The pope – Successor to Peter?
• No evidence in the New Testament that Peter was in Rome.
• No evidence for an immediate “successor” to Peter, not even in Rom.
• No mention of a bishop
of Rome in the New Testament or in the earliest Christian sources:
not in Paul’s Epistle to the Romans and not in the Letter of the Romans to the Corinthians.
• Nevertheless, early evidence for the graves of the apostles Peter and Paul in Rome.
• Around the middle of
the 3rd Century, Bishop Stephen of Rome viewed himself as the successor
of Peter and claimed
a primacy over all other bishops.
