Wednesday, February 12, 2020

Michael Mullins on the Ecclesiology of the Church of Rome in the First Century


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)