Apostolic Primacies

Trent Horn and Suan Sonna recently produced a video responding to a parody of Catholic arguments for the papacy that I posted about a decade ago. The list within that post originated about a decade earlier. It's a little over twenty years old now. As I explain in the introduction to the 2012 post linked above, I don't think any of the items on my list or any combination of them suggests that Paul was a Pope. And, to address an issue Suan raises near the beginning of the video, yes, some of the items on the list weren't intended to be the best arguments that could be made for a Pauline papacy. The introduction to my 2012 article mentions the example of citing Acts 19:11-12 to parallel a Catholic appeal to Acts 5:15. I wouldn't include that Acts 19 passage if I were just trying to produce the best arguments for a Pauline papacy. Even the points I made that I considered more significant weren't presented in the best potential form they could take. I was paralleling a list at a Catholic web site, which was similarly brief. That list included 50 items, so I included 51 in mine, as a parody of the shallowness of the arguments that are often put forward for a papacy (51 being better than 50).

I largely agree with what they say in the video regarding problems with arguing for a Pauline papacy on the basis of a list like mine. I don't think anything they said about Peter in the video exempts a Petrine papacy from the same conclusion. I agree with Trent and Suan that we have to take factors like Peter's lesser literary skills into account when comparing how much of the New Testament he wrote in contrast to how much Paul wrote and when evaluating other contexts in which Paul was more prominent than Peter. But we similarly have to take into account that Peter's prominence in the gospels occurred at a time when neither Paul nor James was yet an apostle, that Peter's personality traits could lead him to speak more than other members of the Twelve and take initiative more (e.g., getting into the water in Matthew 14:28-29 and John 21:7) without his having more authority than the other disciples, and so on. Just as Paul's later prominence can and should be qualified by considerations like his greater literary skills, Peter's earlier prominence should be qualified by factors like the ones I just mentioned.

Trent and Suan are right about Peter being the leader of the Twelve. He did have a primacy, and he had one in multiple ways, in fact. So did other apostles. Some of those primacies overlapped in time. Trent and Suan mention that in Galatians, Paul focuses on his rebuke of Peter rather than a rebuke of others who had erred, and it's surely true that Peter's prominence (you could call it a primacy) motivated Paul to do so. But, at the same time, Peter is named second, after James, in Galatians 2:9, and Peter is referred to as being intimidated by "certain men from James" (2:12). James had more prominence than Peter in some contexts (you could call it a primacy), but nobody should conclude that James was a Pope.

Similarly, though the reference to Peter as "first" in Matthew 10:2 comes up in the video, we read of how nobody is greater than John the Baptist in 11:11, the next chapter in Matthew's gospel. Categories of primacy or greatness don't inherently involve jurisdiction. Trent and Suan discuss how Judas comes last in lists of the Twelve, and that place in the lists isn't a matter of authority. That gives us precedent to think Peter's first place in such lists (but not all lists, as Galatians 2:9 illustrates) isn't due to his having greater authority.

Suan brings up Luke 22 and John 21, but those passages give us non-papal reasons for Peter's being singled out. He boasted louder and fell harder. The passages are about his unusual need for Jesus' help as a result of those weaknesses, not some sort of unusual authority he had. The triple questioning of Peter in John 21:15-17 is likely meant to parallel his earlier triple denial of Christ. Similarly, Thomas is singled out in 20:27 because he needed restoration after failing in a way in which the other disciples hadn't. Jesus rebukes Thomas in the process of restoring him, and Jesus similarly rebukes Peter in the process of restoring him (by asking the grievous and humiliating question of whether Peter loved him and asking it three times, which paralleled the triple denial Peter was guilty of). You could speculate that the reference to shepherding in 21:15-17 is about papal authority, but nothing in the text or context makes that conclusion probable. The Old and New Testaments frequently apply the terminology of shepherding to a variety of leaders with a variety of levels of authority. Protestants acknowledge that Peter was a shepherd. Mentioning that role in a passage about his being restored after his fall makes sense with or without a papacy. Since the text and context of Luke 22 and John 21 provide us with non-papal explanations for what Jesus said to Peter, we have no need to add a papal explanation. Nothing said by Trent or Suan justifies adding a papal explanation to either text. We should prefer the simpler explanation.

The appeal to Isaiah 22 doesn't work either. I've discussed some of the problems with appealing to that passage elsewhere.

The video I'm responding to here refers to the other apostles receiving their authority through Peter, but that could happen by non-papal means, depending on what type of reception through Peter is in view. Peter is the focus of Matthew 16, since he's the one who spoke up (much as James and John spoke up in Mark 10:35-45, the centurion took initiative to come to Jesus in Matthew 8:5-13 and was commended for having a sort of primacy of faith in verse 10, etc.). It wouldn't make sense for Jesus to respond to Peter by talking to Philip. So, Jesus uses the rock language that's fitting in light of Peter's name, and he mentions the giving of the keys to Peter. But we know that the other apostles are also rocks upon whom the church is built (Ephesians 2:20) and that they're given the keys as well (Matthew 18:18). The chronological sense in which the keys were given through Peter (his receiving them is mentioned first) doesn't carry with it the implication that he had more authority. Andrew's being chosen before Peter in John 1:35-42 doesn't imply greater authority on Andrew's part, the things in my Pauline papacy list that were said about Paul before being said about the other apostles don't prove that he had more authority, and so on. What we have in Matthew 16 is similar to the situation with John 21. It's only a possible reference to a papacy, not a probable one.

And that's true of the Biblical argument for the papacy in general. I largely agree with what Trent and Suan say in the video, including much of what they say about Petrine primacy, but they need to apply their reasoning about Paul more consistently.