Welcome back to Seamus Popery. I'm Joe Heschmeier. I want to explore an argument today that I've heard from both Protestant apologists and from some skeptical Catholic scholars against the papacy. An argument I'm going to call the Ignatian argument in honor of St. Ignatius of Antioch. It goes something like this. Number one, Catholics claim there's been this continual line of popes, bishops of Rome, from St. Peter down to Pope Francis in the present day.

Number two, that's impossible since there wasn't even a bishop of Rome until at least the mid-100s, the mid-second century.

And number three, we can know that because St. Ignatius, who normally mentions bishops, doesn't say anything about a bishop of Rome and his letter to Rome.

So here are a few different versions of that argument. I'm going to start with Dr. Jerry Wals,

presenting this argument, really an argument from silence.

But here's what's fascinating. All of these 40 or so some references to the bishop and his importance and his authority occur in just six of the letters.

There's only one of them where you do not have a mention of a bishop.

And again, it's very striking, and this is one of the pieces of evidence that historians find very striking.

The one, the letter written to Rome is the one where there's no bishop mentioned.

Now, when Wall cites to scholars out there and historians, I think he has in mind this group

of skeptical Catholic scholars and one German Protestant theologian, Peter Lampie.

So the Catholic scholars, Raymond Brown, J.P. Meyer, Eamonduffy,

and Robert Eno, 20th century skeptics, and then Eamonduffy is still a modern-day scholar as well,

who does really good medieval work, by the way. But you'll find variations of this in popular

Protestant apologetics as well. So both Dr. Jordan Cooper and Dr. Gavin Ortland

present a version of this argument, although in their defense, I think they both realize

that maybe this argument isn't the strongest. They both hedge it a little bit, but they seem

to realize its weakness, but they make the argument nevertheless. So you will hear this argument

from folks on both the Catholic and Protestant side against the

historicity of the papacy. But we do have to reckon with the fact that by the

mid-second century the majority of areas in the church, according to St. Ignatius,

have an episcopate, the majority of areas in the church have a bishop. It

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