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After Joe’s debate with LDS apologist Jacob Hansen, there’s been a lot of chatter on the topic of the Great Apostasy. Joe breaks down why this can’t be true from both an LDS and a Protestant perspective.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. And since my recent debate with LDS apologist Jacob Hansen, there’s been a lot of great conversation on this idea of whether the church built by Jesus Christ fell into an apostasy. But today I don’t want to talk about the global church. I want to get very particular. Did the church in Rome, the church built up by the apostles Peter and Paul, stray from the true faith? And if so, when? Now, in making the case that the Roman church has actually kept the faith, they’re really just two facts you’ve got to get straight. And these are facts that I think are pretty easy to prove from history and facts that all Christians really should agree upon. But if these two facts are right, then I’m going to suggest it’s a strong reason we should all be part of the Catholic Church instead of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints or various Protestant denominations or even the Eastern Orthodox Church or the Oriental Orthodox Church.
Now, before I explain those two facts, I want to say a quick word of Thanksgiving at the beginning of 2026. Last year was an incredible one for this channel. Subscribers more than doubled, views nearly tripled compared to the year before. My team, really just Mike and Vanessa, have been working behind the scenes on everything from upgrading the studio, improving the production quality, crafting shorts, and a bunch of other stuff, generally making it easier to see, hear, and enjoy shameless popri. So I am grateful to them. And I’m also grateful to all of you whose financial support over at shamelessjo.com makes it possible for me to have a team supporting me, as well as for everybody else who’s simply liking, sharing, subscribing, and most especially praying for me and for this channel. Okay. So with that said, let’s start with a concrete question. In the first century, were Christians supposed to be part of the visible church being built up by the apostles?
Hopefully the answer to that is obvious. When the New Testament speaks of a church, it doesn’t mean some kind of invisible reality. The church, Ecclesia and Greek is an assembly. That is, it’s a place where people are congregated together and they’re not gathered together as a mob, but as an organized society. Jesus says, “You’re the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hid.” And St. Paul calls the church the body of Christ. So the New Testament church is something both A, visible, cannot be hid, and B, organized, like a city or more like a well-ordered body. And within this visible structured body, there’s one particular church that is of particular importance and later of particular controversy, the Church of Rome. So that’s going to lead us to the first of the two basic facts. Number one, Rome is famously faithful.
Now, that first fact might sound confusing for many non-Catholic viewers. Isn’t the faithfulness of the Church of Rome exactly what’s in dispute? Yes. But both sides should start by realizing that the Church of Rome has been continuously praised for her faithfulness all throughout the ages. And we see this literally beginning with the New Testament itself. St. Paul begins as epistle to the Romans by telling them that your faith is proclaimed in all the world. So when I say that from the start, Rome’s faithfulness is world famous, I’m really saying nothing more than what Paul has already said. Now, of course, Rome being famously faithful in the first century doesn’t mean it’s going to remain that way, and we’re going to get to that objection more directly soon. But many Christians are unaware that these odes to Rome’s faithfulness exist or that they don’t stop with St. Paul in the first century.
We find them rather in every age, including ages in which the Bishop of Rome was often a notorious sinner. Now, I’m not going to give anything like an exhaustive treatment here, but I want to give you at least a sketch, a little taste, looking at the first five centuries of Christianity. We’ve already seen the first century with St. Paul. So let’s jump forward slightly to the early second century. Around 107, Saint Ignatius of Antioch describes the Church of Rome as the church which is beloved and enlightened by the will of him that wills all things, which are according to the love of Jesus Christ, our God. He calls it 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. He also makes two cryptic claims about the Church of Rome and its authority to lead.
He says first that it presides in the place of the region of the Roman. Now presiding is leadership. So this points to some kind of leadership, but then slightly later, he greets it as a church which presides over love. And that sounds both redundant and indeed confusing in English, presides over love. What does that mean? Well, the Greek there is agape, which as the Episcopalian scholar, Massey Shepherd points out, is one of the ways that Ignatius describes the Eucharist. Now at the local level, Ignatius stresses the need for this agape, this Eucharist to be properly celebrated in Union with the bishop. But at the broader level, he seems to be saying that a proper Eucharist is somehow tied to the presiding authority of the Church of Rome. So let’s keep two strands in view at the outset here. The early Christians understood Rome as having some kind of special authority, even though they’re admittedly not always clear exactly what the exact scope of that authority is.
There’s something special about this church in terms of authority, but what often gets overlooked is that they also praise Rome’s faithfulness. A faithfulness that Ignatius says is worthy of God and worthy of being deemed holy. It’s also here in the 100s where we find a famous epitaph on the tombstone of the Bishop Abersius. And the tombstone notes that the bishop actually wrote it himself. Now it’s written in this way that seems calculated to confuse pagans while making sense to Christians. For instance, he talks about how he was the disciple of the holy shepherd, the one who has eyes, which are all seen and how this shepherd was the one who sent him to Rome to see the queen of cities and to see a queen with golden robes and golden shoes. Now, as Christians, we can recognize the holy shepherd is of course Jesus and that he’s saying that Jesus is the one who sent him to the queen of cities, the city of Rome, that he saw there the queen with golden robes and golden shoes, the church of Rome.
That’s an intriguing and I think rather telling image. During this same time period, in the year 180, Saint Irenes of Leon describes the Church of Rome as the very great, the very ancient and universally known church founded and organized at Rome by the two most glorious apostles, Peter and Paul. And like Ignatius, he talks about this glorious church of Rome having a special authority of some kind. In fact, he declares it a matter of necessity that every church should agree with this church on account of its preeminent authority. Now, that permanent authority is going to be on full display in the 200s. There is this period of time known as the little piece of the church where the Roman Empire briefly tolerated Christianity, stopped short of fully legalizing it. And during this time, the Bishop of Antioch was excommunicated as a heretic, but he refused to leave his diocese.
So the church then reaches out to the emperor, Aurelian, to intervene and to kick out the deposed heretical bishop, which he does. But then there’s a fascinating detail. The emperor deferred to the pope and Rome to adjudicate to whom this church of Antioch should be entrusted. Okay. Let’s turn to the 300s. St. Optatus talks about this leadership in terms of the chair, the cathedral, the seat of authority. That’s an image that comes from the seat of Moses in Matthew 23. And he tells his reader that you cannot then deny that you do know that upon Peter first and the city of Rome was bestowed the Episcopal Cathedra, on which set Peter, the head of all the apostles, so that in this one seat, this one cathedra, unity should be preserved by all. He then argued that even if the other apostles themselves have tried to establish separate cathedras, he who set up a second cathedra against the unique cathedra would be a schismatic and a sinner.
So again, there’s clearly something special about this church, the church of Rome. Now, in the year 376 or so, St. Jerome writes to Pope Damesis from Bethlehem in the east, and he’s lamenting that the east, shattered as it is by the longstanding feuds subsisting between its peoples, is bit by bit tearing into shreds the seamless vest of the Lord. And so Jerome writes that it’s his duty to consult the chair of Peter and to turn to a church whose faith has been praised by Paul. He says that evil children have squandered their patrimony. You alone keep your heritage intact. The fruitful soil of Rome, when it receives a pure seed of the Lord bears fruit a hundred fold. I want you to bear that imagery in mind because we’re going to see it later. But for now, look, Jerome is living in the east, but he is from the West.
So you might think this is just a case of him having a pro- Western bias. But around this same time, the great Eastern father, St. Basil, also writes to Pope Dameses, and he talks about the need for the global church to be won in laments, like Jerome does, that nearly all the east is being agitated, right, honorable Father, by a terrible storm and tempest. Basil describes how he looked to the Pope’s visitation as the only possible solution of our difficulties. But short of that, he asked him to at least send some of those who are like- minded with us, either to conciliate the dissentant and bring back the churches of God and for New Union, or at least to determine who was and was not fit for communion with Rome. And Basil’s explicit, this isn’t some weird new odd request, rather this is a longstanding custom.
And he points specifically to the past intervention of Pope Dianisius back in the 200s, who Basil describes as conspicuous in your sea as well for the soundness of faith as for all other virtues. A few years later, Damesis’ successor, Pope Saricia, sins what is called the directed decredo to the bishop of Terragana and Spain. The Pope talks directly about his role as the Bishop of Rome, saying that we bear the burdens of all who are oppressed, or rather, the blessed Apostle Peter, who in all things protects and preserves us the heirs as we trust his administration, bears them in us. Now, he goes on to praise the Spanish bishops for reaching out to him, saying, “Not improperly beloved, you believed that the apostolic sea should be consulted on the questions and dispute.” But nevertheless, he lays down the law and he warns that all priests who do not wish to be torn from the solidity of the apostolic rock upon which Christ built the universal church should now hold the aforementioned rule.
So he’s very clearly laying down the law because of his reputation for orthodoxy and because of this special authority that he has. Let’s jump forward to the fifth century. There’s a sermon to the Christians of Rome in which Pope Saintly of the Great describes Peter and Paul, the two founders of the church of Rome, as superior to Ramus and Romulis, the twin brothers said to have founded the city of Rome. And he says that as the head of the world, through the blessed Peter’s holy sea, Rome had attained a wider sway by the worship of God than by earthly government. Now, that distinction between the authority of Rome in terms of earthly government and the authority of the church of Rome spiritually is a significant distinction because it actually points to this question of why. You will sometimes hear people claim that the Roman church was just important because that’s where the capital of the empire was, but that explanation doesn’t really make a lot of sense because just 13 years after the legalization of Christianity, Constantine moved the capital to Constantinople and it never returned.
So for Christians like Leo, Rome as the worldly imperial capital was already this history lesson from before their birth. Instead, the early Christians were clear why they had this respect for Rome. They described the authority and the faithfulness of the Church of Rome in spiritual terms, not political ones. The Remus and Romulus of Christian Rome were the apostles, Peter and Paul. In Leo’s words, their martyrdom in Rome was like the planting of two heaven sown seeds that bore a hundred fold fruit, giving rise to thousands of blessed Roman martyrs. Or as one ancient hymn put it, “Oh, happy Rome stained purple with the precious blood of so many princes. You excel all the beauty of the world, not by your own glory, but by the merits of the saints whose throats you cut with bloody swords.” It’s ghastly, but I think it gets the point across.
Now, if that basic picture is correct, if the church in Rome has a spiritual authority because of its apostolic founding, fortified by the blood of the martyrs, we should all be Catholic. It really doesn’t matter how you get to this place, whether it’s through the root of authority or this ironclad reputation for orthodoxy. Either way, once you can say with Iraneus that it is a matter of necessity that every church should agree with this church on account of its preeminent authority, we know that the church of Rome teaches Catholicism and so we should all be Catholic. Well, obviously, not everyone is. So non-Catholics have to believe that at some point, Rome ceased to be a trustworthy bastion of orthodoxy, but this is where we have to grapple with a second basic fact. Number two, Rome is not in a corner. Here’s what I mean by that.
In Acts 26, when St. Paul is defending himself before King Agrippa, he says that the king knows about these things, for I’m persuaded that none of these has escaped his notice for this was not done in a corner. Now, Paul’s point here is simple. A grippa doesn’t have to just take Paul’s word for any of this stuff. He’s the king of Judea. He can’t possibly be ignorant of Jesus of Nazareth or even of the preaching of Paul himself. Much of Jesus’s life, death and resurrection occurred in and around Jerusalem. It wasn’t in some obscure backwater, but this is no less true of Rome than of Jerusalem on the contrary. This is why Leo can describe it as a head of the world. And in scripture in the Roman form declared Rome the umbilicus mundi, the naval of the world. As we’ve seen, that doesn’t appear to be why the early Christians respected the church of Rome that much, but it does mean that Rome is very much center stage on the world stage.
So it creates a problem for anybody saying that the Roman church slid into error or apostasy or in the most extreme formulations that it went from being this faithful church to becoming the horror of Babylon or the Pope went from being the successor to Peter to the antichrist. These are not just theological claims you can support by your own subjective reading of the Bible. Those are objective historical claims and they’re claims you should be able to show. You should be able to show where at point A, Rome was famously faithful, a fact indisputable from historical evidence, to point B where it recants this earlier faith. Now, there are a lot of ways you can get at this question. Sometimes I find it helpful to ask, who was the first Pope or who was the first Bishop of Rome? Because the historical evidence for bishops of Rome going back to the time of the apostles is quite clear and quite strong.
Another approach is to just ask when did the Catholic church begin? I mentioned I recently debated the LDS apologist, Jacob Hanson, and I asked him that question. And I think it’s fair to say that he had some difficulty giving a plausible straight answer to a very simple question. Now this back and forth went on for nearly nine minutes. You can go watch it yourself if you want to, but there was no real clear answer about why we should believe the Catholic Church began in 1965 or in 1870 or any other date after the time of Christ. But that problem isn’t unique to Jacob. And I don’t mean to pick on him here. Rather, as I made a video showing last year, different Protestant apologists also can’t agree, for instance, on when the papacy began. Once you claim that it wasn’t started with Peter, it wasn’t started by Christ and you put it at some later date in history, the historical details start to get pretty fuzzy.
Perhaps the cleanest way to approach the question would be to think about it like this. A faithful Christian in the first century should be in communion with the Church of Rome. After all, as Paul says, it’s famously faithful. And this continued on where Christians regarded communion with Rome as a matter of necessity. So when does that change? At what point in history can we objectively say communion with Rome becomes unnecessary or even evil? And did the Christians at this time notice such a sea change that this bastion of orthodoxy was no longer faithful, no longer trustworthy? I really liked the way the St. Edmund Campion poses these questions back in the 16th century. Wayne then, did Rome lose this faith so highly celebrated? When did she cease to be what she was before? At what time, under what pontif? By what way, by what compulsion, by what increments did a foreign religion come to pervade city and world?
What outcries? What disturbances? What lamitations did it provoke? Were all mankind all over the rest of the world lulled to sleep. While Rome, Rome, I say, was forging new sacraments, a new sacrifice, new religious dogma. Has there been found no historian, neither Greek nor Latin, neither far nor near to fling out in his chronicles even an obscure hint of so remarkable a proceeding? Now I would suggest that the reason that we don’t have any clear evidence, that there’s no objective historical point, everyone can just agree, “Oh, here’s where the Catholic church started after Peter or here’s where there started to be a papacy where there hadn’t been before, or here’s where there was the first bishop of Rome and there hadn’t been before.” The reason you don’t have any clear evidence of any of that is because throughout all the ebbs and flows of history, the Church of Rome actually remained the same and kept the same faith throughout the ages.
And so today, just as in the earliest days, it is a matter of necessity that every church should agree with this church on account of its preeminent authority. Finally, remember that video I mentioned in which Protestant apologists offered contradictory answers to the question of when the papacy began. You can see that as well as my response to it right here. For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.