Papal Bull: A Response to Contemporary Papal Scholarship Tyler Dalton McNabb Associate Professor of Philosophy at USJ – University of Saint Joseph Peter Lampe, in his work, From Paul to Valentinus, argues that until the second part of the second century, the church in Rome favored a fractured collegial Presbyterian ecclesiology.[1] The Catholic historian, Robert Eno, agrees with Lampe when he states the following: But the evidence available seems to point predominantly if not decisively in the direction of a collective leadership. Dogmatic a priori theses should not force us into presuming or requiring something that the evidence leans against….This evidence (Clement, Hermas, Ignatius) points us in the direction of assuming that in the first century and into the second, there was no bishop of Rome in the usual sense given to that title.[2] And Eno is not the only Catholic historian who agrees with Lampe. Eamon Duffy, who served on the Pontifical Historical Commission, agrees that ‘all the indications are that there was no single bishop of Rome for almost a century after the deaths of the Apostles.’[3] Using Bayesian reasoning, Jerry Walls, an analytic philosopher of religion, has recently argued that if there was a bishop in Rome…
