Roland Minnerath on Stephen's Dispute with Cyprian and Firmilian

Commenting on Pope Stephen’s dispute with the Cyprian and Firmilian, and how such disproves the later Catholic claims, dogmatised at Vatican I in 1870, about the authority of the bishop of Rome, one Eastern Orthodox scholar wrote:

The figure of Peter was often interpreted by ecclesiastical writers in a mystical sense. So Origen says that each believer who proclaims the true faith, even true gnostic, bears the name of Peter (Commentary on Matthew XII, 14, where petra is Christ himself). Until Pope Stephen (254-57), there is no Roman bishop claiming to exercise the Petrine office in the church. What we know about his claim is induced from the reaction of his opponents. Stephen pretended to rally all the churches to the practice of the Roman church in matters of readmission of heretics and schismatics, founding his intervention on the words of Matthew 16:18. The pretension of Stephen was harshly rebuked by both Cyprian and Firmilian of Caesarea in Cappadocia. The latter protests that Stephen declares himself to have succeeded in the “cathedra Petri” and to occupy his “locus” (Cyprian, Ep. 75,17). Stephen seems to have drawn the consequences of Cyprian’s first version of De unitate 4. As for Firmilian, he must have been upset by the fact that Stephen planned to excommunicate the Asian churches. The synod of Carthage of 256 rejected such a pretension as coming from one who claims to be “the bishop of the bishops.” Firmilian adds that no bishop should be judged by another bishop, each one being accountable only to God (cf. Cyprian, Ep. 72,3,2). There seems to come quite a clash between the Roman and the African-Oriental interpretation of the Petrine character of the see of Rome. Up to our own times, the issue raised by this controversy would receive different answers. (Roland Minnerath, “The Petrine Ministry in the Early Patristic Tradition” in James F. Puglisi, ed. How Can the Petrine Ministry Be a Service to the Unity of the Universal Church? [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2010], 34-48, here, p. 38)