13 - Papias and Structure of Early Church

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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Well, we press on in our study of church history. I believe we went over the martyrdom of Polycarp last time.

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I don't think that we said anything about Papias. I'll just mention him briefly.

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Papias, by the way, I don't think I mentioned Polycarp dies around 156. So we're talking middle of the 2nd century.

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Polycarp dies around one, Papias dies around 150. Also claimed to be another disciple of John.

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He did write, but we only have fragments of about five books and primarily only because they are quoted by others.

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As you'll discover a little bit later on, one of our most important and controversial sources is the church history of Eusebius, who writes around the middle of the 4th century.

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Eusebius records for us many things that we would not have otherwise.

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Like I said, he's controversial because exactly how accurate was he, things like that is sometimes difficult to ascertain.

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Papias is mentioned by a number of people. So obviously at one point his books had some level of distribution, but very little of them have come down to us, which makes us wonder, of course, how many other people wrote and did not have their writings come down to us in any form at all.

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There really is, you know, just time itself destroys so much and then when you have books that may have only been popular within a particular area, if that area is not around Egypt, which is nice and dry and hence good for preserving things or at least around where the

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Dead Sea Scrolls were found and things like that, if it's in Italy someplace, well, most parts of Italy where you get more precipitation, things like that, it's much more likely.

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I even found out, I was really surprised, you know, we've got a cruise coming up and I'm really disappointed.

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I discovered only after doing this that they no longer have the formal nights on cruises. The yes in the back was my son who was going on the cruise and is now very happy.

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He doesn't have to worry about anything overly special for that night. There still is a night where you can dress up and stuff, but it's it used to be you have these formal nights and, you know,

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I mean people would rent tuxes and the whole nine yards. Well, one of the main reasons, one of the main excuses that I used to get my kilts because most of you know,

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I'm Scottish in my heritage and so I actually have two genuine, not off -the -rack cheapies from some

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Scottish novelty shop someplace. My two kilts were made at McKenzie's menswear in downtown

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Glasgow, I'll have you know. They are the real thing and that's exactly right.

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You go ahead and go like that, buddy, because they are, they are, they weigh about 10 pounds.

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I mean they, I literally have to be careful with the baggage weight allowance because those babies will really put you over and so on formal nights,

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I get to get to wear my kilts and but problem was

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I had them made back when I was a weightlifter. So the kilts have already been fixed. I took them back with me once.

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McKenzie's was great for nothing. They, in two days, they totally redid them and made them fit, which is wonderful.

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But you have these jackets and so the, I tried the jackets on a couple weeks ago.

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It was, it was, it was comedy. They were just, they were huge.

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I could put another person in there with me and so there's actually a kilt place out in Scottsdale and so I went out there and I took the two jackets

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I had with me and I noticed the guy was looking at him real carefully and so we got around to sort of bargaining.

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Lo and behold, one of my two jackets had no idea, had two moth holes in it. Now, they were very small. I would never have noticed them.

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But even here in Arizona, in a closed, you know, space that's hardly ever open, still stuff gets in and when you look at the papyri, you sometimes wonder, where'd that one little hole come from?

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Sometimes they're, it's something like a moth, something like that. There are a bunch of papyri and even vellum manuscripts where you have these very nice round holes and it's a wormhole.

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You know, the guy just went straight through, you know, and on each page you're gonna have this perfect little, one little guy just, you know, munch, munch, munch, you know, straight, straight on through and so it's, it's really surprising that, that we have as much as we have when you, when you think about it.

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Anyway, that was a long way to get around to saying that we don't know much about papyrus and even when you have people quoting other people,

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I know, you know, I had a recent experience where I had a run -in with quote -unquote

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Christian media and you would think Christian media would be nice to you. Not necessarily. In fact, I was invited this week.

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I had one of the major Christian news websites ask to interview me about a, about a three or four minute clip from the dividing line that sort of gone viral and I declined.

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I was like, I, I just can't expect fair treatment from anybody. So I'm just,

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I'd rather just do my own program. That way if you take it out of context, that's your responsibility. But I don't have to be going, no, what

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I actually said was this, blah, blah, blah, blah. So even when someone quotes papyrus,

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I know what it's like when I hear people, sometimes I'll hear people, they listen to a debate I did or a sermon

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I did or read a book of mine, and then they, they say something to me representing what they think

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I said, and I'm just left going, really? You, you, you think that's what I said? Wow, it's scary.

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So if that happens now, I'm sure it could happen back then, too. About the only thing we can, one of the reasons papyrus come, his name comes up is in the debates about what was the apostolic eschatology?

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What did the apostles teach about eschatology? And of course eschatology, normally when we use that term, unfortunately in our context, that's almost always just a discussion of the various millennial schemes.

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Amillennial, postmillennial, premillennial, and the always popular panmillennial.

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It'll all pan out in the end. But that's, that's not really the extent of eschatology.

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Eschatology means much more than that. Judgment, the nature of hell.

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There's a debate coming up again. There's a pretty large movement going on right now of reformed conditionalists who would wish to in some way challenge the traditional doctrine of hell and eternal punishment.

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Not with a universalistic concept, but with a limitation on the time period of punishment.

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So it's not, well, it has eternal consequences, but not eternal duration.

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I guess be the way that they would put it, try to accurately represent them. Anyway, if that's a subject

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I've tried to stay as far away from as possible, even though I did do a couple things on radio in England about it, because I do not want to become the apologist for hell.

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It's not really something, I'm just going to have to leave that to somebody else, just don't have any interest in it. Papias's name comes up because we know he was a millennialist of some type.

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Normally when we think of millennialism, almost always we think of a form of dispensationalism, but certainly wasn't dispensational millennialism because dispensationalism wasn't around back then, but he certainly believed in some type of a literal thousand -year reign, and that's where he is normally brought into the conversation in any citations of what has come down to us from the fragments of five books.

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Now, next, we have briefly touched upon, but now I want to focus in a little bit more, what was the church structure in the apostolic period?

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We've mentioned this, but I want to make sure that you get this down. We have already seen, at least early on, two primary perspectives.

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We see in Clement the multiplicity of elders, a plurality of elders perspective.

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There is no one Bishop of Rome writing to the one Bishop of Corinth. It's the elders at Rome writing to the elders at Corinth.

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So, around 95 to 100 AD, both of these churches, deeply influenced by the

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Apostle Paul, only a matter of decades earlier, have a plurality of elders.

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Then we saw, within a decade after that, in Ignatius, we saw both, in the sense that Ignatius and a number of the churches to which he writes, now have a monarchical episcopate.

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Monarch. So, mono, arcae, one head, monarch, a king type term.

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Monarchical episcopate, so you have a singular Bishop. Now, he may have others who are beneath him, and eventually this has become extremely complex with development of deacons, subdeacons, bishops, and archbishops, and, you know, all sorts of multiplication of things, eventually.

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But, Ignatius himself is the Bishop of Antioch, and it almost looks,

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I mean, we can't necessarily trace this, but it almost looks, if you look at a map, as if this is coming out of the east and moving west.

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Obviously, there are advantages and disadvantages on a pragmatic level to both forms of church government.

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I mean, on a very pragmatic level, dictatorships work well, as far as efficiency goes.

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And so, having any type of committee situation is not nearly as fast -moving and easy to handle as a dictatorship is.

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So, at the same time, there is, sadly, a very strong tendency amongst people for a movement toward clericalism, to a movement toward a clergy system.

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The past couple weeks in the Divine Line, I've talked a little bit about the Roman priesthood and issues relating to that in light of so much ecumenical fuzziness amongst so -called evangelicals today.

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But here are the two views that you have early on. Some have theorized that Ignatius's view came about as a result of persecution, that the church under persecution needed to have a sort of a centralization of authority, that trying to get people together when persecution is taking place might have been more difficult to do, just communication -wise, things like that.

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We certainly know that martyr bishops had a huge influence.

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Cyprian and others who, you know, give their lives end up having a tremendous positive impact in the sense of encouragement of others that might not be quite as big if you just have a whole group of elders that are not nearly as well known.

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But for quite some time, both views existed side by side. However, eventually what happens is that in the

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New Testament, we have terms such as bishop and elder, episkopos, presbyteros, and what happens is eventually, well, really both in East and West, presbyteros declines and morphs into priest, becomes a lesser office, so you become a priest and then from that you can become a bishop.

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There were exceptions. There were people who went straight from layperson to bishop.

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That did take place. But in general, there is a morphing of the offices, and first they have to be separated from one another.

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Biblically, they're the same. They're interchangeable. But eventually what happens with tradition is they become separated and then one becomes superior to the other.

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And of course the first thought across most of our minds is, well, but how can that be when these things are, you know, in the

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New Testament, they're interchangeable, etc, etc. Well, I know

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I was in, I was in seminary. I was in seminary before I was challenged to look at the

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New Testament evidence with somewhat of a less jaundiced or biased eye and myself recognized that the single pastor deacons that I had grown up with, that's all

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I'd ever known, that was every Baptist church I'd ever been in, had had the pastor and now they may have had a staff of other people we called assistant pastors and things like that, but you had the pastor and you did not have a multiplicity of, there were no elders.

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I mean, if we were, if we had been forced to answer, we'd say, well, pastor, but in fact,

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I would imagine even all the way through Bible college if I had, someone had said, you know, did you notice an elder here?

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And I'll say, I took Greek in college. It took Greek starting my sophomore year, so I, it's not that I hadn't seen it.

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But if someone had said, who are your, who are your elders?

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I probably would have conflated them with the deacons because that's how the deacons functioned.

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I mean, at the church I was at at that time, we had 150 deacons, maybe, at least.

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It was huge, huge, massive group. Well, it's 20 ,000 members. We can never find more than 7 ,000 at a time, but it was 20 ,000 members.

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Some of you know what I mean. Isn't that true? I mean, I remember the 20 ,000 member time, and then when we'd all get together,

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I'd sort of run the math and go, we're missing a few folks. I'm not sure where they went, but anyway. I probably would have gone, yeah, deacons, okay.

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But then someone said, well, have you noticed it's plurality of elders and notice that the same qualifications here, here, it's used interchangeably here.

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Where did you get this distinction part? And I just, when I first got hit with that, I'm just sort of like, and it's just never been discussed.

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And so you must understand, especially once the Roman Empire falls, and again, once the standard experience of people for centuries is just, everything's always been the same.

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It may be natural for us to think critically about these things, but it hasn't, you got to realize we have it so easy.

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We have it so easy. We can go to the grocery store and buy food and get home in half an hour.

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When for centuries, most people had to spend every bit of their energy every day just getting enough food to eat.

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It doesn't leave you a lot of time for speculative theology or even just for doing basic theology.

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You know, when most, when literacy goes, it's understandable how things like that happened.

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And again, it's just important to keep those things in mind. So many people look at church history and forget all that and forget how easy it is for us to sit in judgment of those who came before us, but that's not, that's not the way to do it.

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So, eventually, and if you want to listen to this, I guess

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I forget what year it was, but Mitch Pacquan and I did a debate sometime back in the early 2000s, somewhere

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I think, where we debated the issue of the priesthood. And that's basically what he said was, yeah, this developed over time from the office of presbyter into the concept of priest and but it took hundreds of years and for the first couple hundred years this wasn't known, but this is a proper and appropriate development over time, is the

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Roman Catholic perspective. Which of course then leads to the big issue that we are forced to deal with fairly regularly today, and that is, was there a supremacy of the

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Roman bishop in this early period? The vast majority of Roman Catholic historians who simply teach history will admit, no.

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There is a fairly large chasm that exists between Roman Catholic scholarship on history and Roman Catholic apologetics.

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That is, the apologists and their historians are generally not on the same page on this issue.

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And of course, the apologists will just simply dismiss those that disagree with them as being liberals, but the reality is there's a tremendous amount of evidence on this subject and I see, when was the last time, it was the 1990s, was the last time that we got a

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Roman Catholic to debate the subject of the papacy. We've not been able to for nearly 20 years now.

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Because if you are a, if you have any meaningfully balanced reading of the sources yourself, you shouldn't lose a debate on the subject, because the historical reality is a historical reality.

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Fundamentally, you have to accept the authority of the papacy to then find the basis of the papacy in history.

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If you don't start with an acceptance of it, and you just look at history, you're going to recognize it for what it is.

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Something that developed over time, that is not apostolic, was not believed in the early church, and that grew in authority, century by century, up until it reached a certain high point, and then has declined ever since then, and continues in decline.

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And I would say that Francis has hastened that decline as well, as far as even overall, just the realm of the

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Pope's authority. Some of the statements he has made, though he has made very few official statements, the reality of what he says, the fact that he keeps escaping his handlers and talking to reporters.

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You can just see these Vatican handlers going, Where'd he go? I thought you had him! Oh no! This type of thing is going on.

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Some of the comments he has made have functionally limited the realm of his authoritative claims, even if not officially, functionally, this has taken place.

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So we mentioned the Epistle of Clement. Often cited as evidence of the authority of the

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Bishop of Rome in an early period. Here, before the first century is out, the head of the Church of Rome is writing to another church to correct them.

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See, this is early evidence of the papacy, and yet when we looked at Clement, we don't find a single bishop.

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We don't find one bishop saying, We have the authority to tell you these things because this is the Church of Rome.

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No, that's not what you find in that epistle at all. Which, if the apostolic teaching was that Peter had been designated by God to be the successor of of Christ, the

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Vicar of Christ, this is what you'd expect to find. You need to understand, when you think about what the papacy is claiming, it is an extended series of claims, and the likelihood of the truthfulness of that entire chain of claims is based on looking at each one.

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So if there's only a 50 % chance that the first claim is right, and then only a 50 % chance the second claim is right, what is the chance that the whole chain is right?

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What? 25%. So if there's a 50 % for the third and a 50 % for the fourth, once you get it down to about eight, you're talking, what, maybe a two and a half percent chance at that point?

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And even lower. So, when you look at the claims of the

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Church of Rome at this point, it starts with this idea that, to Peter alone, was given the promise of holding the keys of the kingdom.

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And I remember, I've only been there once, but some of you remember, I think it was 2005.

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It was the one time I've been to Italy, and I've told the story before I almost starved while I was there. But anyway, that's a long story.

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Trust me, Olive Garden is not northern Italy. That's southern

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Italy. In northern Italy, if you cannot knock someone silly with the piece of bread you're eating, it's not really bread.

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So, I mean, wow. Anyway, but I remember standing in St.

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Peter's and looking up at the cupola, you know, the big dome, and all the way around the inside of the big dome, in gold.

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Not in gold that you can buy down at the Home Depot, but in the gold you find in the vault of a bank.

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In Latin, is the Petrine promise, Matthew chapter 16. You, Peter, upon you,

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I'm going to build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against that church. And I look up at that stuff, and like I said, debated many, many times.

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The Roman Catholic will tell you those words are addressed to Peter, and they are.

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The pronoun you are Peter is singular. And there have been arguments made by Protestants down through the years that aren't the best arguments.

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Petros and Petra. Well, there's a difference between the two, and one means little stone, one means big rock.

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Maybe, but doubtful. Probably pushing that one way too far. The reality of Matthew 16 is that Jesus says to Peter, you're

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Peter, and upon this rock. Now, if I'm talking to you,

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I'm not going to switch from using a pronoun of you to then using a different pronoun, this.

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That doesn't make any sense, and the reality is the text never changes focus from who

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Jesus is. Because what had Jesus just asked? Who do you say that I am?

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And Peter's response is you're the Christ, the Son of the Blessed One. And the confession that Peter makes is the confession that all believers make, and that is the foundation of the church.

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And there are many early church fathers who interpret it that way, even though Rome tells you that you must believe. That it is the constant faith of the church, all the way back, that this was fulfilled only in Peter.

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That just requires you to lie about history. And I've heard Roman Catholic apologists say that.

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I've heard Roman Catholic apologists, I remember Tim Staples, every church father is like, what? No, I can give you church father after church father after church father after church father that interpreted

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Matthew 16 differently than you did. In fact, the first one to interpret that way was the Bishop of Rome, Stephen, who was called imperious by other people.

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In fact, Vermillion, at the time was Stephen's bishopric, referred to him as Pontifex Maximus.

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Now some of you have heard that term, Pontifex Maximus. That is an official title of the Bishop of Rome today.

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But you need to understand when Vermillion called Stephen Pontifex Maximus, that was one of the most insulting things that Vermillion could have ever said to him.

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Because everybody knew that Pontifex Maximus was the pagan priest of Rome, not the

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Christian priest. He was the chief pagan priest. And so to call someone

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Pontifex Maximus was to slap them across the face. What an irony that about 1 ,500 years later, the

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Bishop of Rome adopts that pagan title as his own, when initially it was a massive insult.

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So there's just so much we can get into. When we talk about Cyprian, we'll see in the middle of the third century that the

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North African bishops and Stephen, they butt heads. And that the deacons at the

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Church of Rome wrote to Cyprian and called him Pope. The term had not yet,

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Pope is just Papa, it means father. It had not yet come to mean what it comes to mean in a later period of time.

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And so there's just so much development over time and that first, that first Matthew 16 passage isn't talking about Peter as the foundation of the church.

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So it collapsed at that point. Secondly, you have a number of other texts.

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You have the text where Peter denies

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Christ three times and Jesus says, I've prayed for you that your faith may not fail.

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Well, Rome will take that and say, see, never prayed for anybody else, their faith wouldn't fail. So it's only

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Peter's faith that won't fail. No, seriously, I'm absolutely, I'm telling you the truth. And the thing is these texts that they now use, you look back to the other church, how do the other church interpret them?

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None of them interpret the way that Rome does today. But they'll, they'll look at those, those texts and when you have so little evidence of your position, you got to use everything you can get.

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So every text about Mary becomes something deeply significant about Mary. Every text about Peter becomes something deeply significant about Peter, except when

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Peter describes himself as a fellow elder in his own epistle, that's not all that important. But, you know, the

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Pope will say, well, you know, bishop amongst bishops, but still a fellow bishop, blah, blah, blah, blah. So the very first, the bedrock though is

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Matthew 16. Without Matthew 16, all the rest of it collapses. And yet there's, there's a real problem and that is when it talks about to you,

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I will give the keys of the kingdom of heaven. The question that I have then asked my

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Roman Catholic apologist friends has been this, when did Peter receive those keys?

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Well, when you think about it, there's only two possible answers that can be offered to that.

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The safest is it is not recorded in scripture. It's not recorded in scripture.

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So Matthew records the promise of giving the keys only to Peter, because the modern

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Roman Catholic theory is, well, all the apostles have them in a sense, but only under the headship of Peter.

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Peter has the keys of the kingdom of heaven in a sense that no one else ever has them.

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That's foundational to the whole idea of what the Cathedra Petri is, the seat of Peter.

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And in Roman Catholic theology, that Cathedra Petri is what the Pope sits upon. And that's what gives him the authority that he has.

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Interestingly enough, as we said, we get to Cyprian here in a few weeks. Cyprian said every bishop sits upon the

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Cathedra Petri. Every bishop is the successor of Peter. Anyway, but if you say that, then the very foundational establishment of Petri in primacy, the

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New Testament writers didn't consider important enough to actually record for us. Just the promise, not the fulfillment. What's the only other option?

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Is there anything else in Matthew's gospel that might tell us where Peter received these keys?

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There is one other text, remember? Matthew chapter 18, where Jesus specifically says,

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I give to you the keys of the kingdom of heaven. There's only one problem. If you look at Matthew chapter 18, it's all the apostles together that receive this authority, not

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Peter alone. And so, pick your poison, but the reality is that the assumption is made, and believe me,

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Roman Catholic apologists who themselves very rarely can actually read the New Testament language will be very happy to tell you, just like a lot of Jehovah's Witnesses who can very rarely read

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John 1 in Greek will lecture you on the significance of the lack of the article before the pre -verbal predicate nominative, blah, blah, blah.

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Will tell you, the Greek here is singular. Peter, Sue, you.

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It is. So, when was it fulfilled? And almost none of them have ever thought about that.

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Now, obviously, some have, but the vast majority are just repeating what they've been told.

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They listen to it on Catholic Answers Live, and they just repeat it because they've heard it over and over again. So, that's the foundation.

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And so, you have to go from that to the next thing being Peter was the

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Bishop of Rome. There's all sorts of reasons not to believe that. When Paul goes to Rome, what does he say?

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Everyone's left me. This person's gone there, that person's gone there. If he's in Rome, where's

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Peter? Where's the Bishop? Everyone's left me. That wouldn't be a good thing. Now, there's lots of traditions later on that Peter went to Rome, but there's also traditions that he met.

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What did Peter himself say? Paul's apostle to the Gentiles, Peter's to the

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Jews. And his epistolary literature says he's gone to Babylon. Now, so, code word for Rome could be, but there were

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Jewish groups elsewhere that would fit into that description as well.

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We just don't know, but you have to believe that. You have to believe Matthew 16 is about Peter, he went to Rome, he became the first Bishop, he then passes his authority on to the next

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Bishop, and here's where the problem is. There was no singular Bishop of Rome until about 140

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AD. And believe me, Peter's been gone for 80 years. So, how in the world do you have this succession of this one specific office for 80 years, when nobody believes that there's a single

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Bishop there? Yes? Isn't it true that even there could be an even word in the early...

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That's because there are different succession lists. Once succession lists begin to develop, there are differences between them.

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No question about that. Not necessarily. No, that's true.

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That's true. Here's what J .B. Lightfoot said in regards to that epistle of Clement.

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There is all the difference in the world between the attitude of Rome towards other churches at the close of the first century, when the

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Romans as a community remonstrate on terms of equality with the Corinthians on their irregularities, strong only in the righteousness of their cause and feeling as they had a right to feel that these councils of peace were the dictation of the

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Holy Spirit and its attitude to close the second century, so only 100 years later, when Victor, the

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Bishop, excommunicates the churches of Asia Minor for clinging to a usage in regard to the celebration of Easter, which had been handed down to them from the apostles and thus foments instead of healing dissensions.

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Now, let me stop right there. As we will see, this is called the Quartodeciman Controversy. There was a controversy between East and West as to how you calculated the date of the resurrection of Christ.

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And about 180 A .D., Victor, the Bishop of Rome, thinks this is so important that he excommunicates the

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Eastern churches. Now, no one takes him seriously, and Irenaeus remonstrates with him and says, you're a hothead, cool your jets.

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But his point is there's this huge difference, even in 100 years, between the

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Epistle to the Corinthians, around 95, and Victor in 180.

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Even this second stage, he continues on, has carried the power of Rome only a very small step in advance towards the assumptions of a

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Hildebrand, or an Innocent, or a Boniface, or even of a Leo. These are obviously famous bishops of Rome.

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Hildebrand, Innocent, Boniface, more modern this millennium.

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Leo is 5th century. But it is nevertheless a decided step.

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The substitution of the Bishop of Rome, this is very important, the substitution of the

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Bishop of Rome for the Church of Rome is an all -important point. The later

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Roman theory supposes that the Church of Rome derives all its authority from the

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Bishop of Rome as the successor of Peter. History inverts this relation and shows that, as a matter of fact, the power of the

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Bishop of Rome was built upon the power of the Church of Rome. Now, why would the

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Church of Rome have power in the ancient world? Because it was Rome. Because the old saying was, all roads lead to Rome.

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And Rome remained the center of commerce and government and literary output and everything else for quite some period of time.

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And hence, as Christians would go in and out of Rome, they'd be constantly influenced by the

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Church of Rome. Which is why Paul, for example, planted a church at Ephesus. Ephesus was the key city in that area.

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And we naturally see evangelism going on up the Lycus River Valley because of the brilliance of planting a church right there where there's going to be this constant type of communication.

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Well, because Rome was Rome, you have the Church there having an outsized influence upon others because of communication, because the fact that they would have more funding than other churches would have, probably have more people.

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We read little hints of some of the major families, important, powerful people in Rome who had servants who were

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Christians who themselves may have been secret Christians. And hence, Rome could help in times of need in ways that many other churches could not.

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And when you've got the purse strings, when you've got a little more to be able to help other people out, you've got a lot of influence.

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But it was the church, not the bishop. Especially when it takes you up to 140 AD even to adopt the single bishop concept.

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It certainly isn't the bishop that is like that. So as I mentioned, the truth of this statement could be seen in Ignatius' letter to the

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Church at Rome while recognizing the Church at Rome as having the presidency in the region of the Romans. Not, I note, over the entire world.

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Ignatius nowhere addresses the Bishop of Rome at all, nor even acknowledges his existence. The position of honor that is

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Rome's is hers, not because of her bishop, but because of her location and nature as a church. The words of Ignatius normally say it are to her that they have the presidency in the country, the region of the

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Romans, being worthy of God, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. As Lightfoot commented on Ignatius' words, oh, and it sounded like a remote control car running around amongst our cars, like weird.

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As Lightfoot commented on Ignatius' words, this then was the original primacy of Rome, a primacy not of the bishop, but of the whole church, a primacy not of official authority, but of practical goodness, backed however by the prestige and the advantage which were necessarily enjoyed by the church of the metropolis.

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And so here in this early period where you would expect to have the foundational elements of the papacy clearly in line, what you have is just the opposite.

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And that's why I say Roman Catholic apologists have to look through history backwards. They have to look anachronistically, because the reality is the papacy did develop, and it did not develop based upon apostolic teachings that then became better understood over time, blah, blah, blah.

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There's a lot of history involved. Just looking at a map, real quickly, when you think of, if you look at a map and you divide the

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Mediterranean world down the middle, on one side you have Rome. On the other side you have

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Constantinople, Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria. What do you have over here?

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You have multiple cities that claimed as the founders of their churches, apostles.

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To the west you had one. Look at the modern Roman Catholic system and the modern

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Eastern Orthodox system. What's the fundamental designation of each? Monarchy, pope, multiple patriarchs, equality between the patriarchs.

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Where did it come from? Geography. It's a historical development over time.

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It's not a New Testament thing. It's development over time. So with that, starting not next week, sorry, and then not the week after that, but then the week after that,

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I guess. Sometime in September, before I head to New Zealand and Australia, next section, persecution.

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And there actually are some videos on this. Maybe I can track down. We haven't done a video in forever. But that doesn't really record well for the series either.

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So anyways, persecution, extremely important issue. And you know what?

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More so for us than it's been in a long time. To be honest with you, I'll have to admit, if you heard in California, the

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Ninth Circuit just said that religious counselors cannot tell young people that homosexuality is wrong.

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Cannot say you need to change your behaviors and your attitudes. That's the Ninth Circuit saying, we are the high priest of Mulloch.

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This is a secular nation. You are bad people. And by the way, we're under the

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Ninth Circuit. To sell you Ninth Circus more often. But yeah.

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Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Totalitarianism, knocking at the door and prying the lock right now.

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It's happening. All right. Let's close the time with a word of prayer. Our great Heavenly Father, we do thank you once again for this time.

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And we do ask that even as we look at history, that you would cause us to drive deeper into your truth, into your word, that we might be ready with a word to those to whom we speak as we proclaim the gospel in this very dark world.

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We ask that you would be with us now as we go into worship. May you be honored and glorified in all that takes place. We pray in Christ's name.