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After Peter and Paul

The period between the death of Peter and the toleration of Christianity by the Emperor Constantine in 313 has often been represented as a time of the pure church, the church of the catacombs, the church of great simplicity, the church where all Christians lived flawless lives and were ready to die for their faith. No doubt, there is much to admire about the Christians of these early centuries, but they were human beings with faults, failings, and sometimes grave weaknesses.

What did the church of Rome look like fifty or seventy-five years after Peter? Fundamental to it during this period was the ongoing impact of its origin in the Jewish community. Christians soon began to separate from the synagogues but, as mentioned, they organized themselves into similarly discrete units. They met, as did Christians in other cities, in the homes of wealthier Christians, and there they held their religious services. As the communities grew they rented space in public edifices. Each of these house-churches or neighborhood communities had a leader or elder—a “presbyter,” the synonym for elder. As late as the second century, a document called the Shepherd of Hermas spoke of the Church of Rome as having many rulers.

This raises a problem for those lists of popes that begin with Linus, Cletus, and Clement. The fact that Clement was responsible for the letter to the church of Corinth suggests that there was at least an informal hierarchy among the elders. There surely were occasions when the Christians in Rome wanted or needed to act as a group. Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Romans shows that, despite the fact that they had no central organization, they looked upon themselves as a single church and were looked upon that way by others. Clement’s letter comes from the whole church of Rome, not from a particular house-church.

Elsewhere in the church bishops emerged as leaders of the community, a pattern eventually followed by Rome. The Christian communities provided for poor relief, with special care for orphans and widows. This activity needed organization and supervision, not simply on a house-to-house basis but in a way effective for a whole urban reality. Moreover, the Christian churches began to experience bitter disagreements.

An early and particularly divisive issue was about when to celebrate the most important of the Christian anniversaries, the resurrection of Christ. The Christians of the eastern part of the Roman Empire tended to celebrate it to coincide with the Jewish Passover, no matter on what day of the week Passover fell, whereas the Romans, for instance, celebrated it every Sunday. As time went on the Romans began to celebrate it more solemnly once a year on the Sunday after Passover. This issue soon erupted into a rancorous argument among the churches, and each church needed somebody to speak for it.

Another problem requiring the same solution was the relationship between the Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament, and the more properly Christian documents, those of the New Testament. In the middle of the second century a Christian named Marcion rejected not only the entire Old Testament but even parts of the New. What documents deserved to be considered normative and therefore canonical? A further, more profound question was the relationship between Father, Son, and Spirit. A heresy known as Modalism sprang up that said that the distinction between Father and Son was purely nominal or only transitory, two “modes” of an identical reality. Then, a disciplinary question: what to do with apostates, those people who during persecution abandoned their faith by sacrificing to Roman gods and who afterward repented and wanted to be reconciled to the community. Clear leadership was required to deal with problems like these. No later than the middle of the second century, Rome like other cities had evolved into a pattern of a single leader for the community.

By that time the Church of Rome had also evolved from primarily Greek-speaking to Latin-speaking. The community then numbered at least fifteen thousand, probably many more. Within a century the number grew incrementally and more than doubled. By 300 it had tripled or quadrupled to become a sizable body that had made inroads into the highest levels of Roman society. The bishops were elected as elsewhere in the Christian world by the presbyters, now increasingly considered and called priests (sacerdotes), and they were then confirmed or approved in some fashion by other members of the local church. The process developed naturally, without legislation determining or governing it. This lack of clear procedures led to controversy and contention, which sometimes reached scandalous levels.

At first the bishops were married men with children. A number of the early popes were married, and a few of them in these early centuries were descended from previous popes. Pope Silverius (536–537), for instance, was the son of Pope Hormisdas (514–533). By the end of the second century, nonetheless, a consensus began to form that bishops could continue of course in their marriage but, once they were ordained bishop, were to live with their spouses as brother and sister—married, yes, but expected not to have marital relations with their wives. Indeed, around the year 305, the Synod of Elvira (near Granada) forbade not only bishops but also priests and deacons from such relations.

Meanwhile in Rome an ever sharper awareness developed that the Church of Rome was an apostolic church and that that fact gave it a special character. The Roman church, therefore, had special responsibilities regarding other churches. Correlatively, the other churches wanted to validate their decisions by being in communion with the Roman church and in concert with what the bishop of Rome thought best. In these first several centuries that concern to be in agreement with Rome was vague, unformulated, and did not everywhere prevail, but it is clear that a pattern was in the making very early. The pattern would, however, have a rough time fully establishing itself.

This is still “the church of the catacombs,” not in the sense that Christians lived in them but in the metaphorical sense that even in the religiously tolerant atmosphere of the Roman Empire, Christians were persecuted. The problem the Romans had with Christians was their refusal to sacrifice to pagan gods and, more specifically, their refusal to sacrifice to the deified emperors. The Roman Empire, in which most of the population was illiterate, was held together and given a sense of cohesion through symbols and images. Busts and statues of the emperors were everywhere, and they represented a reality that went beyond their person. Not to sacrifice to them made Christians seem a danger to the state—made them, in our terms, unpatriotic, even subversive.

By the Middle Ages a tradition had grown up that all the popes from Peter until Constantine died as martyrs. Since the records are not always complete or reliable, it is often difficult to know just what happened to whom. Nonetheless, it is now certain that, while a few popes died as martyrs, the majority did not. Until the persecution of the Emperor Decius in the middle of the third century, the persecutions, even in the city of Rome, were intermittent, uncoordinated, and often local, which helps explain why popes escaped the death penalty.

This situation also meant that Christians as individuals (and also as communities) owned property. By no later than the third century, moreover, they had built and owned churches in which they could worship as they pleased, even though the property might be seized during a persecution and the community dispersed. The era of the house-church was definitively over. Christians in Rome were not living in catacombs because they had never lived in them and, despite romantic legends, did not use them even as places of refuge. The catacombs were simply their burial grounds in which, however, religious ceremonies were sometimes held.

Between Linus and Pope Miltiades, who was pope when Constantine issued his edict tolerating Christianity, the records list thirty-one popes—Linus, Cletus (or Anacletus), Clement, Evaristus, Alexander, Sixtus, Telesphorus, Hyginus, Pius, Anicetus, and so forth. Their names, the kind of functions they performed, and the dates of their election and death become ever more reliable as time moves on. By the time of Pius (about 142–155) and Anicetus (about 155–165) the records provide basically sound but minimal information, and from then on they get more ample. A good deal is known about the popes of the third century.

Pope Callixtus I (217–222), is hardly typical, but his pontificate provides a window into the church of Rome at the time and reveals some of its problems. Callixtus, born in Rome, was a slave of a high-placed Christian named Carpophorus. He served as Carpophorus’s financial steward, which meant he was entrusted with large sums of money. Something went wrong—Callixtus was accused of embezzlement. To avoid prosecution he fled the city and tried to board a ship at Ostia. But he was caught, brought back to Rome, and put to work on a treadmill. Eventually released, he was arrested for causing a disturbance in a synagogue on a Sabbath. This time he was handed over to the prefect of the city, who had him flogged and exiled to the mines in Sardinia, where many other Christians were also enslaved on that notorious “island of death.” He was probably about thirty years old at the time.

These events took place during the reign of Pope Victor (189–198), an African, the first Latin-speaking pope. Victor brought to his office an insistence on the strictest discipline for the clergy and was certainly the most forceful, even imperious, of the second-century popes. His attempts to get other churches to adopt the Roman calendar for the celebration of Easter were resisted and resented in Asia Minor, but they were probably primarily directed to dissidents within his own flock at Rome.

Victor is the first pope known to have had dealings with the imperial court. Marcia, the mistress of Emperor Commodus, was, it seems, a Christian. Through her the pope was able to arrange for the release of many of the Christians in Sardinia. Although Callixtus was not on the list of those to be released, he managed in this atmosphere of amnesty to obtain his freedom. He returned to Rome sometime around the year 190. He then began his clerical career and was soon ordained a deacon. Pope Zephyrinus, Victor’s successor, appointed him administrator of the Christian cemetery on the Appian Way, probably the first cemetery the church legally owned. It contains the “crypt of the popes” where the remains of a number of third-century bishops of Rome were laid to rest. Today it is called the catacomb of Callixtus.

Callixtus’s new position showed off his administrative skills, which resulted in an ever closer relationship with Zephyrinus. He quickly became a person to reckon with. Upon Zephyrinus’s death he was in 217 elected by the Roman clergy to succeed him, but Hippolytus, a Roman presbyter, refused to accept Callixtus and had himself elected by a faction of the clergy inimical to Callixtus. Two popes! This is the first of many such papal schisms. Hippolytus goes down in history as the first anti-pope, a person who claims to be pope but whom contemporaries or later historians judge illegitimate.

Hippolytus accused Callixtus of many things. He said he was a Modalist—but at least while Callixtus was pope he spoke in orthodox fashion about the Father and Son, and he excommunicated Sabellius, the intellectual leader of the Modalists. Hippolytus saw Callixtus as somebody weakening Victor’s strict policies and accused him of disciplinary laxity—Callixtus gave “full reign to human passions and said that he pardoned everyone’s sins.” More specifically, Hippolytus accused him of letting bishops stay in office even when they had committed some grievous fault or given scandal, of refusing to condemn clergy who married, and even of allowing into the episcopacy and priesthood men married two or three times.

These accusations came from a hostile source and must be judged accordingly. Hippolytus was a rigorist who could not tolerate the gentler approach that Callixtus took. Callixtus tried to reconcile to the church clergy that a harsh discipline had driven out, for which he should more likely be praised than excoriated. Despite his questionable early career, he conducted himself with dignity and effectiveness during his brief reign. He also is credited with setting an important precedent by permitting Christian women of noble birth to marry men of lower status, something that civil law disallowed. In so doing he staked a claim for the church in regulating matrimony.

Like all the popes of the first three centuries, Callixtus has been revered as a martyr but, since there was no persecution during his reign, he almost certainly was not one. According to one account he was seized by a lynch-mob during a local anti-Christian riot in the Trastevere section of Rome, which probably erupted because of resentment of Christian expansion in the neighborhood, and thrown to his death from a window. Although we do not know for sure how he died, we know where he was buried. His tomb was discovered in 1960 under the ruins of an ancient Christian oratory on the Via Aurelia and was positively identified.

Callixtus’s pontificate is significant in that it shows how it was possible to rise from the lowest social status to the highest position in the Church of Rome. It reveals the internal dissensions within the Christian community and the different approaches to ecclesiastical discipline, which would continue to disturb the peace of the church. It presents us with the first papal schism, which Hippolytus would continue during the reign of the next two popes until his death in 235.

But Hippolytus’s claim to fame rests on a better basis than leading a schism. He was a prolific and respected writer on doctrinal matters and was one of the most accomplished theologians of his day. Unfortunately, his moral and disciplinary rigor turned him into a divisive figure in a community that needed to stand united. In 1959 Pope John XXIII installed an ancient statue of him at the entrance to the Vatican Library. The statue of this man of great learning is the first thing visitors to the library lay their eyes on.

Pope Stephen I is a great contrast to Callixtus, though like him he had a short reign, 254–257. Stephen was a Roman aristocrat from the Julian family, at the very opposite end of the social scale from Callixtus. He is in that regard symptomatic of the increasingly heavy infiltration of Christianity into the higher levels of Roman society by the middle of the third century. An ancient source states that Pope Lucius “after fulfilling his ministry for slightly less than eight months . . . on his deathbed passed his functions to Stephen.” The statement suggests the indeterminate way in which popes were chosen, though even with Lucius’s designation Stephen probably required ratification by the clergy of the city. It also suggests that the transition was easy, without the contention that troubled Callixtus and his two successors. The political situation for Christians dramatically improved during Stephen’s pontificate because the emperors Valerian and Gallienus put an end, temporarily, to the persecutions instigated by Decius and Trebonius Gallus.

Stephen is important because through his conflict with Saint Cyprian, the powerful bishop of Carthage in North Africa (near present-day Tunis), he reveals the growing influence, prestige, and claims of the bishop of Rome, and reveals as well the resistance Roman claims met. During the persecution of Decius many clergy and laity had “lapsed” and sacrificed to the gods. Among them were two bishops from the Iberian peninsula. Basilides of León and Martial of Mérida had sacrificed and thus saved themselves. Their flocks repudiated them. When the persecution ended the question arose as to their fate. Basilides appealed to Stephen for himself and Martial. The pope readmitted them not only to communion with the church but also to their sees. The Spanish churches then appealed to Cyprian, who convoked a meeting, a “synod,” of North African bishops, which confirmed the deposition and excused Stephen’s actions on the grounds that he had been deceived by the reports he had received.

How to deal with these lapsi became a huge and ongoing problem for the church in this period. Stephen had to face it again when bishop Marcian of Arles refused to reconcile them even on their deathbeds. Cyprian on this occasion pleaded with Stephen to assemble the Gallic episcopacy against Marcian and have them come up with a successor. Cyprian’s letter was an implicit acknowledgment that Stephen had authority over other churches.

But the bishop of Carthage did not acknowledge any carte blanche authority of the bishop of Rome. The major conflict between these two powerful personalities erupted over the question of the validity of baptism administered by heretics or schismatics. Cyprian was adamant that it was not valid. He had on his side most of the churches of North Africa as well as those of Syria and Asia Minor, an impressive line up. Baptism could be conferred only within the church. This stance was simply a conclusion from Cyprian’s broader principle, “outside the church, no salvation” (extra ecclesiam nulla salus), which would be invoked thousands upon thousands of times in subsequent centuries to justify or oppose a spectrum of theological opinions.

Stephen held the milder view that rebaptism was not necessary. He had on his side the tradition not only of the Roman church but also of the churches in Alexandria and Palestine. Stephen tried to impose the Roman tradition on the churches of Asia Minor and threatened to break communion with them if they resisted. Meanwhile, in 255 Cyprian wrote a treatise on the subject and then held two synods in Carthage, 255 and 256, that categorically affirmed his position. Without mentioning Stephen’s name Cyprian obviously targeted him when he said that nobody sets himself up as a bishop over other bishops and tries to force his colleagues into obedience.

When Cyprian sent envoys to Stephen to justify his position, Stephen refused to see them or grant them hospitality, and treated them as heretics. This was a shocking breach of courtesy to a fellow bishop. The situation was explosive. Bishop Dionysius of Alexandria, who agreed with Stephen’s position on baptism, wrote to him, however, and begged him to adopt a more conciliatory attitude. Stephen’s enemies accused him of glorying in his position and of recklessly endangering the unity of the church. Bishop Firmilian of Cappadocia reacted strongly to Stephen’s threats and reproached him for thinking his powers of excommunication were limitless.

It is difficult to imagine what might have happened if Stephen and Cyprian had lived even a little while longer. Stephen, though reputed to be a martyr, almost certainly died peacefully in Rome in 257. He was succeeded by the conciliatory Sixtus II. A year later Cyprian died a heroic martyr’s death in a new persecution. With the deaths of the two protagonists, the tension was diffused. Eventually Stephen’s position on baptism prevailed, was adopted even by the African churches by the beginning of the next century, and is the one followed today in mainline Christian churches. If Stephen is important for his strong stand on that issue, he is also important because it seems he was the first pope to find a basis for papal primacy over other churches in the passage from Matthew’s gospel, “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church.”