Was Peter the First Bishop of Rome?

Extract

The question of whether Peter was indeed the first bishop of Rome has recently gained popular prominence in the United States due to the best seller by historian and papal critic Garry Wills who vigorously dismisses the entire idea as myth. Although simplistically and sensationally presented, Wills’ thesis relies on the view of many, albeit more subtle, critical scholars that Peter could not have been a bishop at Rome because there were no bishops in Rome until the middle of the second century A.D. Several years ago, David Albert Jones O.P., challenged in this journal this common view of episcopacy in the first century. One scholar, Francis Sullivan S.J., recently responded specifically to Jones’ challenge by reaffirming the apparent majority view. This article will briefly refer to Sullivan’s critique of Jones, and will present in a new light the New Testament evidence showing that Jones’ questioning of the reigning critical view is indeed well-founded and long overdue.

The heart of Jones’ challenge is highlighting the flawed assumptions underlying the reasoning used to deny a first century episcopate: 1) the ideological tendency to view apostolic ministry as “free, loose, inspired and lay” while seeing “the emergence of clerical forms as a fall from primitive innocence” (Jones, p. 142); and 2) the denial of the existence of a first century episcopate based on the alleged silence of early documents. In essence, Jones rightly detects a pervasive bias in the critical literature against developed church structure as somehow contaminating the springtime of apostolic Christianity.