Tune in to “Called to Communion” for more obfuscation

In 1953, the Lutheran theologian Oscar Cullmann produced a work, “Peter: Disciple, Apostle, Martyr,” which traced virtually every single piece of theological (Biblical) and historical and literary and archaeological evidence about the life and death of Peter. It is this work, in my opinion, that really forced Rome to re-think what the papacy was all about.

Consider what Vatican I pronounced about the power and function of the papacy:

Wherefore we teach and declare that, by divine ordinance, the Roman Church possesses a pre-eminence of ordinary power over every other Church, and that this jurisdictional power of the Roman Pontiff is both episcopal and immediate. Both clergy and faithful, of whatever rite and dignity, both singly and collectively, are bound to submit to this power by the duty of hierarchical subordination and true obedience, and this not only in matters concerning faith and morals, but also in those which regard the discipline and government of the Church throughout the world….

So, then, if anyone says that the Roman Pontiff has merely an office of supervision and guidance, and not the full and supreme power of jurisdiction over the whole Church, and this not only in matters of faith and morals, but also in those which concern the discipline and government of the Church dispersed throughout the whole world; or that he has only the principal part, but not the absolute fullness, of this supreme power; or that this power of his is not ordinary and immediate both over all and each of the Churches and over all and each of the pastors and faithful: let him be anathema.

This was no soft-and-squishy doctrine. Adrian Fortescue, writing in his 1920 work, “The Early Papacy: to the Synod of Chalcedon in 451,” made this bold statement: “We have all the evidence we can require that the Catholic Church in the first four and a half centuries did believe what we believe [now] about the papacy” (pg 30). Clement, in his letter [1 Clement], commands the Corinthians to return to the obedience of their lawful hierarchy. He does not advise; he commands. He commands with an authority, one would almost say with an arbitrary tone, that has not been exceeded by any modern Pope.

Fortescue, who was among other things a writer for the “Catholic Encyclopedia,” was a mainstream writer during that era. And Pius XII demonstrated that statement in spades, by making an infallible pronouncement that all Roman Catholics were to believe, and he let the consequences be known that “It is forbidden to any man to change this, our declaration, pronouncement, and definition or, by rash attempt, to oppose and counter it. If any man should presume to make such an attempt, let him know that he will incur the wrath of Almighty God and of the Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul.

Such was the certainty of the papacy in itself, during what Patrick Buchanan referred to as the real Catholic Moment in America.

Yet just 10-15 years later, after all of that certainty, Vatican II was not only tinkering with the infallible papal formula, but making major changes to it. The “command economy” of Rome became one “communion,” the church, “governed by the successor of Peter and by the Bishops in communion with him, (13*) .... [(13*) Dieitur. Saneta (catholica apostolica) Romana Ecelesia .: in Prof. fidei Trid., 1. c. et Concl. Vat. I, Sess. III, Const. dogm. de fide cath.: Denz. 1782 (3001).]” That citation, 13*, which is given in the Vatican II document Lumen Gentium, by the way, comes from Vatican I. (It’s fascinating to see how Vatican II cite’s Vatican I, and all the things that they leave out).

Vatican II goes on to describe this “communion” of popes to bishops: Just as in the Gospel, the Lord so disposing, St. Peter and the other apostles constitute one apostolic college, so in a similar way the Roman Pontiff, the successor of Peter, and the bishops, the successors of the apostles, are joined together…: Let’s go back a bit further and see the picture that Vatican I uses to describe this “communion,” the state of this relationship:

But now, with the bishops of the whole world sitting and judging with Us [i.e., “Me”], gathered together in this Ecumenical Council by Our [i.e., “My”] authority in the Holy Spirit, We [i.e., “I”], having relied on the Word of God, written and transmitted as We [i.e., “I”] have received it, sacredly guarded and accurately explained by the Catholic Church, from this chair of PETER [CAPS in Denzinger], in the sight of all, have determined to profess and declare the salutary doctrine of Christ, after contrary errors have been proscribed and condemned by the power transmitted to Us [i.e., “to Me”] by God.

The holy, Catholic, Apostolic, Roman Church believes and confesses .... (from Denzinger, the selection cited by Vatican II.)

Some day, when I have time, Lord willing, I’ll try to reproduce some of the things that Pius IX actually said about any of the bishops who dared to challenge his program.

Nevertheless, it is said that Vatican II completed the teaching of Vatican I on the subject of the relationship of bishops to popes. There is now an ongoing effort to try to understand the proper role between bishops and popes, because there are some very different looking images put forward.

Karl Barth jokingly referred to Cullmann as “an advisor to three popes.” And there can be no question that Cullmann’s work on Peter was one of a number of scholarly works that, shall we say, provided the impetus to re-explore and even to “reformulate positively” the actual role of Peter vis a vis the other apostles (and hence, the role of “the successor of Peter” vis a vis the successors of the other apostles).

It would seem as if a Protestant work that had the impact that Cullmann’s work had, coulda, woulda, and shoulda been responded to. And yet, here is Cullmann’s own account of the Roman Catholic response to that work:

In … most of the Catholic reviews of my book on St. Peter, one argument especially is brought forward: scripture, a collection of books, is not sufficient to actualize for us the divine revelation granted to the apostles.

This, as we have seen, is “The Roman Answer,” no matter what the question is in these discussions. “Scripture, a collection of books, is not sufficient to actualize for us the divine revelation granted to the apostles.”

This is precisely the objection that Michael Liccione makes in his response to Keith Mathison’s piece. Entitled Mathison's Reply to Cross and Judisch: A Largely Philosophical Critique, Liccione, in a way similar to the way described by Cullmann, largely ignores Mathison’s work – deliberately choosing to avoid the historical challenges to the Roman position, instead focusing on the “interpretive paradigm”.

And of course, “the interpretive paradigm” comes down to this:

For example, the Protestant has no way, other than fallible arguments, to secure his account of what belongs in the canon, which account, in the case of the OT, runs counter to what the older traditions of Catholicism and Orthodoxy eventually concluded. Therefore, he has no way, other than the use of fallible arguments, to show how the canon should be identified. And if he doesn’t have more than that, then he has no way of making certain that the way he identifies the norma Normans for the other secondary authorities is correct.

In other words, “Protestants can’t infallibly “secure” the New Testament canon, therefore, the “interpretive paradigm” put forth by Rome is the correct one.” Liccione throws out thousands of words for the purpose of re-hashing the canon issue.

In my initial response to the Called to Communion discussions about Mathison’s article, I spoke of the need to “take Rome’s claims off the table”. If the Roman Catholic claim to authority does not stand on its own, then no amount of other objections will make it right. I mentioned that these apologetic arguments, from the Roman Catholic side, always seem to boil down to this: “Protestantism has problems; therefore, the Roman Catholic Church is what it says it is.”

Liccione’s article is merely a distraction. Liccione is avoiding the bulk of Mathison’s article – the historical challenges to Rome’s claims – because he cannot make a cogent response to them. And yet, the historical work that’s being done has persuaded official Rome to adjust its theology of the papacy, and of the Roman church itself. It is a slow, laborious process, and some are only being dragged kicking and screaming.

Mathison dealt squarely and thoroughly with “The Church that Christ Founded.” He showed it really to be as much of a fairy tale as “The Great and Powerful Oz,” with fire and smoke billowing. But that Oz, that Roman Catholic Church, is just a hollow image.

The real “Church that Christ founded” us dispersed among Christ’s true believers who “gather in my name,” who understand what Christ has truly done for them (Gal 1:6-9) and who are united by the Holy Spirit. It is a Spirit who “blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”

On the other hand,

Cullmann on Kerygma, Gospel, Tradition and Apostolic Authority

And beginning with Moses an all prophets, he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself. And their eyes were opened and they knew him. They said to each other, Did not our hearts burn within us . . . while he opened to us the scriptures? (Luke 24:27, 31, 32).

Thus begins Cullmann’s account of “The Tradition,” from which I’ve cited several times now, and which, I have heard from someone reliable, is probably the best account of the relationship of “scripture and tradition”. As I work through this, of course, I’ll check Cullmann’s analysis against other writers on the topic, and of course, against the witness of Scripture.

Last time I cited Bryan Cross’s view of succession (in contrast to Sullivan’s). In the recent Catholic Answers thread that bore my name, some of the folks there were a bit saddened that I didn’t stay and answer all their questions. Of course, I answered a number of their questions, but there ended up being more than 400 comments and I just didn’t get to read all of them, much less respond to them. One of the writers there, Pete Holter, a (as I understand it) former Reformed believer, provided this account (somewhat abbreviated):

God the Father passed His authority on to Jesus (cf. Matthew 28:18), Who passed it on to the apostles (cf. Luke 10:16 and Matthew 28:19), who passed it on to their successors.

This “passing on,” in the Roman Catholic account, takes a similar flow as that given in shorthand form by many Roman Catholics. In many of these accounts, indeed, in the official account, the words “authority” and “tradition” and “succession” sort of get muddled together until, in the Roman Catholic mind, there is just one thing: and the Roman Catholic Church and its teachings and Magisterium have the very authority of God on earth. It’s been that way since the muddling, and that’s good enough for us!

I think Cullman’s “The Tradition” admirably isolates those threads – authority and tradition and succession – he defines them well, and he talks about what genuinely gets “handed on” from God, what just sort of gets picked up along the way, and what gets distorted.

My copy of this article is found within Cullmann’s 1956 collection of essays, “The Early Church” (London: SCM Press Ltd). In his own words:

Firstly, I shall try to prove that the New Testament regards the Lord exalted to the right hand of God as the direct author of the tradition of the apostles, because he himself is at work in the apostolic transmission of his words and deeds. Secondly, by examining the conception of the apostolate, I shall attempt to determine the connection between the apostolic tradition and the post-apostolic tradition, and the difference between them. Thirdly, I shall enquire whether this distinction is confirmed by the history of the early Church, and whether, in creating the canon, the Church itself deliberately separated apostolic from ecclesiastical tradition, so as to make the former the norm of the latter (pg. 59)

Over the next couple of posts, I'd like to follow Cullmann's account, bringing in other information as I go. Christ, of course, is the final and perfect Revelation of God. As the writer to the Hebrews begins by saying, “In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom also he made the universe. The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word.”

Philip said, “Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us.”

Jesus answered: “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you I do not speak on my own authority. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work. Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me (John 14:8-11).

But God does not give an unclear view of himself in the Old Testament, and it is this God we see when we see Christ.

Oscar Cullmann on the relationship between oral tradition and the canon of the New Testament, part 1

There is a discussion going on at Green Baggins on the topic of Oral Tradition. I contributed the following, which I've expanded and edited a bit; this has also gotten long enough that I'm going to relate it in two posts:

Nick asked: The $64 million question is: how do you know these inspired oral teachings were eventually enscripturated?

In his work, "Scripture and Tradition," (c) 1956, Oscar Cullman noted that something like this was precisely the Roman Catholic response to his 1953 work, “Peter: Disciple, Apostle, Martyr”.

One argument especially is brought forward: scripture, a collection of books, is not sufficient to actualize for us the divine revelation granted to the apostles. (Oscar Cullmann, “The Early Church,” London: SCM Press LTD., pg 57.

Some things don’t change.

Fortunately, Cullmann had the background and resources in his day to research the issues and to think it through. One of the things that I’m most excited about in reading Kostenberger and Kruger’s “The Heresy of Orthodoxy” is that they make essentially the same argument, and relate essentially the same facts.

I’m not sure why this work hasn’t been picked up by more Protestants. Cullmann puts forth this argument:

1. For Paul, the paradosis (“oral tradition”), in so far as it refers to the confession of faith and to the words and deeds of Jesus, has a parallel in the Jewish concept of paradosis.

2. This tradition relates to the direct apokalypsis of the Lord to the Apostles. That is, the office of the Apostles was unique because they provided unique eyewitness testimony to the life of Christ.

3. This tradition lived and died with the apostolic office. No other source had the eyewitness authority of the Apostles.

4. The development of the canon was a conscious decision on the part of the earliest church, born from the consciousness of the heresies spinning out of control, to establish a superior written norm, and to stake out the boundaries of orthodoxy and heresy.

Essentially, he says, the early church made a key distinction between “apostolic tradition,” that is, what the Apostles taught orally and in writing, and “post-apostolic” or “ecclesiastical” tradition.

This is the place to speak about the establishment of the canon by the Church of the second century. This again is an event of capital importance for the history of salvation. We are in complete agreement with Catholic theology in its insistence on the fact that the Church itself made the canon. We even find in this fact the supreme argument for our demonstration. The fixing of the Christian canon of scripture means that the Church itself, at a given time, traced a clear and definite line of demarcation between the period of the apostles and that of the Church, between the time of foundation and that of construction, between the apostolic community and the Church of the bishops, in other words, between apostolic and ecclesiastical tradition. Otherwise, the formation of the canon would be meaningless.

We must recall the situation that led the Church to conceive the idea of a canon. About the year 150 there is still an oral tradition. We know this from Papias, who wrote an exposition of the words of Jesus. He tells us himself that he used as a basis the viva vox and that he attached more importance to it than to the writings. But him we have not only this declaration of principle; for he has left us some examples of the oral tradition as he found it, and these examples show us well that we ought to think of an oral tradition about the year 150! It is entirely legendary in character. This is clear from the story that Papias reports about Joseph Barsabbas, the unsuccessful candidate, according to Acts 1/23 f., for the post of twelfth disciple rendered vacant by Judas’s treason. Above all there is the obscene and completely legendary account [in Papias] of death of Judas Iscariot himself.

The period about 150 is, on the one hand, relatively near to the apostolic age, but on the other hand, it is already too far away for the living tradition still to offer in itself the least guarantee of authenticity. The oral traditions which Papias echoes arose in the Church and were transmitted by it. For outside the Church no one had any interest in describing in such crude colours the death of the traitor. Papias was therefore deluding himself when he considered viva vox as more valuable than the written books. The oral tradition had a normative value in the period of the apostles, who were eye-witnesses, but it had it no longer in 150 after passing mouth to mouth (Cullmann, 88-89).

[It's important to note here that, while Cullman capitalizes the word "church," he uses the word in the proper sense; not in the sense that Roman Catholics use the word.]

What Cullman relates here is that the church (as reported by Papias) had greatly valued the living voice of the Apostles. But they recognized the thing that we (Protestants) have all along been saying: the “living voice” is not a reliable transmitter, after a point. As with the game of “telephone,” where a message becomes badly distorted after being passed from person to person, the value of this “living tradition” had seriously degraded.

The traditions reported by Papias are not the only ones. From the same period we have the first apocryphal Gospels, which were collections of other oral traditions. It is sufficient to read these Gospels, one of which tells of the infant Jesus making living sparrows, carrying water in his apron, and miraculously killing companions who were annoying him, or to read the numerous apocryphal Acts, in order to realize that the tradition, in the Church, no longer offered any guarantee of truth, even when it claimed a chain of succession. For all these traditions were justified by [various chains] of transmission reaching back to the apostles. Papias himself also makes this claim when he says that he got his information from people who had been in contact with the apostles. The teaching office of the Church in itself did not suffice to preserve the purity of the gospel (88-90).

This selection is long enough for now. But I wanted to make the essential point: the early church did recognize the weakness of relying on "the living voice."


For more information, see also: Jason Engwer's series on The New Testament Canon.

Oscar Cullmann on the relationship between oral tradition and the canon of the New Testament, part 2

Continuing from my previous post.

Slight clarification here. In the citation from Cullmann that follows, he is using the words "apostolic tradition" to describe "the sum of what the Apostles taught, both orally and in written form." He makes a distinction between "apostolic tradition," which was the definitive, eyewitness testimony of the Apostles, and what later became "ecclesiastical tradition," that is, the traditions of the church.

Cullmann is in the process of making the case that the canon of the New Testament became fixed, as a necessity, because of the damage that was being inflicted by various gnostic heresies: "oral" tradition was no longer reliable because it was becoming an admixture of too many things. The only reliable "apostolic tradition" was that which had been written down by the apostles and their associates during the lifetimes of the apostles.

By establishing the principle of a canon the Church recognized that from that time the tradition was no longer a criterion of truth. It drew a line under the apostolic tradition. It declared implicitly that from that time every subsequent tradition must be submitted to the control of the aposotlic tradition. That is, it declared: here is the tradition which constituted the Church, which forced itself upon it. Certainly the Church did not intend to thereby put an end to the continued evolution of the tradition. But by what we might all an act of humility it submitted all subsequent tradition to be elaborated by itself to the superior criterion of the apostolic tradition, codified in the Holy Scriptures.

To establish a canon is equivalent to saying this: henceforth our ecclesiastical tradition needs to be controlled; with the help of the Holy Spirit it will be controlled by the apostolic tradition fixed in writing; for we are getting to the point where we are too distant from the apostolic age to be able to guard the purity of the tradition without a superior written norm, and too distant to prevent slight legendary and other deformations creeping in, and thus being transmitted and amplified(90).

Well, while the early church understood the danger of "legendary and other deformations creeping in, thus being transmitted and amplified," it would seem that this has become the creed of the Roman Catholic Church: "We know that legendary and other deformations have crept into our dogmas, where they are transmitted and amplified. And we embrace these legendary and other deformations, and we press them on the consciences of loyal Roman Catholics."

But I digress. After some further justification of the process above: the need to fix a norm by fixing the Canon of the New Testament, Cullman notes something about the character of the Apostolic Fathers that I had noticed and have even commented on, but have not until this time been able to put it all together:

For a long time it has been noted that, apart from the letters of Ignatius, the writings of the so-called Apostolic Fathers, who do not really belong to the Apostolic age but to the beginning of the second century—[1 Clement, Barnabas, the Shepherd of Hermas]—despite their theological interest, are to a considerable distance from New Testament thought, and to a considerable extent relapse into a moralism which ignores the notion of grace, and of the redemptive death of Christ, so central to apostolic theology. [See Torrance’s “The Doctrine of Grace in the Apostolic Fathers,” 1948].

It has also been noted that the Church Fathers who wrote after 150—Irenaeus and Tertullian—although chronologically more remote from the New Testament than the authors of the first half of the century, understood infinitely better the essence of the gospel. This seems paradoxical, but is explained perfectly by that most important act, the codification of the apostolic tradition in a canon, henceforward the superior norm of all tradition.

The Fathers of the first half of the century wrote at a period when the writings of the New Testament already existed, but without being vested with canonical authority, and so set apart. Therefore they did not have any norm at their disposal, and, on the other hand, and on the other hand, they were already too far distant from the apostolic age to be able to draw directly on the testimony of eye-witnesses. The encounters of Polycarp and Papias with apostolic persons could no longer guarantee a pure transmission of authentic traditions, as is proved by the extant fragments of their writings.

But after 150 contact with the apostolic age was re-established through the construction of the canon, which discarded all impure and deformed sources of information. Thus it is confirmed that, by subordinating all subsequent tradition to the canon, the Church once and for all saved its apostolic basis. It enabled its members to hear, thanks to this canon, continually afresh and throughout all the centuries to come the authentic word of the apostles, a privilege which no oral tradition, passing through Polycarp or Papias, could have assured them (96).

The written fixation of the witness of the apostles is one of the essential facts of the incarnation. The church of 150 AD consciously set about to formulate a canon, to put an end to the numerous apocryphal works that had been appearing in the first part of the second century, fueling the expansion of the different heresies.

Andreas Kostenberger and Michael Kruger largely concur with this process, adding that first, the Apostles would have been more than familiar with the concept of covenant, the need for covenant documents. The books of Moses provided this very set of documentation. In their own era, there were, of course, the Apostles saw to o that the Gospels, and the various letters that they knew had been written. Kostenberger and Kruger then note:

Although the term “closed canon” is most commonly used to refer to fourth-century ecclesiastical decisions, there is a real sense in which the canon, in principle, was “closed” long before that time. In the Muratorian Fragment (c. 170), the very popular Shepherd of Hermas is mentioned as a book that can be read by the church but is rejected as canonical. The grounds for this rejection are due to the fact that it was written “very recently, in our own times.” In other words, the author of the fragment reflects the conviction that early Christians were not willing to accept books written in the second century or later, but had restricted themselves to books from the apostolic time period. They seemed to have understood that the apostolic phase of redemptive history was uniquely the time when canonical books were produced. [Jason Engwer has commented on this section, noting that they could have expanded this so much more than they did. See here.]

Thus, from this perspective, the canon was “closed” by the beginning of the second century. After this time (and long before Athanasius), the church was not “open” to more books, but instead was engaged in discussions about which books God had already given. In other words, due to the theological conviction of the early Christians about the foundational role of the apostles, there was a built-in sense that the canon was “closed” after the apostolic time period had ended.

Note that the books themselves carried the marks of “canonicity.” Kostenberger and Kruger cite Herman Ridderbos:

When understood in terms of the history of redemption, the canon cannot be open; in principle it must be closed. That follows directly from the unique and exclusive nature of the power of the apostles received from Christ and from the commission he gave to them to be witnesses to what they had seen and heard of the salvation he had brought. The result of this power and commission os the foundation of the church and the creation of the canon, and therefore these are naturally unrepeatable and exclusive in character.

Meanwhile, it was not the authority of “the Church” which determined the canon. In reality, as Cullmann notes, it was the decision of the church (in fixing the canon) determined that “oral tradition” was becoming too corrupted to be useful.

By establishing the principle of a canon the Church recognized that from that time the tradition was no longer a criterion of truth.

Some concluding thoughts from the Called to Communion discussion 1

I’ve mentioned in the past that the issue of the early papacy (or rather the non-existent early papacy) is the “soft underbelly” of Roman claims. If anyone has been involved in these types of discussions – Catholic/Protestant – you know there is always something that can be brought up to evade or change the topic. (The phrase “oh yeah, but what about this…” comes to mind.)

I’ve outlined in another post what Roman Catholics have traditionally believed about the papacy, things which I believed in my early years (the 60’s and the 70’s) – and it’ll be useful to recap them here:

1. The pope is the chief bishop, primate, and leader of the whole Church of Christ on earth.

2. He has episcopal jurisdiction over all members of the Church.

3. To be a member of the Catholic Church, a man must be in communion with the Pope.

4. The providential guidance of God will see to it that the Pope shall never commit the Church to error in any matter of religion.

(Source, Adrian Fortescue, “The Early Papacy”)

These four items are things that are said always to have been believed – and Vatican 1 etched them into stone, so to speak. But these thing are said to have been believed back into the earliest days of the church. From the beginning, according to some.

Fortescue goes on to state that the underpinning, further, revolves around these three foundational elements:

But all of this depends on something else, he said. "All of this depends further on three more theses, into which we cannot enter here." (Pg 51)

These three theses that he did not touch are:

1. "That our Lord gave these rights to the Apostle St. Peter."

2. "That St. Peter must have a successor in them."

3. "That his successor is the Bishop of Rome."

Ratzinger tried to defend these three theses in his “Called to Communion.” And some time ago, I started to get into this and analyze it – it is a genuinely weak set of arguments, given what we know today.

* * *

Peter Lampe’s work (which we know as “From Paul to Valentinus: Christians in Rome During the First Two Centuries”) was first published in Germany in 1987. This work was not a first-of-a-kind work by any stretch. It was sort of a tying together of a lot of disparate threads of thought, which had started more than half a century prior. Here is a summary of some of the major efforts that I’ve found:

In 1927, James Shotwell and Louise Loomis compiled virtually every document that had been used in support of the papacy from the first five centuries of the church (“The See of Peter,” New York and Oxford: Columbia University Press, ©1927, 1955, 1991). These were grouped roughly into “three distinct sets of texts on the ascendancy of the Papacy within the Roman Catholic Church.”

Without going into detail, the vast majority turned out to be, at best, a “curious and less respectable set of documents, the popular apocryphal literature, which grew up around the figure of Peter almost as soon as reliable records began, literature sprung from misconceptions and confusions or else frankly fictitious.”

In the 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s, a Lutheran theologian named Oscar Cullmann wrote a major study, “Peter: Disciple, Apostle, Martyr” (the first English translation Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1953). In this work, Cullmann analyzed both the theological claims of the papacy (and provided major exegetical studies of Matthew 16:17-19 and related texts). As well, he analyzed the historical literature in tremendous detail, in order to ascertain Peter’s role in the early church, as well as the concept of “succession.” He concluded among other things:

The original Church was led by [Peter], and he led it only in its earliest period. For as soon as the foundation for this leadership is laid, Peter will give it up. Another, James, will take it over in Jerusalem, while Peter will concentrate entirely on his missionary work and will do so, indeed, in a subordinate role under James.

This later subordination of Peter under James is a fact important in every respect. It confirms first of all that the leadership of the Church by Peter also has its significance for us chiefly as a starting point. [This is a point that Cullman has been making throughout: the fact that Peter is "first" is a unique fact. There is no "successor" to Peter. Any leadership role that was given to Peter, any primacy, was completed by this time. It was non-continuing in any way.].

James is the actual head of the Church from the moment that Peter dedicates himself completely to missionary work. The memory of that fact was steadily retained in the whole of Jewish Christianity, which took an interest in the ancient traditions. According to Hegesippus, “The brother of the Lord, James, takes over the leadership of the Church with the Apostles. (Citing Eusebius E.H. II, 3, 4).

Particularly important is the fact that the Pseudo-Clementina, which are friendly to Peter, clearly subordinate Peter to James. Peter has to “give an accounting” to James, “the bishop of the holy Church.” To him Peter sends his public addresses, and [Pseudo-]Clement calls him [James] “Bishop of Bishops,” “leader of the holy church of the Hebrews and of the churches founded everywhere by God’s providence. [Pseudo-]Clement traces Peter’s commission to him [Clement] back to a commission that James gave to Peter. These late reports thus agree with what we can learn concerning James from the letters of Paul and the book of Acts.

[In other words, any "Petrine succession" to Clement came through a commission to James. This document, by the way, was one of the documents that was widely believed for hundreds of years, known as the "Pseudo-Isidore Decretals."]

It will not do, however, to make some such objection as that Peter went to Rome just at that time in order to “transfer” the primacy from Jerusalem to that place. In reality Peter does not leave Jerusalem in order to transfer the primacy elsewhere; he leaves rather to spread the Gospel. But the significant thing, as said, is that in relation to the new leadership at Jerusalem he does not continue in some superior position, as though James were only his substitute, or were only Bishop of the church at Jerusalem, already sunk to the position of a local church. He rather subordinates himself to the authority of James as the central government. (Cullman, “Peter,” 224-226).

There is more to this, and I’d love to publish it some time.

In 1969, Daniel William O’Connor published “Peter in Rome,” a critical study designed to look at the question of whether Peter actually ever was in Rome. And the answer there was “yes, but likely only at the end of his life. It is probable that he was martyred and buried there. His bones were never recovered.”

In 1973, there was a major work, “Peter in the New Testament,” subtitled “A Collaborative Assessment by Protestant and Roman Catholic Scholars (© 1973 Augsburg Publishing House. I have a Wipf and Stock reprint). This work was edited by Raymond Brown, Karl Donfried and John Reumann, “from discussions by” about nine different Roman Catholic and Lutheran scholars, as part of “the United States Lutheran—Roman Catholic Dialogue” that was going on, and its topic was “the Role of the Papacy in the Universal Church.

The conclusion of this group was really to have raised more questions than they answered, and at the end, the reader was referred to the second phase of this work, a patristic study “co-chaired by the Ref. Dr. A.C. Piepkorn of Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri, and by Professor J. McCue of the School of Religion at the State University of Iowa (Iowa City).

I have not been able to track down this work, but a 2004 survey by a Franciscan priest Rev. Adriano Garuti (“Primacy of the Bishop of Rome and the Ecumenical Dialogue” San Francisco: Ignatius Press) summarizes the Catholic-Lutheran dialogue this way:

In spite of a certain rapprochement (which is unthinkable if it is confronted with the theory of the papacy formulated by the First Vatican Council), it is impossible to overlook the controverted points which still exist, especially concerning the ius divinum and the fullness of the power of the Bishop of Rome (pg 193).

Dr. Peter Lampe is a Lutheran scholar who is one of the signatories of the 1998 document that was presented in advance of the “Joint Declaration on Justification,” which strongly suggested that that “Joint Declaration” was a mistake.

* * *

As I mentioned, Lampe’s study came out in 1987. In 1989, the Vatican began its own historical study. The results of this study have not been published, as far as I know. (If they had found something favorable, don’t you think they would be crowing about it? But instead, what came out of that, was the 1995 encyclical, Ut Unum Sint, in which we see the spectacle of a pope asking for theological input on ways “to find a way of exercising the primacy which, while in no way renouncing what is essential to its mission, is nonetheless open to a new situation.”)

Shortly thereafter, the Vatican held a “theological” symposium on the papacy in 1996, and the strongest reassurances for the papacy that came out of that was, “we are aware of development in the papacy” … “Peter was the leader of the apostles” … “the bishop of Rome is [somehow] the successor of Peter, based on the fact that Peter and Paul died in Rome…”

The symposium is characterized by its properly doctrinal nature, aimed at extracting the essential points of the substance of the doctrine on the Primacy, according to the Catholic Church's conviction of faith...

In addition, there was a document of “reflections” published, just to keep everyone “on the same page,” that is, “These "Reflections" - appended to the symposium - are meant only to recall the essential points of Catholic doctrine on the primacy…” – this is now what it is essential to believe.

THE PRIMACY OF THE SUCCESSOR OF PETER IN THE MYSTERY OF THE CHURCH
Reflections of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Prefect
Tarcisio Bertone, Archbishop emeritus of Vercelli, Secretary

No longer are the boastful claims made by Fortescue a part of the calculation. As much as possible, historical considerations have been stripped from “what it is now essential to believe”.

Note this paragraph from the conclusion of that theological symposium, written by Ratzinger:

On the basis of the New Testament witness, the Catholic Church teaches, as a doctrine of faith, that the Bishop of Rome is the Successor of Peter in his primatial service in the universal Church;13 this succession explains the preeminence of the Church of Rome,14 enriched also by the preaching and martyrdom of St Paul.

Note the bone given to Paul, although Peter and Paul were “Founders” of the church at Rome. Note also that somehow, in some undefined way, it is “the New Testament witness” where this “succession” “explains” “the preeminence of the Church of Rome”.

This “explanation” may be found in Ratzinger’s “Called to Communion,” and I will say here, that it is such a tremendous stretch, that I find it to be laughable. (You may not, but then again…)

The summary of that document is:

13. … it is essential to state that discerning whether the possible ways of exercising the Petrine ministry correspond to its nature is a discernment to be made in Ecclesia, i.e., with the assistance of the Holy Spirit and in fraternal dialogue between the Roman Pontiff and the other Bishops, according to the Church's concrete needs. But, at the same time, it is clear that only the Pope (or the Pope with an Ecumenical Council) has, as the Successor of Peter, the authority and the competence to say the last word on the ways to exercise his pastoral ministry in the universal Church.

So, in effect, "nanny-nanny-boo-boo on you."

Nevertheless, there is going to be a “last word” on the papacy; it is forthcoming, and it is going to be the result of these historical studies that these Called to Communion folks are mocking and dismissing right now.

Michael Liccione is mistaken on multiple points

Stephanie said:

One item from Liccione which does deal with what you have responded is also being discussed in the combox.

Specifically: Another of Mathison’s arguments is that there’s no evidence of mono-episcopacy in Rome until the late second century, and that some Catholic scholars agree with that judgment, which indeed they do….

In fact, most of the Catholic scholars I am aware of actually agree with that judgment. I’m not aware of any who contradict that “judgment”. You might say it is “universal”. In fact, this view is taught in a work entitled “The Rise of the Papacy,” by Robert B. Eno, S.S. That S.S. stands for the Order of the Sulpicians, whose mission it is to teach parish priests. So I can’t account for the course schedule, but there’s a good chance that a parish priest near you is on board with this account.

Liccione: That requires arguing, as he does, that St. Irenaeus and one of his sources, Hegisippus, misstated the evidence from the post-apostolic Church of Rome, even though Irenaeus himself had been to Rome and known St. Polycarp of Smyrna personally, who in turn had been to Rome and had himself known the Apostle John personally. Such an argument would have us believe that, roughly 1,900 years after the fact, we can understand the meaning and reliability of the late first-century sources better than people who had lived less than two generations after the fact and had known eyewitnesses to it.

There’s no question that Irenaeus was an important witness. It’s funny that Liccione wants to talk about Hegesippus, because Hegesippus is one of those “secondary sources” for which Liccione says “is not a reputable form of argument” down below.

With respect to Irenaeus, Cullmann [who is not by any means a liberal!], in the work I referred to in my previous post, noted this:

Toward the end of the second century, Irenaeus writes, chiefly in connection with a description of gospel origins that goes back to Papias, that Peter and Paul had preached in Rome and founded the church, and he repeats the assertion when he speaks of the Roman church as the “very ancient and universally known church founded and organized by Peter and Paul.” Here, too, occurs at least one [historical] error: the Roman church in any case was not founded by Paul. That is entirely clear from his letter to the Romans. This at once calls in question the historical trustworthiness of the statement (Cullmann, 116).

Paul writes to the church at Rome without addressing a leader. He writes in the years 57-58, a date that is very firm in history, in a letter that is not contested. Excuses are made as to why Paul makes no mention of Peter in Rome, even though the church has been attested in Rome perhaps from Acts 2, when visitors for Rome were present at/saved at Pentecost. In Acts 18, Aquila and Priscilla are expelled from Rome by the edict of Claudius, attested in secular history, 49 ad.

So the church at Rome is attested long before Paul writes, and there is no leader there.

Ignatius, who knows and writes about Bishops in the east, writes to Rome without mentioning a Bishop. There is no question the city of Rome is important. It is the capital of the empire. This church “which presides in the place of the district of the Romans…”

Consider the Shepherd of Hermas. According to the Muratorian Canon, the oldest (ca. AD-180-200?) known list of the New Testament and early Christian writings, Hermas was the brother of Pius, who is listed as a bishop of Rome (ca 140-154). So he was writing earlier than Hegesippus, whose “list of bishops” is said to be the first one (c. 166), and earlier than Irenaeus (c.180). Hermas was, in fact, listed in the Muratorian Canon as a book to be read in the churches [i.e., it was liturgical].

Afterwards I saw a vision in my house. The elderly woman came and asked me if I had already given the little book to the elders (presbuteroi, plural). I said that I had not given it. “You have done well,” she said, “for I have words to add. So when I finish all the words they will be made known to all the elect through you. Therefore you will write two little books, and you will send one to Clement and one to Grapte. Then Clement will send it to the cities abroad, because that is his job. But Grapte will instruct the widows and orphans. But you yourself will read it to this city [Rome], along with the elders (presbuteroi) who preside (proistamenoi – plural leadership) over the church." (Vis 2.4)

Roger Collins, “Keepers of the Keys of Heaven: A History of the Papacy,” (New York: Basic Books, 2008), notes “The author of the Epistle of Clement may have been the man of this name later described as the person responsible for drafting communications sent behalf of Christians of Rome to other churches.” If this Clement did compose 1 Clement, then it certainly would be understandable why the Corinthian church would have thought they received a letter from Clement (even though the name of Clement does not appear within that letter. Rather, it is from “the church of God that sojourns in Rome”).

But Hermas could not be clearer. There is a plurality of presbyters who “preside over” the church at Rome. This is no fuzzy mention, as in Ignatius, of a church in “a place of honor”. This is a clear explanation for the “argument from silence” in Paul’s letter to the Romans, in the absence of a clear leader in both 1 Clement and Ignatius.

Hermas reiterates the structure of this leadership, and the fact that they are not leading, but rather that they fight among themselves. He calls them “children”.

Look therefore to the coming judgment. You, therefore, who have more than enough, seek out those who are hungry, until the tower is finished. For after the tower is finished, you may want to do good, but you will not have the chance. Beware, therefore, you who exult in your wealth, lest those in need groan, and their groaning rise up to the Lord, and you together with your good things be shut outside the door of the tower. Now, therefore, I say to you [tois – plural] who lead the church and occupy the seats of honor [multiple “Chairs of Peter”?]: do not be like the sorcerers. For the sorcerers carry their drugs in bottles, but you carry your drug and poison in your heart. You are calloused and do not want to cleanse your hearts and to mix your wisdom together in a clean heart, in order that you may have mercy from the great King. Watch out, therefore, children, lest these divisions of yours [among you elders] deprive you of your life. How is it that you desire to instruct God’s elect, while you yourselves have no instruction? Instruct one another, therefore, and have peace among yourselves, in order that I too may stand joyfully before the Father and give an account on behalf of all of you to your Lord.” (Vis 3.9)

Hermas here is chastising the multiple leaders of the church at Rome. This is important to note because Hermas identifies himself as a slave (Vis. 1.1). It will not do to say that this is a group of priests who work for a bishop. The entire group "presides."

Yet here, in the leadership of the church of Rome, there are multiple elders who "preside"; they are acting like sorcerers. They exult in their wealth. They take the seats of honor. They want to teach, but they are guilty themselves of having no instruction.

As for what we can know 1900 years after the fact, I’m convinced there is much that we can learn. Archaeology confirms writings, secular writings confirms New Testament writings. How can forensic scientists reconstruct a murder based on such small and insignificant things as fingerprints, DNA evidence, and striations on bullets?

Liccione: That dubious sort of move is rather common among liberal scripture and patristic scholars; it’s just special pleading when made by a conservative theologian who would often find liberal scholarship dubious on just such grounds.

Is it “special pleading”? There is no question that “liberal scholarship” has put the New Testament as a whole, and the life of Christ, through the most strenuous bit of examination over the last 200 years that any person or set of documents has been subjected to. And our historical knowledge of both the life of Christ and the New Testament is on far firmer footing than it has ever been. Even “liberal” scholarship is confirming important facts and details about the life of Christ.

With respect to the life and letters of Paul, for example, there is a body of his work that interacts with secular people and places and histories, that there is no question as to who Paul was, where he traveled to, what he wrote, and on and on. His letters are so well attested, scholars don’t even quibble over dates and places any more.

I’d say rather that what Liccione calls “conservative” and “liberal” scholarship in these fields are doing their jobs so well that many formerly contested things and events are coming into such a sharp focus that many things are agreed upon by both sides.

Consider the life of Christ. Craig Blomberg recently blogged about a conservative and an atheist historian who agreed: the Resurrection probably was being reported the same year it happened. This is a tremendous confluence of agreement on facts, especially when you consider that 100 or so years ago, Bertrand Russell was making a name for himself by mouthing off that Jesus never even existed. Blomberg has published one or two books in the last few years, which I haven’t read, that probably go into far more detail than this.

Gary Habermas has put together a list of 12 historical facts about the resurrection of Christ that huge numbers of scholars, liberal and conservative, agree upon in huge numbers.

Consider the following four items. In his work “The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus,” Habermas says that virtually 100% of scholars believe the first four are “so strongly evidenced historically that nearly every scholar regards them as reliable facts,” and the fifth is believed by more than 75% (pg 48).

1. Jesus died by crucifixion

2. Jesus’s disciples believed he rose and appeared to them

3. The conversion of Paul (from persecutor of the church to leading Apostle).

4. The conversion of James, the brother of the Lord (originally a severe skeptic)

5. The empty tomb.

Habermas surveyed more than 2,400 sources in French, German, and English in which experts have written on the resurrection from 1975 to the present.
So when Liccione and other Roman Catholics from the CTC school of thought want to wave their hands and dismiss “liberal” scholarship, I want to say they simply do not know what they are talking about.

But consider further that this same confluence of scholarship that is bringing the life of Christ and the reliability of the New Testament into such sharper and clearer focus, are decimating Roman Catholic tales of the early papacy.

Liccione: The argument in question, which is fairly common, also trades on an ambiguity in the use of the word ‘presbyteros’ in the early Church. And it has been vigorously contested on that and other grounds by Catholic scholars whom Mathison simply ignores. The selective use of secondary scholarly sources is not a reputable form of argument. So Mathison’s present argument doesn’t merit more attention here either.

I’ve given examples from Hermas above of the “trading on ambiguity” in the word “presbuteros” above. What’s Hermas saying? Is he being ambiguous?

Too, I’m sure that Mathison’s trying to summarize here. There is nothing “not reputable” about what Mathison has done, and for Liccione to cast aspersions on his motive or his method is just simply what’s decried at CTC as ad hominem. But when you can’t really address what the writer is saying, then shoot the messenger.

Elders, Teachers, Chairs, and Thrones: “what they knew, and when they knew it” (Part 1)

George Santayana famously defined a fanatic as “someone who redoubles his zeal whenever he has lost sight of his goal.”

Bryan Cross has published a long article on “The Chair of St. Peter”. In the fashion of a Medieval florilegium [book of sentences], it is thick with early church references to “the Throne of Peter” and “the thrones of the apostles,” etc., as if somehow this amounts to scads and scads of evidence that the papacy is what it says it is. Bryan concludes his article this way:

The testimony of the tradition we find in the Fathers and other early writers indicates a deepening awareness of the significance and authority of St. Peter’s chair, especially in grounding and preserving the fidelity and unity of the Church. But some conception of the authority of this chair seems to have been present even from the second century. [JB note: but not in the New Testament, not among the Apostles, and no significant mentions of this concept are even evident, much less explicit, until the third century.] And the clearest and most developed conception of this authority seems to have been in the particular Church of Rome, and especially in her bishops. At the same time, there is no comparable set of patristic quotations in which it is claimed that the chair of St. Peter did not hold such authority.

So the inquirer is then faced with a dilemma that in a certain respect parallels that each of us faces regarding Christ’s own claims concerning Himself. Either the Church at Rome almost immediately fell into serious error regarding her own eccesial [sic] authority and role in relation to the universal Church, and though various bishops at times disagreed with her decisions (e.g. St. Cyprian), no one ‘corrected’ her claim concerning her own authority until the time of Photius in the ninth century, or during all those centuries (and to the present) she was truly what she always claimed to be. The former option leaves us with the paradox that the Apostolic seat widely believed to be the touchstone of orthodoxy in every respect for hundreds of years, was terribly wrong about its own identity, and therefore unsuited to be anyone’s touchstone of orthodoxy.

I’ve already written extensively to the effect that the Apostolic Fathers, those writers from, say, 100-150 AD, because of their reliance on “oral tradition,” did in fact begin to lose their understanding of the Gospel of Grace. For example, T. F. Torrance, “The Doctrine of Grace in the Apostolic Fathers” is a major exegetical study of these works, tracing, point-by-point, just how these writers differ from the gospel of Grace as preached by Jesus and Paul:

T.F. Torrance aims in this book to discover how and why there came about in the early history of the Christian Church the enormous difference that exists between the faith of the New Testament and that of the second and third centuries. He explores how the concept of grace is distinctively characteristic of every doctrine of the New Testament, and yet at the same time is the most sensitive to change.

I’d commend this work to you in every way. Keep in mind that this is a major doctrine. Oscar Cullmann describes precisely how this happened:

About the year 150 there is still an oral tradition. We know this from Papias, who wrote an exposition of the words of Jesus. He tells us himself that he used as a basis the viva vox and that he attached more importance to it than to the writings. But in him we have not only this declaration of principle; for he has left us some examples of the oral tradition as he found it, and these examples show us well that we ought to think of an oral tradition about the year 150! It is entirely legendary in character. This is clear from the story that Papias reports about Joseph Barsabbas, the unsuccessful candidate, according to Acts 1:23 f., for the post of twelfth disciple rendered vacant by Judas’s treason. Above all there is the obscene and completely legendary account [in Papias] of death of Judas Iscariot himself.

The period about 150 is, on the one hand, relatively near to the apostolic age, but on the other hand, it is already too far away for the living tradition still to offer in itself the least guarantee of authenticity. The oral traditions which Papias echoes arose in the Church and were transmitted by it. For outside the Church no one had any interest in describing in such crude colours the death of the traitor. Papias was therefore deluding himself when he considered viva vox as more valuable than the written books. The oral tradition had a normative value in the period of the apostles, who were eye-witnesses, but it had it no longer in 150 after passing mouth to mouth (Oscar Cullmann, “The Tradition,” in “The Early Church,” London: SCM Press, Ltd., ©1956, pgs. 88-89).

I’ve written extensively about this process. While the fixing of the canon of the New Testament enabled a writer like Irenaeus (c. 180 ad) to recapture and understand a concept of Grace that earlier writers had lost through a reliance on “oral tradition,” it is vitally important that we understand that some of this “entirely legendary” “oral tradition” did make its way into church organization and church teachings. This is not to say that the entire church became corrupted at that moment. Rather, this process was like yeast getting into the dough (Matt 16:11-12) – it doesn’t corrupt all at once, but the festering situation led to some of the fourth and fifth and sixth century abuses that I’ve written about. And it’s vitally important that Christians understand this progression, because the enemies of Christianity today (scroll down to the “Bart Ehrman” section of this blogpost) certainly have no respect for the truth of Christianity, much less the legends.

In the spirit of “chairs” and “teaching,” and to begin to discuss just how much the meaning of this idea evolved during the early centuries of church history, I’d like to step back for a minute, to the beginning of Jesus’s ministry in Galilee, to talk about where the notion of “teaching” and “chairs” actually came from:

Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news about him spread through the whole countryside. He was teaching in their synagogues, and everyone praised him.

He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down.

The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him. He began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his lips.

Understanding the Jewish synagogue system is important, not only for understanding Jesus and his ministry, but also for understanding where Christian worship came from, how it came about, and importantly, where I’d like to focus, on how the leadership structures of early Christianity developed.

People on both sides of the Roman Catholic/Protestant divide will often use the words episkopoi (“overseers”) and presbuteroi (“presbyters”) without understanding that these words had definite meanings when they are used in the New Testament. In fact, it’s remarkable how much Christianity owes, in form and function, to the Jewish synagogue.

Jesus is a pious Jew, who attends synagogue regularly. On this occasion, Jesus goes to the synagogue as was his habit on the Sabbath. This point is especially important, because Jesus’ controversy with the Jewish religious leadership may have left him with a reputation of being a religiously insensitive rebel. In fact, many of the six Sabbath passages in Luke end up in some controversy. Jesus may be pious, but the character of his piety is different from that of the Jewish leadership. On the Sabbath, Jesus will heal, meet people’s needs, and instruct them. The synagogue as a center of Jesus’ activity parallels the church’s activity around the synagogue or temple (Acts 3-4; 13). Christianity did not attempt immediately to isolate itself from Judaism. Rather, it saw itself as the natural fulfillment of Judaism’s hope. So a part of its mission was to call Jews to enter the time of fulfillment. (Darrell L. Bock, “Luke, 1:1-9:50”, “Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament”, Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, © 1994, pgs. 402-403.)

I’m amazed at just how much time, in some of the newer histories of the New Testament, is spent on “the Jewish background.” F.F. Bruce’s “New Testament History (New York: Doubleday, © 1969) for example, devotes 150 pages of a 400 page book to such topics encompassing “Judeaea under Roman Governors”, “Philosophical Schools”, “Hasidism, Pharisees and Sadducees”, “Essenes”, “Zealots”, “The Qumran Community”, and “Judaism at the Beginning of the Christian Era,” before beginning with John the Baptist.
Bock Continues:

A synagogue service had various elements: recitation of the Shema (Deut 6:4-9), prayers, a reading from the Law, a reading from the Prophets, instruction on the passages, and a benediction.

The exact nature of the synagogue service—including how fixed it was in this period—has been the subject of discussion. Though some speak of a fixed cycle of readings every three years, such a schedule in this period seems unlikely. The Hebrew Scripture would be read in a standing position in one- to three-verse units. The text was translated into Aramaic, the local language, an oral procedure that often involved targumic renderings of the text (i.e., Aramaic paraphrases of the Hebrew OT), though the translator did not read from a text in the assembly. The Torah was always read, and often a reading from the Prophets followed. After the reading came an invitation for someone to instruct the audience. Based on texts already read or on new texts, this instruction could be done by any qualified male in the audience, provided ten males were present. Jesus stood up apparently to indicate that he could speak about a passage. Jesus gave such a lesson from the prophets, what was called the Haftarah (a reading from the Prophets).

Jesus takes the scroll and unrolls it to the place from which he will give instruction. It seems that Jesus chose the reading from the Prophets and “found” the place in Isaiah from which he wanted to teach. If the text was part of a fixed reading schedule, then the scroll would have been opened at the appropriate place. This detail suggests that a reading schedule was not used, but that Jesus chose his text (Bock, 403-404).

* * *

The drama intensifies now that the eschatological passage has been read, but its exposition remains. The scroll is rolled up and returned to the attendant, who is responsible for getting and returning the scroll to the ark where it is kept. In all probability he is the hazzan of the synagogue. Jesus then sits down to teach. Teaching in a sitting position was customary (Luke 5:3; Matt 5:1; 23:2; 26:55; Mark 4:1 …). As he prepared to speak, Jesus had the crowd’s attention. The common Lucan term (atenizontes) depicts intense, focused emotion by describing the crowd’s gaze of attention. (Bock, 411).

For more on the evolution of the early papacy and the introduction of forgery by popes to enhance their own stature, see my earlier series of posts on “The See of Peter”.

Roman Catholics get New Testament Canon issues precisely backwards

I’ve been continuing to follow the Green Baggins thread, From Natural Revelation to Special Revelation. For anyone interested in the differences in how Roman Catholics discuss the development of the canon of the New Testament, and how Protestants view it, check out the comments of Pastor D.T. King, Steve Hays, Ron D., and others in this thread.

In the comments, Bryan Cross has staked his life (seemingly) on the concept that the Protestant argument for the development of the canon of the New Testament is merely an “ad hoc” argument; we can’t know the canon infallibly, whereas, Rome has defined the canon “infallibly”.

I haven’t done a thorough study of this, but according to Wikipedia, the word “infallibility” wasn’t even a concept in the church until the 9th century, applied to the papacy by the megalomaniac Gregory VII (“the Roman church has never erred; nor will it err”) in the Dictus Papae. No doubt he said this with a straight face. [And we’ve certainly seen Bryan Cross’s straight face in his gravatar.]

So what genuinely seems “ad hoc” is the thought that this concept of infallibility was superimposed on the canon development process. There is no historical warrant for it.

I would suggest to you that a better principle in terms of this issue particularly is, "what did they know, and when did they know it?" That, after all, is the essence of what the study of history is all about.

In other places, I've traced some of the theological reasons for the development of the canon. The early church, once beholden to the preference for "oral tradition" (as Cullmann described, citing Papias in the early 2nd century), faced with questions such as those produced by Marcion, came to the conclusion that it needed its own "canon" -- the heretical ideas of those early Gnostic years were just becoming too pervasive; the development of the authoritative bishop, the notion of "succession" as a kind of proof of authority, and also a fixed canon all came into focus during those years.

Especially with regard to the fixing of the canon, I'd commend to you the works of David Trobisch. In his work Paul's Letter Collection (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1994), he studies manuscript evidence as well as the our understanding of the simple development of "the codex" as a form of communication. He makes the case that Paul himself began collecting his own letters into a collection. This is confirmed by Stanley Porter in his contribution to Exploring the Origins of the Bible, Craig A. Evans and Emanuel Tov, Editors (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008).

Andreas Kostenberger and Michael Kruger place the New Testament documents into the concept of "covenant documents." The earliest church was thinking in terms not only of "new covenant" ("new testament") but also "covenant documents." Kostenberger and Kruger trace this process through their The Heresy of Orthodoxy (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2010). One of the more striking images was that of the "beehive of activity" involved with the process of creating and distributing books and codexes of the Scriptures during the first half of the first century.

As Steve Hays noted, the Pentateuch was what it was, because of who Moses was. He did not require some sort of imprimatur to come along at a later date and certify those five works as Scripture. Moses's works were "covenant documents"; they were Scripture at the moment he wrote them. And Kostenberger and Kruger argue that the New Testament documents were also viewed as covenant documents, created and ratified by the Apostles, again, the unique eyewitnesses to Christ himself, the total revelation of God (Hebrews 1), and treated in a similar way.

Finally, Trobisch (again) traces both the need for and the development of "the canonical edition" or The First Edition of the New Testament, (Oxford: Oxford Unity Press 2000).

Trobisch notes this about "the Canonical Edition":

The atmosphere created by the conflict with the Marcionite movement and the Easter Controversy contains characteristic features of the implied readership of the Canonical Edition. The edition portrays Paul and the Jerusalem authorities in a harmonious unity, presuming that the readers are conscious of the worldwide unity of the church. The success of this publication did not depend on an authoritative decision of the church; rather, readers found their convictions better expressed in the Canonical Edition than in competing literary works. During hard times of persecution, this book was capable of defining or reinforcing the identity and the unity of its readers. At the end of the second century and in the beginning of the third, Irenaeus was reading this edition in Lyons; Tertullian read it in Carthage and Asia Minor; Clement had it in Alexandria, and Origen in Palestine. This particular edition, in other words, was read worldwide.

In the New Testament Scriptures were found the unity and truth of the early church. In truth, none of this is "ad hoc". It is a historical process, unfolded by the Providence of God, and New Testament scholars like Cullmann and Ridderbos and Trobisch and Andreas Kostenberger and Michael Kruger are investigating the sources in a detailed manner, and the history of this process is coming more sharply into focus.

Really, it's the quest for "infallibility" that is an ad hoc concept, superimposed on the process, many centuries after the process occurred, and at best "infallibility" (as an ad hoc idea) was superimposed at Trent, when Rome really had no other response to the Reformation but to try to assert its own authority with a made-up, ad-hoc concept (infallibility).

For more, extremely thorough documentation of how the New Testament came together, see also this complete treatment by Jason Engwer at Triablogue.

"Objection, Your [dis]Honor!"

I owe a few responses to Paul Hoffer -- he chimed in over at Called to Communion near the end of the thread.

Paul Hoffer in Comment 60: Hello all, since Mr. Bugay indicated in his comments to my article on his misuse of Rev. Lampe’s book that I should have directed my energies to interact with Chapter 41, I have had the opportunity to take up some time studying the thesis presented there.

This, by the way, fails to comply with the Called to Communion posting guidelines, which mandates that one address someone in the second person ("you") rather than in the third person voice.

PH: It seems to be founded on a notion that Rome’s titular churches (home-churches) were so fractionated that they could not have been overseen by a single bishop.

A mere "notion"?

Long before Lampe, there were scholars writing about the absence of a monarchical bishop in Rome. In the 40's and 50's, Oscar Cullmann ("advisor to three popes") was detailing significant shortcomings in the traditional Roman position; this was followed up by intensive studies by Daniel O'Connor ("Peter in Rome") Raymond Brown et. al ("Peter in the New Testament"), as well as others. Lampe's detailed work provided solid confirmation for what others had held based on things long understood in the history of that topic.

For example, Schaff has sections on "the Peter of History" and "The Peter of Fiction." Sorting out these two has been difficult, not least because "the Peter of Fiction" was a strong and mighty early pope. The reality of it is quite different, although Peter may in fact have died at Rome, it is highly questionable that he founded the church there, (it is certain that "Peter and Paul" did not "found" the church at Rome -- a testimony that is given by Irenaeus), it is highly questionable that he ever "commanded" anyone, given his role and status as one who traveled there as a missionary.

There are many other factors too that go into the "notion" that there was not a monarchical bishop at Rome. Ignatius, who was an aficionado of the word "bishop" does not seem to have been able to locate a bishop when he writes to Rome. True, this "could" have been an oversight, but for him to purposely have ignored such a person would have been a great affront.

In a completely separate piece of evidence, Hermas states clearly that the city was ruled by a plurality who "fought among themselves." You may want to say that "this doesn't explicitly deny" that there was a monarchical bishop. But both of these are far clearer statements than those upon which an early papacy has historically been founded; but even if there were a monarchical bishop in charge of Hermas's unruly bunch, that would speak volumes about the incompetence of such an individual's [lack of] leadership.

Lampe's work provides confirmation for many, many points of fact that other researchers had strongly suspected. That is the value of his work.

Further to this, you risk here committing the word fallacy of semantic anachronism, that is, using a word in a later manner that was not intended by the New Testament writers. You must be aware that this happens all the time, for example, whenever Catholic writers see the word "episkopos" and related -- they think it means what "bishop" means to day -- and worse, when Catholics see "Peter" they reflect "pope" back on that. Two worse fallacies could not be envisioned in this type of study.

What safeguards have you taken to assure yourself (much less, our readers here!) that you are not committing these fallacies?

PH: Reviewing the data that he sifts through does not actually show that the Roman churches were fractionated and is based on a more modern-view of what a mono-episcopal bishop was supposed to be. As pointed out by David Albert Jones, a professor from Oxford and Oswald Sobrino, such an argument is based on several false assumptions and is a poor argument.

Your mention of names here does not show how the arguments actually shape up. It does not surprise me that partisan Catholics would put forward their own takes on these things. Bryan Cross (to his credit) tried to provide an analysis of Lampe's own analysis of Hegesippus's "list". Unfortunately, the tone of this, as I noted in that thread, was very much a tone that said, "these things as I've written them are not 100% excluded, and therefore, given that they support the Roman tradition they must not only be potentially true but actually true." It is wishful thinking of the highest order.

PH: As pointed out by David Albert Jones, a professor from Oxford …

You mean the bioethicist, who is not a historian?

PH: … and Oswald Sobrino, such an argument is based on several false assumptions and is a poor argument.

Who is this guy anyway?

PH: Adrian Fortesque, Henri Daniel-Rops, Prof. Edward Weltin, … seem to concur based on the preliminary researches that I have started …

How could they "concur"? Fortescue (whose work I have outlined here) pre-dated all of these studies. But I would encourage you to keep reading. It will give you a good idea of just how far away from the truth of history someone like a Fortescue could get.

Henri Daniel-Rops also pre-dated this work and therefore could not have interacted with it. It does not seem as if Weltin published in this area. You must be in some arcane sources.

As far as Bernard Green, OSB, it does seem as if he's addressing Lampe's work. But again, he does so from the position of a partisan, and his "objections" seem to be along the lines of those raised by Bryan Cross.

What is your intention in throwing out these names? Are you intending to show that there is some sort of great groundswell of scholarship that is addressing and defeating the body of scholarship that I've presented? If so, you are hardly making a dent. In reality, your citation of these individuals shows your desperation in this matter -- the distances you must travel to find someone who holds a contrary opinion.

PH: Note too that Mr. Bugay does not address the fact that Schatz, Sullivan, Eno or even Raymond Brown whose views tend to mirror in some respects Lampe’s views, do not argue (Schatz and Sullivan especially) that this argument negates the validity of apostolic succession or the basis for the papacy.

I'm trying to take one thing at a time; Perhaps you could tell me how this comment is not a deflection from the main subject?

Nevertheless, I want to make you happy. To be sure, Schatz and Eno pretty much exclusively dealt with the papacy. Sullivan talked about the transition [and it was not a close transition] of "apostles to bishops". He does not try to "negate the validity of apostolic succession" but rather he does clearly state at the end of the work that he (like Brown) believes that the lengthy "process" by which "bishops" succeeded the Apostles was directed by God and therefore was of "divine institution." To quote him (as I have done in various places, "Although development of church structure reflects sociological necessity, in the Christian self-understanding the Holy Spirit given by the risen Christ guides the church in such a way that allows basic structural development to be seen as embodying Jesus Christ's will for his church."

If you want to cite Raymond Brown -- he is even more detailed with respect to the New Testament:

A more traditional Catholic explanation of why individual Christians are not specifically designated as priests in the NT is that the apostles who presided at the Eucharist were priests in everything but name, for the name was too closely associated with the Jewish priests of the temple. But this explanation is based on a serious oversimplification about apostles in the NT, as we shall see in Chapter Two, and suffers from the added difficulty of unwarrantedly supposing that in NT times the Eucharist was thought of as a sacrifice and therefore associated with priesthood.

Because of the origins of Christianity in Judaism we would really have to suppose just the opposite: animal sacrifice would be thought of in terms of blood and there was no visible blood in the Eucharist. True, there are sacrificial overtones in the traditional eucharistic words of Jesus (the mention of the shedding of blood, the covenant motif, the "for you" theme), but this coloring was understandable because Jesus spoke these words before his bloody death. There is no proof that the Cristian communities who broke the eucharistic bread after the resurrection would have thought that they were offering sacrifice.

In these observations I am not questioning the legitimacy of the development in later theology whereby the Church came to understand the Eucharist as a sacrifice; indeed, a recent study by a Calvinist argues that there was real continuity in such a development and that it is loyal to the implication s of the NT. I am simply pointing out that such a theology was a post-NT development, and so we have no basis for assuming that early Christians would have considered as a priest the one who presided at the eucharistic meal. (Brown, "Priest and Bishop," New York: Paulist Press, 1970, pg 16.)

The fact is that the connection of "authority" of "priestly succession" going back to the New Testament is a false one, and Rome's recent bombast that "the communities of the Reformation" don't have this succession is just a non-starter for many Protestants who do know and understand the roots of this "development" and reject it.

The fact is that all of Rome's supposed foundational connections to authority -- priests, bishops, popes -- are later developments that can easily be rejected on the basis of the New Testament. Lord willing I will get around to putting all of these pieces together.

PH: The whole notion is fractionation is sort of making a mountain out of molehill as all it shows is that the Catholic Church back in the day practiced setting parishes up based on geographical boundaries which we still do today.

If the papacy is claiming that it has authority that it never had, then it is not a molehill, it is an important topic to investigate. Your statement here about "geographic boundaries" is another red herring that ignores the whole area of what authority actually meant in the earliest church. Nobody denies that there was a practice of setting up parishes based on geographic boundaries. In fact, if you had read more closely, you would understand that Lampe uses this very practice to establish the picture he draws of house churches, by tracing the titular parishes of the fifth century, for whom we have names and signatures.

All this shows is that, as a lawyer, you are skilled in the art of obfuscation -- you throw out a lot of highfalutin words that seem to have some meaning, but when investigated more thoroughly, there is much to be desired.

How much better would it be for you to work for clarity in these matters? Doesn't your Catholicism bind you to honesty? Or does it rather bind you to blind partisanship?

Apostolic Succession In Perspective: Review and Introduction

Before I start back into some of the historical processes regarding the Synagogue and teachings and elders, I’d like to stop and take stock of what I’ve written, and put it into the perspective of the overall discussion.

Here’s a key statement from the Keith Mathison piece; which may be found in Bryan Cross’s extended dialogue with Michael Horton:

Of course the inquirer has to determine whether there is a succession of authority from the Apostles to the bishops of the present day, and whether Christ gave to St. Peter and his successors the primacy. But just as our discovery of Christ does not entail that the basis or ground of His authority is our judgment that He is the Son of God, and just as a first century Roman citizen’s discovery of the Apostles would not entail that the basis or ground of their authority is his judgment that they were sent by Christ, so the contemporary inquirer’s discovery of the Catholic Magisterium extending down through the centuries by an unbroken succession from the Apostles to the present day does not entail that the basis or ground of this Magisterium’s authority is the inquirer’s judgment that it is the divinely authorized teaching authority of the Church Christ founded. The reasons by which he grasps its authority are not the ground of its authority, whereas without apostolic succession the only ground for the authority of any confession or pastor is its or his general agreement with one’s own interpretation of Scripture.

It is said that “it all comes down to authority,” and this, in many ways, is the focal point of Roman Catholic claims to authority. Let’s take a look at the authority claim that Bryan is making (which I believe to be consonant with what Rome has taught in the past, although, I would say, Rome is in some ways “re-calibrating” this “story” in our lifetimes):

The Inquirer has to determine:

1. Whether there is a succession of authority from the Apostles to the bishops of the present day

2. Whether Christ gave to St. Peter and his successors “the primacy”.

Of course, the answer to both of these is “no”.


There are three things, according to Cross, the authority of which are not dependent on [“not entailed by”] the enquirer’s “discovery” of them:

1. Christ is the son of God

2. The Apostles’ authority during the first century

3. The Catholic Magisterium extending down through the centuries by an unbroken succession from the Apostles to the present day.

He says, “without apostolic succession the only ground for the authority of any confession or pastor is its or his general agreement with one’s own interpretation of Scripture,” but that is a meaningless philosophical construct that doesn’t matter, because if “apostolic succession” is not historically viable understanding of “church authority,” then it is not, and the “philosophical necessity” posited by Bryan is just simply meaningless.

It’s at point 3 where Protestants can and do and must understand and draw the line that this item #3 was not “from the beginning” – this point #3 was a development that occurred, took place in the second part of the second century in the forges of what Oscar Cullmann called the “post-Apostolic” period, the period of the Apostolic Fathers. The early generations of the church relied on an “oral tradition” to carry through the Apostles’ teaching (δόγματα –see Papias, for example); but this oral tradition failed to stem the tide of [mostly local Roman] heresies in the turbulent capital of the Roman world, which itself was the site of the comings and goings of people and religions from all over the world. Names like Carpocrates and Basilides and Valentinus and probably a dozen others all claimed to draw upon Christianity in some way, according to Everett Ferguson, “Church History Volume 1: From Christ to Pre-Reformation” (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan 2005). It was during this time that “the early church adopted strategies that with varying degrees of effectiveness continued to be employed in subsequent centuries (pg 105).

The orthodox church, the church which relied on the (δόγματα) of the Apostles at first relied upon an “oral tradition” to defend and distinguish itself from this “gnostic soup,” but that attempt could not provide the defense that was needed. And I’ve described it in the past. It is at this point we see the emergence of other defense mechanisms that were more successful, and which seemed to have been solidified in the subsequent centuries:

1. The fixing of a canon of the New Testament as a doctrinal norm

2. The standardization of an office of monarchical bishop, present in some areas of the east but not in the west

3. The notion of “succession”

These “developments” gave shape to the church that Irenaeus knew in the late second century, and which writers like Tertullian and Hippolytus wrote about early in the third century.

The short “short summary” of the result of this process is provided by Francis A. Sullivan, “From Apostles to Bishops: The Development of the Episcopacy in the Early Church” (New York: The Newman Press ©2001 by the Society of Jesus [“Jesuits”] of New England). Sullivan says:

While most Catholic scholars agree that the episcopate is the fruit of a post-New Testament development, they maintain that this development was so evidently guided by the Holy Spirit that it must be recognized as corresponding to God’s plan for the structure of his Church (pg 230).

Sullivan is among those theologians who are sort of at the forefront of the “recalibration” that I noted above. Even though this represents a tremendous concession (and the Bryan Crosses of the world resist it with all the wishful thinking they can muster), it is still not going far enough. It is at this point, around these historically-verifiable elements of church history, where Protestants must (and will, I believe) take issue with Roman Catholics: while there is no question that God enabled “the one true church” to survive this period, the resultant “structure” was merely an expedient of the time, crafted by the individuals of the time, and not some sort of divinely-mandated “structure” that God intended for all time. (Here is the point at which to understand the method of God in his response to Paul’s plea: “My grace is sufficient for you.” What worked in the past will be a disaster for the future. Do not rely on “the structure,” God says. “Rely on me.”)

In my posts citing F.F. Bruce and Roger Beckwith on the synagogue structure that was in place during New Testament times (and which I hope to continue to work with), the following statement from Sullivan is evident:

This structure was in development during the New Testament era, but even at the close of that period the Church did not yet have a structure adequate to meet the challenges it would face during the second century. Catholics see no reason to think that the Holy Spirit, who guided the Church during the period of the New Testament, would have ceased to guide it during the development of the basic structure necessary for its long-term survival (230).

And of course, upon this, again, it turns. It is mere assumption that this is some sort of “divinely mandated structure.” In a comment the other day, PeaceByJesus reminded us of the meaninglessness of claims to “unbroken succession” from that time till the Reformation.

The history of this entire period and of course, the leadership structure of Medieval church history, scream mightily that this is the point at which Protestants can and do and should draw the line, and say, “we reject this so-called authority, the rotting fruit of which is evident throughout history, and the supposed cleaning-up of which [at Trent] was merely cosmetic. Roman dogma had permitted a creeping rot to infest itself, and from Trent onward effectively anathematized the Gospel, the kerygma, “the precepts or the teachings (δόγματα) of the Apostles”.


John Calvin went into tremendous detail about much of this in his Institutes. Without having the historical perspective that we have today, Calvin wrote a summary of this process that someone like Francis Sullivan is only now catching up to.

I’ll stop here for now, with a reminder. Viisaus noted in a recent comment, “Or in other words, the Reformers pointed out that it was more important to be successors of apostles in SPIRIT rather than (to claim) to be their successor in FLESH.” I would extend that remark – not only successors of the Apostles in Spirit, but in the very teachings (δόγματα) of the Apostles, which, in our day, can be found only in the Scriptures.

The Roman Catholic Hermeneutic

Tim Prussic, whose name I've seen in various comments, and who seems to be a fan of Richard Muller's "Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics," is commenting on his own blog on a very long "Called to Communion" posting by Tim Troutman on the topic of "Holy Orders and the Sacramental Priesthood." So far he has done Part 1 and Part 2 of his analysis, and he promises more.

About half way through part two of Tim Prussic's analysis, he comes to this conclusion:

[Tim Troutman's] stated purpose, as it comes to the text of God’s Word, is simply to “demonstrate that the concept of Holy Orders is consistent with the biblical evidence.” Passing by Tim [Troutman]’s lack of definition of the phrase “Holy Orders,” and consequential lack of clarity as to the consistency of it with the biblical evidence, the statement itself is telling. Tim spends some time on the text of Scripture, but it appears that his interests really lay elsewhere. Mere consistency is his aim. Discovering and obeying what God’s Word teaches and requires regarding the government of Christ’s church is not Tim’s aim.

In the process, Tim Prussic comes to an understanding of Tim Troutman's hermeneutic (at least in Part 2) which makes some sense:

Not only has Tim [Troutman] not proved that the Apostles had the power to confer their same authority upon other, but it would appear he didn’t even try to prove it. When it comes to handling the biblical data, Tim’s article (thus far) is full of “proof texts,” but does not interact with the text or even really seek to understand it. It appears that he’s far more eager to move onto what the church has to say. I suspect that a great deal of our disagreement really stems from this: my authority is the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture and Tim’s is something different. I will not presume to speak for him, to specify his authority, but I think he’d agree that our concepts of authority differ. Because our authorities differ, our doctrine differs. (Emphasis added).

Tim Prussic really is very kind not to try to say what that different authority is. But we do need to know what it is and where it comes from. I've described some of that here:

With regard to the Catholic Church, [their hermeneutic] is a blatant form of revisionism. This is evidenced by Pius IX’s method articulated in his Letter, “Gravissimas inter,” to the Archbishop of Munich-Freising, Dec. 11, 1862, reiterated in Pius XII’s statement in Humani Generis, “theologians must always return to the sources of divine revelation: for it belongs to them to point out how the doctrine of the living Teaching Authority is to be found either explicitly or implicitly in the Scriptures and in Tradition.”

This is further explained in a variety of sources. One Roman Catholic theologian wrote, “We think first of developed forms for which we need to find historical justification. The developed forms come first and the historical justification comes second.” (“Ways of Validating Ministry,” Kilian McDonnell, Journal of Ecumenical Studies (7), pg. 213, cited in Carlos Alfredo Steger, “Apostolic Succession in the Writings of Yves Congar and Oscar Cullmann, pg. 322.) Steger calls this type of historical revisionism “highly questionable if not inadmissible.”

Aiden Nichols, “The Shape of Catholic Theology” (253) notes that for the last several hundred years, according to these popes, “the theologian’s highest task lies in proving the present teachings of the magisterium from the evidence of the ancient sources.” One internet writer called this method “Dogma Appreciation 101” (related in a discussion of his studies in a Catholic seminary.) Nichols calls this, “the so-called regressive method,” and notes that Walter Kasper (now a Cardinal) has traced the origins of this method to the 18th century.

Prior to Newman’s “theory of development,” it was the practice of Catholic apologists (see Bossuet) to argue that the church had never changed: “semper eadem.” But in the course of further historical research, it became necessary for someone like Newman to explain the huge scope and number of the changes that Rome had effected on the church over the centuries.

In the Orwell novel, 1984, it was the job of the main character, Winston Smith, “to rewrite historical documents so they match the constantly changing current party line. This involves revising newspaper articles and doctoring photographs — mostly to remove ‘unpersons,’ people who have fallen foul of the party.”

To find precedence for this practice, Orwell had to travel no further than the Roman Catholic Church, which had made this its practice for centuries. In describing how we have come to know about the genuine teachings of Nestorius, Friedrich Loofs wrote, “The church of the ancient Roman Empire did not punish its heretics merely by deposition, condemnation, banishment and various deprivation of rights, but, with the purpose of shielding its believers against poisonous influence, it destroyed all heretical writings ... a similar fortune was prepared for Nestorius.” (Loofs, “Nestorius,” 2-11).

Of course, according to Orwell, “If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say this or that even, it never happened—that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death.” (Book 1, Chapter 3)

This is precisely what the Catholic Church, at an official level, to a greater or lesser degree, has been doing for centuries, and it is the type of thing that its modern apologists continue to do today. (Especially adherents to Newman’s “theory of development.”)