) century, another incurred the anger of his African colleague, the masterful Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, by his arrogant claims.
By the beginning of the fourth century, the era of the religious conflict which ended in the triumph of Christianity, the Bishops of Rome had ‘arrived’. It only required a further development of contemporary history for the Papacy, for the Universal Bishopric, to make its appearance.
Between 150 and 200 of the Christian Era, the Church, which had now finally broken with Judaism, evolved its own distinctive Bible, its New Testament, in contrast to the ‘Old Testament’ of the Jewish Synagogue. No qualified critic now supposes that what we have in the New Testament is unbiased history. Contrarily, what we actually have is the history of an institution, the Christian Church, written and rewritten in the evolving interests of that institution.
In this ‘editorial’ work, the powerful Church of Rome took a prominent part. Two notable additions to the original text of the Gospels must be ascribed to its direct agency.
The Fourth Gospel had asserted the primacy of John, ‘The Beloved Disciple’, its titular author, amongst the Apostles. So a new, admittedly forged chapter, the twenty-first in the current text, had to be added to prove the primacy of Peter, the legendary founder of the Roman Church.
‘Appetite comes with eating.’ As the power and claims of the metropolitan Roman Church grew, they required a direct divine authority. An unknown forger of genius proved equal to the daring task. Probably early in the third century, the famous commission of Christ to Peter, ‘Thou art Peter’, etc, which gave Peter and his successors the keys of Heaven and Hell, was inserted in the original text of Matthew, [2] then regarded as the eldest and most authoritative of the Gospels. In a sense, one could state that the unknown forger was the Founder as well as the Prophet of the Papacy.
1. Author of the nearly canonised ‘Shepherd’.
2. No historic Jesus could possibly have used the words added to the text of Matthew. For the term ‘Church’ only came into use after the new religion had broken with the Jewish Synagogue (AD 70) after the destruction of the Temple, at the very earliest, and probably much later.