Let's forget for a moment about Irenaeus' claims about Peter and Rome. The claims of Petrine and Roman primacy are necessarily intertwined and juxtaposed against claims of Markan primacy at Alexandria. In my opinion, Irenaeus developed these claims to both raise the Imperial capital as the center of Christianity and at the same time diminish Alexandria's standing within the Marcionite universe.
What I find so peculiar is that within the council chambers in Commodus' royal palace everyone seems to be an offshoot of Polycarp - an influential preacher from Greece and Asia Minor but one intimately associated with the apostle John.
Whether it be Irenaeus or Florinus or those followers associated with each of these men - what were so many 'Johannine' Christians doing infiltrating the highest ranks of the Roman see of Peter?
I know no one asks this sort of thing. Most people just 'believe' or let their faith guide their inquiries - but just think of it. If there really was a 'Roman Catholic' Church established since the time of Peter - i.e. a 'worldwide' or 'universal' community centered developed from Peter to Linus, Linus to Anacletus, Anacletus to Clement, Clement to Evaristus, Evaristus to Alexander, Alexander to Sixtus, Sixtus to Telesphorus, Telesphorus to Hyginus, Hyginus to Pius, Pius to Anicetus, Anicetus to Soter, Soter to Eleutherius - how the hell could a bunch of yahoos - followers of ANOTHER apostle and ANOTHER tradition no less - guys 'from the sticks' rise to the top of this Petrine tradition in Rome?
It doesn't make sense.
The reason I bring this up is because I have some familiarity with the Alexandrian tradition. I know how difficult it is to get elected Pope in that Church. I know how tightly controlled that ecclesiastic tradition is. There is no way that a bunch of outsiders from Joel Olstein's ministry could just waltz into the church of St. Mark and end up defining the tradition in the contemporary age.
I should correct that. In the age of Irenaeus Demetrius did indeed just waltz into St. Mark's church in Boucolis with his wife no less and did indeed 'oversee' the Church but he undoubtedly had the Roman state behind him.
I am starting to wonder about the same thing going on in Rome.
I know the stupid story about Irenaeus being summoned by Eleutherius but really - does anyone outside of devout Catholics really believe there was this functioning 'worldwide Church' already in 177 CE?
No, they do not.
The more likely scenario was that there were all these individual Apostolic Sees with their own functioning ecclesiastical hierarchies.
To think that the churches of Asia Minor were already fully integrated with the Roman Church at this date just doesn't make any sense.
I could believe for instance that the Roman Church drew from other Italian churches. Yet the idea that Florinus from Asia Minor and Irenaeus from Lyons - both students of Polycarp end up meeting at the highest rank of Roman society when only a generation earlier Polycarp did not receive the acknowledgement of Rome's highest ranking official (Anicetus) is just absurd.
Indeed when we really look at the list of Roman bishops before Victor it is impossible not to see that they were ALL foreign born.
The point of course is that Rome was never 'the Petrine See' in the manner that Irenaeus would later invent. It was like Lyons or any other non-Asiatic, non-Syrian or non-Egyptian Christian community. Roman churches were undoubtedly little more than satellites of other ecclesiastical traditions in the age before Irenaeus - either in Antioch or Alexandria.
And that's the point isn't it? No matter how you slice it, two disciples of Polycarp's Johannine tradition in Ephesus couldn't have ended up in the Palatine Hill fighting for the soul of the Roman Catholic Church if the tradition as we know it was pre-existent. The claims about the Church of Peter had to have been invented at one of those council meetings and projected back in the distant past.
You know who I suspect represented the true spirit of the pre-Irenaean Roman Church? Gaius of Rome. After all isn't he remembered as opposing the Johannine tradition. Maybe his motivation was much simpler than scholars have previously understood.
Maybe he was resisting a 'foreign invasion' of native Roman traditions - even those of a 'mere' satellite church ...
Read my the Real Messiah.
Buy it here
