Audio only:
Joe responds to some key points raised in Gavin’s video “The Papacy is Not From God.”
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer and Dr. Gavin Ortlund just released a video titled The Papacy is Not From God that I think warrants a reply. Now, I should say at the outset, I respect the bluntness of his argument and I hope that he won’t be offended if I answer him in an equally straightforward manner. And second, I think he’s focused on exactly the right question. As I said in my book, Pope Peter, if the doctrine of the papacy is true, everyone should be Catholic. If the doctrine of the papacy is false, no one should be Catholic. So I want to applaud him for asking the right question, even if obviously I disagree with his conclusions. Now, I also want to make clear upfront that I’m not going to try to answer every single argument he makes. I’ve laid out the arguments for Peter having a papal type role in my book, Pope Peter, I’ve looked at the history of bishops in the early church in my book The Early Church was a Catholic church, so you can check out those for more. But I want to focus on just one part of his argument, the idea that there was no bishop of Rome in the early church. So the argument goes the Bishop of Rome couldn’t have been the Pope early on because there wasn’t a bishop of Rome early on until perhaps sometime in the early second century.
Gavin:
So the first point here is that the early in the earliest times it doesn’t look like you have a single bishop of Rome at all. So not only do you not have a single bishop whose supreme and in certain conditions infallible, you just don’t have any single bishop in Rome. And so hey, when does it exactly come in? It looks like sometime there in the early second century, but it’s hard to be dogmatic about exactly when.
Joe:
So the reason I want to take a closer look at this one claim is that I think the more you look at the evidence, the weaker Gavin’s case turns out to be. Now I realize in answering his argument, I’m not proving the papacy true. Plenty of Orthodox, even Anglicans and Lutherans might agree with me here without accepting the Catholic claims about the papacy, but I do think it’ll move the conversation in the right direction if we can at least take the worst arguments off the table. Speaking of tables, special thanks to everyone who supports this channel over on Patreon. If you follow this channel, you might know that the equipment that was on this table started to malfunction recently and we had two episodes where the video just straight up didn’t work because of your generous support over@shamelessjoe.com, we were able to get my producer Mike out here from Nashville and he was able to upgrade both the laptop and the camera.
So when I say that your generosity is what makes this happen, those are not just nice words, I really mean it. I have no idea what we would’ve done otherwise. So thank you again to everybody, shameless joe.com. Okay, so what is the evidence that Gavin offers for his claim that there wasn’t a bishop of Rome early on and how well does all that evidence hold up? I think the easiest way to tell the story is to go chronologically, starting with the oldest sources first. While there’s some controversy on the precise dating of ancient works, the oldest extra biblical work that Gavin cites to is probably the diday. He mentions it only briefly, but he claims that it teaches that there are only two offices in the church.
Gavin:
So this confirms the picture we get from the New Testament and from the dike. Another important first century testimony that you’ve got two offices in the church.
Joe:
Now I’m surprised to see Gavin claiming this and I’m more surprised at the evidence that he offers to prove his point as Oxford’s David Downs explains the Ecclesia and the Diday has teachers, apostles, prophets, bishops and deacons, and the text never really explains what these rules are or how they might differ from one another. So it’s led to ongoing debate. There is simply no scholarly consensus on what the Diday is trying to tell us about the organizational structure of the church. This is literally a fight that’s been going on since the publication of the Diday in 1883 after it was discovered from ancient writings. But from what I could tell, there seems to be four or five offices when it’s not entirely clear from the text which of these might be itinerant, temporary, which ones are local, permanent, and you can see this all for yourself.
You don’t need to take my word for it. In chapter 11, we’re told how to treat teachers, apostles and prophets. Chapter 13 talks about the need to financially support true teachers and prophets and how to tell them apart from false teachers and false prophets. So you might be wondering how Gavin can say that the dedicate only mentions two offices when it seems to mention five. The only proof offered in his video is the line appoint for yourselves, bishops and deacons worthy of the Lord from chapter 15. Now the text is presented on screen as the end of a sentence ending with a period, but if you check his source, you’ll see that that’s simply not true. The line has been altered and I want to be clear, I’m not saying he did this on purpose. This happens easily enough accidentally, but it’s important to know there has been a really important alteration here.
When you go back and read, you’ll see that it’s only part of a sentence that goes on to say that bishops and deacons rendered to you the service of prophets and teachers. And then the next sentence says, despise them, not therefore for they are your honored ones together with the prophets and teachers. So in the unaltered version of the passage, Gavin cites four roles are mentioned, not two bishops, deacons, prophets, and teachers. Somehow those last two got deleted in Gavin’s version and the comma was replaced with a period. So it lets him say that the dedicate teachers that there’s only those two bishops and deacons, but the evidence really does say otherwise. The other first century TGA cites is first Clement, which is typically dated to the year 96. He claims
Gavin:
If you just read Clement’s letter, it strongly confirms the claim that the apostles supported two offices in the church. That is what he plainly says, and he regards bishops and deacons two offices as the fulfillment of prophecy, and he uses the term bishop and presbyter interchangeably and on multiple occasions he always refers to the leadership in the church in Corinth and the plural. For example,
Joe:
Gavin cites to part of a sentence from chapter 42 of the letter. But once again, when you read it in context, even just read the two proceeding paragraphs, I think a very different picture emerges. Now to zoom out a little bit, the Christians of Corinth are dealing with an internal schism where some of the members of the church don’t want to obey the presbyters, the elders, and so they write to the Church of Rome, which I think is telling of itself, and Clement writes back denouncing their disobedience as a shameful and detestable, sedition utterly abhorrent to the elect of God. And he says in chapter 40 that when we look into the depths of the divine knowledge, it behooves us to do all things in order, which the Lord has commanded us to perform at stated times. So notice that he’s talking here about us now there’s a divinely ordained order to the church.
He then connects this order to the threefold order of the Jewish priesthood. First he does this by talking about the need for sacrifices to be done in the proper order and how those who present their offerings at the appointed time are accepted and blessed. And then he says, for his own peculiar services are assigned to the high priest and their own proper places prescribed to the priests and their own special administrations devolve on the Levites. The layman is bound by the laws that pertain to layman. Let every one of you brethren give thanks to God in his own order, living in all good conscience with becoming gravity and not going beyond the rule of the ministry prescribed to him. So when Clement is talking about the high priest priest in Levite, he’s not literally suggesting we need to go back to animal sacrifices in the temple.
Rather as Lutheran scholars like Joel Orlowski acknowledge Clemente is using the image of high priest priest Levite and that threefold structure in the Old Testament to tell us something about the threefold structure of the New Testament church, this agrees with what we know from ancient liturgical text. For instance, the oldest ordination rights we have are from what’s called the apostolic tradition, which is generally agreed to be the work of Saint Ians in the early two hundreds. There’s some scholarly debate, we don’t need to get into all the weeds there, but in any case, these ancient prayers describe how the bishop is to exercise high priesthood for the without rebuke, and we find similar prayers in many of the ancient rites for the ordination of bishops. So did he suddenly change his mind a paragraph later when he says that the apostles appointed the first fruits to be bishops and deacons of those who should afterwards believe?
I don’t think so in the Bible, even though Israel had a three-tiered structure, high priest, priest Levite, it was often referred to by the shorthand priests and Levites, but we know that the high priesthood was actually something distinct. For instance, only the high priest could go into the holy of holies. Now, even today you’ll similarly find Catholics referenced to clergy as priests and deacons. Even Catholic answers has material in which we do. So that doesn’t mean we don’t believe in bishops and it doesn’t mean we think there are literally only two tiers to holy orders. By far, the clearest early source on what the structure of the early church looked like is Saint Ignatius, the bishop of Antioch. Now, he wrote about the year 1 0 7 on route to his martyrdom, and I think it’s fair to say that Ignatius completely obliterates the idea that the early Christians had two tiered churches.
You’ll find people, even scholars who claim that Ignatius calls for the appointing of a single bishop in every church, but this is simply untrue. He doesn’t propose anything. Instead, he writes to Christians that he knows already have a three-tiered structure of governance in their local church. For instance, in his letter to the magnesium, we even know the leader’s names. He greets Dames, your most worthy bishop. He greets your worthy presbyters, BAAs and apollonius, and he greets my fellow servant, the deacon sodium. He praises the Ephesians because they’re justly renowned, presbytery worthy of God is fitted as exactly to the bishop as the strings are to the harp so that in your concord and harmonious love Jesus Christ is sung. And again, we know who the bishop was. It was Onesimus, a man of inexpressible love and your bishop in the flesh. By the way, this is probably the same Onesimus who St.
Paul wrote in defense of his epistle to Philemon. So even when we don’t know the exact names of the clergy, we do know that Ignatius had passed through this region on his way to Rome seems to have known the people of these churches personally, and it’s very clear they have a three-tiered structure of governance. For instance, he mentions that three-tiered structure of the church in his letter to the Serian and their bishop is Ignatius’s old friend Polycarp, and he also writes to Polycarp personally reiterating in that letter his call for the flock to be submissive to the bishop, to the presbyters and to the deacons. Now this matters because Gavin has previously claimed that Bishop Polycarp supports the idea that the church didn’t have bishops that only had deacons and presbyters.
Gavin:
You’ve got other documents from the early second century that seem to function just like the first century where you’ve got Polycarp’s epistle to the Philippians chapters five and six. It’s just like one Timothy three. You’ve got two offices, qualifications for deacons, qualifications for presbyters.
Joe:
So Gavin appears to be claiming that Polycarp believed there are just two tiers to church governance, presbyters and deacons. I’m sure he can clarify if I’m misunderstanding him there, but if Polycarp’s friend Ignatius can be trusted, we know it’s not true. We know Polycarp himself is bishop and given that Polycarp personally sends the Philippians copies of Ignatius’s letters, I think it gives us an indication that he’s endorsing what Ignatius is saying. But Gavin is nevertheless right to point out that
Gavin:
Plus Ignatius makes no mention of all Bishop in Rome.
Joe:
Amon Duffy, the scholar Gavin points to his support for much of his argument makes the same point claiming that since Ignatius’s letter says nothing, whatever about bishops, this is a strong indication that the office had not yet emerged at Rome, but Duffy’s argument is simply untrue. Ignatius does mention bishops in his letters to the Romans and again, you can see for yourself, he mentions in his letter to the Romans that he is the bishop of Syria and he says that upon his death their bishop will be Jesus Christ. So it takes for granted that they know that there is one bishop per church. Now it’s true Ignatius doesn’t mention who the bishop of Rome is. He also never mentions who the presbyters or deacons of Rome are either. He doesn’t say anything about the structure of the church there, unlike the other churches to whom he’s written.
There’s no indication that Ignatius knew in Rome, so it’d be arbitrary to draw from what is just complete silence that therefore this proves since he doesn’t mention the bishop, there must not be a bishop since he doesn’t mention presbyters or deacons. Pressers and deacons still exist. That’s just arbitrary reading from silence and I think we can go further than that and say, no, we can prove from ignatius’s writings the exact opposite. Here’s how in his letter to the Traian, Ignatius explicitly says that if you don’t have the three-tiered structure, you don’t have a church. And he not only refers to Roman as a church, but he calls it a church that presides in the place of the region of the Romans worthy of God, worthy of honor, worthy of the highest happiness, worthy of praise, worthy of obtaining her every desire worthy of being deemed holy and which presides over love.
Again, I think this is something about the importance of the church of Rome and again, I think it completely discredits the idea that they didn’t have a three-tiered structure. Think about it like this. Imagine you’re someone who writes a lot of letters about how marriage is between a man and a woman, and then imagine somebody finds another letter you write praising them for their recent marriage but not explicitly mentioning the sex of their spouse. It would be absurd to conclude from this that since you don’t mention the sex of their spouse that time, it must have been a gay marriage. No, the only way to read your letters harmoniously is we know you think marriage is opposite sex. You think this is a marriage, therefore it’s opposite sex. Ignatius thinks a church has three tears. He thinks Rome is a church. Rome has three tears. Therefore, I think we can conclude on the basis of Ignatius. There certainly is a bishop of Rome in the year 1 0 7, but Gavin insists that Rome didn’t have a single bishop until perhaps sometime in the early second century, and as proof he cites to the shepherd of Hermes
Gavin:
Even a little after Clement is the shepherd of Hermes, which was written in Rome sometime in the early second century and talks about the presbyters who preside over the church and so forth always speaks of the leadership of the church and the plural. This is just what the evidence looks is that early on, not only do you not have a single bishop in Rome who has supremacy over the church, but you just don’t have a single bishop in Rome. It’s just not there early on. And so hey, when does it exactly come in? It looks like sometime there in the early second century, but it’s hard to be dogmatic about exactly when.
Joe:
There are three problems with this. The first is that once again, when you look at the evidence, it doesn’t quite say what Gavin claims. It says, now you should understand the shepherd of Hermes is apocalyptic literature. So think of something more like the book of Revelation. There’s going to be a lot of symbolic images and so it takes some parsing through to understand what’s actually being said. But at the beginning of the book you have this series of visions and the third vision describes a tower built upon stones, which it says represent the apostles, bishops, teachers and deacons, and it goes on to praise the bishops and teachers and deacons. Now that sounds like there are apostles and then there are three tiers of church governance, bishops, teachers, and deacons. So it’s not clear how this would support the idea that there were actually only two tiers.
The text doesn’t just say presbyters govern the church and that’s it gives a more dynamic picture that seems to say there are three tiers. But the second problem with using the shepherd of Hermes in this way is what’s called the morr fragment. As the name suggests, this is an ancient fragment of a document which most scholars date to the second century. It’s a list of books which are and are not part of the Bible, but when it comes to the shepherd of Hermes, it says it’s not part of the Bible because it was written in Rome very recently in our times in the city of Rome, while Bishop Pius, his brother was occupying the chair of the church of the city of Rome. So that’s what seems to be second century evidence directly contradicting Gavin’s theory because obviously if Hermes’s own brother Pius is the bishop of Rome.
In fact, we know from other early sources as well in the early one forties that pretty well disproves the idea that Rome didn’t have a bishop at the time that Hermes is writing the Shepherd. Gavin mentions EU a couple of times in his video, but it’s worth understanding who EU is and what he actually says. Now, we know even from his own writings that he learned about Christianity from St. Polycarp of Smyrna and that Polycarp would talk about the things he had learned from his own teacher, the Apostle John. So we can sketch out a rough timeline of three generations, generation one, you’ve got the Apostle John, he’s young at the time of Christ and he’s the lasted day of the apostles. He dies perhaps as late as the year 100 generation two. St. Polycarp was born in the year 69 and he dies in near 1 55 at the age of 86.
Generation three. Seu seems to have been born sometime in the one twenties and he’s writing against heresies in about 180, and IUs not only insists that the Church of Rome has a single bishop, but he’s insistent that it always did, and what’s more he’s actually able to name every bishop from the time of Peter and Paul down to his own day. Now obviously if this is true, this completely disproves the claim that Rome didn’t have a bishop early on, and here it is isn’t the only one making this claim. You have other sources seemingly independent like Tertullian, who similarly talk early on about how one of the things the true church can do the heretics can’t do is provide a list of all of their bishops going back to the time of the apostles and Tertullian specifically cites places like Rome and Smyrna and how they can do that.
But if Gavin is right that there was not a bishop of Rome when shepherd of Hermes was written, which seems to have been the early one forties, this would mean that people like EU were alive when Rome switched their governance from whatever they had before to an Episcopal. So is EU just lying about this? Are all of the apostolic churches just forging their evidence? Because this is a question that would’ve been in the recent past if the mono Episcopal only came to Rome in the one forties or so, then it follows that when EZ claimed it dates back all the way to the apostles. Both he and the other people alive there in 180 would know this wasn’t true because they been old enough to remember. It’d be like me trying to tell you today, oh no, the Soviet Union never existed. Too many of us are old enough to remember a change that big.
So are we to assume that all of the Christians here are just lying. The last thing isn’t just in response to Gavin’s point, but really a broader point to anyone who wants to advance a theory like this because I actually don’t think it’s enough to say that you don’t believe in the papacy. Remember, the thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. It is not enough for you to tear down if you’re going to be a Christian. Let’s see what you can actually put forward. If you’re someone who thinks the papacy is not from God and that the model of bishops we find universally throughout the early church is also not from God, I think you should have the burden of proof to show what is. Did God create presbyterianism? Did he create congregationalism? Gavin is theologian in residence at Emmanuel Nashville, which has a structure of pastors, elders, and deacons.
Ironically, it looks like three offices. Is that structure from God or are we to say that nothing is from God, that Jesus sent the apostles out without any kind of instructions for how to build up the church? Because here’s the thing, if you think that Jesus did create some kind of structure of governance, if he did give some instructions to the apostles, you can imagine how people would freak out if somebody else came along and usurped that structure. For instance, if there were elders governing all the local churches and suddenly one guy comes along and says, Nope, we don’t need you anymore. It’s just going to be me leading from now on. How likely is it that those other elders are going to take that kind of demotion with that objecting, and particularly if this new bishop is replacing the structure of the church that Jesus Christ founded?
Wouldn’t everybody be upset about that? But as Leon Morris points out in the evangelical dictionary of theology, we don’t find any kind of freak out at all in his words. Nowhere is there evidence of a violent struggle as would be natural. A divinely ordained congregationalism or presbyterianism were overthrown. The same threefold ministry is seen as universal throughout the early church as soon as there is sufficient evidence to show us the nature of the ministry. In fact, not only is there not a violent struggle, scholars have found no trace whatsoever of any churches going from a Presbyterian or a congregational structure to a church governed by a single bishop. In fact, we’ve seen several claims from church fathers where they make it very clear that they don’t believe they have the right to change the structure of government because it was given to them by Christ through the apostles.
Finally, are we really to believe that Jesus Christ sets up a system of leading his church and that this system either fails right away or else his followers simply universally silently and quickly reject the system and then they replace it, all of them and all over the place, all in the same way with a new system that outlasts someone created by Christ and it lasts 2000 years longer? That claim might sound absurd, and I don’t know people who explicitly articulate that, but if that’s not what opponents of the monoepiscopacy believe, what is it that they’re arguing for? Exactly. Now, look, in all of this, I should again, stress. I am merely scratching the surface, and I know many of you’re going to say something like, fine, maybe all of the historical evidence outside the Bible really does support the Catholic side of the question, but the Bible itself still seems to say bishops and presbyters are the same thing. Well, if that’s what you’re wondering, I’ve got a video covering that as well as the historical evidence we talked about today, plus a bunch of other stuff right here. For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.