#238 Who was the first pope?

I learned this today. The creation of the term “pope” to mean the head of the Roman Catholic church started in the 11^th century.

The word “pope” comes from the Greek word pappas, meaning father. The pope is the head of the Roman Catholic church and is known as the Bishop of Rome or the Vicar of God. He is the supreme head of the church and is supposed to be God’s representative on Earth. He is supposed to uphold God’s laws and everything he says must technically be infallible.

The church says that the first pope was St. Peter, one of the disciples of Jesus. Other than the Bible, there is no actual evidence that Peter existed. This doesn’t mean that he didn’t exist, it just means that there is no evidence. In those days, record writing for anyone other than very influential people was not common, so it is hardly surprising, but it is difficult to say the office of pope started with St. Peter when there is no actual evidence that he was the first pope.

If we do take Peter as the start of the Catholic church, then I don’t think we can call him pope in the same way as today’s pope is a pope. To begin with, the Church wasn’t an organization with only one head until at least the 2^nd century. It was a loose group of organizations that tried to spread the word of Jesus. At the time, Christianity hadn’t yet been accepted and these groups were persecuted. They met in homes and tried to spread the word that way. This led to a lot of different interpretations of the message. The Romans had made an empire that was very conducive to the spread of new ideas. They had good roads and waterways and the empire was mostly peaceful. They had encouraged most of the people to learn Greek as a common language. This is probably one of the reasons why the word for pope comes from the Greek.

By the year 100, over 40 Christian communities had been founded. Nobody ruled over them. The new religion spread rapidly among slaves and poor people. It possibly gave them hope. The first church council was convened in the year 48 to resolve doctrinal differences. Somebody must have chaired this council, but they weren’t pope.

By the end of the 2^nd century, the different communities of Christians had started to grow into a hierarchy. The problem with so many different groups was that the church’s message and Jesus’s teachings would change and this wasn’t good. To stop it, the early church started to have one bishop in charge of all the other churchmen in a city. The church slowly started to mimic the structure of the government of the Roman empire. The bishops who were in the most important cities started to have more power than the bishops that were in less important cities, in just the same way as the powerful people in big cities were more powerful than powerful people in regular cities. And, of course, the most powerful of all the cities was Rome.

The current pope is the Bishop of Rome and that institution goes back a long way. The first bishop of Rome is said to be St. Peter. There is no way of knowing if that is true. However, his successor was Linus, who was the bishop of Rome from 67 AD to his death in 76 AD. If Peter isn’t the first pope, then that would make Linus the first pope. He was known as the first bishop of Rome and the first pope until about the 3^rd century when it became custom to call Peter the first pope.

The biggest change to the structure of the church comes when Constantine becomes the emperor of Rome in 312. He embraces Christianity and the church starts to take on more power and a more concrete structure from there. In 313, the bishop of Rome, Miltiades, was asked by Constantine to call a council. Constantine legalized Christianity and gave Miltiades the land that would become the papal seat. The church had started to come into its own.

There were about thirty popes between Linus and Miltiades, but they didn’t call themselves pope. They were the bishops of Rome. The term papa was generally used for any bishop in the same way that we use “father” today. The word papa was first used to refer to the bishop of Alexandria in 240 and soon after all bishops were known as papa. The first bishop of Rome to be called papa was Pope Marcellinus in 300, but it still just means father. In 950, the word enters the English language, being used in reference to Pope Vitalian.

Pope Gregory VII, in 1073, restricted the word Pope to apply only to the head of the Roman Catholic church. And with that, it was backdated to all the previous popes, even going as far back as Peter.

So, the first person to make the word pope mean only the head of the Roman Catholic church was Gregory VII. However, the first actual pope was probably Pope Linus. Or Pope Peter, depending on what you believe. And this is what I learned today.

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By Quirinale.it, Attribution, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=115828333

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