In this episode Trent sits down with fellow apologist Joe Heschmeyer to talk about a claim Protestant apologists (and some Catholic scholars) make about the papacy and its apostolic roots.
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answer’s apologist and speaker, Trent Horn. Fancy digs today. We are in the Catholic Answers studio. I get to sit in a comfy chair. I got a nice boom mic here and I have fellow apologist Mr. Joe Heschmeyer. Joe, welcome to the program.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Thanks for having me on. It feels a lot like being at work.
Trent Horn:
Right. This is where we are. Now, I’m a little bit jealous of you because you have got … I’m visiting the Catholic Answers studio only for two days.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Right.
Trent Horn:
But you get to be out here for a month, getting a month break from Midwest weather, to be here in California, so I’m a little jealous.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah, I very conveniently scheduled video stuff during the coldest part of the Midwestern year and then it has been in the 60s, 70s or low 80s every single day since we’ve been here with not a cloud in the sky. It’s unbelievable.
Trent Horn:
And I say, good for you, my friend.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Oscar Wilde said that the shame of youth is that it is wasted on the young, and it’s tempting to feel the same way about California.
Trent Horn:
Right, that the weather’s wasted here? Other people would use it better? What I wanted to talk today is … Well, actually it was funny. I told Joe, Hey, I’m going to be in the studio tomorrow. Let’s talk. And I just want to talk about whatever you’re just jazzed about, something you’re just really excited as talk about. And I just got an advanced copy of your new book. Well, it’s out now and the book has a wonderful self explanatory title, The Early Church Was the Catholic Church. It’s a mystery. What could this book actually be about?
Joe Heschmeyer:
What could the thesis of the book be?
Trent Horn:
So I love it, that we have something because a lot of people, including many Protestants, are more interested in learning about Christian history. And I think many people find their way into the Catholic church. This happened for me, that I looked at all the Christian denominations and thought, all right, well what did the first Christians believe? What did they believe? I would like to be close to what they believe. And so there are many more Protestants who are interested in that. It leads them to Catholicism, and I think there are Protestant apologists who step forward and say, oh wait, wait, not so fast. The early church is not the Catholic church we might think of. And one of the arguments that they raise, it relates to the papacy. They might say, okay, you’ll find some similarities here. But when you think Catholic, what’s the first thing that pops into your mind? The Pope.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Right.
Trent Horn:
Right? The Catholic Pope. But then they’ll say, look, when you go back into the early church, you go back to the first century, they’ll say, well, there wasn’t a Pope. We don’t see anyone talking about a first century Bishop of Rome. And this is a thesis that is a common, not just amongst some Protestant apologists, but even among some Catholic scholars.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah.
Trent Horn:
Father Ino, you’ve got Eamon Duffy who’s a very well respected medieval Catholic scholar. There are JP Meyer, Raymond Brown, plenty of Catholic scholars who, yeah, claimed that there was not just not a Pope in the first and second century or first up to the [crosstalk 00:03:05] Yeah, but that there wasn’t even a Bishop of Rome at all, not even a debate about what was his authority, what was his jurisdiction, but just he didn’t exist is their claim, which is a really radical claim.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Right.
Trent Horn:
So, that there was just a council of priests who was overseeing the church at Rome. And then the office of Bishop emerged slowly after that with the office of the papacy merging even further after that, which would make one doubt whether the papacy is even a part of the deposit of faith at all. So, that is what I want to talk about today, this idea that in academicy terms, we would say the debate over the mono episcopists [crosstalk 00:03:40] Was the early church … and I think many Protestants have tried to argue for this, that it’s just a Confederacy of believers, little house churches. Was there in every region or every city where there’s a church, was there a single Bishop presiding over the church in that region? Number one, and then number two, was that the king case for the church in Rome? Because as Catholics, it’s not just any Bishop that’s most important. It’s the Bishop of Rome. Was there one in the first century?
Trent Horn:
And I think my view would be very similar to yours. This is an issue that I’ve addressed before on the channel. It was actually something that I addressed in one of my previous videos. If you look online, I have a rebuttal to the strongest argument against Catholicism offered by a Protestant author, Jerry Walls.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yes.
Trent Horn:
And he went on Cameron Bertuzzi’s podcast and he talked about this very issue. And so I went through that, offered a lot of insights, but you’ve done even more research on this than I have. So you’re jazz talk about this. I’m jazzed to talk to you. [crosstalk 00:04:39].
Joe Heschmeyer:
I mentioned Jerry Walls in this chapters. It’s very much in the common discourse right now among Protestants and among Catholics alike.
Trent Horn:
So yeah. So what would be your basic thesis? Let’s just [inaudible 00:04:51] people to understand that you’ll have some Protestants, even some Catholic scholars saying, well, there wasn’t really a single Bishop of Rome, that emerged in a very delayed way that accrued over time. And you’re saying no, that the office of the episcopate, the Bishop, is something we can trace back to the New Testament. And it’s something we can find continuity from the New Testament through the first century and the early second century.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. The positive case would look something like this, that the threefold structure, that there’s one Bishop accompanied by priests or presbyters and deacons is something that goes back to the time of the apostles, goes back to the apostles, goes back ultimately then to Christ. And that it was something that was viewed as an inheritance from Judaism, that Judaism has this three-tiered structure of high priest, priest and Levite. And that very, very early on, we see these connections being made implicitly, but pretty obviously in first Clemons letter in 96 AD more explicitly in the early 200s in one of the ordination rights for a Bishop in which he’s compared to the high priest. Those kind of connections around people’s minds. And that this was something that was understood as St. Ignatius of Antioch says, if you don’t have this three tiered structure, you don’t have the Catholic church, you don’t have a church.
Trent Horn:
And I think that this is huge. For me, I did another video a while back called The Church Father That Protestants Fear the Most. And I asked you, I said, Joe, take a guess. You said, oh, St. Ignatius of Antioch because he’s very, very early. We can date him to early seconds century like 110, 107.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yep.
Trent Horn:
So we’re talking now within one to two generations of the crucifixion, within a generation of the apostles themselves and what he just discusses, that he’s very clear that the authority structure within the church, it’s not the Bible. No discussion about any kind of a fixed or closed canon of scripture that serves as the authority. Rather, he says things like follow the Bishop as Jesus follows the father.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah.
Trent Horn:
And you’re right. I think it’s [crosstalk 00:06:56]. I would say it’s Magnesians, literally the Magnesians where he says that if you do not have Bishop, priest and deacon, you don’t have a church.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Exactly.
Trent Horn:
That’s not the Catholic … and he uses the phrase, the Catholic church. Now to pardon, going back to what you said about the New Testament though, how would you look at the idea that, and this is something, a view that I’ve always held, is that it seems in the New Testament that the offices of bishop, priest and deacon can seem somewhat interchangeable in how the terms are applied. Paul refers to himself with the title as a deacon.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yes.
Trent Horn:
Peter refers himself as a fellow priest that Bishop Greek episcopy overseer. The English word priest that if you’re reading in the New Testament letters, that’s where the title elder might be found is the Greek word presbyteroi, the presbyteroi.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Right.
Trent Horn:
And then the diakonos is where we get the word deacon.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Right.
Trent Horn:
So deacon, priest, bishop, or diakonos, presbyteroi, episcopoi, it seems like in the time of the New Testament, these are at least much more interchangeable than by the time of Ignatius.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. That’s certainly true, partly because terminologically, they’re being set still in the same way that … There was an incident when president Biden was vice president, he presided at a gay marriage. And in English, saying the vice president presided, we have no trouble with that.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
But someone reading that in translation is going to be very confused. Well, how could the vice president be the one presiding?
Trent Horn:
Yeah, because if you read it literally, it would be the vice presider was the main presider.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Exactly.
Trent Horn:
They would trip over themselves.
Joe Heschmeyer:
With this in Greek, you have overseer, elder, servant. Those are what bishop, priest, deacon, or bishop, presbyter, deacon mean. And so people are confused by that because the Greek sometimes is being used in an official, technical, more specific context, but more often is used in a much looser context. So to give you an example, if you look do a word study on diakonoi, of servant or servants [crosstalk 00:08:53] Exactly. It is literally the root of deacon and it’s sometimes translated as deacon in the New Testament, other times translated as servant. And bizarrely, it’s used to describe Phoebe. It’s used to describe Jesus. It’s used to describe the 12 apostles. It’s used to describe St. Paul. It’s used to describe all sorts of people who weren’t deacons or weren’t only deacons in the case of the ordained. And then it’s not used in Act six to describe the first seven deacons.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And so you just can’t make the word based argument. It’s not a very strong argument, and the reason is really simple. By the time the New Testament documents are being written, the first documents are probably St. Paul’s letters. Well, we know they’re St. Paul’s letters to churches, [crosstalk 00:09:37] meaning the church predates the New Testament. So you don’t have some New Testament instruction guide on how to build the church from scratch, [crosstalk 00:09:45] because they weren’t building churches from scratch. The churches already existed. And so it’s only [crosstalk 00:09:50].
Trent Horn:
And by the time we have the first New Testament document, we’ll call it, say I Thessalonians, the church has existed for 20 years.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Right.
Trent Horn:
For 20 years the church has gone through one generation before you have the first canonical document in the New Testament. So I mean, 20 years is a long time to have a leadership structure in place.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. And so in first Timothy three talks about the Bishop, singular, and then talks about deacons. And it doesn’t mention elders, but then in I Timothy five, elders are mentioned. So people are left saying, okay, well, does he think elders is just another term for the bishop [crosstalk 00:10:27] or for deacons, or is he describing three offices? And I think someone going just off the text alone wouldn’t be able to conclusively arrive at a conclusion.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And I think case in point, Protestantism has massively different ecclesiologies [crosstalk 00:10:43] that the structure of a Protestant church varies more widely from denomination to denomination than almost any bit of theology or any other [crosstalk 00:10:51].
Trent Horn:
Some Protestants have bishops, other Protestants just have a single pastor.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Exactly.
Trent Horn:
Some are more Congregationalists.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Right. You’ll have congregational presbyteral and episcopal governance and a ton of variations on that theme. John Calvin argued there was a fourfold structure in the church.
Trent Horn:
Yeah.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And no one takes his view. And then St. Paul mentions all of these ministries and offices without specifying which ones are which. From the text alone, from the biblical text alone, you’re not able to reconstruct in the same way that if you were to just take the speeches of George Washington to try to figure out what the structure of the United States looks like, you probably couldn’t do it [crosstalk 00:11:26] because he might address like the governors or something. He meant, oh, are there a lot of governors per state or is he addressing all of the governors in the country? Those kinds of things, because it was never meant to be used for that.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
That’s a misuse of the New Testament.
Trent Horn:
Both the new Testament, and we have things like the letters of St. Ignatius of Antioch. And then we go, well, though, when we go even further, unfortunately, we don’t have a lot to draw from because at least in the early … because I think a lot of these critics will say, I’m willing to give you by the time of Pope Victor I, you have the papacy.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Right.
Trent Horn:
A lot of them are willing to grant, yes, we have a Bishop of Rome who has authority over other bishops or other churches, and that would place us around the end of the second century.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Right.
Trent Horn:
But what we’ll look at really our biggest witnesses are going to be the Letter of Clement, who we would traditionally recognize to be the third successor of St. Peter, the fourth pope. And then the writings of St. Ignatius of Antioch, because we’ve got the really more minor Greek pathologists like Athenagoras or [crosstalk 00:12:26] the Seer. They’re not talking about church governance.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Well, I think the other source we have is later in the second century, but looking backwards [crosstalk 00:12:34] which would be the Roman lists compiled by Hegesippus in 160 and Irenaeus in 180, that they are tracing every Bishop from the time of the apostle, every Bishop of Rome from the time of the apostles down to their day with Eretherius who’s the 13th successor.
Trent Horn:
And people try to write that off like, oh, well, St. Irenaeus, he’s writing 150 years after the time of Jesus, but in your book, which you all should pick up, by the way, The Other Church Was a Catholic Church, I need my little royalty after that, [crosstalk 00:13:05] you make a good connection that that’s not that far. You use an example of Alice von Hildebrand who just recently passed away.
Joe Heschmeyer:
The example was applicable when the book came out and then for about four weeks after.
Trent Horn:
Yeah.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And I point out that the gap in time between the death of the apostles, Peter and Paul, and the time of the writing of [inaudible 00:13:27] in 180 is 114 years. And 114 years ago, the now late Alice von Hildebrand, who was still alive, her husband was in college and she has a book describing what it was like for Dietrich van Hildebrand at university. She didn’t of course know him then [crosstalk 00:13:45] but she married him and was still alive when the book came out. So 114 years, not that long.
Trent Horn:
Yeah.
Joe Heschmeyer:
The other example is just take the actual second century. We know the Apostle John dies in about 100. He has two students we know of Ignatius of Antioch, which we’ve already mentioned, and then Polycarp of Smyrna. Polycarp is born in 69 AD. He dies at the age of 86 in 155 AD. We know a lot of details of his martyrdom because accounts of his martyrdom are written down before 12 months is up.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
I mean, in honor of the one year and anniversary of his death, an account of his martyrdom is published, and he is a mentor of Irenaeus. So Irenaus learned Christianity from a student of the apostle. It’s [crosstalk 00:14:28] By the way, Irenaeus is the first person to tell us Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are the four gospels.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
So Protestants who say we can’t trust Irenaeus, he’s a liar, he’s making up details about the church of Rome, he’s either untrustworthy because he’s a total dupe and somehow was tricked into believing a 30 year old institution was 115 years old, or he’s a liar by trying to somehow convince the Romans that they’ve always had [crosstalk 00:14:52].
Trent Horn:
And I think this comes up, and for me, it really shows to burden of proof that I think that we should push back on. I would say the burden of proof is not on us proving that there was a first century Bishop of Rome, but why should I believe the critics? Most of their argument are very dubious arguments from silence, and arguments from silence are dangerous. I’m actually working on this in my current book, comparing the arguments between Protestants and atheists, that atheists do the same thing or liberal Protestants. They’ll say, well, if Jesus was really born of a virgin, why didn’t Paul say so?
Joe Heschmeyer:
Right.
Trent Horn:
Why didn’t mark say so? Mythesis will say, well, if Jesus really was a man who taught and not just a myth, why doesn’t Paul quote Jesus’ teaching about taxes in Roman 13 when he does say pay your taxes? I don’t know, but that doesn’t take away from the evidence I do have for these things.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And then we can even give at least a tentative response to that, [crosstalk 00:15:50] which is that they’re writing on scrolls and they’re writing with limitation. Now, anyone old enough listening to this who remembers T9 phones when you had to carefully push seven three times in order to get a T or whatever, you know your text messages were a lot shorter right than they are now, because it’s a lot easier to write.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
So right now you can write a 70,000 word book because it’s easy to type and correct mistakes when they come up and go back and edit and edit in chunks. When you’re writing by hand on a scroll, word economy is enormous. So the physical writings of the first and second century are much shorter than later books, and it’s not shocking why they are. And before the printing press, writings are shorter. So making an argument from silence that a guy who writes for three pages, doesn’t include every Christian teaching, [crosstalk 00:16:36] it’s a miserably weak argument.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. Now let’s talk about the arguments in silence that are made. So one would be that there is no Bishop at Rome because when St. Ignatius of Antioch writes to the church of Romans, a letter to the Romans, he doesn’t mention that there is a Bishop at Rome. He doesn’t discuss anything like that. And I want to bring it up, so we don’t forget it was a great analogy we were discussing before this episode was that certainly there is a single Bishop of churches in his time because he refers to himself [crosstalk 00:17:07] in the letter to the Bishop to Rome. Sorry, in the letter to the church at Rome, he refers himself as a Bishop. And in the other letters to the other churches in Asia minor, which is now modern day Turkey, he addresses that it is presumed there is a single Bishop in those churches. Oh, so the analogy you gave, I’ll let you explain it, would be about … let’s say someone like Dr. James Dobson was writing letters to seven Christian churches on marriage. So take this away.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Okay. So, if I can, just to spell it a little more of the argument from silence you’re talking about, [crosstalk 00:17:43] Father Raymond Brown is one of the most famous to offer this. He says to explain Ignatius’s insistence on and defense of the threefold order, one must posit that the single Bishop model appeared in Antioch and Asia Minor circa 100. So because bishops are mentioned in Ignatius, his other letters, therefore they must be new.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, because he’s insisting that you follow the Bishop, this must be a new thing he has to drill into people.
Joe Heschmeyer:
But then later in the same book, he argues that the signal failure of Ignatius to mention the single Bishop in his letter to the Romans, he goes on to say, makes it likely that the single Bishop structure did not come to Rome ’til circa 140 to 150. So if he mentions it or if he doesn’t mention it, either way, that proves Father Brown’s case of the papacy didn’t exist. And that’s a terrible argument from silence. It’s a heads, I win, tails, you lose argument.
Trent Horn:
Right, because here’s the thing, what we could ask Father Brown is, Father Brown, what would Ignatius have to say [crosstalk 00:18:35] or not say [crosstalk 00:18:37] for you to believe that this institution has been around for a long time? Because for me, I mean, he might say, well, if he said that we’ve received this from the apostles, well, you could just say he’s like Irenaeus and he’s been duped.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Right.
Trent Horn:
You could still come up with an excuse, even if he had something like that, so you’re right. So if he does say follow the Bishop, ah, he’s so insistent, it must be new, and he doesn’t tell the people at Rome to follow their Bishop, oh, that means there was no Bishop. We can’t have the third alternative. Well, it’s just presumed every church has a Bishop.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Exactly. And then the one thing it proves is that bishops already exist in at least six of the seven churches, [crosstalk 00:19:11] because he’s not telling him, you should really put a Bishop in place. He’s greeting their bishops by name.
Trent Horn:
So let’s imagine James stops and writes his letters on marriage.
Joe Heschmeyer:
So imagine he’s got six letters and to the first six families, he writes, obey your mom and dad. And in the seventh, he mentions in the letters, you don’t have a family without a mother and father or whatever. And then the seventh one, he just praises the family as a model family and maybe says something about the parents, but doesn’t go into any detail about the mother and father [crosstalk 00:19:39] explicitly.
Trent Horn:
Or let’s say this seventh letter he’s writing to the Jones’. And he says [crosstalk 00:19:42] he says, this is a family that I take lessons from.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yes.
Trent Horn:
I don’t give this family lessons. So let’s say he’s writing to seven families about what it means to have a Christian marriage. Six of them obey your mom and dad, there needs to be a mother and father. To the Jones’, hey, the Jones’, that is the family. I take lessons from them, people, but he never says that the Jones’ have a mother and father.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. He refers to this church. Ignatius, when he is speaking to the Romans, refers to them as a church that presides.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And you describes him as presiding in charity. He speaks to them as one that he looks up to rather than as one he feels like he can give unsolicited advice to.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And so it’s not shocking that he’s not going to give unsolicited advice in the same way that if you’re saying, I’m writing to you this great model family, that’s not the time that you’re probably going to launch into it, obey your mother and father, and do this, do that.
Trent Horn:
And it would be ridiculous to say in that example, oh, he wrote to the Jones’ they’re the model family. If someone said, if you notice in Dr. Dobson’s letter, he only uses the terms family and parents. Not once in the letter to the Jones’ does he say mother or father. [crosstalk 00:20:52] Therefore, the Jones’ were a sames sex couple [crosstalk 00:20:54] because otherwise, if they were this model family, you would say that makes no sense. He doesn’t have to say it because it’s presumed that they are the paradigmatic example, the model, just like when Ignatius writes to the church at Rome, if there are bishops in other churches and this is the best church, the one that leads the others, it’s going to be the same as the others, and there’s going to be a Bishop there.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And Ignatius mentions, as you alluded to, he mentions being the Bishop in the singular sense [crosstalk 00:21:22] twice in his letter. So he assumes they know that there’s one Bishop per city. And again, he holds him up as the model. But more than that, if you want to understand why does the letter to the Romans read differently, there are really, really obvious reasons.
Trent Horn:
Yes.
Joe Heschmeyer:
In the case of all the other letters, he’s writing to churches that he knew personally from his travels through Asia Minor in route to his martyrdom.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. You can look on a map, all of them, to the [inaudible 00:21:47] the Smyrnaeans, the Magnesians, the Ephesians, when you look at them on a map, you can put little pinpoint dots in and it’s all within a day’s journey.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. Yeah.
Trent Horn:
It’s all within a day’s journey of Antioch. And he’s the big, heavy hitter because he’s the Bishop of Antioch.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah, and these are probably people who had personally ministered to him [crosstalk 00:22:05] as he’s a prisoner because the Romans didn’t feed prisoners. They would have other people come and take care of prisoners.
Trent Horn:
For a background for everyone, the letters of St. Ignatius of Antioch, they were written while he was being escorted to Rome for his martyrdom. And so he was writing letters during this time. And the Romans, like you say, they’re not going to take care of you. Oh, you have visitors? They can give you bread.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Right.
Trent Horn:
And you can give them letters at that time.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And so that’s why he’s in a position where he can give them advice, because he knows them. He knows them intimately. And the same way that if you’re writing letters to friends and family, you might give them advice on their current situation that you wouldn’t give unsolicited to people you don’t know. To the Romans, he doesn’t know them. The reason he’s writing to them is not to give them pastoral counsel. It’s explicitly to ask him not to interfere in his martyrdom and not to risk their own life trying to save him from martyr.
Trent Horn:
And I would say for me, another reason, because people will say, oh, well, why doesn’t he mention the Bishop of Rome by name? The fact that he doesn’t mention the Bishop of Rome by name means there was no Bishop of Rome. Oh, well that’s an interesting argument. But Ignatius doesn’t mention any Christian by name in the church of Rome.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Right.
Trent Horn:
Logically, there must have been no Christians [crosstalk 00:23:14] in Rome.
Joe Heschmeyer:
He doesn’t mention deacons. He doesn’t mention presbyters. We might as well argue those didn’t exist either. The argument from silence is very selectively applied here.
Trent Horn:
It makes sense that he’s not going to mention the names of these people. In the letter to the Romans, Ignatius only mentions Croccus, someone who is traveling with him, who was there in Asia Minor. If this letter is intercepted, he’s not going to give the Romans the names of the prominent Christians in the city of Rome. So yeah, I think these arguments from silence, we’re on the wrong burden of proof here. I want to see the other side make that demonstration. And I think the arguments are pretty weak. So why don’t you tie it together? [crosstalk 00:23:52]
Joe Heschmeyer:
I’d like to maybe lay out the argument in the opposite direction on the argument for silence, if I may [crosstalk 00:23:56] because father McGuckian has a piece from 2005 [crosstalk 00:24:00] in New Blackfriars where he points out that the notion of a church in … excuse me, the notion church choosing its church order is unheard of in Christian tradition until the [crosstalk 00:24:09] sixteenth century.
Trent Horn:
So this is our argument from silence. [crosstalk 00:24:12]. Me likey, me likey.
Joe Heschmeyer:
The idea that a church just chooses to change its structure [crosstalk 00:24:15] is totally unheard of. And if you think about it, it would be insanely disruptive and you would find a lot of evidence of that disruption. If you went into a Baptist church and said, from now on I’m the sole leader of this church, people are going to have something to say about that.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Or you just say, well, this was this nice Roman democracy, I’m going to replace it with a single Caesar, people are going to have something to say, pro or con [crosstalk 00:24:39] or just observing the change. There’s zero evidence of the change.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
That’s a really remarkable lack of evidence, but they’re literally arguing from no evidence that a massive revolution happened. It’s like, oh, we don’t have any evidence of this five year period in French history. They must have gotten rid of the government and installed a dictatorship. That’d be an insane conclusion to go to from the silence.
Trent Horn:
But that’s what we’re arguing for, that these critics, including some Catholic scholars will argue, well, what happened in the early church is that it was originally a council of elders. Some will say council of elders, some will just say it was just straight, more Protestants that are not as scholarly. It was just democratized household churches. Others say, well, there were councils of elders and priests, but not single Bishop [inaudible 00:25:21] much later. Well, then there had to be a change. Everyone’s like, go to church. Who’s this Bishop? What, we have a Bishop? What’s going on now? This like, oh, well, eventually, there would be this massive disruption. You would think there would be people who would be for and against this, and it would be a source of controversy, but we can say, well, well, no, there is no evidence of that controversy. And we could take the critic’s own argument from silence to say that shows there was no controversy, [crosstalk 00:25:47] because there was a single leadership structure prevailing the church during this time period.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Leon Morris, in the evangelical dictionary of theology, makes just this argument.
Trent Horn:
Wow.
Joe Heschmeyer:
He says nowhere is there evidence of a violent struggle as would be natural if a divinely ordained congregationalism or Presbyterianism were overthrown, because that’s an important point. If the apostle set this structure up and you, some random guy came along and scrapped it, wouldn’t one or two faithful Christians … not just the normal politics of the thing of like [crosstalk 00:26:14] I was leading and you usurped my power, but you usurped Jesus.
Trent Horn:
Look at the strife that took place at the end of the second century over the quartodecimam controversy.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yes.
Trent Horn:
That is the controversy about when to celebrate Passover. Do we use the Jewish lunar calendar or do we celebrate it according to the liturgical calendar and so it always falls on a Sunday? And that was a huge deal [crosstalk 00:26:37] when Pope Victor tried to make it uniform and people trying to celebrate it, the dispute and disagreement between the two camps. And that’s just over the dating of a liturgical feast, not [crosstalk 00:26:48] how we run the church.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And one that there had clearly been a diversity in that they knew about it. The second century Christians knew that the churches established by Philip and John went by the Jewish calendar. The other 10 apostles churches went by the Roman calendar.
Trent Horn:
People knew about this dispute for a long time and yet were supposed to believe there would’ve been this heavily disputed change from congregational worship or from a council of priests to a Bishop. And yet there’s no record of anyone talking about this change ever.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And if they did feel free to change structures, it’s really remarkable that the hundreds of churches for which we ever records of by the early third century, by the early two hundreds, all of them have the exact same structure.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Isn’t that weird? If every country has the ability to choose its own system of governance, they don’t all have the same one.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
That’s weird. That’s more or less what you would expect. But imagine if they all had the identical structures. That would make you think maybe they don’t feel free to pick and choose [crosstalk 00:27:44].
Trent Horn:
Because they’re receiving a leadership structure, a hierarchy sacred order in Greek hierarchy that is part of the deposit of faith itself that was given by the apostles.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And Pope Clement, tying this back to the start of the conversation, [crosstalk 00:27:57] in 96 describes this as something that they receive from the apostles. In other words, he explicitly disclaims the idea this is something they or create or adapt.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
But something they received. It’s the same kind of way that Irenaeus and Hegesippus talk about it later. The apostles established this and it comes down.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Not we had a committee meeting, we decided this would be the best structure for our church. So these scholars are suggesting something that has no historical precedent prior to the reformation and is totally attached from lived experience and reality. It’s an otherworldly world they’re describing in which people just say, oh, okay, well, if you want to scrap the biblical church for a new one, we won’t complain or write about it or notice it.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
We’ll just go on our merry way. It’s unreal. It’s it is very hard when you actually try to prove the emergent case [crosstalk 00:28:45] to find any scrap of historical evidence that couldn’t be better explained [crosstalk 00:28:51] in the Catholic view.
Trent Horn:
Man, this is fun.
Joe Heschmeyer:
It’s so fun to come back [crosstalk 00:28:55] and just hang out. We’re going to have to bat this around a little bit more. Definitely have you back on the show soon, but until we do that, I’m going to recommend there’s so much more we could have talked about and a lot more of other related subjects. Your book, The Early Church Was the Catholic Church, where can people get a copy of that?
Trent Horn:
Yeah, it’s on sale right now. You can do bulk sales, even for as cheap as $3 a book from shop.catholic.com, [inaudible 00:29:19] shop. You can also get it from your local Catholic bookstore or Amazon or wherever you buy Catholic books.
Joe Heschmeyer:
I like it. Mr. Joe Heschmeyer, thank you so much for being here today. Everyone, thank you so much for listening. Check out Joe’s book. Also, I have a new course on the Catholic Answer School of Apologetics, schoolofapologetics.com, a course on arguing about abortion. It’ll equip you to be, pro-life, definitely something you want to check out, but thank you guys so much. I hope you all have a very blessed day.
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