Commenting on texts that some Catholic defenders of Roman/Papal Primacy cite from Irenaeus and Cyprian, Karl Morrison, then-professor of Medieval History at the University of Chicago, wrote:
Thus far, we have followed one school of interpretation by describing Sts. Irenaeus and Cyprian as representatives of the doctrine of collegiate episcopacy. Some scholars, however, have found in the works of each of these authors one passage which they interpret to endorse the contrary doctrine of papal monarchy, and we must digress briefly to refer to those passages. In his treatise, Against Heresies (III, 3, 1ff) Irenaeus argued that the truth of orthodox doctrine was attested by its antiquity, which clearly showed heretical doctrines to be recent inventions, quite apart from the original teachings of Christ and the Apostles. He referred in his argument to the episcopal succession in Rome. St. Peter was a co-founder of the Roman See, though not the first bishop; he and St Paul committed the episcopate to Linus. Clement succeeded Linus; as an immediate disciple of the Apostles, he had occasion to state the apostolic teaching in the letters which he sent to settle a dispute in the church at Corinth. Irenaeus then mentioned by name each Roman bishop down to Eleutherius, his contemporary, and concluded with the crucial passage which may be translated as follows: “In this order, and by this succession, the ecclesiastical tradition from the Apostles, and the preaching of the truth, have come down to us. And this is the most abundant proof that there is one and the same vivifying faith which has been preserved in the Church from the Apostles until now, and handed down in truth” (III, 3, 3).
Scholars who have thought this section the earliest assertion of papal supremacy have so argued because in their view St. Irenaeus seems to say that the faith of the whole Church has been preserved in the Roman succession, and thus, by implication, that the faith of the Roman Church, or even more the faith of the Roman bishops, is the canon of orthodoxy. This interpretation, however, leaves out of account two factors: the technical question of manuscript tradition and the context of Irenaeus’s remarks. Irenaeus wrote Against Heresies in Greek, but soon afterwards a Latin translation of it appeared which, as far as we can tell, was not consistently faithful to the original text. The Greek text only survives in fragments; the translation alone preserves large sections of the treatise. One such section is the passage in question. Any translation of this passage must do violence to the text as it stands. The confused syntax in the critical statement indicates that the translator did not accurately understand Irenaeus’s text, or that the translation itself has become garbled. In either case, the Latin version as it stands does not represent exactly Irenaeus’s thought. Furthermore, the context of the section argues strongly against the strict Romanist interpretations; for Irenaeus continued in the section immediately following the one in question to eulogize Polycarp of Smyrna as a bishop who had learned his doctrine from the Apostles themselves and ardently transmitted it, and whose testimony was handed down by the churches of Asia and by the men who succeeded him, and to recall that “the church in Ephesus, founded by Paul, and having John remaining among them permanently until the times of Trajan, is a true witness of the tradition of the Apostles” (III, 3, 4) Whatever his meaning in citing the Roman episcopal succession, Irenaeus clearly did not intend to designate the Roman See as the exclusive repository of true doctrine, or as anything other than a see which cherished the heritage of faith which it shared with other apostolic churches such as Smyrna and Ephesus.
The disputed passage by St Cyprian likewise presents textual difficulties. Indeed, these remarks in Cyprian’s On the Unity of the Catholic Church (c. 4) occur in three independent readings. One of which exalts the Roman pre-eminence with the classic doctrine of Petrine primacy, the second emphasizing the equality of the Apostles, and the third, much the shortest, indicating without elaboration the unity of the Church prefigured in the unity of the Apostles. This diversity of texts, all of which occur in authentic manuscript traditions, has been the source of much partisan contention. It seems unlikely that, as some extreme Protestant scholars have maintained, the affirmation of Petrine primacy was a willful falsification by “Romish editors.” The reliability of the manuscript traditions supporting each of the versions indicates that the three recensions occurred very early, and that they may indeed have been executed by Cyprian himself. But if the problem of authenticity can be clarified by assuming that the different readings represent three quite sharp and important changes in Cyprian’s through, the problem remains of establishing their sequence. If Cyprian were the author of all three versions, which one states his mature judgment?
The crux of the dispute is whether Cyprian though the unity of the Church abided first in St. Peter as the Prince of the Apostles, and later in his see, or first in the whole college of the Apostles and afterwards in the episcopacy as a whole. Scholars who favor the most fully developed statement of Petrine primacy cite in support of their view another passage in a latter of the Father. There, discussing the appeal of some heretics to Rome, he wrote: “After such things as these, moreover, they still dare—a false bishop having been appointed for them by heretics—to set sail and to bear letters from schismatic and profane persons to the throne of Peter, and to the chief church whence priestly unity takes its source, and not to consider that these were the Romans whose faith was praised in the teaching of the Apostle, to whom faithfulness could have no access” (Ep. 59, 14). But, in this letter to Pope Cornelius, Cyprian continued to deny that the Bishop of Rome could rightly judge the case appealed to him on the principle that every bishop must judge definitely the cases which arose in his see, and that once his judgment had been given there could be no appeal. The appropriate bishops had already decided the case, and Cyprian admonished Cornelius to have nothing to do with the appellants. In describing Rome as “the chief church whence priestly unity takes its source,” Cyprian consequently seems to have meant no more than the man he called his “master” meant in a similar passage. Tertullian once wrote of Rome as the see whence apostolic authority had come to the hands of North Africans (De praescr. haer., 36; Corp. Christ., ser. Lat., 1, 216f), but in that passage, he also referred to Corinth, Philippi, Thessaloniki, and Ephesus, all “apostolic churches, where the very thrones of the Apostles preside and their own authentic writings are read, uttering the voice and representing the face of each of them severally.” Tertullian assigned no administrative headship to these apostolic sees, and in denying Rome adjudication in North African matters, Cyprian indicates that he was of the same mind. Indeed, the meaning of the controverted passage in On the Unity of the Catholic Church may be indicated by the chapter which immediately follows it, in which Cyprian explicitly stated his doctrine that the unity of the Church stood in the unity of the college of bishops.
The passages by Sts. Irenaeus and Cyprian which are sometimes adduced as testimonies to Roman primacy are, therefore, textually unclear, and their elucidation is consequently uncertain. The context of these two chapters, the burden of other works by the same authors not clouded with textual difficulties, and the policies which the two bishops followed in their official actions all indicate that in their different ways they subscribed not to the Petrine theories read into these passages, but to the doctrine of episcopal collegiality. (Karl F. Morrison, Tradition and Authority in the Western Church 300-1140 [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969], 24-27)
