Questioning the historical record of apostolic succession? Jimmy Akin explores the challenges and evidence for tracing the lineage of Catholic bishops back to the apostles. He discusses the fragmentary nature of early Church records and the importance of “snapshots” documenting ordinations. Discover the safeguards within the ordination process that ensure the validity of apostolic succession.
Transcript:
Sophia is in Minnesota listening on our website, Catholic.com. Sophia, go ahead with your question for Jimmy.
Hi, Jimmy. Thank you very much. I, basically, I was, I’ve been thinking a lot about apostolic succession, and a lot of the defense for apostolic succession comes from the writings of the church fathers, which makes a lot of sense. But I was kind of wondering if there is like an actual line kind of recorded somewhere, and if there isn’t, are there like fragments of that line recorded somewhere?
So there’s, to my knowledge, there is not a single comprehensive list map in all of the world’s bishops, all the way back to the apostles.
There is, and this is easily available on a website, I believe the website is Catholicclergy.com, although I could be mistaken about that. But there is a registry within the Catholic church that traces the lineage of all current bishops back several hundred years. And I know that before that, we also have other indicators of who ordain, which bishop ordain who as another bishop. But it’s not, it’s not a complete list.
Also, the process has failsafes built into it. So it’s not just one bishop lays hands on you if you’re going to be consecrated to bishop. It’s typically at least three. So even if there was a danger that one bishop might have been invalidly ordained, the other two bishops putting hands on you will secure your ordination as a bishop. And so even though we don’t have, to my knowledge, a list going all the way back to the apostles for every single bishop, it is morally certain that that that we do have lines that go all the way back to the apostles.
The problem is, we just don’t have good records in the earliest history of the church. The amount of surviving literature from like the second century is very sparse. A lot of it didn’t get written down and a lot of it that did get written down has not survived the ages. But even then, we do have records of like principal sees where like for the bishop of Rome, this guy succeeded this guy who succeeded this guy.
So we do have records from that time and they indicate the substantial integrity of the lines of apostolic succession.
Okay, so just so that I understand, I might be repeating what you just said, but I just want to make sure I understand that there’s going to be like little snapshots of the apostolic line technique. Like, we’ll find little snapshots that we uncover, but we just don’t have it just because it was so long ago, basically. Yeah, and then after a certain point in history, like no later than the, I forget the 15 or 1600s, we’ve got the entirety of it for all the lines of bishops. So the defense of the earliest, the line, especially in the early church will be from like our knowledge of how the practice of ordination is, right?
Yeah, I mean, we do have records of them talking about ordination and saying this is what we do and this is how we do it. When it goes back to the apostles, we just don’t have all the links in the chain documented, but we have them saying this is what’s going on and it goes back to the apostles.
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