Ex-Church of Christ Support Board

So I heard a CofC preacher addressing the topic of elders and as an aside brought up the topic of Peter as the first pope. The extent and entirety of the basis was that Peter could not be pope since he was married. Therefore, slam dunk, the Catholic church is invalid.

I thought about addressing the topic, if only because I assumed it would be insulting to those former Catholics who were in the room at the time but were converted to cofc. But maybe they were not insulted. But I doubt they could very well open a deeper discussion or else look as if they had sympathy for RCC. So I thought on it and considering the limitations of the preacher and many in the room, I decided to not press for a bit of a deeper and more respectful discussion.

But to think that "Peter was married" is the slam dunk is silly IMO. I was thinking about thief on the cross and Jesus having authority to do whatever he wanted to do. About how polices and commands came later and changed things such as collections. I thought about the obvious tiers of disciples and apostles in the gospels and Acts. Even Paul is referring to Peter as "if Peter can do it then so can I"...that there is basis to at least discuss a notion of ranking. Peter, James, and John are much more significant with Jesus.

So I decided to drop it and I opened up Catholic.Com and Catholic Answers just to see quickly a nuanced and deeper argument in support. But alas, LOL, what they had was just as silly and dismissive IMO...the 2 prong argument was that Peter had a mother-n-law but possibly he was widowed. The other was that the term "wife" was misinterpreted when Paul says he has a right to have a wife....what he most probably meant was a "sister woman" who would be a helper on his trips...and assistant of sorts but not a sexual partner.

So much for a deeper argument and discussion.

He certainly did enough wandering around the country to put any possible marriage into question - what wife would put up with that?

I think the RC didn't require leaders to be unmarried (or widowed) until several centuries in. The Eastern Orthodox church still lets their leaders be married, but if they want to rise up high, they can't REmarry if their wife dies, so most of the heads of the various national branches of EO are either single or widowered. Is widowered a word? Maybe it's still widowed. Whatever.

That's a funny sort of sermon topic though - I didn't think the coc had any problem with Peter being a major leader of the early church. Surely the TITLE 'pope' didn't come along until later on. It just means 'father', as in 'father of the church' or 'church father' anyway.

So - is he putting forth Paul as a suitable alternative supreme leader? Just guessing...

No, the "argument" is that the RCC is obviously a false religion because of an irreconcilable contradiction. That being that Peter was the first Pope and yet Peter was married. Therefore smoke comes out of any computer faced with such a paradox.

I am the one pondering on the various tiers of disciples and apostles as they are described in the NT. And that Jesus can do whatever he wishes. So if Jesus wanted a married man to be the first Pope but then no others, that would be Jesus' right and prerogative. Just like the thief on the cross.

Doesn't the RCC rest their argument on the 'on this rock' statement with Peter as 'the rock'? IIRC, the coc says the 'rock' was what Peter SAID, and not 'Peter'.

I read that originally popes were married and it was changed in the eighth century because of the expense of supporting surviving families.

agricola wrote:Doesn't the RCC rest their argument on the 'on this rock' statement with Peter as 'the rock'? IIRC, the coc says the 'rock' was what Peter SAID, and not 'Peter'.

yes, there are a number of arguments. I was merely pointing out what popped up on catholic.com and catholic answers in regards Peter being married...which Sacred Heart radio pushes a lot.

http://www.catholic.com/magazine/articl ... ave-a-wife

This proposes that Peter was widowed and that the term wife is mistranslated. I find this as silly/shallow as the cofc comments I opened with.

I made a mistake in my previous post. . .it was PRIESTS, not popes who were originally allowed to be married. That was changed in the 8th century.

Popes mostly started out as priests, though. And I read someplace - that during the middle ages 'celibacy' was interpreted as not being MARRIED, not as avoiding SEX, which is why so many popes had mistresses and children.

The far western church (British Isles) had married clergy for a LONG time (the Scottish surname 'McNab' is 'son of the priest'), until the RCC exerted itself more strongly and came down hard on those outliers.

Nowadays, I think someone who is already married (for instance, Anglican priests) can become RC priests while married, but they don't get promotions or something. Read about it someplace.

However - back to those RCC websites like Sacred Heart - those are pretty conventional party-line, so to speak, Roman Catholic sites. I'm not surprised that they have a somewhat superficial reading of Peter's MIL which allows them to promote the RCC standard line. They do the same thing about Jesus' brothers and sisters, mentioned in the gospels, because to Catholics, Mary was 'of course' an eternal virgin, so Jesus' brothers couldn't POSSIBLY be hers...usually we get told they were Joseph's by his first wife, or else they were 'REALLY' cousins and the gospels just CALLED them 'brothers' because cousins are like, really close relatives.

I'm pretty sure the coc is closer to correct there - we never had any doctrine that Mary STAYED a virgin!

You want to make Catholics madder than a hatter ask them about Pope Joan.

The article cited by klp above is by Karl Keating, who almost single-handedly established the field of Catholic apologetics vis-a-vis protestant / non-Catholic Christian theology. He verges on sainthood in my book, but this article is rather goofy nonetheless. It has nothing to do with church doctrine and is at best a somewhat interesting "aside."

Clerical celibacy is nothing more than a church discipline and could be revoked by the Church at will -- by the Bishop of Rome and those bishops in communion with him. There are, of course, good reasons for its existence, such as freeing one to follow Christ's call without the moral requirement of providing for a family. Celibacy has been around for many centuries and has served the Church well. Doubtful it would be abandoned without serious consideration. But it could be.

A better article on the same site would be http://www.catholic.com/tracts/more-catholic-inventions, while a far more detailed treatment of the subject can be found in the Catholic Encyclopedia at http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03481a.htm.