How could a papacy have been referred to?

I've explained, in my last post and elsewhere, why passages like Matthew 16, Luke 22, and John 21 don't imply a papacy. If a papacy were to be derived from such passages, it would have to be derived implicitly rather than explicitly. There is no explicit reference to a papacy in any of the earliest sources. That raises the question of what we should expect a reference to a papacy to look like.

Scripture and other sources often explicitly refer to God's authority over creation, the monarchical authority of kings under the Jewish monarchy, and so forth. In my last post, I cited the account of the centurion in Matthew 8:5-13. Notice that the centurion refers explicitly to the authority he has (verse 9). Similarly, there are explicit references to non-papal church offices, such as apostle and elder. We're even told what qualifications they have to meet and other details about their offices. There is no such term (akin to "king", "centurion", "apostle", "elder", etc.) for a papal office, nor is there any discussion of such an office analogous to the discussions we find of other offices in Acts, the pastoral epistles, and elsewhere. The apostles (plural) are referred to as the first order in the church (1 Corinthians 12:28), without any singling out of Peter or Roman bishops, and we see other passages similarly referring to the apostles as equals (Matthew 19:28, Galatians 2:9, Ephesians 2:20, Revelation 21:14). There were ways of distinguishing Peter from the others if somebody had wanted to make such a distinction, as the distinction between Jesus and the apostles in Ephesians 2:20 illustrates, but none of the authors distinguish Peter as having more authority than the other apostles. When individuals like Peter and Paul are anticipating their death (in 2 Peter, 2 Timothy, and elsewhere), they remind people of what they (Peter and Paul) had taught, mention apostolic authority, point them to scripture, and so forth, but don't say anything about looking to the bishop of Rome as the infallible ruler of all Christians on earth, the center of Christian unity, etc. When Paul discusses the Roman church, Luke discusses Roman Christianity in the book of Acts, and various early patristic sources (Ignatius, Dionysius of Corinth, Irenaeus, Tertullian) comment on why the Roman church is significant, they mention virtues like faith, love, and generosity and other non-papal factors, like the Roman church's faithfulness to apostolic teaching, its location in the capital of the empire, and the presence and martyrdom of Peter and Paul in Rome. A papacy isn't mentioned (and can't be assumed to be present in references to Peter that don't specify papal authority, since Peter's relationship with the Roman church wouldn't have to be papal in order to be significant).

All that critics of the papacy need to ask is that the office be referred to the same way other authorities and offices are referred to. We don't have to resort to something like a Catholic reading of Matthew 16, Luke 22, or John 21 in order to justify the authority of God, parents, government officials, Jewish kings, apostles, deacons, etc. If a papacy existed, it would be surprising if such a significant office weren't referred to explicitly and often. But if it were referred to implicitly rather than explicitly, we would accept something that implicitly comes from the authority of Jesus and the apostles, even though the lack of explicit reference to it would be surprising. The problem with the papacy is that it isn't taught explicitly or implicitly.

And an appeal to development of doctrine won't do. See my articles on the subject here. Catholics make different claims about the papacy than others have made about matters like Trinitarianism and the canon of scripture (Trinitarianism and the canon being examples often appealed to when development of doctrine is brought up). The nature of the papacy is significantly different than the nature of the Trinity and the canon. You'd expect a papacy to be easier to understand and to articulate, and you'd expect it to come up more often in discussions than something like some of the details of Trinitarianism or the canonicity of Hebrews. It doesn't make sense to act as though the latter are in the same category as the former. And there's nothing about, say, the canonicity of Hebrews that makes it as suspicious as the papacy. When the canonicity of Hebrews doesn't come up in the gospels, Acts, or Paul's letters, for example, that's no surprise and is easy to explain (under a scenario in which Hebrews is canonical). When the papacy doesn't come up in those contexts, it's a surprise and isn't easy to explain (under a scenario in which a papacy existed and was understood by Christians at the time, as the First Vatican Council claimed). We have Christians for multiple generations discussing why the Roman church is important without citing the papacy as a reason, then we have the Roman bishop Stephen apparently claiming papal authority or something close to it when it was in his interest to do so during the heretical baptism controversy in the third century. There's no comparable situation with Hebrews' canonicity. There's nothing about the letter that suggests it's a forgery, its acceptance as canonical doesn't seem to involve the sort of self-interest that Stephen had during the heretical baptism dispute, and so forth. Similarly, there's no evidence supporting the papacy comparable to or better than what we have for the canonicity of Hebrews (e.g., what Eusebius reported about the widespread acceptance of Hebrews as scripture when he was composing his church history in the late third and early fourth centuries; see my material on canonical issues here and elsewhere on this site for other examples). The evidence for something like the canonicity of Hebrews is better than what we have for the papacy, even though Protestants and other critics of the papacy make much lower claims about such canonical issues than Catholics make about the papacy. More could be said about the issues surrounding doctrinal development, and anybody who's interested can read the other posts I've referenced above.