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.

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).

Whether He Comes With A Rod Or A Crown

"Ye cannot, ye must not, have a more pleasant or more easy condition here, than He had, who 'through afflictions was made perfect' (Heb. ii. 10)….Nay, whether God come to His children with a rod or a crown, if He come Himself with it, it is well. Welcome, welcome, Jesus, what way soever Thou come, if we can get a sight of Thee! And sure I am, it is better to be sick, providing Christ come to the bedside and draw by the curtains, and say, 'Courage, I am thy salvation,' than to enjoy health, being lusty and strong, and never to be visited of God." (Samuel Rutherford, Letters Of Samuel Rutherford [Carlisle, Pennsylvania: The Banner of Truth Trust, 2012], 52)

Overestimating Humor

People do it in a lot of ways. These are just some examples among others that could be mentioned: