by Eamon Duffy
Everything we know about the church in Rome during its first hundred years confirms this general picture. The Christians of the city were thought of by themselves and others as a single church,, as Paul’s letter to the Romans make clear. The social reality behind this single identity, however, was not one congregation, but a loose constellation of churches based in private houses or, as time went on and the community grew, meeting in rented halls in markets and public baths. It was without any single dominant ruling officer, its elders or leaders sharing responsibility, but distributing tasks, like that of foreign correspondent. By the eve of the conversion of Constantine, there were more than two dozen of these religious community-centres or tituli.
Rome was the hub of empire, the natural centre for anyone with a message to spread – which was of course why the Apostles Peter and Paul had made their way there in the first place. Early Christianity jostled for space cheek by jowl with the other blossoming new religions of empire, a fact graphically illustrated by the presence of Mithraic shrines under the ancient churches of San Clemente and Santa Prisca (the reputed site of the house of Paul’s friends Aquila and Priscilla). Late into the second century the language of the Christian community in Rome was not Latin but Greek, the real lingua franca of an empire that increasingly looked east rather than west. The Christian congregations in Rome themselves reflected the cosmopolitan mix of the capital city, and many had strong ethnic and cultural links back to the regions from which their members had migrated. As a result, the life of the Roman Church was a microcosm of the cultural, doctrinal and ritual diversity of Christianity throughout the empire. By the early second century, for example, the churches in Asia Minor had begun to keep the date of the Jewish Passover, fourteenth Nisan,as a celebration of Easter, whether or not it fell on a Sunday. Those Christian congregations in Rome who came from Asia Minor naturally maintained this regional custom, and this marked them off from ‘native’ congregations, who celebrated Easter every Sunday, and had not yet evolved a separate annual commemoration. Despite these differences, the governing elders of the ‘native’ Roman congregations maintained friendly relations with these foreign communities, sending them portions of the consecrated bread from their own celebrations of the eucharist as a sign of their fundamental unity.
This variety in the customs of Roman Christians was not confined to their calendar. Christianity all over the Roman world in the first and second centuries was in a state of violent creative ferment. What would come to be seen as mainstream orthodoxy coexisted alongside versions of the Gospel which would soon come to seem outrageously deviant, ‘heretical’. But the outré and the orthodox were not always easy to distinguish at first sight, and the early Christian community in Rome had more than its fair share of competing versions of the Gospel. For Rome was a magnet, attracting to itself a stream of provincial elders, scholars and private Christians, eager to see and learn from so ancient a church, above all eager to visit the resting place of the two greatest Apostles.
Among them came a succession of teachers and thinkers determined to make their mark in the greatest city of the empire. They included the arch-heretic Marcion, who arrived in the city in AD 140. Marcion denied that matter could be redeemed, rejected the whole of the Old Testament and most of the New Testament scriptures, and taught a radical opposition between the angry Creator God of the Old Testament and the loving God and Father of Jesus Christ. He was a wealthy shipowner from the Black Sea, and by way of credentials presented the Roman church with a handsome sum of of money (22,000 sesterces, roughly the annual income of a noble citizen). For a largely lower-class urban organisation with its own overstretched social welfare system for widows, orphans and the elderly, and with an expanding aid-programme to needy churches elsewhere in the empire, wealth on this scale was an eloquent testimonial. Marcion was able to function as an accepted Christian teacher in Rome, for several years before his expulsion from communion by the elders of Rome in AD 144: his money was returned.
But Marcion was merely the most influential of a succession of such deviant teachers round the mid century – men like Tatian, the Syrian philosopher who came to reject the whole of Hellenic civilisation as incompatible with the Gospel, or Valentinus, who taught a bizarre gnostic system (from the Greek word for knowledge) in which thirty ‘aeons’ or spiritual powers emanate from the Supreme God, in male and female pairs, Christ and the Holy Spirit forming one such pair. All these men to begin with at least operated within the loose framework of the Roman church, and Valentinus for a time even entertained hopes of election as bishop or ruling elder.
II THE BISHOPS OF ROME
It was against this mid-century background of ritual and doctrinal confusion that the ‘monarchic episcopate’, the rule of the church by a single bishop, was accepted in Rome. Throughout the Mediterranean world the rule of bishops came to be seen as a crucial defence against heresy. As Irenaeus wrote in his Treatise against the Heresies, ‘It is within the power of anyone who cares, to find the truth and know the tradition of the Apostles … we are able to name those who were appointed bishops by the Apostles in the churches and their successors down to our own times.’3 There is no sure way to settle on a date by which the office of ruling bishop had emerged in Rome, and so to name the first Pope, but the process was certainly complete by the time of Anicetus in the mid-150s, when Polycarp, the aged Bishop of Smyrna, visited Rome, and he and Anicetus debated amicably the question of the date of Easter. Polycarp, then in his eighties, had known John, the ‘beloved disciple,’ in his old age. He therefore strongly urged direct apostolic authority for the practice of the churches from Asia Minor (and their satelite ethnic congregations in Rome itself) of keeping Easter at Passover. Anicetus contented himself more modestly with defending the practice of ‘the presbyters who had preceded him’ in having no separate Easter festival.
By now the pressure of heresy and the need for a tighter organisation was forcing the Christian movement as a whole to sharpen and refine its self-understanding, to establish its boundaries and clarify its fundamental beliefs. As part of that process of development and self-analysis, the Roman church began to reflect more self-consciously on its apostolic pedigree. It was in the time of Anicetus that the earliest attempts were made to compile a succession-list of the Roman bishops, drawing on the remembered names of leading presbyters like Clement. It was probably under Anicetus, too, that the shrine-monuments to Peter and Paul were first constructed at the Vatican and the Via Ostiensis. This architectural embodiment of the church’s claims to continuity with the Apostles would continue into the next century, and from at least AD 230 onwards successive bishops were buried in a single ‘crypt of the popes’ in the Catacomb of San Callisto, the burial-ground on the Appian Way which the Church had acquired some time in the late second century.
Such monuments were the architectural equivalent of the succession-lists, expressions of the increasingly explicit sense of continuity between the contemporary Roman church and the Apostles. The earliest list to survive for Rome is the one supplied by Irenaeus, and in it this symbolic function is very clearly at work. Irenaeus underlines the parallels between Apostles and bishops by naming precisely twelve bishops of Rome between Peter and the current incumbent, Eleutherius. The sixth of these bishops is named Sixtus. It all seems suspiciously tidy.
The list is certainly a good deal tidier than the actual transition to rule by a single bishop can have been. The bishops laboured steadily to extend their authority and to regulate the life of the church in the city – Pope Fabian’s division of the city during the 240s into seven regions, each under the supervision of a deacon, looks like part of this long-term effort at better order. But well into the third century Christianity in Rome would remain turbulent, diverse, prone to split. We know of several such dissident groups, such as the Theodotians, active at the end of the second century in the time of bishops Victor and Zephyrinus. Financed by a wealthy Byzantine leather-seller and a banker (both called Theodotus), these ‘Theodot
ians’ taught that Jesus was merely a very good man who had been adopted by God at his baptism and then raised to divinity at his resurrection. They failed to secure official acceptance of their view’s, but their economic clout meant that they were able to form a separate church and to pay the salary of their own rival bishop. In the next century, other dissidents like Hippolytus or Novatian, more orthodox than Marcion or Valentinus but all the harder to deal with on that account, would also find backers for a challenge to the authority of the official bishop of Rome.
From the start, then, the Roman bishops had to face difficult problems of unity and jurisdiction. The consequences of that preoccupation for the future were already becoming clear in the time of the last Bishop of the second century, Victor (189–98). Victor was the first Latin leader of the Christians of Rome, a sign that the church was spreading out of the immigrant milieu in which it had first taken root. He brought a Latin rigour to his office. He was a disciplinarian, determined to kick the dissident elements in the Roman church into line, and he adopted stern measures. It was Victor who excommunicated the Theodotians, and he also deposed a number of clergy who had been spreading gnostic teaching within the ‘mainstream’ communities in the city. But his most momentous exercise of authority was provoked by the perennial problem of the date for the celebration of Easter.
Our information about this incident comes from the extended account in Eusebius’ Church History, written more than a century after the event. As Eusebius tells it,Victor picked a fight with all the churches outside Rome which were celebrating Easter at Passover, fourteenth Nisan (the so called Quartodecimans) instead of on the Sunday after Passover, which by now had been adopted in Rome and the West more generally. According to Eusebius, this developed into a full-scale confrontation between Victor and the churches of Asia Minor, whose position was vigorously defended by Polycrates, Bishop of Ephesus. After a series of regional synods all over the Mediterranean world had been held to debate the issue, Victor solemnly excommunicated all the Quartodeciman churches. He was respectfully rebuked by Irenaeus, who reminded him of the more tolerant attitude of earlier Roman presbyters, who, despite their disagreement, used to ‘send the eucharist’ to the churches which kept the Quartodeciman date for Easter.
This is a baffling incident, not least because any fragments of eucharistic bread sent on the long sea journey to the churches of Asia Minor would have gone mouldy or hard long before they reached their destination. It has become the focus for centuries of debate about papal authority, for both the friends and the enemies of the papacy have seen in Victor’s high-handed actions an assertion of Roman jurisdiction over the whole of Christendom, as the Pope tried to make Roman custom the norm for all the churches. In fact, it is far more likely that Eusebius misunderstood his source materials. He wrote in the fourth century, at a time when his hero, the first Christian Emperor Constantine, was trying to impose uniformity on the Church on this very issue of Easter. Eusebius tells the story of the Quartodeciman controversy as a sort of rehearsal for Constantine’s concerns. The tell-tale detail of the sending of the morsels of eucharistic bread, however, suggests that the dispute actually arose in the first instance within the city of Rome, and should be seen as primarily an internal affair. Victor was not brawling randomly around the Mediterranean spoiling for a fight, but trying to impose uniformity of practice on all the churches within his own city, as part of a more general quest for internal unity and order. The churches of proconsular Asia may well have protested at this condemnation of a custom which they believed they had derived from the Apostle John, but Victor’s excommunication was aimed at Asian congregations in Rome, not fired broadside at churches over which he had no direct jurisdiction.4
Bishop Victor, then, was probably not taking the first steps towards universal papal jurisdiction. All the same, some notion of the special authority of the Roman church was already widespread. At the beginning of the second century, Ignatius wrote extravagantly about the Roman church as ‘she who is pre-eminent in the territory of the Romans … foremost in love … purified from every alien and discolouring stain’. Ignatius admonished other churches, but for the church at Rome he had only praise. As the century advanced, that note of deference was echoed by others. We have already met in Irenaeus the claim that ‘it is necessary that every Church, that is, the faithful everywhere, should resort to this Church [of Rome], on account of its pre-eminent authority, in which the apostolical tradition has been preserved continuously …’5
This ‘pre-eminent authority’ sprang, above everything else, from the fact that Rome preserved the witness of not one but both of the greatest Apostles; as Irenaeus’ contemporary, the African theologian Tertullian, wrote, Rome was the ‘happy Church … on which the Apostles poured forth all their teaching, together with their blood’. It was a ‘happiness’ that Roman Christians themselves were increasingly proud of, and devotion to Peter and Paul deepened in the third century. A new cult centre based at what is now the church of San Sebastiano emerged in the mid century, and hundreds of surviving graffiti there, invoking Rome’s two great patron saints, convey the fervour of Roman popular devotion to them: ‘Paul and Peter, pray for Victor,’ ‘Paul, Peter, pray for Eratus,’ ‘Peter and Paul, protect your servants! Holy souls, protect the reader.’ From the year 258 a joint feast of Peter and Paul was celebrated at Rome on 29 June, a sign of the centrality of the two Apostles in the Roman church’s self-awareness.6
To this apostolic prestige was added the fact that the church at Rome sat at the hub of empire. This was not necessarily a short-cut to stardom in early Christian eyes, for there was a strong anti-Roman tradition in the early Church. Rome was the harlot city soaked in the blood of the saints, the centre from which spread out wave after wave of persecution. The Book of Revelations’ gloating vision of the coming ruin of Rome, ‘Fallen, fallen, is Babylon the great’ (Revelations 14:8), remained a persistent strand so long as the empire continued to persecute the church, and survived even into the Middle Ages. But by the same token, the church at Rome bore the brunt of persecution, as the deaths of Peter and Paul under Nero showed, and its witness was all the more glorious for being in the eye of empire. The conviction that the Apostles had ‘founded’ the church at Rome sprang above all from the fact that the shedding of their blood there was the ultimate witness, marturion, to the truth of their Gospel.
But Christianity’s rapid growth in the capital had more mundane consequences. The church in Rome, even under persecution, was wealthy. Because of the cosmopolitan nature of the Christian community there, the Roman church was especially aware of the ecumenical character of the faith, its spread through the whole Roman world. That awareness lay behind the Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians in AD 96, which was a demonstration of the Roman church’s sense of responsibility for other churches. The Roman community continued to show that broad concern in practical ways, by sending money as well as advice and reproof to churches in need. In the mid second century, Dionysius, Bishop of Corinth, wrote a letter of grateful acknowledgement for financial aid sent by Pope Soter. He went on to say that Soter’s accompanying letter was being read out during services in Corinth, as the Epistle of Clement still was from time to time.7 As aristocratic converts entered the Church, moreover, the Bishop of Rome, even in the age of persecution, was an increasingly influential person. Pope Victor was able to use the fact that the Emperor Commodus’ mistress, Marcia, was a Christian, to get Christian prisoners released from the penal colony of the Sardinian mines. The habit of appealing to the Bishop of Rome in doctrinal disputes, which in later controversies would become a crucial lifeline for embattled supporters of orthodoxy, sprang both from the sense of the dignity of a community which had inherited not only the teaching but the eloquent blood of the two Apostles, and, more mundanely, from the fact that the Pope was an important grandee, a patron.
But the prestige of the church of Rome was not at this stage primarily a matter of the bishop’s status or authority. It was the church
of Rome as a whole which basked in the glory of the Apostles and commanded the respect of other second- and third-century Christian communities. About the year AD 200 the allegorical epitaph of Abercius, Bishop of Heropolis in Asia Minor, recorded that he had gone to Rome at Christ’s command, ‘to behold an empire and to see a queen in a golden robe and golden shoes; I saw there a people with a shining seal.’8 The honourable status of the Roman church the ‘people with a shining seal’, persisted even when there was no bishop in charge. In the long vacancy in the bishopric after the death of Pope Fabian in the Decian persecution (AD 250–1), the presbyters and deacons of Rome went on exercising the oversight and care for other churches which had become characteristic of their church, sending four letters of advice and encouragement to the churches of North Africa, letters which were copied, circulated and read aloud during worship just as the letters of Clement and Soter had been. The letters breathe the distinctive sense of dignity and responsibility which was becoming the mark of the Roman church: ‘The brethren who are in chains greet you, as do the priests and the whole Church which also with deepest concern keeps watch over all who call on the name of the Lord’.9
By the beginning of the third century, then, the church at Rome was an acknowledged point of reference for Christians throughout the Mediterranean world, and might even function as a court of appeal. When under attack for teaching heresy, the great Alexandrian theologian Origen would send letters appealing for support not only to the bishops of his own region, but to faraway Bishop Fabian at Rome, where he himself as a young man had made a pilgrimage. For the earliest Christians apostolic authority was no antiquarian curiosity, a mere fact about the origins of a particular community. The Apostles were living presences, precious guarantors of truth. The apostolic churches possessed more than a pedigree, they spoke with the voices of their founders, and provided living access to their teaching. And in Rome, uniquely, the authority of two Apostles converged. The charismatic voice of Paul, bearer of a radical authority rooted not in institution and organisation but in the uncompromising clarity of a Gospel received direct from God, joined with the authority of Peter, symbol of the Church’s jurisdiction in both heaven and earth, the one to whom the commission to bind and to feed had been given by Christ himself.
