Resources For Addressing The Papacy

The papacy has been getting a lot of attention lately, because of the Pope's death. Go here for a brief summary of some of the evidence against the papacy. The main section of the post is just two paragraphs long, summarizing some problems with Roman Catholic appeals to Isaiah 22 and Matthew 16 and several contexts in which there could have been evidence for an early papacy, but the office is absent or contradicted instead. And here's a collection of many of our posts on the papacy, including lengthier discussions of the issues summarized in the first post linked above.

The Departure Material In John

I've written about what I've called the departure passages in scripture and how they relate to issues like the papacy and sola scriptura. See here, for example. Acts 20, 2 Timothy, and 2 Peter have been discussed a lot, but I want to expand on John's material, which has been neglected.

How Corrupt The Roman Catholic Church Is

The Other Paul and James White recently discussed the latest edition of the Jerome Biblical Commentary, an edition with a foreword from Pope Francis. See here for some examples of similar problems with Catholicism in other contexts.

More Discussion Of The Problems With The Eliakim Argument For The Papacy

John Cranman and Jeremy Kidd recently produced a video that makes a lot of good points about the argument for a papacy based on Eliakim in Isaiah 22. (I came across the video by means of a link from The Other Paul on Twitter.)

Protestants Are More Consistent With Matthew 16

Peter isn't just singled out in verses 16-19, which Catholics highlight. He's also singled out in verses 22-23. No other apostle is called Satan. Does it follow that Peter was uniquely Satanic, more evil than anybody else or any other apostle or something akin to that? No. For one thing, Peter can be singled out in verses 22-23 without having any relevant sort of primacy. It could be, and it probably was the case, that Peter was singled out in verses 22-23 because he singled himself out by speaking up. It wouldn't make sense for Jesus to respond to Peter by talking to Thomas. It doesn't follow that Peter was singled out because of being more Satanic than anybody else or some such thing. Since we know in the abstract that something like being singled out in verses 22-23 in the manner in which Peter was singled out doesn't imply primacy in any relevant sense, and the evidence as a whole suggests Peter didn't have the primacy in question (e.g., the evidence we have that Judas was more Satanic than Peter), we conclude that a Satanic primacy most likely isn't being referred to. The passage could be referring to such a primacy, but that possibility isn't a probability. Just as Peter's personality, such as his outspokenness, can explain, and seems to best explain, his being singled out in verses 16-19 without the involvement of something like an additional church office, the same is likely true in verses 22-23.

Protestants apply the same sort of reasoning to verses 22-23 that they apply to verses 16-19. Catholics, on the other hand, are less consistent.

Does Peter's name suggest papal authority?

Catholics sometimes make claims like the ones I came across in a recent discussion about the papacy: "He spoke to Peter first, and changed his name and gave him the authority specifically. At no other point does God change someone's name and it does not denote new authority and responsibility."

Problems With The Eliakim Argument For The Papacy

Some comments I posted in a YouTube thread, in case anybody would find them helpful:

Were Ephesus and Constantinople prominent because of a perpetual office instituted by Jesus or the apostles?

Because none of the earliest Christian sources refer to a papacy, Catholics often resort to suggesting that any sort of reference to a prominence or primacy of the Roman church is adequate evidence for the office. But when sources like Paul, Ignatius, Dionysius of Corinth, Irenaeus, and Tertullian commend the Roman church for non-papal reasons, it doesn't make sense to equate that with affirming that the Roman bishop has papal authority. It's sometimes suggested that critics of Catholicism are asking for too much when they make that sort of distinction. But it does make sense to distinguish between two concepts that aren't the same, and we do that with other early churches and early bishops. Think of how prominent churches other than Rome were in early church history (Jerusalem in the book of Acts, Ignatius' comments about the significance of the church of Ephesus, what Irenaeus said about the importance of the churches of Ephesus and Smyrna, the prominence of Constantinople in later centuries, etc.). All that Protestants and other critics of Roman Catholicism are doing is applying the same reasoning to Rome that we and Roman Catholics apply to other churches.

Petrine Primacy Isn't A Papacy

A good passage of scripture to bring up in discussions of the papacy is Matthew 11:11. We're told that nobody born of women is greater than John the Baptist. We don't conclude that he therefore was a Pope or that nobody, including Peter, could have had any authority over John. He could be unsurpassed in one sense without being unsurpassed in another sense. Similarly, when Jesus goes on in the same verse to say that he who is the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than John, it doesn't follow that some sort of jurisdictional primacy is in view. Matthew 11:11 illustrates the fact that there are multiple ways in which somebody can be considered to have a primacy. Somebody like John can simultaneously be unsurpassed in one context without being unsurpassed in another. And the placement of the passage in Matthew 11 is significant, since Peter's primacy in 10:2 is often cited as evidence that he was a Pope, as are the comments about him in chapter 16. As I told a Catholic I had a discussion with earlier this year, do a search on terms like "greatest" and "first" in Matthew's gospel and see what conclusions you end up with if you interpret all of those passages as referring to papal authority. We use categories and language of primacy often in our everyday lives without thinking of a papacy or something equivalent to it. One person will be a leader among a group of friends (making certain decisions for the group, taking the initiative more often than anybody else, etc.) without having any equivalent of papal authority. We speak of who the greatest military leader was, the greatest American president, or whatever without having any equivalent of a Pope in mind.

You can believe in a Petrine primacy, as I and many other non-Catholics do, without believing in a papacy. I also believe in a primacy of John the Baptist, a Pauline primacy, and primacies of other Biblical figures. Peter is the greatest among the Twelve in some ways, and my sense is that he's probably the greatest among the Twelve overall. (You could argue that John the son of Zebedee is the greatest, because of his influence on later history through his gospel and because of other factors, but my sense is that Peter is the more significant of the two overall.) However, I'd place Paul ahead of Peter if you go beyond the Twelve. That Pauline primacy doesn't involve a papacy, just as Peter's primacy doesn't.

If a papacy had existed in early Christianity, we probably wouldn't have to go to passages like Matthew 10:2 and 16:18-19 to find unverifiable, possible allusions to it. Go here for a discussion of how the papacy is absent across many contexts where we'd expect to see it mentioned if the office existed early on. And go here for a collection of resources on the papacy more broadly.

We can think of a series of steps involved in sorting through these issues. For example, if a passage like Matthew 10:2 or John 21:15-17 is cited in support of a papacy, is a papacy implied by the text in question? None of the passages cited by Catholics (in scripture or in the earliest sources outside of scripture) logically lead to a papacy. We can go on to ask whether we'd expect a papacy to be mentioned in certain places if the office existed at the time (e.g., the many New Testament passages on church government issues, the early patristic comments on why the Roman church is significant). We can also ask if any of the relevant sources seem to deny the concept of the papacy. You can read my material linked above for examples of all three of these questions being addressed. But we don't need to go through all of these steps to be justified in not believing in a papacy. The insufficiency of the arguments for a papacy are enough to justify not accepting the concept, even if we thought that no early source contradicts the concept or have never even considered whether any early source does so. We take the same approach with any other matter involving some type of primacy (Matthew 11:11, the unique name given to James and John in Mark 3:17, the unique language applied to Paul in the context of Acts 9, the focus on Paul in Acts, Paul's having written more books of scripture than any other apostle, John's being referred to as "the elder", etc.).

"At open variance with this clear doctrine of Holy Scripture as it has been ever understood by the Catholic Church are the perverse opinions of those who, while they distort the form of government established by Christ the Lord in his Church, deny that Peter in his single person, preferably to all the other Apostles, whether taken separately or together, was endowed by Christ with a true and proper primacy of jurisdiction; or of those who assert that the same primacy was not bestowed immediately and directly upon blessed Peter himself, but upon the Church, and through the Church on Peter as her minister....For none can doubt, and it is known to all ages, that the holy and blessed Peter, the Prince and Chief of the Apostles, the pillar of the faith and foundation of the Catholic Church, received the keys of the kingdom from our Lord Jesus Christ, the Saviour and Redeemer of mankind, and lives presides and judges, to this day and always, in his successors the Bishops of the Holy See of Rome" (First Vatican Council, session 4, chapters 1-2)

We want a king!

We should keep in mind that one of the reasons people can have for being Roman Catholic or finding Catholicism appealing is the sort of interest in a king that the ancient Israelites had, an interest that can be sinful. People can have sinful reasons for desiring some other belief system, including Protestantism, but my focus here is on Catholicism and the connection between the papacy and a monarchy. We should keep in mind that a desire for a monarchical form of church government can be, and I think often is, part of why people are Catholic or are attracted to Catholicism. And the motives for wanting that sort of authority structure don't have to be entirely sinful in order to be partly sinful or to be inadequate to justify accepting the papacy.

"your wickedness is great which you have done in the sight of the Lord by asking for yourselves a king" (1 Samuel 12:17)

The Keys In Matthew 18:18

See this Twitter thread from The Other Paul for some good points about Cameron Bertuzzi's recent video on alleged evidence for a papacy in Isaiah 22. We've said a lot about Isaiah 22 and the papacy over the years, and anybody who's interested can search our archives. In the remainder of this post, I want to add some points to the ones made by The Other Paul.

More About The Arguments For Pauline And Petrine Papacies

The Other Paul and Geoff Robinson just produced a good response to the video by Trent Horn and Suan Sonna on a Pauline papacy.

Since Luke 22, John 21, and Jesus' singling out of Peter in the Garden of Gethsemane have been getting a lot of attention, I want to point out how unusually weak Peter is in the gospel accounts leading up to Jesus' death. While all of the disciples are referred to as being unfaithful to Jesus in that context, and Judas is obviously the worst of them, the degree to which Peter falters is often underestimated. As I said in my initial response to the video by Trent and Suan, Peter boasted louder and fell harder. Before we even get to his triple denial of Christ:

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).

Was there a papacy in the early church?

There's been a lot of discussion of the papacy lately on some popular YouTube channels. For example, Cameron Bertuzzi recently had Joe Heschmeyer and Jimmy Akin of Catholic Answers on his channel, along with some Protestants arguing for the other side. Here's a good one-hour summary, from Gavin Ortlund, of the problems with arguments for the papacy. The Other Paul has been producing a lot of good material on the subject as well, often with Geoff Robinson. Steven Nemes has been making a lot of significant points, such as in this recent video on Matthew 16 and Isaiah 22. You can find collections of our posts on these issues here and by clicking on the relevant post labels, like Papacy.

No Bishop Of Bishops

"For neither does any of us set himself up as a bishop of bishops, nor by tyrannical terror does any compel his colleague to the necessity of obedience; since every bishop, according to the allowance of his liberty and power, has his own proper right of judgment, and can no more be judged by another than he himself can judge another. But let us all wait for the judgment of our Lord Jesus Christ, who is the only one that has the power both of preferring us in the government of His Church, and of judging us in our conduct there." (Cyprian)

As you can see on the page linked above, dozens of other bishops at the council spoke after Cyprian made his comments. Nobody voiced any disagreement with what he said. They often appeal to scripture and reason to justify their position on the matter before them, but nobody appeals to papal authority. And nobody gives any indication of thinking that such an office existed or that departing from it or operating independently of it needed to be justified.

Jerome On Isaiah 22 And Eliakim

Roman Catholics often claim that Matthew 16 should be interpreted in light of Isaiah 22, which supposedly should lead us to the papacy. I've discussed some of the problems with that sort of argument in the past, such as in the comments section of the thread here. It's often noted that there is no support for such a reading of Isaiah 22 in the earliest centuries of church history and that Revelation 3:7, a passage discussing Jesus, is more reminiscent of Isaiah 22 than Matthew 16 is. In his commentary on Isaiah, Jerome not only sees Jesus as the equivalent of Eliakim, but even cites Revelation 3:7 in the process of discussing the passage in Isaiah. He sees Peter in the passage, but as one of the cups of Isaiah 22:24, along with the other apostles:

Eliakim means "God rising again," or "resurrection of God." Therefore, that God rising again, who is the son of Hilkiah, that is, "of the Lord's portion," will take your [the Jewish law's] place, and will be clothed with your robe, and will be strengthened by your sash, so that what you had in the letter, he possesses in the Spirit; and he will be father of those who inhabit Jerusalem, that is, the "vision of peace," which means the church, and the house of Judah, where there is the true "confession" of faith. This is why he says to the apostles, "Little children, I am with you a little longer" [John 13:33]; and to another, "Son, your sins are forgiven" [Matt 9:2]; and to another, "Daughter, your faith has saved you" [Luke 7:50]. Also, I will give to him, he says, the key of the house of David, "who opens, and no one shuts, who shuts, and no one opens" [Rev 3:7]. And this very key will be upon his shoulder, that is, during the passion. This accords with what is written in another passage: "Whose sovereignty is on his shoulder" [Isa 9:6]. For that which he will have opened up by his passion cannot be closed, and what he will have enclosed in Jewish ceremonies, no other will open….

This is also why in the Gospel it is written, "All the people were hanging from him [like hanging from the peg in Isaiah 22:24]" [Luke 19:48]. Indeed, this happened not merely at that time, but it is fulfilled up to the present day, that they hang various kinds of vessels from him, as if from the word of God, wisdom, justice, and all things by which Christ is designated….I think that the cups [in Isaiah 22:24] are the apostles, filled with the life-giving waters, of which it is said, "Bless the Lord from the fountains of Israel" [Ps 68:26]. (Thomas Scheck, trans., St. Jerome: Commentary On Isaiah [Mahwah, New Jersey: The Newman Press, 2015], p. 376, section 7:41 in the commentary)

He goes on to say that verse 25, as it applies to Christ and the church, will be fulfilled in an eschatological falling away.

You don't have to agree with all of Jerome's comments in order to recognize that he makes no reference to papal implications in the passage and that his understanding illustrates how easily the passage can be interpreted differently than Roman Catholics interpret it once we head down the path of this sort of interpretation.

The Use And Abuse Of Typology

Gavin Ortlund recently posted a good video on the subject. It's based on a recent debate on the papacy he participated in, which is also worth watching.

The Widespread Absence Of A Papacy

One of the reasons for rejecting the papacy is the lack of justification for it. There are apparent contradictions of the concept of the papacy in some New Testament documents and other early sources, but the lack of evidence for the office would be enough reason to not accept it, even if such contradictions didn't exist.

However, Protestants often focus on too narrow a range of contexts in which the papacy is absent in the early sources. A lot of attention is given to passages about Peter in the gospels and Acts and material about church government in the early sources, for example, but we ought to think more broadly about where a papacy could have been mentioned if it existed. A papacy wouldn't have to be mentioned at every conceivable opportunity. But the larger the number and variety of contexts in which a papacy could have been mentioned, but wasn't, the more likely it is that the office didn't exist. What I want to do in this post is provide a few examples of contexts that are often neglected.

The apostles sometimes discussed their upcoming death, what was being done to preserve their teachings, and how Christians should conduct themselves going forward (e.g., Acts 20:17-38, 2 Timothy 3:10-4:8, 2 Peter 1:12-21). If the papacy was considered the foundation of the church, the infallible center of Christian unity throughout church history, the absence of any mention of such a resource in passages like these is significant.

Another group of relevant contexts is the imagery used to refer to relevant entities, such as what imagery is used to refer to the apostles or the church. We get twelve thrones without Peter's throne being differentiated (Matthew 19:28), three pillars without Peter's being differentiated (Galatians 2:9), twelve foundation stones without Peter's being differentiated (Ephesians 2:20, Revelation 21:14), etc.

The early Christians often interact with the objections of their opponents. The gospels respond to the charge that Jesus performed miracles by the power of Satan, Paul responds to his critics in his letters, Justin Martyr wrote a response to Jewish arguments against Christianity, Origen wrote a response to Celsus' anti-Christian treatise, and so on. See here regarding the lack of reference to a papacy in such contexts.

It's important for Protestants (and other opponents of the papacy) to bring up considerations like these, since the absence of early references to a papacy becomes more significant when the absence occurs across a broader range of contexts. If only two pages of early Christian literature were extant, the absence of a papacy (or whatever other concept) would be much less significant than its absence across two million pages. The number of pages matters (assuming the usual diversity of topics you'd get with an increase in such a page number).

One of the reasons why it's become so popular for Catholics to argue for the papacy by an appeal to something like typology or Old Testament precedent is that there's such a lack of evidence in the New Testament and the early patristic literature. So, there's a turn to other sources to try to find what isn't present where we'd most expect to see it.

The Simplest Explanation For Peter's Prominence

There are many places in the New Testament in which Peter is prominent for reasons that are obviously of a non-papal nature. I'll start with some examples in the gospels of Matthew and John that are striking in how similar they are, despite appearing in such different contexts. When Peter leaves the boat he's in and enters the water in Matthew 14:29 and John 21:7, while the other disciples remain in the boat, he does so because of the nature of his personality, not because he's a Pope. Similarly, Peter's entering the tomb, while John remains outside, in John 20:6 is best explained by Peter's personality, not a papal office. And so on. Peter was outspoken, impulsive, rash, and so forth, so that he would often stand out for reasons other than a papacy. There's no reasonable way to deny that Peter's prominence in the early sources is due partly to such personal traits.

And that's a problem for Roman Catholicism. Since Peter's personality explains his prominence so well, no papacy or any other concept of a similar nature is needed to explain that prominence. All other things being equal, we prefer simpler explanations. Simplicity isn't the only criterion we take into account, but it is one of the criteria we consider. Why seek a second explanation for Peter's prominence when the first one is sufficient?