The Origins of the Papacy

our topic tonight is the origins of the papacy and I actually had created this topic before the events of the end of last year when actually one of the two living popes at the time uh passed away so we have here kind of an image from the funeral of Pope Benedict XVI and when he who had been the Emeritus Pope died at the end of last year he ended a decade of a very anomalous situation of having two living popes um one current pope and one Emeritus popes living kind of side by side both continuing to use the papal name continuing to dress in white hanging around in papal properties and so forth he ended that time period and then he set a new precedent for having a pope actually preside at the funeral of his predecessor something that I think has never happened in 2000 years of papal tradition because in almost every case the pass Pope dies and before you uh can have to has to be died and buried and so forth usually before you actually pick the new pope and so this was a rare rare circumstance so in 2013 the reason why that happened is Benedict XVI became the very first pope to resign his position since Gregory XII did so in the year 1415 in other words that had been a lapse of 598 years since the last time a pope had decided to do that nevertheless it does seem as we enter a new era of longevity where medical science is allowing people to live increasingly long lives but on the other hand at the extreme edge of those years and their late late 90s and their hundreds and so forth a person's capacity to run an institution like the Roman Catholic church is can somewhat be impaired and I think Benedict foresaw that and Francis the current pope is also sort of suggested that he might be considering something of this following that precedent if so this may have established a very I think laudatory new precedent you probably people should be doing these kind of retirements instead of living until the very end like it was more common in the past when longevity wasn't like this so another elective monarchy was for example um you know the Holy Roman Emperor and he was Emperor until somebody killed him or the Doge of Venice elective monarchy the Supreme Court justices in the United States that as long as they're alive they continue to uh impose their opinions on on U.S law so so um so the papacy is a unique institution it is a sovereign monarchy that is nearly 2 000 years old it is quite rare in that list of those some of the more famous monarchies like the British Monarchy um doesn't go back 2000 years anyway at least has a you know a direct predecessors going back to the Norman Conquest in 1066 the Normans are heirs to the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms that go all the way back to the Kingdom of Wessex so so it best you know here we're talking about 1400 years or so the Japanese monarchy is somewhere in that same range maybe a little longer in that kind of era era but in any event it's a it's there's not too many that are having this kind of longevity as an institution so what is a pope where did the papacy come from this is Jude Law as Pope in a TV show that I'm not sure is still going on that was called the Young Pope so what's the word so the pope versus popes so the word Pope just derives from the Greek Papas meaning father and so it was initially applied actually to all Bishops especially in the Greek East and so it would have just been kind of a um kind of a informal title like you're calling a priest you call priest's father sometimes or uh father Abbott you know or you know mother Abbas and so forth so father and mother being kind of the spiritual father of an individual um let's say monastic Community or a diocese a seed of a bishop um and so on and so but from kind of that just general title of generally calling somebody father the word Pope itself as it pulls into Latin by the time of the Central Middle Ages by the 11th century the title had really gotten in the west and the Latin West where people are speaking Latin as their lingua Franca as their International Language it's reserved at this point for the bishop of Rome so originally whatever any any kind of leader any Bishop would have been able to have that title um nevertheless it continues to have be used outside of the Latin West and so for example the Coptic Bishop of Alexandria one of the ancient patriarchal Seas of Christianity the patriarch of Alexandria who is the um in the same way that the Popes are claimed to be the successors of Saint Peter the Coptic Bishops are the successors of Saint Mark um they have those guys also still use the title Pope and so the head of the Egyptian Orthodox Church um in this case at the time when I made the slide it was uh shanuda the third he was the uh the current Coptic Pope and so the popes or the Bishops of uh the uh Egyptian Orthodox Church use that title so back to the Roman popes the Popes are also the head of an actual internationally recognized country uh the Vatican State a state that is less than half a square kilometer and yet nevertheless is uh like I say generally recognized as an international country that is not the case for example of other um religious leaders so the Dalai Lama while he when he was born was the head of Tibet you know as a which was this you know obviously an independent state um that state has been occupied by the People's Republic of China and the Italian has been in exile for almost all of his life and so there is not a thing where they've taken a little State around the the holy capital of Lhasa in Tibet and made that into a an independent state to the way they've done for the papacy in other words there's no other you know the the head the prophet of the um the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints the Mormon prophet they have a state of the U.S but they don't have a independent nation the way they have several senators in the United States Senate and so forth but they don't have a whole country the way the uh the popes do so Vatican City is in fact the remains of a much larger uh territory that was ruled by the popes called the Papal States historically and the popes became essentially recognized internationally as Sovereign princes that were in charge or the the total leaders of these states since the mid 8th Century so for a whole long time they have been internationally recognized Sovereign leaders so although the Papal States were actually dated to the Donation of Constantine so in other words although you know you they look back a much further period um it's later proved once once the science once the academic discipline of of textual uh criticism got going the Donation of Constantine was one of the very first really important documents that was proved in the early modern period it was proved then to be a forgery it turns out it's an 8th Century forgery so right around the time that the papacy is laying claim to being Sovereign over these states they have somebody in the papal Library very conveniently gave a deed that purported to be from the emperor Constantine who gave all of these territories for the Pope's rule but it turns out that the way that document is written would be totally anachronistic to the 4th century when when the emperor Constantine would have been alive and instead relates very much to the circumstances and conditions of the 8th century when it was written which ends up being the case for pseudopographic texts always you almost always introduce anachronisms it's very difficult for uh forgers to get away with you know doing it especially in the past before anybody knew uh all these things very well so we made a little bit of a timeline it's not easy when you have uh 2000 years so what what do you pick out as the events um but I'm just kind of running you through this really kind of closely as we kind of go you know 2 000 years so I have up until 2013 the resignation of Benedict the 16th um if we let's take it from the present and go backwards if we go backwards from that the Papal States themselves were sort of dissolved or merged into Italy at the end of the 19th and the early 20th centuries um essentially Italian unification happened uh Italy took all of that territory and and the popes essentially locked themselves in their castle and they were disputing with the Italian government over uh whether or not you know the Italians had the right to take all of that land from them which the Pope's denied until they were able to make a deal with Mussolini which recognized the Vatican as the present boundary and so forth um before that time is a very low point of the papacy between the reformation and getting to that kind of low Point frankly of dealing with Mussolini in that way and in that entire time period uh the scope of the papacy was much reduced in general to kind of looking to not looking as far beyond Italian Politics as all that so from the Reformation kind of on all the popes were Italian and they didn't have um you know sort of the international Prestige that we kind of think of right now Pope Francis is one of the most um recognized individuals people you know celebrity or whatever uh best known individuals on the whole planet and um if he flies to anywhere you know you get you can fill stadiums with all the people who want to go see him and so forth that was not happening in the 1700s for popes and so forth um you know the 18 1800 when when Napoleon conquers all of Europe and he has the pope come to to imitate Charlemagne in order you know Charlemagne uh the pope put a crown on his head on Christmas Day and revived the Roman Empire a thousand years later and unfortunately not quite like a thousand and two years later Napoleon didn't get it done in time he has the pope come he's going to revive the Empire again he's essentially taking the he's taking the Imperial Crown but the pope is at such a low ebb that Napoleon kind of pushes the old guy aside takes the crown and puts it on his own head so in other words he is not he doesn't need papal legitimacy which is now at quite a low ebb during that kind of time period so we'll be back track a little bit before that one of the things that had happened at the end of the Middle Ages that caused again some of the kind of the decline of the papacy's prestige is the Avignon papacy so when the popes for a century the 14th century largely left the city of Rome and were effectively clients of the French King living in the southern French city of Amia where they had the capital of the central medieval papacy and while that was happening then there was a big Schism and at a certain point there was two popes one in Rome one in Avignon and then there were three popes one in Pisa one in Avignon and one in Rome and so forth so it was a low ebb for the papacy before that though in the Central and Middle Ages I have here called out Gregory the seventh who is the person uh For Whom the Gregorian reform is named he is a person who begins a program that gets the papacy to its highest ebb which occurs right around 1200 or so and so that Gregorian reform era between Gregory and Avignon papacy is papacy at its height that also is triggering the Schism with the Eastern church so the Eastern Orthodox break with the papacy as it starting off on these kind of pretensions I as we go back on this timeline we get to the year 800 when Pope Leo the third crowned Charlemagne King of the Franks as the Western Roman Empire Reviving the Western Roman Empire creating what would eventually become the Holy Roman Empire um uh signing on the essentially a new alliance that the popes in Rome have with Western Leaders with the Franks as opposed to the preceding period of time when they were looking East to Constantinople um as we backtrack before that we're seeing this entire time period of when the Lombards the last of the Germanic barbarians to come across the Alps conquer most of Italy but not all of Italy and so the parts that continue to be sort of Byzantine holdouts are the parts that are kind of looking to the pope for leadership nevertheless during that time the Popes are still kind of writing to the Emperors in the East and Constantinople for help that period kind of begins with one of the first great popes of the Middle Ages Pope Gregory the first Gregory the Great uh the same Pope who sends the mission of Saint Augustine of Canterbury to England and Begins the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons and the foundation of the Church of England and so forth anyway going back from that the Council of nicaea so Constantine the emperor Constantine becoming Christian and setting the Roman Empire on a path to having Christianity be the state religion and then dialing all the way back to Saint Peter who maybe died around the year 64 or 68 sometime in there according to tradition anyway and then some 30 years before that the death of Jesus so the institution of the papacy has evolved substantially over the course of these past 2000 years so the Bishops of Rome which is how the institution starts in other words it begins as simply the Bishops of the city of Rome they have successfully asserted Primacy over other bishoprics of the Latin Roman Church with nevertheless setbacks in terms of schisms so the Eastern churches broke away and then later in the beginning of the modern era Protestant Anglican Church is also broke away leaving the papacy not as the let's say first among equals among a unified uh Universal Christendom but as the head of the largest sect or denomination within Christianity the Roman Catholic Church so as we have talked about when we look at kind of the origins of early Christianity Christianity spread through the Roman Empire initially taking the form of largely autonomous congregations based in cities and towns where each City in town ultimately has a bishop and the bishop tradition is not that there is some Central Bishop like a Pope in Rome or something like that who is appointing your Bishop for you rather the every constant congregation themselves the people there are when your Bishop dies you you find that you appoint a new person by the acclimation of the members in that town and so forth so there is a Apostolic succession from the founder whatever the apostle was who founded or planted the congregation Where You Are uh down to uh the bishop and then a bishop at Bishop and Bishop but it is essentially something that's happening locally in other words it is totally autonomous and um as we've seen there's also a great diversity in thought uh among Christians and so uh there is no agreement on christology how do we understand uh Christ in terms of who was Christ is Christ fully human and fully Divine does Christ have one human divine nature or two Natures one being human and one being Divine uh what is a relationship between uh Christ and uh the Creator and between Christ and the spirit and so forth there is a vast variety of thought on that topic and it is only really by the time we get to the the fourth Century that a structure starts to happen so for example then what I'm suggesting is at that initial time period it does not have an org chart where we say the bishop of Rome is on top and then there's these other Bishops in Antioch and Corinth and Ephesus and Alexandria and so forth that org chart does not exist in the early church rather the Bishops are largely autosyphilis just to say without a head and equal to each other there's no structure really then to compel uniformity which is one of the reasons why there was so much diversity in early Christianity and why we sometimes call it multiple early christianities and so forth although in a lot of these leading Bishop bricks um these the Bishops will be part of this sort of proto-orthodox community but even so you know and the bishop of Antioch and Alexandria they are leaning a different direction let's say than the Bishops of Roman Corinth and so forth okay that said although all the Bishops were initially equal very early on Bishops of Rome established a tradition where they at least claimed to be first among all of those equals so they're in the capital of the Empire and that gives them that um uh sense I guess of of being able to be the Arbiters and so for example in the first century already uh one of the Bishops of Rome and indeed the First bishop of Rome that we can kind of really historically nail down Clement the first wrote a letter to the Church of Corinth so that he could end a dispute that is happening among the members of the church in Corinth and he's stepping in and arbitrating for it even though you know again in theory what is what is what the guy in Rome have to do with the bishop brick and so forth in Corinth so there's a precedent already then from what Clement writes in order to step in and arbitrate in the second century a later Bishop of Rome Victor the first threatens to excommunicate various Eastern Bishops for views that he's finding and actions that he's finding heretical so in other words they're claiming already to have some powers and there are some precedence quite early on for that as always whenever we look at Christian history the conversion of the emperor Constantine in 315 is the real game changer changes everything for the whole trajectory of the religion Constantine when he uh tries to he joins the church as a profession of Faith he becomes a Christian he doesn't actually get baptized right away but anyway that's not part of the practice of the time but he starts to want to learn about it and he also kind of realizes fairly quickly that he is inherited a church that doesn't have a an overall structure the way the Empire does and also he realizes that the church is divided about some of its most basic doctrines and so one of the things that he does with that church you know divided among co-equal Bishops who disagreed the emperor's solution is to create something new so he summons all the Bishops to come together uh to nicaea which is very close to where his uh new imperial capital is going to be Constantinople Mr Cross a little C from there and he has them come together for a general counsel or what we call an ecumenical council for oikum manoi which is the the the uh the world the Known World essentially the Roman Empire is what he's more or less saying but essentially a universal Council of the entire Christian church and so in all these utocephalus Bishops now come together and they create something new uh the council then defines what the Orthodox beliefs are going to be it creates the Nicene Creed so the thing that a profession of beliefs that all Christians can say about let's say christology about the Trinity about all those things so that they can say kind of the limits of what that belief is without entering into a trinitarian heresy which is very easy so you can instantly like I say if you kind of say anything more than the Nicene Creed you're almost immediately going to commit a trinitarian uh heresy one of them or other uh the council also defined a bunch of alternate beliefs non-trinitarian beliefs for example arianism is condemned as a heresy and in the council the council also created a hierarchy kind of for the first time with Metropolitan it was called Bishops as being above Bishops still called metropolitans in the east in the west here we use the word Archbishop so essentially it's essentially creating an Archbishop as a new rank above Bishops so so we have it in here we just get find ourselves on the timeline this is right kind of at the beginning right so Constantine transformed a diverse collection of largely autonomous expressions of Christianity into a single institution of the Imperial Church which in a couple Generations after him under the emperor theodosius became a state religion of the Roman Empire and as a result of that that enhanced The Prestige of the bishop of the Empire's Capital Rome so by making kind of a hierarchy by um by making it an imperial State religion ultimately the Emperors enhance The Prestige of one of the Bishops within that Empire the bishop of the capital the bishop of Roe nevertheless that doesn't necessarily mean out of an org chart that the bishop of Rome is on top right so I mentioned here there's now these Metropolitan Bishops so the bishop of Rome is an Archbishop he's uh over top of in his archdiocese he is presiding over for example the bishop of Milan the bishop of Carthage the bishop of Ravenna but now there's other Metropolitan Bishops so the bishop of the new capital Constantinople he's going to be over top of the bishop of nicaea and Ephesus and Adrian opal and likewise the bishop of an old patriarchal Center like Antioch is in charge of caesarea laodicea Odessa and so forth but as we are considering this org chart actually um there is actually something new that has now been added to the toolkit so it's not just the first general counsel the Council of nicaea seven general counsels of the church both East and West are convened by Emperors and then over the course of the next few hundred uh years and so one of the things that is added to this org chart effectively is this ecumenical council which is obviously creating decrees and so forth that are above what any one Bishop has to say and because it's the Emperor who calls the council and presides over the council um really the org chart that emerges out of Constantine's church is not that the pope is on top but rather the emperor is on top the council is the next governing body and then there are the Bishops metropolitans above regular Bishops of which then the bishop of Rome continues to claim to be first among equals among all of the Bishops nevertheless another thing that Constantine did was found Constantinople as a new specifically Christian Rome Capital uh of the Eastern Empire or an Eastern capital for the Empire it is a much more militarily defensible position and it was very difficult to take it's at the strategically important location the crossroads of Europe and Asia and also the crossroads in terms of the water from the Mediterranean the Aegean to the Black Sea and so forth so it's an amazingly important center and the walls that got built around it made it almost impossible to capture and so that ends up being a competitor for the old Rome and so as the Imperial government continued to exist in Constantinople after the traditional fall of Rome in 476 A.D there became more and more pressure in other words more and more Prestige transferred to the East and so increasingly the Bishops of Constantinople challenged the idea of Roman Primacy in other words the idea that the Roman Church the Roman Bishop the pope is the first among equals and in fact because the bishop of Constantinople is right there with the emperor is working with the emperor is at the head of the Imperial government with the emperor the Bishops of Constantinople assume a title ecumenical patriarch which sort of means kind of patriarch over the whole world right and so and so it is a um a title that the Pope's dispute uh back and forth and indeed this dispute over Primacy between the two Imperial capitals the original capital Rome and Constantinople is one of the the major causes for the Schism between the Latin West and the Greek East eventually uh in the west as the Western Empire Falls as the byzantines exert kind of lukewarm control over the West including Italy but are not able to really hold out against the Lombards the Popes are essentially uh kind of preserving and being the last kind of Imperial officials of any importance that are kind of overseeing the last Byzantine outposts and so you can kind of see in this particular map in the center in the Dark Ages essentially from 568 to 774 as the Lombards have descended in and taken over kind of the green areas there of Italy the other holdouts places like Venice Blitz is like the executive Ravenna of the of Rome and so forth uh Naples those continue to be sort of enclaves of romanitas and those are essentially the Popes are able to kind of become independent princes that are kind of ruling over whatever's left uh in the middle of all of this so from the 8th Century onward the popes find a new alliance they're no longer able to get the Emperors to do much to help them the Lombards are too much the popes start writing to a new Christian power in the west the kings of the Franks and the Pope's Ally with those kings who eventually come down and Destroy and conquer the Lombard Kingdom and to affirm the popes as princes of Papal States so that culminates that Alliance culminates in 800 like I say with Leo III Reviving The Western Empire giving the papacy a new protector and also though a new rival because now they have to deal with the fact that there's a western Emperor and that ends up dominating the next uh whole chapter of papal history so there's an important precedent that happens with that papal coronation it's something that as I mentioned Napoleon was very aware of and he didn't want to give the same precedent or control over his Empire to the popes so ecumenical Patriarchs and popes have always held a subordinate role had all had always held a subordinate rule to the Emperors in Constantinople but by taking the initiative to revive the Western Empire by crowning the emperor Leo III pretty much created an important precedent for papal Primacy essentially the way now the empire in the west is going to work the way the Holy Roman Empire or the Western Roman Empire works is that the princes in Germany um initially the princess of the Franks but later it becomes the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation the princes in Germany get together they elect a essentially Emperor designate and the emperor designate has the title King of the Romans then the king of the Romans comes to Rome where he's crowned by the pope and then he's afterwards known as the emperor the Holy Roman Emperor so once there was an emperor in the west again he also had an interest in deciding who sat on Peter's throne and so Emperors also fairly quickly began to influence papal elections and they assumed author the authority to depose unworthy popes and so this like I say is what sets up a major rivalry then between the Western Emperors and the papacy throughout the Middle Ages so like the Imperial Crown in the west the papacy is also an elected monarchy and we've we've been alive probably to watch essentially that both the election maybe Benedict and Francis and so kind of see how it is the media kind of camps out around as all the popes here are gather I'm sorry the books all the Cardinals are are gathered in the Sistine Chapel uh and they have their ballots and so forth as they're picking who's going to be the next uh Pope so how are the popes made how would the emperors affect the process so the current system there's about a hundred Cardinals they enter the Sistine Chapel they um and once they have got their ballots they burn them they send up a smoke signal to the people outside and if it's the right color signal then they'd say habemos pop them we have a pope and so forth uh so that the dark smoke is there's no Pope yet the white smoke is the pope has been chosen and the red salt is tweeted around the world and so forth so originally like all Bishops popes were chosen actually just by a consensus of the clergy and the people of the Rome and they had essentially an informal acclimation and so elections didn't have any kind of actual formal rules or who was doing the electing and so forth it was generally speaking a consensus that this person might be the right person they kind of put the crown on his head and they take him out to the balcony and Proclaim him before the people and everybody if everybody shouts yes then that's sort of the um that's sort of all it kind of took in the past however that resulted in uh occasions where there were more than one person that was acclaimed and elected and so then there would be a pope and an anti-pope and he didn't know which one was the real Pope and so forth because there's two a contested election which happened many many times throughout the Middle Ages so restricting the election to the Cardinals and Cardinals are originally now they're International clergy so they'll essentially give if somebody the bishop of Montreal the Archbishop of Montreal here in Canada is an important backer of the Pope or something he might get the title uh Cardinal Archbishop and so forth but um originally when the Cardinals emerged they are effectively the um the deacons uh priests and Bishops of the local diocese that are immediately surrounding the city of Rome so by limiting the election to the Cardinals that was designed to limit manipulation of the elections and also to avoid disputed elections so in the 11th century the papacy was at a low Point German Emperors uh the Holy Roman Emperor would intervene they would come down and just depose uh popes that were clearly bad and corrupt and so forth and they would appoint um because they really actually did believe in papal reform they would report a point reform minded popes ironically um by kind of having good thoughtful popes that the Emperors kind of put on the throne this led to the gruvagorian reform popes who then got law got studying law they created you know legal universities and so forth and they and they were able to successfully assert papal Primacy over secular rulers uh ultimately destroying the power of the Holy Roman emperors themselves um and so anyway that was an unintended consequence of reforming the papacy on the part of the emperors later Emperors continued to attempt to depose popes and replace them with uh compliant loyalists however that uh at a certain point they lost the ability to do that very successfully the popes kind of beat out the Emperors so for example in his fight with Pope Alexander III the emperor Frederick Barbarossa created three successive anti-popes But ultimately had to concede defeat and recognize Alexander as the as the pope and so forth so that kind of gives us anyway the kind of the middle then between uh the crowning of Charlemagne and the height of the papacy so as the papacy became more assertive and successful in claiming Primacy over the Latin Western Christian Church Eastern Greek Christians still inhabiting the remains of the Roman Empire historians called the Byzantine Empire but in the East they just consider themselves to be the Romans still they were alienated and they fell out of communion with the western church altogether so from that high point like I say the reform popes frequently had to flee Rome because they were fighting the Emperor or they were fighting other Lords or they were fighting with Roman citizens and so forth and as they did that they moved to Avignon this is the Palace of the popes that's still there the move was not intended to be permanent but once the curia moved there once the papal Court moved there it was very difficult to go back to Rome and as things went on French popes started picking French Cardinals once they were based in France and the curia increasingly fell under the influence of the French and so seven of these uh seven avignonis Popes are French so in other words these are these become it becomes a kind of a French institution when that happens this has also caused amazing amounts of Scandal so cut off from the Papal States which were ungovernable the curia didn't get its normal money that it was getting that it would be able to tax lands in other words they were not getting any of those revenues and so they had to do other things like sell indulgences which that becomes kind of a scandal of the church which is to say you've committed a sin you're going to have to do a lot of penance in in limbo in in uh in purgatory in the future if you but if you pay a bunch of money to get a certificate and a blessing from the pope you're going to skip out on 100 years or whatever of purgatory and so forth in other words it's a way to raise money in the here and now that a lot of people object it to so overall what ends up happening by the Avenue news papacy is dominating by French interests and focused on Revenue papal Prestige probably dropped to an all-time low while it's in Avignon and so one of these very important Mystics Saint Catherine of Siena in a you know a sexist time period nevertheless women women leaders who assert a lot of influence she successfully shamed uh one of the last uh avignony's popes to return to Rome so under that pressure Gregory the 11th returned to Rome it had fallen into ruins the Cardinals who came back with him were all upset about being there they wanted to go back to Avenue where everything they had palaces where everything was nice before they could go back home Gregory died while he's dead the Cardinals go into their conclave the people outside demanded now they pick a Roman Pope so in other words they're not going to let them get away with picking one of their French Cardinals to be the pope so the majority of the Cardinals under that kind of pressure pick one of their own bartolomeo pregnano who was a 60 year old Italian from Naples who had served as a loyal bureaucrat I always think oh these guys he's he's just as loyal backbencher and so forth and he's kind of old anyway so he's not going to be a problem once they get the crown on him the new pope is not you know a lot of times it gets a lot more Vigor than they'd ever had so he becomes Urban Sixth and he is not a pliant tool to the Cardinals he announced a whole bunch of reforms aimed at eliminating graft and Corruption it was upsetting to the Cardinals these moves would have wiped out a lot of their income and so forth in response the mostly French Cardinals I say freak out they claim that their first election had been done under duress they enter a second conclave they elect a second guy Robert of Geneva as Pope and then they all flee back to Avignon and so that is what causes uh two popes right so there's a pope in Avignon which is immediately kind of recognized by the French of course and if you're going to be recognized by the king of France they have the old alliance with the kings of Scotland so obviously Scotland but if your enemy is if your friend your friend is France then your enemy is England so and the guy in England of course recognizes Rome and so forth and so essentially Europe is divided into two those kind of two camps about which which one is Pope so because of this problem people after all this a lot of time people don't want to have two popes they want to have a solution so the solution that everybody proposes is we need to have another one of these ecumenical councils and so Cardinals from both sides from having on a Rome uh uh four cardinal I'm sorry 22 Cardinals four Patriarchs 80 Bishops representatives of a hundred more Bishop bricks met with 300 doctors of theology in Pisa in 1409 in order to solve the system the council declared that the authority of ecumenical councils is superior to Bishops including the Pope the council declared both popes the pope of Avignon and the pope of Rome to be deposed and the pounds the peas and Cardinals then elect a new pope and so that solved the whole problem right now now there's three popes and so and so then that that's a situation now that lasts uh another few decades um our couple not a few another decade and a half until there is another more successful Council the Council of constance in 414 called and overseen by the king of the Romans which is to say the emperor designate sigismund king of Hungary so one of the last kind of very powerful uh uh Holy Roman emperors because he's also king of Hungary in his own right the Council of constance then again is widely attended it ends up being like a council an ecumenical council where they vote by Nations so the Italians the Germans the French and the English are represented they ultimately accept the Roman Pope's resignation and therefore legitimize the Roman line retroactively and they depose the uh the peas in Pope and the uh and the avignonis pope and they create their own new pope but this time it sticks so Martin V then becomes Pope going forward so Constance then declares the idea that emekumenical councils are superior to popes and part of the deal in naming the new pope Martin V is that they got him to promise every five years he'd call a new ecumenical council and that would be essentially the way that the church is governed it's essentially creating like a parliament for the church an attempt to create let's say a constitutional monarchy uh and so that kind of gets us to the end of the Avignon PPC right here right but unfortunately although Martin V who is named Pope by this ecumenical council of constance although he promised to call new ecumenical councils every five years to create this kind of constitutional parliamentary system to oversee the church he then immediately failed to do that so he effectively ended the threat of conciliarism by preventing any consuls from being called unfortunately that left the church still in need of many many reforms and it let left it quite open to further Schism so while the papacy successfully had edged out the Eastern Patriarchs the patriarch of Constantinople and so forth by essentially writing off the whole Eastern Church which left they smashed the power of the Holy Roman emperors they avoided the threat of conciliarism nevertheless as it starts doing all those things the scope of the papacy Narrows pretty much to that of a powerful local Prince fighting in Renaissance Italy and so by the time we get to the end of the Renaissance the first Medici Pope Medici being the Renaissance princes of Florence of Tuscany one of their cousins nephews what kind of thing is made Pope Leo the 10th he was actually really distracted by all of the immediate threats around him in Italy and really didn't devote much time to this strange thing that's happening up in in Germany where an obscure monk named Martin Luther Nails 95 Theses to adore in 1517 and so forth and so the papacy doesn't really react as to this what becomes an important threat which it doesn't seem like it is maybe at the beginning so just to kind of go through from that to the present so having lost the kind of northern half of Latin Christendom to the Protestants and anglicans the remaining Church refounded itself in opposition to protestantism during the counter-reformation the end of the 16th and the early 17th centuries from the Council of Trent until the Peace of Westphalia although the papacy continued to be at the head of the Roman Catholic Church it's now actually at that point then merely the largest denomination within Christianity as opposed to being the kind of first among equals of the universal church and so forth so papal power as I said kind of an ebbed in all of that kind of time period after after 1648 up until really to the end of the 20th century with Vatican II and then later with John Paul II who really did a lot to um recapture the international Prestige of of the papacy and bring it to a new level again that it really hadn't had for a couple centuries so as I say then from the occasional claims of being first among equal the popes became Sovereign princes in the 8th century they had they achieved really significant power over Western Christendom by the reign of innocent III probably the most powerful Pope the turn of the um 12th century 13th century it's 1198 to 12 16. um uh but let's go back now as we kind of have now done that history we want to talk about the earlier the beginnings of the papacy what about that period of time before Clement the first of Rome one of the first people that we've quoted in the lecture today how do we get back from that to Jesus so how did all this get started so there is a galleon fisherman named Simon or Simeon who gets nicknamed Peter which means Rock in Greek so essentially calling a guy named Simon starting calling him Rocky uh one of Jesus's leaders who is one of Jesus's leaders and his leading disciples and an early Christian leader after uh Jesus's crucifixion so the traditional understanding of Peter has emerged out of Christian tradition is that he was a prominent early Christian leader the leader of the Twelve Apostles and among early Christians the proto-orthodox community the community that becomes the Orthodox and Catholic Church the Greek and Latin churches under Constantine the proto-orthodox community looks to Peter's Authority and claims Peter's Authority um Peter led a church in Antioch before according to tradition anyway we're relocating in his final years to Rome where he is assumed to have been martyred by the emperor Nero um one of the most important components of uh Peter's Authority comes from the gospel of Matthew there's an image here of Christ bestowing the Keys of the Kingdom to Peter and in that account in Matthew it says Jesus answered and said unto unto him blessed art thou Simon barjona Simon by son of Jonah for Flesh and Blood hath not revealed unto you unto thee but my Father which is in heaven and I say also unto thee that thou art Peter in other words he changes his name here and Upon This Rock Thou Art Iraq and Upon This Rock I will build my church and the Gates of Hell shall not Prevail against it and I will give unto thee the Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven and whatsoever Thou shalt bind on Earth shall be bound in heaven and whatsoever Thou shalt loose on Earth shall be loosed in heaven water here okay and so this is where we have all of these cartoons and so forth we have a big Trope like that when you're gonna when you die and you're gonna go to heaven Saint Peter is at the gatekeeper right because uh essentially Jesus gave him the keys to the kingdom of heaven and he's the one with the keys and he's there checking uh your whole list of uh naughty and nice lists or whatever whether you're going to make it into into heaven Saint Peter is Heaven's GateKeeper it is also um the symbolism in the papal coat of arms so the popes who uh claim to be The Heirs of Saint Peter use those keys described in that account of Matthew and actually nowhere else um as a symbol of papal Authority usually the two keys crossed like two swords uh behind a Royal Crown behind a triple Papal crown originally the term Cathedral that doesn't refer when we say Cathedral you probably think of a large kind of gothic church but actually many Gothic churches like that are not technically cathedrals and indeed um the Vatican itself Saint Peter's Rome is not a cathedral because the word Cathedral refers actually to the throne of the bishop and so in a lot of cases there'll be an actual seat in in one of these Cathedrals that's kind of the big chair or Cathedral for the the diocesean bishop and the cathedral for Rome is actually a different Church entirely the Cathedral of Saint John's latter in one of the uh four really ancient churches in Rome um nevertheless the papacy had moved and is in kind of hangs out at the Vatican now uh in part even though that's outside of Rome's ancient walls and actually um they actually had to have a to ring the Middle Ages because of all of the Barbarian attacks and so forth they actually had to build walls called the leonine walls around the Vatican in order to include them in the walls of Rome because Saint Peter's is in fact the traditional site of Peter's martyrdom and tomb and so if you go to Saint Peter's there's this with all the kitchen which is I guess a fancy word for canopy and it is a very fancy canopy that is directly uh placed I mean it's under the dome but it's in uh over Peter's the site of Peter's traditional too and if we take a floor plan you can kind of see in the dots there kind of new St Peter's the Saint Peters that exist now is that big thing where the tomb is right kind of let's see if I can can I use this thing or not this work no I can't okay I'm sorry I'm gonna go back I was gonna see if my marker would mark it for you essentially you can kind of see uh the tomb of Saint Peter's is in the middle of the of the big Saint Peter's Church the dark black is the Old Saint Peter's the fourth Century Basilica that was um one of the most important ancient uh and preserved Christian churches that was ripped down by the Renaissance Pope Julius II uh who it was essentially a major Act of vandalism was when he destroyed Old Saint Peter's although he caused the creation of new Saint Peters which is amazing artifact itself but he had to destroy it in order to build it and then in the gray below that is a much ancient um even more ancient uh thing which is the circus of Nero circus being the place where the chariot races are held and as you probably are aware you know the The Chariot stadiums and also the amphitheaters where the Gladiator uh uh things occur are sites where um during persecutions the Roman authorities are are martyring uh Christian Martyrs and so traditionally the idea here is that Peter is martyred by the emperor Nero during local persecutions that conducted in Rome that Nero conducted between 64 and 68 and in this case he was he would have been executed crucified uh in the circus and then buried uh just outside the circus and that's why anyway Saint Peter's is where it is so so early Christian tradition then connects Peter and Rome for example one of the important most important early thinkers origin wrote uh at the end probably wrote it in the maybe the early third Century he said Peter was crucified at Rome with his head downwards as he himself had desired to suffer so essentially the idea of that traditional story and so Peter's cross is often an upside down cross more or less he's saying that he doesn't um he didn't have the he wasn't wasn't worthy to be killed in the exact same way as Jesus and so he's going to be crucified and he's able to talk the Romans who are executing him to do it must side down instead of uh instead of right side up and so essentially that's the traditional story uh Jerome uh Saint Jerome who is a very important in collecting the biblical Canon and translating it into Latin he connects Peter to Clement the first that early first century pope that we talked about suggesting actually that Clement was either the immediate successor to Peter or that he used the fourth Bishop of Rome there's a little reference that he had which is that Peter ordained Clement lioness and anacletus and so the idea of it was maybe there's one or two popes between Peter and Clement and that but in any event there was a direct connection between Clement who is a known historical figure anyway and Peter another known historical figure but not one that we know for sure was ever in Rome so that's kind of a traditional understanding of Peter and I want to kind of look at what we can know about the historical figures that we can get at the um the origins of these Traditions so this is a painting a modern painting of Peter and Jesus walking on water so in the gospel of Mark there's a story that Jesus walking on water that has a parallel in the Gospel of John always as we know Luke and Matthew use Mark as a source whereas Luke deletes the story so it doesn't include this walking on weather story Matthew adds a story of Peter trying to walk to Jesus on the water and so that's again one of the only and Matthew kind of things Matthew's pretty Pro Peter um historical sources for the Peter so for I'm sorry sources for the historical Peter so mostly what we have in order to look at Peter our new testament accounts and so those are Paul first and foremost Paul's letters second we have a bunch of letters that are actually attributed to Peter two letters first and second Peter in the New Testament and then there are stories about Peter in the gospels and in Acts in addition to those kind of um books that made it into the Bible there's a whole bunch of Christian Apocrypha lost Bible biblical books we might say books that did not make it into the Canon which include things like the gospel of Peter the acts of Peter The Apocalypse of Peter um the problem with all of these is that unlike things like the Gospel of Thomas or even the dedicate these are later texts and they're less important and they don't they're mostly um building on existing tradition rather than uh preserving anything from the life of Peter and then in addition to that we also have then writings of early Christians Christians before Jerome and origen including people like papius Clement who we've mentioned a couple times here polycarp Ignatius and arenais so let's look first at the Epistles of Peter since that seems like that would be a great source to learn about Peter so like I say two letters claim to have that claim to have been written by Peter have been canonized in the New Testament both of them are written in Greek and it was already realized by the time of Saint Jerome St Jerome who like I say is an important scholar who's assembling the Canon of the Old and New Testaments and is actively translating the Canon into Latin which becomes the The Vulgate of Saint Jerome it's called the Catholic Bible the Latin Bible um Jerome noted that these two letters are both of them too sophisticated in terms of their Greek to have been written by a poor fisherman like Simon Simon Peter whose first language would have been Aramaic and maybe would have known a little bit of Hebrew and now he's learning Greek uh and how great how good could his Greek ever be um so Jerome's solution was uh once I'm sorry and the language and the writing style of actually both letters are too distinct from each other to have been written by the same person and so first Peter is not written by the same person the second Peter so Jerome's solution to this which is a traditionalist solution is Peter had two secretaries and he kind of told uh what he wanted to say to one maybe even in Aramaic and that person you know wrote the first Peter and then he wrote to the next letter later to using a different secretary and so forth um so that was the the solution in the event the point of it is uh they're both written in Greek that's too sophisticated and they're written by different authors so let's look at the second Peter first so second Peter does claim it's written by uh quote as it begins in in in the beginning of chapter one verse one Simon Peter a servant and Apostle of Jesus Christ so it's not making any you're not it knows who's pretending to be by uh but unfortunately the text itself reworks and expands the Epistle of Jude so this is a different Bible book the shortest book in the New Testament likely written between 70 and 110 and is this second Peter by because it uses Jude as a source is thus written after Jude um you know again obviously Peter is dead by the time Jude is written so among the pseudopographical texts in the Bible therefore II Peter I think stands out as being conclusively demonstrated that it's not what it claims so it is literally dependent on Jude Jude is written very likely after Peter's death the second Peter claims to be written by Peter but it is in fact somebody who's not Peter who is reworking the Epistle of Jude it's therefore pseudopigrapha which is to say text written by someone who's claiming to be someone they aren't writing the authority of Peter and so forth but nevertheless not written by Peter first Peter also represents a context of widespread persecution that did not exist during the reign of Nero so we talk about when we're looking at doing literary criticism to find out if something is a forgery is an we look at anachronisms and so um uh you know the reign of Nero is the traditional date of Peter's death so therefore it's still probably an early writing and so some Scholars suggest that first Peter is instead dated to the reign of the emperor dimission in the 80s or 90s and so therefore because it's reflecting a later time it has anachronisms and therefore is not written in Peter's life so most Scholars agree that the text could not have been written by the historic Peter again whenever we are doing biblical criticism there are traditionalists who want to maintain um Petra and authorship they want to maintain the traditional identifications even if um I would say that those are not plausible but I would find I I would tend to argue that a lot of these traditional Scholars are are kind of have that agenda item as opposed to leading to whatever the evidence leads them so um taking then those two aside which are not maybe getting us to the historic Peter nevertheless Peter is a major character in The canonical gospels and acts and in fact traditionally the author of Mark is thought to have been an assistant to Peter and the gospel of Mark has been imagined to reflect Peter's perspective as a result where does this come from so this is based on a very early Christian papayas of hierapolis who himself was had gone around and talked to for very early Christian sources including someone named John the Elder a leader of the church in Ephesus and so although papias is work is lost he is quoted a lot in people like origen and Jerome and later writers and so forth and so we have some of the preface and other quotations out of his text that he wrote sometime at the end of the of the first and the beginning of the second centuries so papayas writes concerning the work that he has as he's trying to reconstruct the early Christian story he writes I shall not hesitate also to put into ordered form for you along with the interpretations everything I learned carefully in the past from the elders and noted down carefully for the truth of which I vouch for unlike most people I took no pleasure in those who told many different stories but only in those who taught the truth nor did I take pleasure in those who reported their memory of someone else's Commandments but only in those who reported their memory of The Commandments given by the Lord to the faith and proceeding from the truth itself and if by chance anyone who had been in attendance on the elders arrived I made inquiries about the words of the elders what Andrew or Peter had said or what Philip or Thomas or James or John or Matthew or any of the other of Laura's disciples and whatever aristian and John the Elder the Lord's disciples were saying for I did not think that much information from books would profit me as much as information from a living and surviving voice so that's explaining kind of his methodology he is going around he's not crediting uh written texts as much but if there is a um an old disciple who shows up in his town who maybe remembers something that one of the original Apostles had said then he would copy that down and so um many Christians he's saying look he's talking to for example John the Elder and as I've mentioned um lots of people conflate all of these guys named John with each other and so this is a disciple that's personally living around in Papaya's nose uh maybe around the year 100 in Ephesus and a lot of people equate this guy as if he's John the Apostle the Beloved disciple John the Revelator and so forth it's very likely just John the Elder some other guy named John but because of uh that supposed connection to Authority papius's descriptions here are given undue Authority I think in weight he's actually an early guy and I think what he's actually showing is is that as of the Year 100 a lot of these stories and a lot of this background is completely unknown even to Christian leaders and he's having to try to reconstruct it by asking a lot of old people questions uh specifically regarding the gospels regarding Matthew populist claims therefore Matthew put the logia the sayings in an ordered arrangement in the Hebrew language but each purpose person interpreted them as best he could this statement has confused Scholars for centuries so it led people for many many centuries to conclude the false conclusion that Matthew was the first gospel and that's one of the reasons why it's first in the order of the New Testament even though Mark is the older gospel and also that Matthew's gospel was originally written in Hebrew and then translated into Greek but textual criticism really has demonstrated that Matthew was composed in Greek that it's textually dependent on Mark and what I think it really demonstrates is papayas papias is a interview process here is unreliable so in other words he's coming up with uh information that's that is false so uh and this this shows it so as we've seen in other lectures the gospels in fact are Anonymous texts written by Greek sorry written in Greek by Christians who were not eyewitnesses of Jesus to which the names Mark Matthew Luke and John were later ascribed and so while the gospels and acts contain historical information they're not histories themselves and actually most of their contents are literary so we can't just take every single thing that happens in the gospels or acts as information about the historical Peter and so forth right they are being written for very different literary purposes by um devoted Christians who want to tell the story in order for for a religious purpose and when they don't have um they're working from Traditions that may or may not have historical basis and when they and when they don't have details what they do is they go to the Old Testament they go to the Hebrew Bible they find prophecies or by Isaiah they find stories uh in the deuteronomic histories they find phrases in the Psalms and and create um information or stories about the historic about Jesus the gods Jesus of the Gospels knowing or believing as they do that Jesus's life was reflected by those Old Testament stories so in other words um that is why they match in those ways so as problematic then there's all these later sources are we actually can confirm Peter is an actual historic figure through the writings of Paul it always comes back to Paul when we're doing these kind of historicity things right so Paul of Tarsus is the earliest Christian whose writings survived and Paul describes meeting with Peter as well as with James the brother of Jesus he's met them both he says for about 15 days three years after his own conversion experience so this would have been very early in the 30s or so Paul has really no reason to make up these characters who are in fact uh Rivals of his it turns out so let's just read a little bit about what Paul has to say writing in the late 40s or early 50s in the letter to Galatians he says you've heard of my previous way of life in Judaism how intensely I Paul persecuted the Church of God and tried to destroy it I was advancing in Judaism Beyond many of my own age among my people and was extremely zealous for the traditions of my fathers but when God who set me apart from my mother's womb and called me by his grace was pleased to reveal his son in me so that I might preach him among the Gentiles my immediate response was not to consult any human being in other words I had a vision of Christ right God revealed his son to me and my immediate response was not to consult any human being I did not go to Jerusalem to see those who were Apostles before I was so in other words he is not being called by any human powers he's not part of a structure of the um anybody who had already been an apostle or a disciple of Jesus he's called directly by a vision and he therefore went to Arabia and so he went to it's probably Jordan and so forth and later I returned to Damascus so in other words he went and decided to be an apostle and a preacher directly based on his own conversion Vision as opposed to listening to these authorities and then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to get acquainted with cephas which is to say Peter kephus here is a um uh Aramaic for Peter Peter's Greek for rock skephis is kefa is Greek for I'm sorry Aramaic for rock so Paul calls him cephas and stayed with him 15 days I saw none of the other Apostles only James the Lord's brother so in other words there are still Apostles uh By the time Paul is doing this at the end of the 30s and he's meeting with these folks and they are still based in Jerusalem I assure you before God that what I'm writing to you is no lie that doesn't that isn't a vote of confidence but any event he's trying to assure us that that is true statement then I went to Syria and cilicia I was personally unknown to the churches of Judea that are in Christ they had only heard the report quote the man who formerly persecuted us is now preaching the faith he wants to try to destroy and they praised God because of me so in other words Paul met the Apostle cephas kefa in Aramaic for stone in the 30s in Jerusalem the earliest tradition about the visions of the resurrected Christ also occurs in Paul so Paul indicates actually that Christ appeared first to Peter so Paul says in Corinthians 15 First Corinthians 15 what I received I passed on to you as of first importance that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures that he was buried that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures and that he appeared to cephas and then to the twelve and then all the other people that he appears to and so forth so while emphasizing Peter's importance here Paul's teaching actually contradicts the later gospel Traditions which indicate that Jesus or the Risen Christ appeared first to his female disciples and apostles so Paul also indicates that Peter was married and that Peter's wife accompanied him on Apostolic missions so again in his letter to the Corinthians chapter 9 he says First Corinthians chapter 9. don't we have the right to take a believing wife along with us as do the other Apostles and the Lord's brothers and cephas so it seems in this reference here to indicate that the original idea of missionary pairs so Jesus sends people out two by two may have been because a male Apostle is paired with a female Apostle female Apostles would have had trouble traveling alone because of uh Roman law and Greek customs and so forth but Paul actually in this case he's unmarried he changes that tradition by traveling around with young men so he has missionary companions like Titus and so forth for which he's actually criticized so he is actually responding to that it's okay for me to go around with these young guys or whatever as my missionary companions because uh other Apostles like Peter are bringing their wife around as their companion and so forth so the gospels in the same way Mark in Mark chapter 1 confirms that Peter was married he talks if there's any way a um an incident anyway at his mother-in-law's house and so forth so Peter is also portrayed as a Christian factional leader in Paul's writings so Paul is the leader of a faction in Christianity and he actually identifies Peter as an opposing leader or at least as a leader to which other factions look to for Authority so again in First Corinthians chapter one he says one of you says I follow Paul another says I follow Apollos another says I follow cephas and still another says I follow Christ and so although Paul here is arguing that Christians should transcend such factionalism he's essentially admitting that there's been a conflict he's been in conflict with Peter uh and and the other their Divergent views whether non-jew and over their Divergent views on whether non-jews who convert must adhere to Jewish law and he spells that out in other places more clearly so for example here he describes in his letter to the Galatians his fight with Peter and the acknowledged pillars of the church he says as those as for those who were held in high esteem whatever they were makes no difference to me because God does not show favoritism so as to those who were held in high esteem in other words the leaders of the church cephas and Paul I'm sorry and James the brother and Jesus John and so forth and they're held in high esteem by some people that doesn't make any difference to me because God doesn't show favoritism is what Paul's saying they those guys added nothing to my message on the contrary they recognized that I had been entrusted with the task of preaching the gospel to the uncircumcised just as Peter had been to the circumcised so in other words he had a meeting with these leaders like Peter and they all said yeah okay you have a calling and you're supposed to preach to the Gentiles you're supposed to preach to Greek speaking people who are not Jews already they're not circumcised and Peter's going to go around and and convert all of the Jews for God he says who was at work in Peter as an apostle to the circumcise was also at work in me as an apostle to the Gentiles James cephas and John those esteemed as pillars gave me and Barnabas Paul one of you Paul's young men companions the right hand of Fellowship when they recognized the grace given to me they agreed that we should go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised they're going to go convert Jews you guys could go ahead and convert Greeks so whether or not there really was an agreement like that Paul admits that it didn't not hold so he goes on and says later then when cephas came to Antioch where Paul had been leading and planted a Christian Community I opposed him to his face because he stood condemned for before certain men came from James the brother of Jesus Peter used to eat with the Gentiles he didn't always keep kosher he was actually agreeing with me about the law and so forth but when they arrived when James the brother of Jesus's um Messengers when his leggetts arrived then Peter began to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles because he was afraid of those who belong to the circumcision group this faction led by Jesus's brother James that's in opposition to Paul so the other Jews in the Christian Community in Antioch joined Peter in his hypocrisy so that by their hypocrisy even Barnabas even his young man companion was led astray uh and so this is a pretty direct admission of a one-on-one fight that Paul is having here with Peter where he's saying essentially I'm opposing him and condemning him to his face for his hypocrisy and the hypocrisy of these so-called pillars uh who God shows no favorites I don't care what they who they say they are I'm directly called by Christ your policy so so what do we get from information about the historical Peter in Paul so from Paul we learn um that there's a guy and he's got a nickname Peter cephas he's one of the original Apostles of Jesus during Jesus's lifetime that that P Peter had a vision of the vision Christ according to Paul he was the very first person to have a vision of the Risen Christ that he continued to be one of the acknowledged pillars of the church that existed in Jerusalem alongside Jesus's brothers James the brother of Jesus Jude the brother of Jesus so forth and also John who we'll talk about in a future lecture he's also the source then of factional authority so the circumcision faction is what um what Paul's calling them what we might call them as like the original Jesus followers as opposed to the new Pauline Jesus followers Paul and the the beginnings of proto-orthodoxy these are maybe the uh the poor of Jerusalem the ebionite faction the original faction he was married Paul was married traveled with his wife he vacillated over this kosher question when he's with Paul he's okay with it when he's with James he's like okay I I'm not going to do that anymore and at a certain point he's active in Antioch so we learn all of those kind of things and we can say that for sure about the historical Jesus sorry about the historical Peter um things beyond that that we get out of the um out of the gospels you know his original name is Simon that he's a fisherman all of those things we have to build up based on the same criteria that we do with the historical Jesus about multiple attestation Criterion of embarrassment other kinds of things in order to build a fuller portrait but we get at least this kind of Bare Bones from the direct testimony of his local rival or his contemporary rival Paul um so unfortunately that doesn't give us any connection between Peter and Rome in Paul's writings so although Paul met with Peter on at least two occasions in Jerusalem and then later in Antioch he does not connect Peter with the city of Rome Paul's final letter actually in the New Testament though his longest letter the letter to the Romans is written to the Christian Community that existed in Rome and he wrote it in the mid to late 50s A.D it's very clear from Paul's letter that the Roman Community the Rome Christian Community in Rome is actually very large and well established already and that Peter and Paul did not found it it was already there from some other other Founders Paul actually writes out and addresses 50 different individuals but makes no mention of Peter so he's uh you know even though he knows Peter so it's very unlikely that Peter is present in Rome at that kind of time or is in any way associated with the church in Rome um there is also no early awareness of Peter's martyrdom in Rome anyway that Peter was martyred is understood but it's a general kind of understanding so as we saw later tradition held that Peter was martyred in Rome under Nero between the year 64 or 68. however just a few years later beginning with Mark which is written maybe around the year 70. all of the gospels and the book of Acts which is just the second half of the Book of Luke all of those are written after 64 or 68 and in fact in fact soon thereafter but none of them mentioned the idea that Peter is martyred in Rome or that Peter had become Bishop of Rome and it's certainly not um so say if that story was known to the author of Mark it is not outside of the author of Mark's uh uh literary um you know literary principles and understanding it to what to do to have put that back into the story in other words Mark if Market heard that Peter had been in Roman was martyred in Rome he could very easily have had Jesus have a prophecy of that that was going to happen the same way that Mark is writing after let's say if it's 70 or 73 right he's after the the war is happening the Jewish revolt and the destruction of the temple Mark is putting back into Jesus's mouth a prediction that the temple was going to be destroyed knowing that it's going to be destroyed because he's alive at that point so in other words it's very um unusual if that story was known if it had already been created if that it was an actual historical event you would think that one of the gospel writers specifically the book of Acts which is about where Peter's a major character and is running around and doing stuff um but none of these books seem to be aware of this tradition which therefore probably doesn't exist yet as a story so in other words it's not something that happened and it's not something that has been invented yet as a story so when we do have at the end of the first century this bishop of Rome Clement the first and he's actually he mentions Peter but he doesn't connect him to Rome he doesn't cite him as a predecessor so centuries later Jerome tells a story that Peter had personally ordained Clement to priesthood and so forth but Clement here who is writing an intervention letter to the Corinthian Church and he doesn't really have any particular standing to do it if he was saying I Clement Bishop of Rome the successor of Peter who personally put on my you know he put his hands on my head and ordained me to priesthood who gave me the keys to the kingdom he you think you might mention that as he's trying to establish standing for himself why he's intervention intervening in the Corinthian Church Clement doesn't do that and there's no particular reason to imagine that he's heard of a story associating Peter with Rome or as one of his predecessors or anything like that um there is a reference in the pseudographical letter first Peter it indicates that the author is writing from Babylon obviously the author isn't Peter but he is pretending to be Peter and so he at least at this point is associating potentially associating anyway Peter as being in Rome which is essentially the new Babylon although it doesn't specifically say that so in other words this tradition may have started you know started to evolve in the second century Ignatius of Antioch the late first and second early second century indicates that Peter and Paul had a mono admonished the Romans although I don't know that it means that he said that they had done so in person finally by the time you get to the end of the second century irenaeus of Lyon claims that Peter and Paul founded the church in Rome but we know actually from Paul's letter to the Romans that that's not true so in other words the church in Rome had already been well founded that Paul did not was not a founder of it he's writing to it in order to try to get support from the church in Rome and he doesn't associate that with Peter at all so later the tradition is developing and so later people assume that that's the case and so to sum up as we go back to our timeline and some what I think I want to say is the papacy is certainly an ancient Institution it dates to the first century its claims to Primacy have some very ancient precedence going all the way back to the first century but they were largely developed and had more fruit during the Middle Ages while the connections to Peter are likewise ancient going all the way back to the end of the first and the beginning especially in the end of the second centuries and third centuries they do not actually connect to the historic Peter who in my view probably very likely never never visited Rome and so uh that's even though there is a traditional tomb and so forth that that tradition established was established in the tomb location and so forth were established after the tradition that Peter was in Rome which was many many decades after uh Peter fell out of the historic Peter fell out of historical record and so that is my review on the origins of the papacy and so we will see now if there have been questions and while landro is giving me questions I'm going to have a glass of water that's okay no problem I'm drinking water anyway while we that's fine guys we don't have a lot of questions if you have any questions about this or please go ahead and otherwise maybe I've filibustered you this was a longer lecture again and it was kind of fun to do it's kind of in our wheelhouse of who was you know this kind of Bible figure in a way we got around we got around by the end to who was uh the historic Peter um and is there connections then between the the tradition that the historic Peter was the first Bishop of Rome or not uh the Traditions I think just don't reach back enough so Bob Garrison says to the spot in St Peter's Square where Peter was supposedly crucified might not be the actual place what a historians think so the answer to that is there's no um no particular historical basis to that so it's a traditional spot that spot was identified maybe sometime in the second century as early as sometime as the second century so it's been a traditional spot for a whole long time it's the um uh uh it's the same as the it's the same as the as the Holy Sepulcher Jesus's tomb in Jerusalem so it's a very important ancient church and it goes all the way back to the 4th Century but um uh but the chances that that is where Jesus actual tomb is is effectively nil it's something that many centuries later people looked around and they said oh I must have been here and it's not there so the answer is that it's a traditional spot it has imbued with lots of intentional and um uh it you you you experience the story there but it is not um it's not a historic uh identification there's I would say the most likely scenario is that uh that the historic Peter never went to Rome um secretary Secret Asian Dan says are popes actually crowned um I guess maybe it's not called crowned in that way I mean I guess where the crowning um is somehow like is maybe the important thing of a of a of a secular King they do have crowns and so they have um a crown now that is a Triple Crown um that was added to successively now if you see like this giant Pope hat the crown the Papal crown that has the three tiers to it is something that developed again in the Middle Ages is it builds out of an original hat which is a um a a pagan Roman priest hat originally um I think where this originally comes from and it's actually an imperial it's modeled on the um kind of a late Imperial Crown itself so the papacy had takes over a lot of the um let's say the kind of the royal trappings and things like that that had occurred for the Imperial Monarch so essentially the popes in the west are the representatives of the uh the Byzantine emperor for a whole long time and that's where some of the um some of the regalia develop so they do have crowns I think they're probably the most important um I guess probably the most important thing that happens is is the anointing um I'd have to go through the entire ritual of how the how the Popes are made and so forth that they have crowns and they wear them so maybe it's not being crowned Pope but it's um I don't think I've got to I have to look it up exactly how this ceremony works uh operation IV 85 says Center place do you envision any further schisms involving the Catholic church in the future or even reunification among some combination of Catholic Protestant Eastern churches so the uh the papacy has had for at least half a century pretty successful um ecumenical Outreach to Eastern churches and so almost every um almost every kind of Eastern tradition includes both a independent right and also a um right where they're in Union with Rome and so for example there will be unicranian an independent Ukrainian Orthodox church and then there's also going to be a Catholic Ukrainian Orthodox Church where they really don't have any I don't think they have to even have anything different they can continue to have the entire Ukrainian right and everything you're going to do in terms of all of your traditions and practices but you just acknowledge that the pope is the first among equals and so forth and then you're in Union with Rome and so most of the Eastern churches have a division like that where where where they're in some kind of there's a a proportion of the Believers who are in Union with Rome in a portion who aren't and so that is ongoing um there are some other uh reunifications that are working in terms of there are uh understandings that the the papacy can have in terms of priesthood practice and so forth with the lutherans and with other Protestants anglicans and things are there any further schisms gonna involving the Catholic church in the future it's uh it's difficult to say um I I think that the uh the Catholic church is a it's a very big tent Church there are big divisions that are existing between um the church in the developed world and the church in the developing world so how you know managing all those is is always complex uh certainly the most recent Pope Francis the current pope has is good at in my opinion of making potentially kind of ambiguous statements where he tries to get people away from hot button divisive topics and to not you know and to sort of calm down over them and things like that so he's been pretty successful the his predecessor John Paul II really turns the uh in a social sense really turned the church in a real hard right direction and his shadow over the church in terms of having uh like for example the the bishop brick in the United States or people who are you know in a lot of cases way way far right of their their um their followers and so forth and have alienated uh a lot of people so there's a so there's possibilities for it I'm not I don't I don't know for sure I don't I don't have a a sense of that as anything's on the horizon anytime uh soon uh uh Donnie Lee Gringo Leon hi Leon uh says is it fair to say then that the Roman Catholic Church claimed to papacy to Peter is based on Matthew's words of The Rock um it it actually may not be fair to say that Leon because actually apparently that claim wasn't Central um necessarily very early on it became after the argument started happening it became a major claim um but maybe what but it wasn't apparently an original claimant and indeed some of the earliest Church fathers who were interpreting um that is more or less saying that the the statement in Matthew here is not anything like isn't actually about founding churches and so forth but it is that Upon This Rock which is to say the rock of your faith so it's it's a general statement about faith is the way a lot of people interpreted that but over time it became a it has become a Papal claim certainly when in the apologetic arguments that go back and forth between the papacy and um and people who are arguing against papal Primacy whether it's the Eastern churches or the Protestant churches and so forth um Jamie Lee says James Lee says do you know of any other instances in scholarship where the Criterion of embarrassment is argued by historians um so yeah I think that that's a I mean I think that that's a fairly it's a fairly normal Criterion to use so it's one of the things that we have to do when we're reading into all sources so um so in a lot of cases the Criterion of embarrassment is useful when you have only positive sources right so there will be some um historical figures for whom you know or movements and things like that for whom we have only negative sources right and so uh and so when we're learning about the you know now there's now the sources have been uncovered for the gnostics and things like that but for let's say alternate Christianity is like the gnostics or the uh the ebionites and so forth we primarily have um the writings of their antagonists and so then we don't have to look for a Criterion of embarrassment because uh because those guys are looking for anything embarrassing about those guys and so in fact when your antagonists say things like about the gnostics that you're just sexually depraved and you you're having orgies all the time um that's that's something that they are kind of creating to embarrass you and actually we would probably correct it the opposite way it turns out that actually um gnostics and things are are likely to more likely to be kind of Aesthetics who actually are opposed to sex at all because they don't want to bring new uh bodies into the world at all right and so and so certainly that was true for like the cathars who were also accused of orgies and things like that even though they're likely practicing like abstinence um and so for so when you only have the antagonists then you don't need the Criterion of embarrassment in other words but if you only have sources that are positive that's when we make use of that right so if you only have um some ancient Kings uh Court biography then anything that that you admit that that Court biographer admits uh you know like oh he massacred all these people or whatever it is you know that they're trying to cover over um if they admit it then that's that would be the Criterion of embarrassment and so a historian is more likely to credit that official biographer even though they are biased in favor of the of the source and so the reason why that's getting used a lot in the biblical studies is that for all of this early Christianity stuff we mostly have Christian sources that are are very much um apologetic already and so then when they sang things where they're apologizing for this so when um you know so when in the in the uh in the gospels uh it you know it more or less says that that people are accusing Jesus of being a drunkard because and and asking why unlike John's followers why don't you why don't your followers fast and then there's an apologetic statement where Jesus says the time for fasting is not now when I when I'm gone then you can fast so um so it's it's essentially a an apologetic statement where people are CR were criticizing people are aware Christians are aware that the historical Jesus is being criticized for not fasting right and so uh and so yeah I think it's a fairly uh normal turn so Michelangelo says is it possible that the name Peter cephas was just a nickname unrelated to church hierarchy or Theology and later reinterpreted as having a more important meeting absolutely um so whereas the name Peter cephas or whatever is multiply attested right so we have we have Paul who is using that nickname so that it's clear that Peter's going by that name or cephas is going by that name Simon is going by this nickname um and so and so why does he get that nickname though so it could be that the um that the gospel of Matthew which says which adds that extra stuff I'm I'm changing your name to Peter but then I'm going to say Upon This Rock I'll build my church that doesn't exist anywhere else that is not multiply attested that is only in Matthew there is no other source for that so there is no reason to um necessarily to associate a a historically um given nickname that Jesus gave to this guy Simon with the idea that he's going to be the founder of a church so um so those two are completely isolated they're only connected in the in the one uh statement that is only attested in the in the gospel of Matthew um so Kevin Hathaway says could Linus have started the church in Rome Linus the son of kraticus he is mentioned by Paul in first Timothy um so first Timothy is late it's one of the non um non-attested uh works you know in other words sudopographical works that is a test that is ascribed to Paul where I would look for the person to have um started the Roman churches we should probably the earliest sources we have on that is Paul's letter to the Romans we could listen to look at those 50 people that he talks about uh including the apostles that he knows about who are he cites as being in Rome um and he those would probably be the place to look for um the founders among those that's probably as best as we could have so probably not so I know Linus is Linus also the one of the uh so there's there's between before we get to Clement the first there uh I think Linus is the second is it you see the second pope that's on the on the list that list is very late so it probably um the the Libre of pontificalis uh is probably coming from uh the time period of Jerome and so it is again a late reconstruction trying to put that together um Ron Wagner says could Peter ordain Clement Bishop of Rome not as a successor but as the First bishop of Rome um so we don't have any evidence of that uh Ron sure Anything could happen but we just don't but we can't with when we're trying to make a history um uh you know what happened in history uh we have to have like a contemporary some kind of contemporary evidence or claim that that is happening so there are later Traditions that suggest that um but they it's surprising that they don't exist earlier when Clement is running around in writing Clement may not be wanting to mention that as a modest person but no one else who is as contemporary is mentioning that either it's a tradition that develops later uh dick McCallum says who traditionally followed Clement so there is a so we have a a list of the popes that is developed that starts with Peter and and so forth and gets to Clement and then goes on uh called the Lieber pontificalis a lot of people assume that the biographies of the early popes that are written there are written by Saint Jerome in the fourth Century or whenever he's active and that um and that unfortunately we don't know you know what that was all based on so there's possible that there is an early archival source and so forth so following Clement we're going to have better um you know better evidence for them but a lot of them are all just Shadows you know at the very beginning little more than names um Daryl Scott uh compared to Catholics how do the Orthodox view Peter um I I think that they view Peter fairly similar um and um you know the main question would be this uh you know this question about you know Primacy right and so they obviously are not going to emphasize that um you know I gave you the keys I found this church upon you and so forth um they probably would have made have those apologetic explanations that they're talking about I'm going to build my church upon Faith the rock of faith is what they're saying a kind of a universal statement as opposed to like I say the um the Catholic apologetic which is that that is a a a narrative of Petron Authority in general the Orthodox uh tradition also um you know venerates Peter as a you know leader of the Apostles and so forth and there's an important Saint and and all of that and I think that they do associate him with Rome and so that uh because that's the tradition so but in general it would just be but everything's short of then that he's the leader and that uh and that all of his successors have to be the leaders they rather or would be in favor of the idea always that all of the Bishops were um you know were always autonomous and indeed the Eastern churches even though the uh Arch the patriarch of Constantinople called The ecumenical patriarch he nevertheless among all of the Eastern Orthodox Churches Still Remains first among equals right and so that's why all of the Eastern churches are all autocephalus so there's the Greek Orthodox church and and the uh Russian Orthodox Church which is now out of communion with the rest of them but everybody else the Bulgarian Orthodox Church Serbian Orthodox church and so forth everybody's got their own Orthodox church because um uh because again their their arguments about Authority are nobody's in charge in that way so everybody can have an autocephalus Church oh and thank you for your support Daryl um Michelangelo says um when did the idea of the Pope's infallibility in his decision start and where did that come from um so the the height of kind of papal pretense about that kind of thing that the pope is a sole Authority and that the pope can for example depose Kings and appoint New Kings and so forth but nobody can judge the Pope that comes out of the Gregorian reform there had been some you know precedence that they were building on but it is a document that occurs in the um was that the 11th century the uh around the time period of uh Gregory VII uh and he creates a document called uh uh dictatis Popeye the the sayings the sayings of the Pope or something like that and they and they come up with a essentially a program of of papal Authority that is new and is in a much more um uh expansive than anything that had ever existed before and so that is the place where that comes from although again the um the even so even today the idea of papal infallibility doesn't mean that every single thing that the pope does is infallible but only those things when he is speaking specifically ex-cottedra that same word as cathedral in other words he's speaking from the seat of his cathedral in other words his throne and when he's speaking ex-cottage then his statement is infallible um but that I don't even think has even happened in the last 200 years so in other words even though even though the doctrine continues I'm not sure that it's in practice uh Mr Valerie says uh what why do you think there are so many conspiracies about the papacy propagated by many members of Protestant denominations uh because people love conspiracies conspiracy theories um it is a it is a plague of our time people prefer to you know there's a lot of real information real information is actually endlessly fascinating and there's an infinite amount of it you can always read about it and you'd find out and it's really wonderful rather than finding real information people prefer to think that they have the pattern of the shortcut the thing that nobody's ever heard of before the Popes are actually refugees from the lost city of Atlantis and whatever you know they they go ever secretly meet inside the Pyramid of Giza and whatever you know everybody wants to have these kind of kids and why do they do it so it's a there has been a major there have been major Wars of religion there is an underlying um you know Protestants and Catholics killed each other in huge numbers uh um part of that division involved uh dehumanizing the other there is a huge tradition uh in back and forth between Protestants and Catholics you know we're kind of on the other side of it a little bit now but um it was pretty serious in my lifetime even still but certainly more serious couple hundred couple hundred years ago and so um and so I think that uh that's why so people are like that uh data 10 asks um does not history seem to suggest that James the brother of Jesus had Primacy over Peter in leading the non-pauline church and the answer to that is yes so the um both the indications essentially in Paul's writings are that you know when he is having this fight with the non-pauline people the the circumcision um a faction that he calls them um that in fact the person who's in charge when he goes to Jerusalem is James the brother of Jesus and later Peter who is um essentially coming as a an apostle to the Christian Community in Antioch um that he is pretty much in line with willing to be in line with Paul and his group until again um Messengers or legates from James from Jerusalem came and then Peter betrays Paul and switches and so forth and causes uh faction so it does seem like James the brother of Jesus is in fact the leader of the church and not Peter so that the idea that Peter is the leader is a later tradition that develops Apollonia says so in the Gospel of John 21 15-21 when was Jesus referring to Paul as a pillar in the church in Jerusalem instead of in Rome uh feed my sheep feed my sheep and so forth um so I don't yeah I don't know that he's calling out I'd have to now get that ver those verses exactly in terms of that so that's part of the um you know the additional writing so that is the after the original Book of John or the John 1 writer has finished writing John 2 an additional editor and redactor has come on and tacked on this additional part or ending including the uh the call to Peter Peter to feed my sheep and so forth I don't think that it specifies though go to Rome to feed my sheep right so I will we'd have to look at it but I'm pretty I'm pretty confident that it is a general um you know it is it is definitely a reflecting Peter petrine leadership right so it is emphasizing Peter who gets emphasized a lot in the Gospel of John the last of the gospels in terms of the Canon um he's second only to the Beloved disciple in that narrative um but um but and so and so they're aware of an emerging tradition of Peter as the leader but not necessarily in Rome Tolkien study says where does um first among equals come from um Primus interpares actually comes from uh Augustus so the emperor the first Roman Emperor uh Caesar Augustus in order to disguise um his total Authority and and dictatorship essentially his new monarchy we call him Emperor Emperor we think of as a super king the word Emperor just meant General at the time and uh and and Augustus made it very clear you know uh I may well be the you know you can give me all these titles like the August one like the the father of his father of the Fatherland and so forth but I'm just as I'm just a senator like the rest of you I am just the first among equals I'm the print caps you know the prince which is where we also get the word Prince um then later from from the from that leader so um so I think that that's uh maybe where it comes from uh as an example in the preceding Century but then um uh the popes kind of start asserting that right away so like I say Clement is uh whether or not he's he don't think he has the phrase first among equals but he definitely um feels like he's as the essentially the bishop of the uh the congregation in the capital this you know of the he's able to um you know give advice or make proclamations to the other uh churches when they're in disorder anyway uh Bob Garrison says with um all of the history of European popes is it possible the next Pope could be Asian um I don't know I I would think that um you know so so the very first time you know Francis who's pope now is the very first time there was a pope from the Western Hemisphere and from the southern hemisphere right so everybody else had always been European or from the Roman Empire so North African you know back when it was your uh Roman and so forth and you know Asia in terms of the um you know the Mediterranean area that's where they've all been from before so in other words there's been popes from Asia before but they're from Syria right uh when the Roman Empire had was included Syria um but in terms of East Asia you're probably thinking or South Asia um I would say it's very unlikely that the next Pope would be East Asian or South Asian um probably uh probably Africa soon before then but anyway um you know there's definitely going to be a lot of pressure there's definitely a lot of pressure on those Cardinals that it's not an Italian the reason why they picked Francis was because yeah so Francis is in fact a Italian Argentinian the reason I knew they were going to pick Francis because because I knew they were gonna have so much pressure to not pick an Italian but they only want to pick Italians uh and so and so they got to pick an Italian who was from Argentina in other words so that was and so they were able to get that to work out and so um so yeah there the Cardinals are one-on-one in Italian you know but they're going to be under so much pressure not to do that but they're going to pick somebody but you know who who knows who what what it's going to be I'm not um uh so thank you so much it's been a very wonderful discussion uh I hope you've enjoyed it I think that we've got a whole bunch of exciting uh ones in the in the works and so next week like I say we will talk about one of the most important text texts left out of the New Testament uh lost New Testaments uh the dedicate

Channel: Centre Place

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Keywords: community of christ, jesus myth, bible studies, christianity lecture, christian education, biblicar scholar, judaism, lost tribes, lost tribes of israel, christianity, history of israel, history of judaism, ancient history, vatican, pope benedict, history of christianity, history of rome, roman empire, papacy, pope, benedict

Id: MYD_i_whauw

Length: 113min 48sec (6828 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 11 2023