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| Elucidations.
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Elucidations.
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(The minister…to the Gentiles, p. 43.)
If St. Peter had been at Rome,
St. Paul would not have come there (2 Cor. x. 16). The two apostles had each
his jurisdiction, and they kept to their own “line of
things” respectively. How, then, came St. Peter to visit
Rome? The answer is clear: unless he came involuntarily, as
a prisoner, he came to look after the Church of the
Circumcision,372
| 372
Origin says so, expressly. See Cave, Lives, i. p.
230. |
which was “in his measure;” and doubtless St. Paul urged
him to this, the Hebrew Christians there being so large a proportion of
the Church. St. Peter came “at the close of his
life,” doubtless attended by an apostolic companion, as St. Paul
was, and Barnabas also (Acts xv. 39, 40). Linus probably laboured
for St. Paul (in prison) among the Gentile Romans,373
and Cletus for St. Peter among Jewish
Christians. St. Peter survived all his martyred
associates, and left Clement in charge of the whole Church.
This most probable theory squares with all known facts, and reconciles
all difficulties. Clement, then, was first bishop of Rome
(a.d. 65); and so says Tertullian, vol. iii. p.
258, note 9.
That compendious but superficial little work,
Smith’s History of the First Ten Centuries,374
| 374 The
Student’s Eccl. Hist., London, 1878. | justly censures as
“misleading” the usage, which it yet keeps up, of calling
the early bishops of Rome “Popes.”375
| 375
It accepts the statement that the earliest application of this
term, by way of eminence, to the Bishop of Rome, is found in Evnodius
of Pavia, circa a.d. 500.
Robertson, vol. i. p. 560. | The same author utterly
misunderstands Cyprian’s references to Rome as “a principal
cathedra,” “a root and matrix,”
etc.; importing into the indefinite Latin a definite
article. Cyprian applies a similar principle, after his
master Tertullian (vol. iii. p. 260, this series), to all the Apostolic
Sees, the matrices of Christian churches.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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