Why the Papacy is Essential to Make Sense of Christianity

Did you ever find yourself in a rut? No matter how hard or how many times you tried you just could solve the problem you working to complete.

That's how I look at New Testament scholarship. I think it's all stuck in the mud. Indeed, we've come to view being mired as a necessary part of scholarship.

I don't know if you've ever noticed this but most of the people involved in Biblical scholarship are Protestant. People are always talking about 'Jewish conspiracies' in banking or the entertainment industry but what about the Protestant resolve to make the Papacy seem like a later addition to Christianity or something inherently 'false'?

I am by no means espousing Roman Catholicism here but I wonder why it is that the idea that 'the Papacy' was sanctioned or anticipated by the gospel or original gospel writer has never got its due.

Surely, if Catholics were allowed to develop rational opinions about their faith and to actually engage their critics in a meaningful way in a defense of that institution they'd have to come up with such an argument.

Everyone knows the bit about Peter coming to Rome and getting martyred but it takes not only blind faith but mental incapacity not to see that Antioch must have been the original 'seat of Peter.'

So how would a Catholic set about to defend that most sacred part of his religious tradition?

Well, you could I guess make the case that the authority of Peter's see in Antioch somehow 'got transferred' to Rome the way that Christian believers like to imagine 'the promise' got realigned away from the Jews to the Gentiles.

Yet there is in my mind no 'meat' to this argument. Antioch is still the headquarters of the Syrian Orthodox Church. There is no convincing association between the term 'Papa' and that See.

All of which should make my interest in the See of St. Mark in Alexandria even more valuable for Roman Catholics. The title of Papa was associated with the bishops of this Christian center since at least the third century (this just happens to be the earliest SURVIVING mention of the term).

It can't be coincidence that Roman Catholic bishops appropriated the title 'Papa' in the age when the pre-existent Alexandrian Papacy was effectively 'cut off' from them.

So why is there such a resistance to taking the Alexandrian Papacy seriously? I really don't know.

It is obvious that religious minds don't want to admit that they need 'help' from reason of all things. Nevertheless the idea that a series of 'Popes' sat in a throne of St. Mark since the time of the evangelist is in my mind a much more believable proposition than the parallel claims about Peter, Linus, Clement and all these foreign born bishops at Rome.

Why do I believe the Alexandrian claims? I guess its because I am Jewish and see how utterly implausible it is to connect ANY Palestinian Jewish sect with a text which references 'the Logos' and other specifically Alexandrian religious concepts or Jewish concepts expressed principally in the Greek language.

I guess when I spent years reading Philo of Alexandria and the Qumran texts side by side, even an idiot like me could see that Philo seemed 'Christian' - or at least more 'like the Christians of Alexandria' than the DSS seemed to resemble anything, anywhere in early Christianity.

I always bring it back to the idea that if aliens came from another planet - individuals or beings who had no connection to anything related to the study of Christianity - and these same 'aliens' did just pick up a copy of the New Testament canon of the group which 'won out' in history but actually researched all the known points of view relating to the tradition (i.e. include the Marcionite faith and other 'heresies') how could any one argue AGAINST the idea that Christianity came from Alexandria?

The Marcionites rejected Acts and said that it was a complete fabrication, so let's leave it and its - bizarre - omission of almost anything to do with the city for the moment.

At its most basic you have three of the four canonical gospels being identified in some way, shape or form as being derived from the city.

In the case of Mark, the Alexandrians make explicit their claim that the gospel was written by, for and about their Church.

In the case of Luke, the claim that Luke was written in Alexandria is well attested.

In the case of John, despite the early association of the material with Ephesus by the associates of Polycarp, it is difficult to imagine that the opening lines were not written by an Alexandrian or someone influenced by Alexandrian Judaism. Similarly, Irenaeus makes clear that the Valentinians in particular were attached to this text and 'Valentinus' - whoever he was - is always identified as an Alexandrian.

I don't want to get too bogged down in developing a proof FOR the primacy of Alexandria as I have done so on a number of occasions already at this site. The point is you'd expect based on the cited evidence alone that it would at least be included at the table with Antioch and Rome.

I certainly think it has THE STRONGEST CASE to make as the case where Christianity was born. It is just that elende Buch - the Acts of the Apostles - the one the Marcionites said was a complete fraud - that always distracts scholars from establishing an equal playing field.

So it is from this accursed book that all knowledge of the past is developed even though we know that a large part of Christian antiquity denied its authenticity.

Indeed once we remove this book from the discussion the whole of Christianity starts to make sense and the 'Papacy' suddenly seems to be an integral part of its development, not from a friendly meeting of Peter and Paul in Antioch (which is explicitly denied in the letter to the Galatians) but from a line of living manifestations of the heavenly Father sitting in the seat of authority first established by an enthroned but elusive St. Mark.