Michael
Mullins, a Roman Catholic priest and biblical scholar (he was my undergraduate
thesis supervisor in Maynooth—the nicest lecturer I had in my years there, too)
wrote a very interesting book on the life of Christians in first century Rome.
In this work, he touches upon the ecclesiology of the Church of Rome as seen in
First Clement and related texts, showing that the monarchical episcopate was not part of the earliest ecclesiology
thereof:
In the case of the church in Rome . . . it is
obvious that the earliest history of the church in the city is obscure and that
one cannot speak of its having a major apostolic founder such as Paul was for
Ephesus or Corinth. The study of the organisation, especially in relation to
its teaching roles, influences and personnel is therefore exceedingly difficult
until one comes to St Paul’s Letter to the Romans. From then on, certain
information about the organisation can be gleaned from the writings connected
with Rome from the time of Paul’s Letter to the Romans until the time of the
Letter to the Romans by Ignatius of Antioch. St Paul’s Letter appeals neither
to the memory of a founding apostle, nor to any specific authority within the
Roman Church. Ignatius of Antioch makes no appeal to the authority of a bishop
in Rome, which is very striking in the light of his frequent appeals to the
role of the bishop in his other letters and the great importance he attaches to
the role. However, as an examination of the Roman documents will show, several
letters emerge from the city claiming to speak with the authority of Peter and
Paul, not however, drawing on their authority as “institutional” but as
apostolic (and martyr) figures and the church of Rom as such can speak through
Clement with the authority of her apostles and martyrs.
The Letter of Clement to Corinth shows the
emergence of the figure of Clement as spokesman/correspondent for the church.
But exactly when did a single bishop emerge in Rome? The Letter of Clement does
not explicitly claim to come from Clement as Bishop of Rome but from the Church
of Rome as such. It is quite in keeping with the letter and its claims to hold
that Clement is “spokesman/correspondent” of the presbyters. It may be that
here we have the partly emerged role of single bishop. Baus stresses this
point:
Even Clement of Rome was too much of a
background figure, as compared with the Roman Church as such, to make it
possible for us to attribute to him, on the strength of his epistle to the
church of Corinth, a right to admonish . . . Rather was it the Roman
congregation as such that made a claim exceeding the limits of brotherly
solidarity. There are no grounds for supposing that Rome’s advice had been
asked for; the Roman letter seeks to re-establish peace by admonition and
counsel, though sometimes its language takes on a more decisive, almost
threatening tone that seems to expect obedience (Baus, K., From the Apostolic Community to Constantine, Handbook of Church
history, Vol I [ed. H. Jedin and J. Dolan], ET, London: Burns and Oates, 1965,
152).
While leaving the role of Clement himself in
Rome undefined, Baus thus emphasises an important point. The bishop, or
spokesman for the presbyters in Rome, was not seen as a clearly defined
authority in himself as yet. This is borne out, as noted above, by the failure
of Ignatius, the champion of the bishop’s role in the community, to mention the
bishop in Rome. It is further borne out by the fact that the Roan document, The Shepherd of Hermas, has ‘bishops’
and ‘presbyters’ in the plural. What is clear however, is that by the end of
the first century the Roman church, as such, was emerging as leader and
exercising a primacy. Eusebius says of Clement that he wrote “in the name of
the Roman church”. The destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple removed the
presence of the parent community from both Judaism and Christianity and opened
the way for the emergency of another “mother church”. Rome was an excellent
candidate for the role as it boasted the ultimate witness of both the leader of
the apostles and the apostle of the gentiles, quickly “canonising” them as the
founders of the Roman church. It also preserved their authentic voices in the
Petrine and Pauline circles and in these the authority of the “founders”
continued as they spoke and wrote in their names. Furthermore, the position of
Rome as capital of the empire, to which all roads lead, which was the centre of
an excellent communication system, and where the levers of power were located,
ensured the importance of the community living there in the eyes of the
communities spread throughout the Roman world. Rome therefore had a double
development of church organisation – her internal development and her
relationship with the other churches.
To develop this strong sense of identity as a
Roman church speaking with the authority of the apostolic “founders” means that
the various elements had at least a loose overall organisation binding them
together. The various elements seem chiefly to have been house churches, of
Jewish or gentile character, bound by close ties, representing circles of
apostolic disciples and suffering from external threat. The Jewish house
churches probably followed the pattern of synagogue organisation with various
persons carrying out various functions, but the head of the household being the
key figure, and the person from whom the house-church took its name. The case
of Paul, Titius Justus, and Crispus in Corinth shows how an apostolic figure, a
synagogue official and a householder/patron were the nucleus of a Christian
house-church/synagogue parallel to the Jewish synagogue. The trouble among the
synagogues in Rome causing the expulsion of 49 must certainly have produced
similar situations corresponding to the eleven or so synagogues in Rome. In
addition the decree against synagogue meetings in 41 meant that the communal synagogue
was already split into more domestic groups, where the householder/patron of
each group could have taken a strong stand on one or other side of the debate
about Jesus, or about the conditions for gentile entry into the church. The absence
of an overall gerousiarch in the
Jewish parent organisation may well account for the intervention of the civil authority
in 49 but it may also explain the slow development of a single episkopos among the Jewish Christians. They
could parallel the individual synagogue models but there was no overall
structure to parallel. The Jewish-gentile question would have been a further
retarding force in the emergence of common identity and organisation among
Christians given the fundamentally different approaches to sharing communal
life and worship at the time when the structures were first emerging and being
defined. (Michael Mullins, Called to be
Saints: Christian Living in First Century Rome [Dublin: Veritas, 1991], 113-16)
