Was there a Bishop of Rome in the First Century?

Abstract

David Albert Jones’ article purports to address a strictly historical question: did the Church in first-century Rome have a single presiding bishop? His argument is designed to examine and refute the view (found in my history of the popes among other places) that the rule of a single bishop was slow to develop in Rome, and that, consequently, the later Roman episcopal lists (most notably that provided by Irenaeus towards the last quarter of the second century) represent a retrospective tidying up of what had been in fact a messier and more complex situation.

Behind this apparently straightforward agenda, however—the sorting out of the facts as far as we can discover them—Fr Jones has another and more pressing objective. He wants to suggest that those like myself who hold that the emergence of the monoepiscopate in Rome was a post-apostolic development, still incomplete at the beginning of the second century, do so not on the basis of the evidence, but because they are in the grip of an unCatholic mindset which colours—and in his view distorts—historical judgement. So, on the first page of his article, he identifies the position he is criticising as “the classic Protestant account of the matter dating from at least as far back as Harnack”. I am intrigued by that adjective “Protestant”. What work is it doing in the fabric of Fr Jones’ argument? It is of course true that Harnack read the evidence in this way: but then so did his older contemporary Louis Duchesne, a Catholic priest with a fair claim to be considered the greatest of all Catholic Church historians, and certainly the greatest nineteenth- century historian of the early Papacy.