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Thursday, October 16, 2025

The Widespread Absence Of An Early Papacy

Gavin Ortlund just put out a video that provides a good overview of a lot of the evidence against the papacy. He makes some points I didn't make in my last post, and my post covers some things not included in his video. When you think of the evidence as a whole, notice that there's such a large number and variety of contexts in which the papacy is absent among the early sources. In addition to being absent, the concept of a papacy is sometimes contradicted. I mentioned some examples in my last post. And keep in mind how important Catholics tell us the papacy is, how it's allegedly the foundation of the church, the source of Christian unity, and so on. The First Vatican Council claimed that the papacy is a clear doctrine of scripture that's always been understood by the church. In reality, the papacy isn't in scripture or the earliest extrabiblical sources, and it's sometimes contradicted by those sources.
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2 comments:

  1. Sam Harper10/21/2025 11:01 AM

    Gavin kept shying away from admitting that he was making an argument from silence. I don't think he needed to do that. Arguments from silence are not always fallacies. It's an informal fallacy, and there are always exceptions to informal fallacies. Arguments from silence can be sound as long as there's some reason to think that if something were the case, then it would be evidence. For example, the fact that I don't see any elephant in my room is a good reason to think there is no elephant in my room. After all, if there were, it would be plainly evident. But you can't say the same thing about spiders because it's easier for a spider to be hidden. So an argument against spiders from silence or a lack of evidence would be invalid, but an argument against elephants from silence or lack of evidence would not be invalid.

    In the case of the Pope, I think Gavin makes a good case. If the Pope were the supreme leader of the church, you'd expect him to be mentioned in places like Ephesians 4:11ff. Since he is not, there probably wasn't a Pope in the early church. I think that's a very solid argument.

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