Today Joe explains how so many different Protestants give so many different answers about who was the first Pope. Most of them will REFUSE to say that it’s Peter, but if Joe can show that all their answers are wrong….who else is left?
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer and one of the things that’s happened with the death of Pope Francis in this move towards conclave, which begins May 7th, I’ll talk about that more when we get there as we await the election of a new Pope. People who may not normally ask questions about Catholicism are asking a lot of questions about the papacy. This includes both Catholics who want to know more about their faith, but also a lot of non-Catholics who are just curious. Why do Catholics have a pope in the first place? And I think this is really good and it’s really good amongst Christians that we ask this question, and I’ve actually talked about this at much greater length than a book called Pope Peter, in which I refer to the papacy as the church’s most distinctive doctrine. Here’s what I mean by that and here’s why it matters.
If you are someone who’s exploring Catholicism for the first time, if you’re coming from say a Protestant background or really an Orthodox background, but especially if you’re coming from say, evangelical Protestantism, the number of questions you might have, the number of areas where Catholics believe one thing and you were taught something else, or we do one thing and you do a different thing. That can be overwhelming, and I’ve talked to people who just feel utterly overwhelmed by the sheer number of questions that they have where they’re finding a draw. They feel compelled to look into this, but they don’t know how to sort through the sheer glut of information, and I think it can be very important to highlight that this is the one issue we have to get right now. I want to make something very clear saying that the papacy is the church’s most distinctive doctrine does not mean that it’s some church’s most important doctrine.
It’s more important that you get the Eucharist right? It’s more important that you get the divinity of Christ, right? It’s more important that you get the Trinity right? It’s more important that you get the existence of God. Those kinds of questions are obviously an uncontroversially more important than the question of the papacy, but the papacy is distinctive. Here’s the difference. If I want to know, should I buy a car or a truck? Well, the engine is the most important part of both vehicles, but knowing that I need an engine doesn’t tell me that I should get a car or a truck. Instead, I should be asking questions about like, well, do I need a truck bed or do I need space for kids in the backseat that’ll help me figure out if I should get a truck or a car? Because what distinguishes it? What is distinctive?
Is the truck bed not the most important but the most distinctive? The papacy is like that. Why does that matter? Because instead of asking 20 different questions about doctrines and practices and everything that can feel overwhelming and scary, you’re asking one question and that one question is really simple. Did Jesus establish the papacy or not? Because if he did, you and I and everyone on earth should be Catholic, and if he didn’t, no one on earth should be Catholic. And so that saves so much time. The other stuff matters. But now, once we have our ducks in the row on the papacy, have the grounding in the framework to answer all those other questions we might have. Because for one thing, if I know I can trust that the Pope can authoritatively decide doctrine, then when I’m trying to figure out other doctrines, if the Pope has said something really important on that subject, I’m going to take that into account in a different way than if I don’t think the Pope has authority or if I think the Pope is the antichrist or something, right?
Obviously the other doctrines kind of go downstream from getting the question of the papacy, but I think we can make it even easier. And this is a question that if you are a Protestant, I hope you’re asking this question and I hope you are working to answer it. If you’re a Catholic, you should have this question in your back pocket as a simple icebreaker kind of question to get people to think more deeply about doctrines they maybe don’t think about. The question is simply this. Who was the first pope? Who was the first pope? Now as I understand it, there are basically three ways you can respond to it. Two of these are answers and one of them is kind of a non-answer. Here’s what I mean. Now, the first obvious answer and the Catholic answer would be St. Peter is the first Pope that you can see in scripture.
Peter is being entrusted with the kind of authority that we can know both from scripture and from early church history is carried on in one way, shape or form by his successors, the bishops of Rome. Now, I’m not even making that full case right now. I’m simply highlighting that that is one answer and I think pretty clearly the correct answer, and I’m going to instead look at the other two ways people answer the question because the second way to answer it would be to say, yeah, there is a first Pope, but it’s not Peter, it’s somebody else. Okay? The obvious follow up then is who is the first Pope? Then if it’s not Peter who we’re talking about, and as we’re going to see there’s several different names that get thrown out and they’re not particularly compelling. I’ll explain why they’re not compelling when we get there.
But the third, at least the second tier is answering the question. They’re saying, okay, you asked who the first Pope is. Here’s who the first pope was. The third is it feels like an evasive answer, although I don’t think it’s meant to be, but it just says, oh, it’s just evolution. The papacy sort of evolved over time. So you’ve got different leaders and some of them have more authority than others, and then you eventually we have a pope. Now you’ll notice that just kind of avoids answering the question because if eventually we have a pope, then the obvious follow-up is, okay, who was the first Pope? Like fine, if you believe there was something that wasn’t quite the papacy, but whether it was good or bad existed before it. Okay, when did we have an actual papacy? Because you’ll notice that third answer just does not actually answer the question.
It just sort of waves away the question. It sort of takes black and white and makes it gray. Now, don’t get me wrong, it’s perfectly fine to believe, and I think both Catholics and Protestants would recognize that the papacy looks different in say 2025 than in 10 25 or in 1 25. That’s fine, and we’ll talk about that at the end of this episode, but it still needs to be asked, well, where do we find a person that you would recognize as Pope and who are they and how do we know that they’re the first one? So with that, let’s then delve even a little bit deeper because the question of who was the first Pope is closely linked to another question that Catholics are very fond of asking, which is who founded the Catholic church? Now, I think that’s a very good question to ask, and I think it should be paired with the who was the first Pope.
And the reason I think it should be paired is if you don’t parrot, then you’re going to have Protestants who give answers that are just kind of like, oh yeah, Jesus established Christianity broadly and we’re all part of that. So sure Catholicism, Lutheranism, Anglicanism, Eastern Orthodoxy, whatever it is, it’s all sort of founded by Jesus. I don’t think that actually answers the question asking who was the first Pope more clearly gets to what the actual question is. And so here I’m going to let actually Dr. Jordan Cooper, who’s a Lutheran, lay out the Catholic argument, which he doesn’t think is a very serious argument, but I think is quite devastating in terms of really highlighting the difference between SA Catholicism and Lutheranism.
CLIP:
Their founder is Jesus Christ and our founder is Martin Luther. So they were founded by Jesus himself, and we were founded by just some guy in the 16th century. So how do we rebut those claims?
Joe:
So yeah, that’s exactly why the question matters. If we can trace Lutheranism to Luther, which I think it’s fair to say we can in 1517 or whichever date you want to give it, but October 31st, 1517 is the usual date people give. We can to the day point to the beginning of the Lutheran movement that very quickly breaks off from the Catholic church. Luther is excommunicated Lutherans rebel against the church, Luther Denounces Pope as the antichrist. There’s clearly a break that happens on both sides. Catholics say Lutherans are not part of the Catholic church. Lutherans say We’re not part of the Pope’s church. There’s no denying this break. You cannot say Luther was part of the same visible church body in 1530 that he was in 1510. It’s just not true and no one will seriously claim that. So yeah, Lutheran is in fact founded by just some guy in the 16th century and in response to this, Catholics would say, but we are not, you can’t tell that same story about the founder of the Catholic church that we can tell about the founder of or fill in the blank various form of Protestantism. Instead, if you’re going to tell the honest story of where the Catholic church comes from, you have to tell the story about Jesus Christ and the apostles. Now, Cooper rejects this kind of, but he admits that, well, if Jesus really does found the church, then he should be a Catholic, which
CLIP:
It’s not really a helpful way of actually having a discussion because you’re presuming the thing you’re trying to argue for because you’re presuming that Jesus created the Catholic church, not just the Catholic church, but the Roman Catholic church. So obviously if I accepted that Jesus Christ founded the Roman Catholic Church specifically, then I would be a Roman Catholic. I mean, duh, of course he would. You should, if Jesus really is the founder of the Roman Catholic Church, but to argue that Jesus is the founder of the Roman Catholic Church is to argue that Jesus appointed Peter as the first Pope and that Peter was given instructions to then lay hands on another individual after him who would also be the next Pope and Vicar of Christ. So if you make that, you’re just making a claim and then saying that your claim proves your claim. So I mean, it’s not an argument,
Joe:
Right? So if the first Pope is Peter, then it follows Jesus established the Roman Catholic Church, really just the Catholic church, and we should all be Catholic. We don’t have to be Roman Catholic. You could be a Byzantine Catholic, a Malachi Catholic, whatever, but you do need to be a Catholic. You need to be in union with the Pope. And so obviously Protestants like Cooper aren’t going to want to accept that. So that’s the stake. If you say that the correct answer to who is the first pope is Peter, then you need to be Catholic. You should be Catholic, and we can both sides agree on that. So what if you reject it, then well, that leaves you with either offering a different candidate as the first Pope or just refusing to answer the question of where the papacy comes from or who the first pope was.
So let’s look then at the people who actually do answer the question, what are some of the other candidates who were given? Now here, I want to make an important distinction. When we’re talking about the first Pope, you can expect two objections. First, there are going to be people who claim there wasn’t even a bishop in Rome until later. Various dates are kind of given, so okay, was there even a bishop of Rome? Because if you don’t have a bishop of Rome, do you even have a pope? That kind of question. And if you’re going to say there wasn’t a bishop of Rome who was the first bishop of Rome, is one part of the question you’ve got to answer two, there are going to be people who say, sure, there was a bishop of Rome, we find a bishop of Rome as far back as we go, but maybe they weren’t always the Pope.
Maybe they didn’t always have the kind of authority that we think of when we think of the Pope. Well, in that case, if the early bishops of Rome don’t count as the Pope who was the first pope, who is the first person you would say meets the criteria to be Pope, and the criteria shouldn’t be just you arbitrarily coming up with something. Now you’ll notice I said I liked the question, who is the first Pope paired with the question of who founded the Catholic church? And one of the reasons I think it’s really important to parrot is because people who don’t know a lot of church history will often have this idea that somehow Constantine was responsible. So they’ll really want to say, oh, Constantine founded the Catholic church. But obviously if the question is who is the first Pope, that’s a nonsensical answer, right?
Constantine isn’t a bishop. No one Catholic or Protestant claims that he was clearly not a pope. He didn’t think he was. We don’t think he was. You don’t think he was. So he can’t be the answer. But nevertheless, people trying to find the origins of the papacy will still try to work him in somehow. And so this answer is really in some ways the kind of evolutionary evasive non-answer. But I’m going to give you just a sense of the sort of something about Constantine evolutionary theories that you’re going to hear before we get into some more particular candidates.
CLIP:
And truthfully, this is how it was for the most part. During the first three centuries or so of the church, men were appointed as pastors and bishops, and that’s essentially the same word, pastors and bishops over the regional churches with the goal of leading the flock humbly under the leadership of Jesus Christ, the true head of the church and one of these regional churches was in Rome, which had its own bishop, but in the fourth and fifth centuries ad, and this was when Christianity went from an outcast in the Roman world to the dominant faith in the Roman world, church leaders began to grow in authority and power. They were called upon by emperors such as Constantine, the great if you remember, to establish church doctrine and also even to intervene in secular matters. So as such, churchmen grew in great power. Bishops and archbishops rose to the levels of princes and dukes and knights and the bishop of Rome, the center of the church on the ashes of the old Roman empire would become the most powerful man in the church. He would actually become on par with emperors and kings. He became the papa or the Pope of the church. Now, this was not an immediate transaction, but by the early Middle Ages we see a power structure very similar to the papal power structure we see today where the Pope wielded absolute power over the affairs of the church and significant power over secular affairs as well. Now, for better or worse, this system would come to dominate the fabric of medieval Europe for over a thousand years.
Joe:
So you’ll notice in a real way, there’s not an actual answer to the question being given. So the question that he’s asking in the video is what are origins of the papacy? And so you would expect him to say, well, the first pope was so-and-so. If I say the origins of America are blank, you might expect me to talk about say the founders or the first president or something like this. If I just said, oh, Americans, they got more independent feeling from the British over time, that’s all true. But I’m not actually answering like, well, when does America start? At what point does it cease to be the 13 colonies and it starts to be something different. And so it is that evolutionary sort of theory, and so somehow Constantine is supposed to be part of this story, but then there’s this multi century sort of a thousand years, the papacy is really important, dominates church politics.
So seemingly if that’s tied to the reformation or the enlightenment and you go back, it seems like he’s saying somewhere between the 300, 400, 500, 600, somewhere in there, you get the rise of the Catholic church, the earliest possible date. If you say Constantine is critical, like he’s a necessary at least forerunner for there to be a papacy, then the earliest you could be putting that is Saint Sylvester. Now, I’m not sure that’s what he’s actually arguing because he doesn’t ever answer the question directly, but we’ll just put St. Sylvester as one of the candidates or I guess any of his successors for the next 400 years. The second candidate that deserves a look is St. Leo the Great. Now Leo, the Great, you’ll find people who know church history really well, who argue that Leo was the first Pope and not without cause, namely Leo is a strong and effective pope.
And so you see the papacy in action under Leo in a way. You don’t always see it in action either before or after Leo. He’s just really good at doing Pope stuff. So one of the people arguing that Leo should be regarded as the first Pope is the 19th century historian and theologian, Philips Scheff. Now s Scheff was a Protestant theologian, but his work on the church fathers tends to be pretty well respected by Catholics as well as Protestants. Obviously we’re going to disagree on some things like the papacy, but he argues that the first pope in the proper sense of the word is Leo, the first who justly deserves to be called Leo the great, and that in Leo, the idea of the papacy as it were, became flesh and blood. Now, I love this answer because it’s a clear answer to the question.
I think the answer is wrong, but I like that he doesn’t just vaguely wave to several centuries of history and say somewhere over here he says, this guy from four 40 to 4 61, the Catholic church was headed by St. Leo the great, and according to Schaff, he’s the first guy who meets his standard as a Protestant for what it takes to be Pope. So he’s going to be the second candidate that we put on the board. The third candidate that deserves to be put on the board is also one of the greats, St. Gregory the greats. So here’s the argument that Gavin Orland makes, that there’s kind of a sword of papacy with Leo, but that you really get the papacy with Gregory. And again, I like that Dr. Orland is answering the question.
CLIP:
Now, eventually in the fifth century, I would argue that’s when you really start to see strong, it starts to come into focus more this role of the Roman bishop as more preeminent and with the pontificate of Leo the great for example, and then definitely in the sixth century, you have a massive consolidation and expansion of papal power with Gregory the Great who’s an incredible leader, and I love Gregory the great, his book of pastoral rule is awesome. And then after that, and by the way, this is Yaroslav Pelican, his history of Christian doctrine. He calls this idea that there was a turning point for the papacy with Gregory the Great in the sixth century, the conventional view. So I’m not way out of bounds here with how this is often looked at after Gregory the Great, you get a massive expansion including into the temporal realm.
Joe:
Alright, so Gavin’s view, if I understand it correctly, is that you get something, this is kind of forerunner to the papacy under Leo the great, but you don’t really have the first pope for another 150 years until you get to St. Gregory The great he recognizes that there’s something, this thing Shaef recognizes as a papacy and it’s just strong Roman authority, but apparently not a papacy and to have the papacy, you don’t have it in until Gregory. Okay, well, some are going to take that view even further and say, yeah, you have it with Gregory and then treat Leo as just like another one of these alleged pastors in the pre-PA church.
CLIP:
Now you’ve already seen this chart many times Christ died on the cross. God’s word was written, the church was suffering and it was kind of a mixed bag. Constantine legalized Christianity. So a lot of people wanted to go along with a bandwagon and they joined the church and the church began to be diluted and diluted, not diluted, diluted, but the gross error didn’t really start until about the sixth century. The first real pope there is a whole string. If you go to the Vatican, you can see all their names. Most of those men, if you’d have talked to ’em in their day, didn’t know they were the Pope. They were bishops of the church in Rome. Rome always had a bishop, a pastor, and in fact, one of the pastors went out and met the barbarians when they came and that’s why they spared Rome. They sacked and took over the Roman empire, but they didn’t destroy the church there because he came out in his white robes and talked to him and everything. But the first real pope was he’s called Gregory the first.
Joe:
Now I want to point out that video that’s from John Barnett. There’s over 400,000 views of him spouting this idea of the history of the church. And if you know anything about church history, you’ll see it’s riddled with often pretty flagrant errors, but the advantage that it has is he is very clear and precise in his allegations. So his allegation is about the split between Roman Catholicism and Christ goes down to a particular year. The year is 5 93 and the Pope is Pope Gregory the great Pope. Gregory the first, and you’ll notice in his presentation he contrast Gregory with the earlier pastors that he alleged. Again, these are obviously bishops over the entire city, but Protestants who don’t want to acknowledge that, just call them pastors, fine. He talks about one of these pastors who’d gone out and talked to the barbarians. Well, he’s obviously referring to Leo the great talking to Atilla the Hun, where he spares the city of Rome.
So he’s clearly putting Leo not in the Pope category, but in the pre Catholic pastor category and saying You don’t have a pope until Gregory the Great. So you’ll notice so far in as much as we have theories, they don’t actually agree with one another. They’re contradictory, but we’ll put his name on the board again. So it could have started sometime with maybe Sylvester, sometime with Constantine, could have started with Leo at the time of Atilla, could have started with Gregory the great. But if we’re just going to choose random popes from history, why not just go fully the West Huff route and claim that the Catholic church doesn’t exist until the ninth century? If that sounds like I’m exaggerating, here’s Wes in his own words.
CLIP:
I know many Roman Catholics will push against this, but I think even using the term Roman Catholicism to talk about the time period where the canon of scripture was being discussed isn’t anachronism in that what we know of as modern day Roman Catholicism, its ideas, its teachings, its dogmas would have been foreign to
The
First few centuries. In fact, I would argue that you don’t get what I would consider to be Roman Catholicism until the ninth century. And the reason I would argue that is because of the ninth century. It’s the first time that the Pope, the bishop of Rome chooses the Roman Emperor Charlemagne and not the other way around. So it’s the first time where there’s a shift in that you have what’s considered the Carol engine. What’s the term I’m looking for? Renaissance, the Carolin Renaissance where you have under charlamagne the great, but all of a sudden there’s a shift in power where now you have this idea of a holy Roman emperor and he’s kind of being given his authority by the Pope rather than the emperor having politic... Read more on Catholic.com