Audio only:
Joe Heschmeyer addresses arguments against the Papacy made from the writings of St. Ignatius of Antioch.
Transcription:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschmeyer. I want to explore an argument today that I’ve heard from both Protestant apologists and from some skeptical Catholic scholars against the papa seat, an argument I’m going to call the Ignatian argument in honor of Saint Ignatius of Antioch. It goes something like this. Number one Catholics claim. There’s been this continual line of Pope bishops of Rome from St. Peter down to Pope Francis in the present day. Number two, that’s impossible since there wasn’t even a bishop of Rome until at least the mid one hundreds, the mid second century. And number three, we can know that because Saint Ignatius, who normally mentions bishops, doesn’t say anything about a bishop of Rome and his letter to Rome. So here are a few different versions of that argument. I’m going to start with Dr. Jerry Walls presenting this argument. Really an argument from silence.
CLIP:
But here’s what’s fascinating. All of these 40 or so some references to the bishop and his importance in his authority occur in just six of the letters. There’s only one of them where you do not have a mention of a bishop. And again, it’s very striking and this is one of the pieces of evidence that historians find very striking. The one, the letter written to Rome is the one where there’s no bishop mentioned.
Joe:
Now, when walls cites to scholars out there and historians, I think he has in mind this group of skeptical Catholic scholars and one German Protestant theologian, Peter Lampe. So the Catholic scholars, Raymond Brown, JP Meyer, eman Duffy, and Robert Eno, 20th century skeptics. And then Eman Duffy is still a modern day scholar as well, who does really good medieval work, by the way. But you’ll find variations of this in popular Protestant apologetics as well. So both Dr. Jordan Cooper and Dr. Gavin Orland present a version of this argument. Although in their defense, I think they both realize that maybe this argument isn’t the strongest. They both hedge it a little bit, but they seem to realize its weakness, but they make the argument nevertheless. So you will hear this argument from folks on both the Catholic and Protestant side against the historicity of the papacy.
CLIP:
But we do have to reckon with the fact that by the mid second century, the majority of areas in the church, according to St. Ignatius have an episcopate. The majority of areas in the church have a bishop. It doesn’t seem to be the case in Rome, but I don’t know specifically because we don’t have that much from that time. But I say it doesn’t seem to be the case in Rome because Ignatius doesn’t mention a bishop in Rome and he does in other areas. So it may have taken a little longer in Rome, but it’s hard to put the pieces together. We don’t have that much evidence.
But since the topic of this video is, is there a bishop in Rome, we notice that he doesn’t mention any bishop in Rome. His letter to the church in Rome doesn’t mention any bishop there. Now maybe there’s a explanation for that. You don’t want to put too much just on that fact alone. But looking at that in combination with everything else thus far, there’s just no mention anywhere of a single bishop ruling over the Roman church in the first century or early second century evidence. So it doesn’t mean there wasn’t one. It means if you believe that there was a single bishop over the church in Rome in the first century, you’ll believe that based upon the later evidence.
Joe:
Now as we’re going to see Gavin’s last claim, there isn’t actually true. You don’t have to look at late second century evidence. You don’t have to look at the late one hundreds to see that there’s a bishop of Rome. It is actually enough to work from the letters of Ignatius of Antioch himself. But to do that, you have to read them in context. Before I get there, I want to cite directly from the book that I think is behind a lot of this thinking because Raymond Brown and JP Meyer and their book, Antioch and Rome talk about this and it’s striking the way they argue it. So for instance, Raymond Brown points out citing Meyer in the other half of the book that to explain Ignatius’s insistence on in defense of the threefold order, meaning that there’s Bishop presbyters or elders, what we now call priests and deacons, that’s the threefold order that to explain Ignatius’s insistence on in defense of the threefold order, one must posit that the single bishop model appeared in Antioch and Asia Minor CIR 100.
So you have to imagine, in other words that in these six letters, the reason Ignatius stresses that you should obey the bishop is because it’s a new thing that’s shown up around eight years earlier. Now, I just want to kind of highlight that argument and say, is that really a strong argument? If you say, Hey, I’m going to be on vacation, obey your parents, or I’m going to be on vacation, I’m leaving this person in charge, make sure you listen to them while I’m out of the office. Does that mean this is a new structure? People aren’t used to though I didn’t have parents before, and so you have to explain parents to me. That’s why you’re saying, I’m not going to be here. Obey your parents. No, it doesn’t have to be that at all. Likewise, as we’re going to see Ignatius is on his way to be martyred, and as he’s leaving tells the Christians in the places that he meets to obey their bishop.
You don’t have to believe this is a novelty. This could be something going all the way back to the apostles. And it’s still good to remember. It’s good to remind Christians today, obey your bishop. That doesn’t mean it’s a newfangled thing, but notice, so if you mention the bishop, that makes it sound like maybe a new thing that has to be defended. But then Raymond Brown is going to say that the failure of Ignatius to mention the single bishop in his letter to the Romans makes it likely that there wasn’t a single bishop yet, and that therefore the single bishop structure didn’t show up in Rome until around one 40 to one 50. Now, I want to just highlight this is a heads eye win tails. You lose argument if Ignatius mentions a bishop, it sounds like. Okay, well then bishops must be new. If Ignatius doesn’t mention a bishop, they’re so new they haven’t even shown up yet.
There’s no room in that bifurcated way of reading the evidence to account for the fact that maybe bishops are old, maybe there had already been bishops for a long time before Ignatius, because neither of the ways he’s willing to view the evidence allows that whether you mention it or not, equally proves his case that bishops are a novelty. Meyer is a little more careful, I think in his half of the book, he points out that Ignatius actually presupposes he’s not defending the presence of a monarchical bishop. He’s presupposing it and therefore that seems like it’s been around for a while. But he nevertheless says he’s silent on the subject when addressing the Church of Rome. That is we’re going to see is not actually true, but we’re going to get into that because Amon Duffy makes the same argument in his book, saints and Sinners, and again, I like Duffy’s stripping of the altars, but when he talks about the early church, he’s off on a lot of things.
He’s skeptical of a lot of church history, and he makes this argument. He points out correctly that the letters of Ignatius are written when he’s en route to be martyred around the year 1 0 7, and that they’re written largely to other churches, appealing to them to unite around their bishops. But then he says his letter to the Roman Church, however, says nothing, whatever about bishops, a strong indication that the office had not yet emerged at Rome. Well, that is just flatly untrue. Like if the question is, are bishops mentioned in Ignatius’s letter to the Romans, the answer is yes. Twice. Did Saint Ignatius think Rome didn’t have a bishop? Absolutely not. Here’s how we can prove it first. He does mention bishops twice in chapter two of his letter to the Romans. You can read it for yourself. He asks him to pray to God and praise that God has deemed me the bishop of Syria worthy to be sent from the east to the west.
Remember, he’s the bishop of Antioch in Syria. He’s over all of the Christians in Syria and he’s being sent west to Rome and he’s asking them to express gratitude to God that he gets to go to Rome and that he gets to be martyred. That’s the context. But he takes for granted that they know what the phrase the bishop of Syria means. He takes for granted that monarchical bishops are something that Romans are accustomed to. If the argument is an argument from silence, there’s not even silence. He mentions bishops later on in chapter nine. He refers to himself as Bishop again. He says to them, remember in your prayers the church in Syria, which now has God for its shepherd instead of me. So he takes for granted that they know there’s only one bishop. He says, Jesus Christ alone will oversee it. Now, remember Episcopal, the Greek word for bishop is literally overseer.
So the word he’s using here is the verb form of bishop. So in English, we could roughly say Jesus Christ alone will bishop it. It doesn’t really work. We don’t have bishop as a verb, but that’s what he’s saying. He’s clearly referring to the office of Bishop now being vacant upon his imminent death and that Christ alone will be their bishop. So it’s just not true that he doesn’t mention bishops. He mentions himself as Bishop twice. Now, it’s true. He doesn’t mention who the Bishop of Rome is. So then we could ask, well, does he think that they have this threefold structure? And the answer is absolutely he does. How do we know that? Because in his letter to the Ephesians, he explicitly says that you need the threefold structure In order to be a church, you need to have the threefold structure of Bishop Presbyter deacon.
And he says, apart from these, there is no church concerning all this. I’m persuaded that you’re of the same opinion. And then when he greets the Church of Rome, what does he say to them? He says, Ignatius, who’s also called in the fors to the church, which has obtained mercy through the majesty of the most high father in Jesus Christ, has only begotten son through church, which is beloved and enlightened by the will of him. So it goes on from there. He talks about how they preside in love and presiding 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 love and which presides over love, et cetera. But the point there is he acknowledges them twice as a church and a church presiding over Christianity, over love, right?
This is the presiding church that the language of governance is used for the Roman Church, and it is called a church twice right there in the introduction. Now that matters because we know for Ignatius that term means something concrete. He doesn’t mean church in the loose way. Some protestants mean it as just a gathering of believers. He explicitly means church in the threefold structure, that if you don’t have that, you don’t have a church. He says that directly. So lemme give you an analogy. Let’s say you took an argument from silence on somebody like Dr. James Dobson. If you’re familiar with him, he was a long time head of focus on the family. He did a lot of stuff on family. So mothers and fathers are important, the two parent, family, et cetera. Let’s say you’re going through all these letters. You see all these letters saying you need to have a mom and dad, marriages between a man and a woman, father, mother, all this stuff.
And then let’s say you come to one of his letters and it says, Smith family, I love you guys. You’re a wonderful family. Keep listening to your parents. But it doesn’t say father and mother, would you reasonably conclude from this? Aha, the Smith must be led by a Sam sax couple must be two men or two women, because otherwise he would’ve mentioned father and mother, like of course not. That’s not just an argument from silence. That’s an argument from silence that contradicts everything else that he’s said Positively. He’s very clear that when he talks about family, it has this meaning. And therefore, if you read into the silence the opposite of what he says, that is a bad reading from silence. It would be like taking every time someone doesn’t mention the divinity of Christ and says, I guess he denies the divinity of Christ now. No, it doesn’t make any sense. Why would you presuppose the opposite of what someone’s affirmed numerous times? If someone has said over and over again, you need to have this three-tiered structure of the church, and then in one letter doesn’t mention it explicitly, why would you take that as a renunciation when he still calls them a church? So the fact this is an argument from silence and a weak one, a contradictory one, an incoherent one. Cameron Bertuzzi actually asked Jerry Walls about this a little bit.
CLIP:
I kind of worry that that’s a kind of argument from silence.
Exactly. And it’s highly speculative and no evidence, whatever to support other than your a priori dogmatic commitment to papal theology.
Well, no, I was saying that the argument that you gave about iron Aris not including letters to bishop or including bishop’s names and everything in his letter to Rome, that kind of sounds like an argument from silence.
How so? I’m not sure I’m getting it. So he mentions bishops in every other letter. He’s almost obsessed with the authority of the bishop. It’s like 40 some references scattered throughout these letters. But when he writes to Rome where supposedly the bishop of bishops lives, he doesn’t mention a bishop.
Joe:
Now you’ll notice walls and trying to explain why it’s not an argument from silence literally just describes what an argument from silence is. Oh, they mentioned it elsewhere, but not here. And he’s reading the not here as a renunciation rather than, well, than read that consistent with all the other times he did affirm it. So nevertheless, I do want to acknowledge one thing because if you’ve read the seven letters of Ignatius, you’ll certainly notice that the letter to the Romans is just different. It’s a very different letter in its content and its style and everything else. Now that doesn’t prove that there’s no bishop. In fact, I might even point out while bishops are mentioned, presbyters and deacons aren’t, and nobody is saying, therefore, presbyters and deacons didn’t exist at Rome. So the argument from silence isn’t even being applied consistently. Bishops, which are mentioned, he must not know, therefore they must not be in Rome.
Presbyters and deacons aren’t mentioned, therefore they must be there. It’s a totally backwards kind of argument. But why then does he approach the Roman church so differently? And to understand that, you need to know a little bit of context about the letters. So as I mentioned, they’re being written as he’s going from Antioch and Syria to Rome to be martyred. And along the way, the Romans had this practice where they would give very little food to prisoners. OF Robinson in his book, penal Practice and penal policy in Ancient Rome says there were rations, but they were minimal for friends and family were expected to supply prisoners wants. There seemed to have been few visiting restrictions. He mentions that later on this changes somewhat under Christian influence, perhaps where the prison conditions began to improve. But there’s a reason why Jesus at the last judgment asked if you visited the imprisoned, because if you didn’t, they would go hungry.
And this is just a context people don’t get. So why that matters is as he’s going from Antioch to Rome, Ignatius is sort of on a farewell tour. The other Christians are able to come to him. So as he’s going through places like Philadelphia, magnesia, trs, Ephesus, et cetera, he’s meeting the Christians there. And then after he leaves, he writes letters to them, the people he’s already met, the people he now knows who took care of him in his captivity. He is now saluting, greeting, and then leaving sort of final instructions for that explains six of the letters. Five of them are to churches that administered to him. One of them is to the bishop of one of those churches, St. Polycarp, who seems to be a friend of his. And then the last one, the one that’s the odd man out is a letter to the Romans.
So that’s an important context. In six of the seven letters, he personally knows the people that he’s talking to and is giving them personal advice and counsel, much of which insists of listen to your bishop. And you get a sense of the intimacy of the letter. For instance, in the letter to the magnesium, he names the bishop and the presbyters and the deacons. In the letter to Polycarp, he greets Polycarp, who is the bishop. He clearly doesn’t just know that bishops exist. He knows who the bishops are because he knows these communities personally. But the letter to the Romans is totally different. He doesn’t know the Romans personally. He’s pretty explicit about that. He acknowledges that he’s going to be coming from the east to the west. This is clearly the first time he’s going to be in Rome. And the whole point of the letter, I know you guys personally, let me give you spiritual counsel.
The point of the letter is, please don’t intervene to stop my martyrdom. And so it’s entirely different in tone and structure and content because it’s a different type of letter. And this is very clear in the passage chapter two of letter to the Romans that I alluded to before. He says, pray then do not seek to confer any greater favor upon me then that I be sacrificed to God while the altar is still prepared. In other words, he knows he’s on his way to be martyred for Christ. And he’s asking the Romans, who he doesn’t yet know, but who he has a good word of mouth, experience of reputation. Of course, he’s not saying, let me tell you what to do. All he’s doing is making this request that they not interfere in his martyrdom and that they continue to pray for his church in Syria after he’s martyred.
So for all those reasons, people making the Ignatian argument, this is worse than an argument from silence. Because if he’s silent on all three of the tiers of the three orders, why would we assume therefore the top tier doesn’t exist? And the bottom two tiers do. But it’s worse than an argument from silence. He’s not actually silent on the top tier. And it’s worse than an argument from silence because we know why this one reads differently than the other ones. And we also know that the fact that he’s calling them a church points to the fact in Ignatius’s own theology that they must have had a bishop. So for all those reasons, not only do Ignatius’s letters not disprove the early bishop of Rome, I think we can make a strong case that they prove there have been an early bishop of Rome, even if it was one Ignatius had not yet met. For Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.