Welcome back to Shemis Popery. I'm Joe Heschmire, and Dr. Gavin Ortling just released a video

titled, The Papacy is Not from God, that I think warrants a reply. Now, I should say at the outset, I respect the bluntness of his argument, and I hope that he won't be offended if I answer him in an equally straightforward manner. And second, I think he's focused on exactly the right question. As I said in my book, Pope Peter, if the doctrine of the papacy is true, everyone should be Catholic,

if the doctrine of the right question. As I said in my book, Pope Peter, if the doctrine of the

papacy is true, everyone should be Catholic. If the doctrine of the papacy is false, no one should

be Catholic. So I want to applaud him for asking the right question, even if, obviously, I disagree

with his conclusions. And I also want to make clear up front that I'm not going to try to answer

every single argument he makes. I've laid out the arguments for Peter having a papal type role in my book, Pope Peter.

I've looked at the history of bishops in the early church in my book. The early church was a Catholic

church. So you can check out those for more. But I want to focus on just one part of his argument.

The idea that there was no bishop of Rome in the early church.

So the argument goes, the bishop of Rome couldn't have been the Pope early on because there

wasn't a bishop of Rome early early, until perhaps sometime in the early second century.

So the first point here is that in the earliest times, it doesn't look like you have a single bishop of

Rome at all. So not only do you not have a single bishop who's supreme and in certain conditions

infallible, you just don't have any single bishop in Rome. And so, you know, hey, when does it

exactly come in? It looks like sometime there in the early

second century, but it's hard to be dogmatic about exactly when. So the reason I want to take a

closer look at this one claim is that I think the more you look at the evidence, the weaker Gavin's

case turns out to be. Now, I realize in answering his argument, I'm not proving the papacy true.

Plenty of Orthodox, even Anglicans,

might agree with me here without accepting the Catholic claims about the papacy. But I do think

it'll move the conversation in the right direction if we can at least take the worst arguments

...