HistoricalChristian.Faith

The Primacy of Rome

Once the church had settled into the episcopal order — one bishop set over the presbyters of each city (traced on the government of the church) — a further question pressed: was any one bishop set over the rest? This timeline traces the development, across time, of the claim that the bishop of Rome holds a primacy over the whole church. It is the climax of the developed episcopal reading: the see of Rome, held to be founded by Peter and inheriting the commission “thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church… I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 16:18–19), is honoured first among the churches and — on the developed reading — exercises a jurisdiction over them by an unbroken Petrine succession. The witnesses show that primacy growing by stages: from a primacy of honour and precedence in the earliest centuries toward a claimed primacy of universal jurisdiction in the West.

The witnesses are set out earliest first — each slotted by date, with his own words where they survive — so that the drift can be read off the timeline itself: from Rome’s fraternal intervention at Corinth in 1 Clement (c. 96) and the church that “presides in love” of Ignatius (c. 108), through the potentior principalitas Irenaeus grants the Roman church (c. 180), Victor’s attempt to excommunicate the churches of Asia over the Easter date (c. 190), Tertullian’s insistence that the keys of Matthew 16 were given to Peter personally and not to Rome’s see (c. 210), Cyprian’s ambiguous “chair of Peter” (c. 251), and Stephen of Rome’s rebuffed attempt to bind the churches over rebaptism by his succession from Peter (c. 256), to the conciliar canons that ranked and checked the great sees (Nicaea 325, Sardica 343, Constantinople 381, Chalcedon 451) and Leo the Great’s mature theory of the pope as Peter’s heir speaking with Peter’s authority (c. 450).

The contested questions are not argued on the timeline. Because every side reads the same handful of texts (Matthew 16:18–19; Luke 22:32; John 21:15–17) and the same early witnesses, the questions on which they divide — whether the “rock” of Matthew 16 is Peter, his confession, or Christ; whether 1 Clement’s intervention evidences jurisdiction or only fraternal counsel; whether the early primacy is one of honour and precedence or of universal jurisdiction; and whether Rome’s claim rests on Peter at all — cut across the timeline rather than sitting at any one point on it. They are therefore weighed adversarially, each on its own merits, in the Arguments section below, not in the chronological list.

Related doctrines: Church order and government — see also the government of the church (the offices and the rival forms of polity — congregational, presbyterian, episcopal — that this Roman primacy crowns). The Eucharistic and sacramental side of the ministry is traced under the ministerial priesthood (who may confect the sacraments, ordination, apostolic succession as a channel of grace); a rival free-church succession model is weighed under Baptist successionism; and the Petrine office itself — Peter among the Twelve and the tradition of his mission and death at Rome, the historical premise on which this whole primacy case rests (weighed at Did Peter lead and die at Rome?) — sits on the apostle Peter and the apostles hub. Constantinople’s counter-claim to an apostolic foundation of its own — through Andrew, the brother called before Peter, later adduced against Rome’s Petrine primacy — is weighed at Did Andrew found the church of Byzantium?

Timeline

1 Clement — the church of Rome writes to Corinth (c. 96)

The earliest datum. Around 96 the church of Rome, unbidden, sent a long letter to Corinth to end a schism that had deposed its presbyters — rebuking the “sedition against its presbyters,” declaring that blamelessly serving ministers “cannot be justly dismissed,” and demanding that the ringleaders “submit yourselves to the presbyters.”¹ That one church should so reach into another’s governance — and warn that any who “disobey the words spoken by Him through us” incur “transgression and serious danger” — is adduced as the earliest evidence of a Roman primacy of jurisdiction.² Yet the letter is issued corporately — “The Church of God which sojourns at Rome” — names no bishop of Rome as its author, entreats and supplicates as much as it commands, and invokes no Petrine succession; whether the intervention shows a primacy of jurisdiction or the fraternal admonition of one apostolic church for another is weighed in the Arguments below.¹ Full detail →

Ignatius of Antioch — the church that “presides over love” (c. 108)

A decade later, Ignatius of Antioch — the great champion of the single presiding bishop — sends the Roman church the most exalted greeting he gives any church: it is the one “which presides in the place of the region of the Romans” and “which presides over love” (prokathēmenē tēs agapēs), heaped with superlatives no other church receives.³ That striking honorific of Roman pre-eminence is genuine early evidence; what it amounts to is contested. For the same short letter carries two limits pulling toward a primacy of honour rather than jurisdiction: alone among his seven letters it greets no bishop of Rome — the sole episcopal title in it is Ignatius’s own, “the bishop of Syria” — and Ignatius pointedly declines to command the Romans: “I do not, as Peter and Paul, issue commandments unto you. They were apostles; I am but a condemned man.”⁴ Whether “presides over love” awards Rome a presidency over the whole church or praises its renowned pre-eminence and charity — and whether the absence of a Roman bishop shows the monarchical episcopate had not yet reached Rome — is weighed in the Arguments below; the monarchical bishop Ignatius exalts everywhere else is traced on the government of the church. Full detail →

Irenaeus of Lyons — the church with which “every Church should agree” (c. 180)

By about 180 the appeal to Rome turns explicit. Refuting Gnostics who claimed a secret apostolic tradition, Irenaeus argues that the true tradition is public and traceable through each church’s bishops — and offers Rome as the sufficient specimen: “the very great, the very ancient, and universally known Church founded … by the two most glorious apostles, Peter and Paul,” with which “every Church should agree … on account of its pre-eminent authority” (Latin propter potiorem principalitatem), before giving the Roman succession-list from Linus down to the reigning Eleutherius.⁵ This is the earliest surviving text to appeal explicitly to Rome’s special standing as a touchstone of the faith. Yet its force is contested at the root: the pivotal phrase survives only in a wooden Latin rendering of a lost Greek — the Ante-Nicene editors themselves confess they are “far from sure” the translation is right — and is read variously as “pre-eminent authority,” “more powerful origin,” or “superior origin”; and Irenaeus grounds Rome’s standing in Peter and Paul jointly and in the publicity of its succession, not in Peter alone or a transmitted Petrine office (the apostles commit the episcopate to Linus, not a bishop-Peter). Whether the sentence asserts Roman jurisdiction, apostolic pedigree, or merely evidential prominence — and how it squares with the same father’s later restraint of Bishop Victor (c. 190, below) — is weighed in the Arguments below.⁶ Full detail →

Victor of Rome — the excommunication that was rebuffed (c. 190)

A decade after Irenaeus wrote, the timeline supplies its sharpest counter-datum. Around 190 the churches of Asia and the church of Rome divided over the date of Easter, and when the Asian churches held to their older “Quartodeciman” custom, Victor of Rome attempted to cut them off from communion as heterodox — writing letters that “declared all the brethren there wholly excommunicate.”⁷ It is the earliest record of a bishop of Rome presuming to discipline churches beyond his own province — and the earliest record of that presumption being openly resisted. Polycrates of Ephesus, answering Victor as a peer, refused to yield, matching Rome’s apostolic pedigree with Asia’s own (the apostles Philip and John, and Polycarp) and closing “I … am not affrighted by terrifying words. For those greater than I have said ‘We ought to obey God rather than man.’”⁸ And the other bishops — including those who shared Victor’s Easter position — did not treat his sentence as binding: “this did not please all the bishops,” and their letters “sharply rebuking Victor” are extant. Foremost was Irenaeus, who admonished Victor that he should not cut off whole churches over an ancient custom and recalled that Victor’s own predecessors had kept peace across the same disagreement; the threatened excommunication did not stand.⁹ The episode is read both ways — as evidence a Roman bishop felt entitled to act against distant churches, and as evidence the wider church did not concede the entitlement, treating it as an overreach to rebuke rather than a ruling to obey. That the same Irenaeus who granted Rome a “pre-eminent authority” (c. 180, above) is the one who here restrains its bishop makes the honour-versus-jurisdiction question, weighed in the Arguments below, unavoidable. Full detail →

Tertullian — the keys given to Peter personally, not to Rome’s see (c. 210)

Around 210, from Carthage, Tertullian supplies the earliest surviving text to argue against the very inference the primacy reading rests on — that the commission to Peter in Matthew 16 descends as a jurisdiction to the bishop of Rome. In On Modesty he rounds on a Roman bishop’s edict remitting the sins of adultery and fornication, mocking its author as “Pontifex Maximus — that is, the bishop of bishops.”¹⁰ He then confronts the proof-text head-on: because every clause of the grant is singular — “to thee have I given the keys … not to the Church” — the power of binding and loosing was conferred “personally upon Peter,” and those who “presume that the power … has derived to you, that is, to every Church akin to Peter” subvert “the manifest intention of the Lord”; whatever the keys convey belongs to spiritual men on the pattern of Peter, “not the Church which consists of a number of bishops.”¹¹ The honest complication, kept in view: this is the schismatic, Montanist Tertullian, now hostile to the mainstream (“psychic”) church, and his rigorism has its own motive for denying bishops the power to forgive. Yet the same author, a decade earlier and still in the catholic church, had appealed warmly to Rome’s double-apostolic pedigree — “the church of Rome, which makes Clement to have been ordained … by Peter,” the “happy” church “on which apostles poured forth all their doctrine along with their blood,” Peter and Paul both.¹² The shift — and whether the Matthew 16 keys are a personal endowment of Peter or a jurisdiction handed down through a see — is weighed in the Arguments below. Full detail →

Cyprian of Carthage — the “chair of Peter,” and every bishop its heir (c. 251)

Around 251, in On the Unity of the Church, Cyprian of Carthage gives the primacy timeline its pivotal double datum. He grounds the church’s unity in Christ’s singular commission to Peter — “upon this rock I will build my Church … I will give unto thee the keys” — and speaks of “the chair of Peter” in language a later papalism would prize; one recension of chapter 4, the so-called Primacy Text, says outright that “the primacy is given to Peter.” Yet the same chapter, on its received text, at once levels the apostles: “the rest of the apostles were also the same as was Peter, endowed with a like partnership both of honour and power; but the beginning proceeds from unity.”¹³ The tension is the whole point. For Cyprian the episcopate is one, “held whole by each” bishop, so Peter’s chair is the figure of the one episcopate that every bishop shares — not the Roman see’s title to rule the rest. The recension problem is itself contested: older editors judged the Primacy Text a Roman interpolation “beyond all question spurious,” while modern study (Bévenot) holds both versions Cyprian’s own — the Primacy Text an earlier draft that still makes Peter the source, not the sovereign, of a shared episcopate.¹⁴ Which recension is authentic, and what “the chair of Peter” concedes, is weighed in the Arguments below. Full detail →

Stephen of Rome — the succession from Peter invoked, and rebuffed (c. 256)

Five years later the same Cyprian acted on his principle against a bishop of Rome, and the timeline supplies its sharpest third-century clash. In the rebaptism controversy of 255–256, Stephen of Rome forbade the African and Eastern practice of baptizing afresh those who came from heretical communities, and pressed his ruling on the other churches under threat of broken communion — resting it, his opponents report, expressly on his succession from Peter: he “boasts of the place of his episcopate, and contends that he holds the succession from Peter.”¹⁵ It is the earliest surviving report of a Roman bishop grounding a claim to overrule distant churches on his descent from Peter — and it was flatly rebuffed. Cyprian answered in council, opening the Seventh Council of Carthage (256) with eighty-seven bishops on the principle that “neither does any of us set himself up as a bishop of bishops … every bishop … has his own proper right of judgment,” and held Rome’s ruling did not bind the African churches.¹⁶ Firmilian of Caesarea answered for the East with open indignation, turning Stephen’s threat back on him: “while you think that all may be excommunicated by you, you have excommunicated yourself alone from all.”¹⁷ The claim was made on Petrine ground and refused; no excommunication took effect, and the dispute lapsed unresolved on Rome’s terms at Stephen’s death. Whether the episode shows a jurisdiction the church recognized or an overreach it rejected — and how much weight to give a claim that survives only through the hostile bishops resisting it — is weighed in the Arguments below. Full detail →

The Council of Nicaea — Rome named as one great see among the metropolitans (canon 6, 325)

With the fourth century the data shift from individual bishops to the councils that ranked and checked the great sees, and the first ecumenical council opens the series with a counter-datum. Nicaea’s sixth canon confirms the “ancient customs” by which each chief see governs its region — and names Rome not as the rule above the rest but as the parallel that fixes the measure: “Let the ancient customs in Egypt, Libya and Pentapolis prevail, that the Bishop of Alexandria have jurisdiction in all these, since the like is customary for the Bishop of Rome also. Likewise in Antioch and the other provinces, let the Churches retain their privileges.”¹⁸ Three hundred bishops, legislating for the whole church, treat Rome as one great see among co-equal metropolitans — its regional authority the same in kind as Alexandria’s and Antioch’s, grounded in custom rather than in a transmitted Petrine commission, and bounded to its own sphere. Whether this concedes Rome a first rank of honour or tells against a universal jurisdiction is weighed in the Arguments below. Full detail →

The Council of Sardica — appeal to Rome “to honour the memory of Peter,” on contested authority (canons 3–5, 343)

Eighteen years later a Western council supplies the earliest conciliar text giving Rome a defined role in the appeals of other churches. Sardica’s canons 3–5 grant that a bishop deposed by his colleagues may — “if it seem good to your charity, honour the memory of Peter the Apostle” — take his cause to Julius of Rome, who may order a retrial by the bishops of the neighbouring province and, if he sees fit, send legates to sit as judges.¹⁹ Later Rome adduced this as proof of an appellate primacy. Two limits pull the other way: the right is bestowed by the council as a favour (not acknowledged as Rome’s by divine descent), and Sardica was a one-party Western synod, not an ecumenical one — its canons never entered the Eastern collections. The sharpest gloss came in the fifth century, when Rome pressed this very appeal-right as a canon of Nicaea, and the African bishops, unable to find it in their Nicene copies, sent to Alexandria and Constantinople for authentic texts and exposed it as Sardican, copied after the Nicene canons under a shared heading — the affair of Apiarius (c. 418–424), which the church of Augustine treated as ground to resist, not submit.²⁰ Both readings are weighed in the Arguments below. Full detail →

The First Council of Constantinople — the sees ranked by their cities (canon 3, 381)

The second ecumenical council frames the ranking of the great sees in frankly civic terms. Its third canon gives the bishop of Constantinople “the prerogative of honour after the Bishop of Rome, because Constantinople is New Rome.”²¹ The canon touches Rome only to leave it first — but the reason it gives for the whole order is that the sees rank as their cities rank, Constantinople rising to second place because it is the new imperial capital, and Rome first, by the same logic, as the elder capital rather than as the chair of Peter. Rome kept its precedence but never received canon 3 as law, disliking both the elevation of a non-apostolic see over Alexandria and Antioch and the political principle behind it. Whether Rome’s early primacy is one of honour tracking imperial status or of Petrine jurisdiction is weighed in the Arguments below. Full detail →

The Council of Chalcedon — “because it was the royal city”; Leo protests and refuses to ratify (canon 28, 451)

The fourth ecumenical council draws the civic logic to its full conclusion, and provokes Rome’s open protest. Canon 28 takes up the canon of 381, quotes it, and states the ground for both sees plainly: “the Fathers rightly granted privileges to the throne of old Rome, because it was the royal city. And the One Hundred and Fifty most religious Bishops, actuated by the same consideration, gave equal privileges to the most holy throne of New Rome” — Constantinople now ranking next after Rome and given jurisdiction over Pontus, Asia, and Thrace.²² It is the sharpest conciliar datum that the fathers grounded even Rome’s primacy in imperial status, not Petrine right. Pope Leo the Great — whose christological Tome the same council had acclaimed — refused to ratify canon 28, resting the order of the sees on the “unalterable” Nicene canons and declaring the bishops’ assent to it null and void: “no one may venture upon anything in opposition to the enactments of the Fathers’ canons which many long years ago in the city of Nicæa were founded upon the decrees of the Spirit.”²³ The council grounded Rome’s pre-eminence in its city; Leo grounded it in Peter and Nicaea — and the collision is exactly what the honour-versus-jurisdiction question, weighed in the Arguments below, must adjudicate. Full detail →

Leo the Great — the pope as Peter’s living heir, “the primate of all bishops” (c. 450)

The timeline closes where the developed doctrine reaches full articulation. Preaching each year on the anniversary of his elevation, Leo the Great states the mature Petrine theory whole: what Christ instituted in Peter is perpetual, so that “as that remains which Peter believed in Christ, so that remains which Christ instituted in Peter,” and Peter himself — not merely his memory — “has not abandoned the helm of the Church,” his “power lives and… authority prevails in his See.” The Roman bishop is Peter’s heir, in whom “abides the care of all the shepherds” and “whose dignity is not abated even in so unworthy an heir” — “not only the patron of this see, but also the primate of all bishops.”²⁴ It is the strongest patristic case for a Roman primacy of jurisdiction, and the timeline sets it at full strength: Matthew 16 read as founding a standing office, the pope as its living heir, and a claimed primacy over the whole episcopate; on the feast of the apostles he calls Rome “the head of the world through the blessed Peter’s holy See.”²⁵ That claim drew real assent on the doctrinal plane: when Leo’s christological Tome (449) was read to the Council of Chalcedon in 451 the fathers acclaimed “Peter has spoken through Leo” — though, tellingly, only after they had examined it against Cyril of Alexandria and satisfied themselves of its orthodoxy, receiving its teaching rather than submitting to Rome’s rule.²⁶ In the West Leo’s jurisdiction leaned on a civil prop: the emperor Valentinian III’s rescript of 445 decreed that “the primacy of the Apostolic See is established by the merit of St. Peter…, by the majesty of the city of Rome, and… the authority of a holy council,” and that Rome’s sanction “shall be law” — imperial backing that grounded the primacy partly in the city’s own majesty.²⁷ And the same council that acclaimed his Tome grounded even Rome’s primacy in its having been the imperial city and gave New Rome “equal privileges” (canon 28, above) — overriding Leo’s protest in the East. His mature theory and those honest limits stand together; whether the primacy it articulates is one of honour and pre-eminence or of universal jurisdiction is weighed in the Arguments below. Full detail →

Arguments

Sub-claims marshaled for a reading above, which cut across the timeline rather than sitting at one date — each weighed adversarially on its own page, with an assessment of the interpretation it serves.

Related arguments — the rock and the keys

Two questions turn on the master proof-text, “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church… I will give unto thee the keys” (Matthew 16:18–19), and are best read as a pair. The first asks what the rock is — Peter, his confession, or Christ; the second asks whether, granting the rock is Peter, the commission descends to his Roman successors as a standing jurisdiction. The two come apart: one can hold the first for Peter and still deny the second, as several of the fathers and much modern scholarship do.

Is the “rock” of Matthew 16:18 Peter, his confession, or Christ? (assessment: contested)

Is the “rock” Peter, his confession, or Christ? — on the grammar the rock is most probably Peter himself: the emphatic “this rock” points to the man just named, the Petros/petra difference is now widely judged to carry no “pebble-versus-boulder” weight in Koine (petra being feminine, the masculine Petros is simply the form a man’s name must take), and the Aramaic substratum collapses the two into one word, kêphā’ — a reading now granted even by non-Catholic exegetes (Cullmann, Albright–Mann, France, Carson). But the ancient church did not speak with one voice: its largest strand reads the rock as Peter’s confession (Chrysostom, “on the faith of his confession”; Theodore, “not the property of Peter alone”; Theophylact; Philoxenus), and the mature Augustine preferred Christ (1 Corinthians 10:4), leaving the choice to “the reader.” Strong by the lights of modern philology, divided by those of patristic consensus — and, either way, identifying the rock decides nothing about a Roman primacy: contested.²⁸

Does the commission to Peter descend to his Roman successors as a standing jurisdiction? (assessment: weak)

Does the commission descend to Peter’s Roman successors? — this is the inference the doctrine actually needs, and it is much weaker than the identity of the rock. Granting that Peter is the rock and holds the keys, the leap to a transmissible office lodged at Rome is not in the text. Its one strong leg is the Isaiah 22:22 allusion — the keys evoke the royal-steward office that passes Shebna → Eliakim, so a keys-office is the kind of thing that can have successors — but the type shows only that such an office could pass on, never that this one did, and Matthew names no successor, no see, and no Rome. Against the descent: the same binding-and-loosing is given verbatim to all the apostles (Matthew 18:18; John 20:23), a point even the pro-Peter fathers concede (Rabanus, Theophylact); Tertullian reads the grant as conferred “personally upon Peter,” non-transferable to a see (c. 210); and even friends of the Petrine reading (Cullmann, Carson) refuse the succession. The office-type is a real observation; the descent-to-Rome is a conjecture beyond the evidence — weak.²⁹

Does 1 Clement’s intervention at Corinth evidence a Roman primacy of jurisdiction? (assessment: contested)

Does 1 Clement’s intervention evidence jurisdiction, or fraternal admonition? — the earliest datum cuts genuinely both ways. Read for what it plainly shows — the church of Rome reaching, uninvited, into a distant church’s governance, prescribing that its deposed presbyters be restored, and warning that any who “disobey the words spoken by Him through us” incur “serious danger” — it is strong evidence of a pre-eminence Rome held from the sub-apostolic age. Read for what the doctrine needs — a recognized primacy of jurisdiction of the bishop of Rome — it under-determines the conclusion, and the weight tells the other way: the letter is a church’s act (issued corporately by “the Church of God which sojourns at Rome,” naming no bishop), it supplicates as much as it commands, it may answer a Corinthian request, and it grounds its appeal in Scripture and church-order — never in Peter or a Roman prerogative, the Petrine theory being absent for another century and a half. Strong as evidence of Rome’s honour, weak as evidence of jurisdiction, and honestly disputed in between — contested.³⁰

Does Irenaeus’s potentior principalitas assert a Roman primacy of jurisdiction? (assessment: weak)

Does the “pre-eminent authority” of Against Heresies III.3.2 assert Roman jurisdiction? — that Irenaeus grants Rome a real pre-eminence, and appeals to its faith as a touchstone of apostolic tradition, is plain; a primacy of honour is well-grounded here. But the further reading — that propter potentiorem principalitatem … necesse est omnem convenire ecclesiam asserts a jurisdictional supremacy — does not hold on its best case. The load-bearing phrase survives only in a wooden Latin rendering of a lost Greek, whose own editors confessed they were “far from sure” of it, and one available rendering (convenire = “resort to”) reverses the sentence, making Rome the mirror of the churches’ faith rather than its sovereign; the frame is anti-Gnostic and evidential, not constitutional (scholarship across confessions — Unger, McCue, Nautin — reads it of preserved tradition, not the church’s constitution); Irenaeus grounds Rome in Peter and Paul and in the publicity of a succession he starts from Linus, not a bishop-Peter; and the same father, within the decade, restrains Bishop Victor from disciplining distant churches. Keep the two objections distinct — the translation is insecure (precision) and the jurisdiction inference is improbable (probability): a primacy of honour, yes; of jurisdiction, read out of this sentence, weak.³¹

Does Cyprian’s On the Unity of the Church 4 (the “Primacy Text”) teach a Roman primacy of jurisdiction? (assessment: weak)

Does De unitate 4 — even on the “Primacy Text” recension — teach a Roman primacy of jurisdiction? — two questions are intertwined and answered together. The textual one settles in the argument’s favour: the old Protestant charge that the Primacy-Text clauses (“the primacy is given to Peter … one See”) were a papal interpolation has failed, Bévenot’s critical work showing both recensions Cyprian’s own — so the argument may be granted its best text without the forgery dispute. But that text does not carry the doctrinal conclusion. Even the Primacy Text makes the primacy given to Peter the means of showing the Church’s oneness, in a sentence that at once calls all the apostles shepherds and has the one Rock “fed by all … with unanimous consent”; the same chapter declares the other apostles “the same as was Peter … in honour and power”; chapter 5 defines the episcopate as one, “held by each one for the whole,” making every bishop an heir of Peter’s chair; and Cyprian’s conduct closes it — “no bishop of bishops” at Carthage in 256, and a flat refusal to let Stephen’s “succession from Peter” bind the African churches. The Petrine imagery grounds episcopal collegiality, not Roman monarchy — weak.³²

Do the great councils show a primacy of honour among equals, or of universal jurisdiction? (assessment: sound)

Do Nicaea 6, Sardica, Constantinople 3, and Chalcedon 28 show a primacy of honour among co-equal sees, or a universal jurisdiction? — the capstone reading of the conciliar record, and it holds. Taken on their own terms the councils rank the great sees by custom (Nicaea 6 names Rome as one metropolitan among Alexandria and Antioch, “since the like is customary”) and by the civil dignity of their cities (Constantinople 3 and Chalcedon 28 ground the whole order — Rome’s first place included — in the sees’ standing as imperial capitals, “because it was the royal city,” and raise the non-apostolic see of New Rome to second place on that same principle). They grant Rome a genuine and consistent first rank of honour, but no standing power to govern the other churches. The jurisdiction reading’s best conciliar legs are folded in and weighed, not waved away: the Sardican appeal to Rome (343) is a real primatial function but a favour the council granted — “if it seem good to your charity, honour the memory of Peter” — enacted by a one-party Western synod and refused when later pressed as a canon of Nicaea (the African bishops’ exposure of the misattribution in the Apiarius affair, c. 418–424); and Chalcedon’s “Peter has spoken through Leo” is assent to the orthodoxy of Leo’s Tome — tested against Cyril of Alexandria before it was received — by the same council that in the same sitting overrode Leo’s protest against canon 28. Rome’s mature Petrine claim is real by 451, but it appears in Leo’s protest against a council, not in the councils’ canons: strong evidence for a primacy of honour, weak for one of jurisdiction — sound.³³

Sources