The Early Christians in Rome

by H. D. M. Spence-Jones

All serious historians now are agreed that S. Peter taught in Rome, wrote his Epistle from Rome, and subsequently suffered martyrdom there.

But historians, as we have stated, are not agreed upon the date of his first appearance in the queen city. Now the sum of the evidence massed together in the foregoing brief study, leads to the indisputable conclusion that the date of his coming to Rome must be placed very early in the story of Christianity, somewhere about A.D. 41–3.

Everything points to this conclusion. How could Peter be, with any accuracy, styled the “Founder of the Church of Rome” if he never appeared in Rome before A.D. 64? Long before this date the Church of the metropolis had been “founded,” had had time to become a large and flourishing Christian community. This estimate of the signal importance of the Church of Rome is based on various testimonies, among which may be ranked the long list of salutations in S. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, written circa A.D. 58.

All the various notices of the leading Christian writers of the first and second centuries in all lands carefully style him as such. Paul, it is true, in most, not in all these early writings, is associated with him as a joint founder: this in a real sense can also be understood; for although Paul came at a later date to Rome and dwelt there some two years, the presence of one of the greatest of the early Christian teachers would surely add enormously to the stability of the foundations laid years before. The teaching of the great Apostle of the Gentiles, continued for two years, was, of course, a very important factor in the “foundation work,” and was evidently always reckoned as such.

But even then, as we have seen, while the two apostles are frequently joined together as founders in the writings of the early Christian teachers, in several notable instances Peter’s work is especially dwelt upon by them.

Then again in the traditional “Memories” preserved to us, some of them of the highest historical value, it is Peter, not Paul, who is ever the principal figure. Paul rarely, if ever, appears in them. Great though undoubtedly Paul was as a teacher of the Christian mysteries and as an expounder of Christian doctrine, it is emphatically Peter, not Paul, who lives in the “memories” of the Roman Christian community.

The place which the two basilicas of S. Peter and S. Paul on the Vatican Hill and on the Ostian Way have ever occupied in the minds and hearts not only of the Roman people, but of all the innumerable pilgrims in all ages to the sacred shrines of Rome, seems accurately to measure the respective places which the two apostles hold in the estimate of the Roman Church.

The comparative neglect of S. Paul’s basilica in Rome when measured with the undying reverence shown to, and with the enormous pains and cost bestowed on the sister basilica of S. Peter, is due not to any want of reverence or respect for the noble Apostle of the Gentiles, but solely because Rome and the pilgrims to Rome were deeply conscious of the special debt of Rome to S. Peter, who was evidently the real founder of the mighty Church of the capital.

The writer of this work is fully conscious that the conclusion to which he has come after massing together all the available evidence, is not the usual conclusion arrived at by one great and influential school of thought in our midst; nor does it accord with the conclusion of that eminently just scholar-Bishop Lightfoot, who while positively affirming the presence of S. Peter in Rome, whence, as he allows, he wrote his First Epistle, and where through pain and agony he passed to his longed-for rest in his Master’s Paradise, yet cannot accept the tradition of his early presence in the metropolis.

The writer of this study has no doubt whatever that the teaching of the vast majority of the Roman Catholic writers on this point is strictly accurate, and that S. Peter at a comparatively early date, probably somewhere about the year of grace 42–3, came to Rome confirmed in the faith—taught—strengthened with his own blessed memories of his adored Master—the little band of Christians already dwelling in the capital of the Empire. Under his pious training the little band, in the six, seven, or eight years of his residence in their midst, became the strong nucleus of the powerful Church of Rome.