Reflections on a debated topic

I want to start by telling a story. It is the story of a wise and good king who lived 3,000 years ago in the Middle East. Although this king made mistakes – some very serious and for which he was punished – he continued to be the pious and devout king that the Bible describes as a man ‘after God’s own heart’ (1Sam 13:14).

King David pleased God so much that he managed to make a special covenant with Him. God promised that a great dynasty would succeed him. He would even give him a descendant – a son – who would become the great liberator of the people of Israel, the long-awaited Messiah that God had promised some time ago and who would be the great and glorious Son of David, the same one who would create a great kingdom that would come to impress David himself.

King David, like all kings – especially the good ones – was a man of many occupations. He had the responsibility of increasing the kingdom’s funds, overseeing public works projects, he had to punish crimes and settle legal cases, he had to fight wars with other countries and attend to matters of foreign diplomacy; all this even above the daily tasks of an ordinary man, such as eating, sleeping and living with the family.

His schedule was full, and there was simply no way to personally manage his own household, which included more than a thousand people including family members and servants. You had to shop, cook, take care of the little ones, educate the students, take care of widows, replace servants, clean rooms, polish floors, build walls, balance accounts, pay off debts, and hundreds of other tasks.

David could not personally supervise all of these tasks, nor was there a way to personally give instructions to each of the servants or family members, nor could he reward or punish the results of those instructions. David then commissioned a group of ministers to oversee his household. These ministers would have to attend to the coordination and discipline of all members.

But it was such a large house, with so many members and so many tasks to supervise, that there were also many ministers to appoint, and whenever you have a large number of people supervising something, there is the risk of disagreements and conflicts arising. Members of one department interfere in the things of the other department, and vice versa. Some think that children should be educated in one way, and others think differently. Some will want the schedule one way, others another. And it is essential to find a way to make the group work in a harmonious and coordinated way.

Then the wise King David devised a method. He appointed a particular minister to serve as chief steward of the house; just as the president of the United States has a chief of staff in the White House. This minister, who was in constant contact with King David, was tasked with settling differences, keeping the ministers in line, and keeping the entire house working together.

This meant that when the King was away, the Chief Steward would have complete charge of the house. He was the head of the house while the king was away, and second in charge when he was present.

This arrangement of having a minister who had the function of leader and who directed the others, keeping them away from conflicts and disagreements, later continued to be used by the kings who succeeded to the throne of the House of David, and even by the kings of the House of Israel when it broke deals with the Southern Kingdom, after the death of Solomon.

Unfortunately, not all treasurers reached their position with dignity. God stripped some of them of their positions. You can read about this in Isaiah 22. There it is described how a chief steward named Shebna is stripped of his position, which had been given to him by a man named Eliakim.

Reading the passage we realize that Shebna angered God because of the pomp and finesse of his offices, his shiny and splendid carriages and other unnecessary luxuries; In an extremely arrogant manner he had ordered a whimsical tomb to be sculpted for him in Jerusalem, when in reality he would be exiled and die in distant lands. God declared that Shebna would be removed from his position as the king’s treasurer and given to another man. God describes this shift in power in a very vivid and visual way. He says, “21 I will clothe him with your tunic, I will bind him with your sash, I will put your authority in his hand, and he will be a father to the inhabitants of Jerusalem and to the house of Judah. ​​22 I will put the key of the house of David on his shoulder; he will open, and no one will shut, he will shut, and no one will open. 23 I will drive him in as a peg in a secure place, and he will be a throne of glory for his father’s house.”(Is 22,21-23). Typical of Hebrew prophecies, there is great use of powerful figures here, two of which – the key to the house of David and the treasurer acting as father to the people of Jerusalem and the house of Judah – are of great significance to us. To symbolize his authority, the chief steward had a special key that he carried in a sack under his shoulder. This key symbolized the difference between him and the other ministers under his supervision. The other ministers could also bind and loose – allow and prohibit activities in the house – but the chief steward, or treasurer, could bind and loose at a higher rank, so no one could override his judgments. Nobody, except the king. Due to his great authority, he served as a father figure to the kingdom. A father, in biblical culture and biblical image, is someone who is capable of defending and providing what is necessary to those who do not have protection. This is the basis of the Old Testament’s strong statements regarding the defense of orphans whose rights have been violated. It is their duty to defend them because they have no father, because they have no one who can defend them or take care of their needs. Anyone who put themselves in the position of defender and provider was seen as a father figure – including the king’s treasurer. If someone’s rights were being violated or if he was in great need, he could go to the treasurer and obtain protection and provisions from him, either immediately and on his own authority or by going to the king to ask on his behalf for what he needed. This is the way in which the treasurer acquired the father figure for the people of Israel.

Why are those lessons important for us now? Because today, for us, there is also a treasurer for the people of God. When the time came for the Messiah to appear – the great son of David, the one who fulfilled the promise made by God to David, being himself the new and perfect David – he did something very similar when establishing his kingdom. The new kingdom could not be merely a national enterprise, like the previous kingdom, but had to be international in nature to include people from all nations. This made the organization grow, and for this reason a larger structure than the previous one was necessary. Thus it was that the ruler of the members of this house, the New David, just like the first, appointed ministers. We call them apostles, bishops, priests and deacons, but ultimately they are ministers – ministers of Christ – who oversee his kingdom. And as before, whenever you have a large number of ministers, there will be some conflict to resolve. For this, there is also a central authority, a boss who is in charge of the others. If this central authority were not available to resolve problems and disagreements, everything would be tremendous chaos and the house would disintegrate into multiple sects, competing with each other. That’s why when Jesus, son of David, set up his kingdom and appointed prime ministers, he wisely appointed the chief minister.

From the beginning of his interaction with this man who would be chosen, Jesus marked him in a very special way by giving him a special name, a personal name. He does this in John 1:42, where we can read of Andrew: “And he brought him to Jesus. Jesus, fixing his gaze on him, said to him, ‘You are Simon, the son of John; your name will be Cephas’ (which means, ‘Stone’).”So, when Jesus met the man he himself would appoint as chief steward – a man known as Simon bar-Jonah or Simon son of John – he gave him a new name to mark him in a special way – the Aramaic word “Cephas”, or more properly “Kepha”, and which later, when the Church began to be spread to the Greek-speaking Gentiles, was translated as “Peter”. This name was not an ordinary name, but it held great meaning. People at this time did not use the name “Kepha.”This word means “Stone” and without a doubt it must have been a little strange for Peter to be called that, naturally he would ask himself “Why has this man whom I hardly know named me ‘Stone’? Why does he say that this will be my name from today? What will he have in store for me?”Peter would eventually find an answer to his doubts. Since Jesus had formed a group of disciples around him, Peter would be the natural leader of the group, and eventually Jesus would formalize this relationship by making Peter the official leader of the disciples. We read in Matthew 16, the famous passage where Christ asks his disciples who people say he is. They respond that people are not sure about the identity of Christ. Then Jesus asks them – the disciples – who they think He is, and Peter correctly answers: “17 You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”Jesus replied: “Blessed are you, Simon, son of Jonah, because it was not flesh and blood that revealed this to you, but my Father who is in Heaven. 18 And I in turn say to you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. 19 To you I will give the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven; and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in Heaven; and”Whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in Heaven.”(Mt 16,17-19).

This passage was of great importance for my conversion. For years I told myself, like any Protestant, that the Rock Jesus referred to in the passage did not refer to Peter but to the revelation that Jesus was the Messiah. Still, one day I was reading this same passage and something I hadn’t noticed before caught my attention. Eventually I noticed many things about this text that point to Peter being the Rock that Jesus was talking about, for today I want to share just a couple of them.

Looking at the structure in which Jesus speaks, he makes three statements, all of them directed at Peter.

The first begins by saying “Blessed are You.”The second begins, “You are Peter.”And the third says: “I will give you the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven.”

The first thing I noticed is that in this passage Jesus blesses Peter. Let’s look at the first and third statements he makes: “Blessed are you,” Jesus says, “I will give you the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven.” I would feel greatly blessed if Jesus told me something like that, and I know anyone would feel the same way. This is significant because, if the first and third statements Jesus makes are beatitudes upon Peter, then the middle one — the second — is also a beatitude upon Peter. This means that when Jesus says: “And I in turn say to you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it…”, He is saying something that magnifies or magnifies Peter.

This is very important in itself because, by trying to say that the Rock is someone else and not Peter, people who dispute the papacy try to say that Jesus opposes Peter’s blessing in this passage and that he actually intends to put him down. They claim, and I myself did so at a time before I converted to Catholicism, that what Jesus actually says in this passage is: I tell you truly, Peter, that you are a small stone, so small and insignificant that it is not compared to the great Rock of the Revelation of My Identity, and I myself will build my Church… But when we put this phrase in the context of the two beatitudes pronounced by Jesus towards Peter, before and after quoting the phrase in question, said interpretation makes no sense. Jesus could have said: Blessed are you Simon, son of Jonah (you little thing), here are the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven… Then we would not have to look any further and it would be clear that Peter is the Rock on which he would build his Church.

Another thing I noticed about this passage is that each of the three statements that Jesus makes to Peter has two parts, the second explaining the first. So that when Jesus makes his first statement saying “Blessed are you Simon, son of Jonah”, the meaning – the reason why he is blessed – is explained in the second part of the prayer, where he says “for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my father who is in heaven.”Similarly, when Jesus makes his third statement and says “I will give you the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven” the meaning – part of what having the keys entails – becomes clear in the second part of the prayer where he says “and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven; and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”This means that when he makes the second statement beginning “And I in turn say to you that you are Peter” its meaning – what it implies to be Peter – is found in the second part which says “and on this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.”

There are also many other reasons why Peter must be the Rock that Jesus refers to. For example, let us note that this passage shows Jesus separated from the Church he builds, not being part of it, and this cannot be its foundation – a point I discovered while reading a Protestant Evangelical commentary on this same passage.

The two reasons I have shown here have been instrumental in my conversion, and are also the reason why I wanted to share them. When I realized that Jesus was making Peter the Rock upon which he would build the Church, this meant that Peter would be in charge of it when Jesus ascended to Heaven. He would be the head of the apostles, the leader of the earthly Church and, as I perceived, the leader of the Church on earth was a very good description of the role of the Pope. Realizing that it was undoubtedly Peter the Rock spoken of in this passage, I had to acknowledge that the Catholics were right and that Peter really was the first Pope.

I did not know if Jesus was also referring to the other Popes, but I knew well that the Catholics were correct in describing Peter as Pope. This is something that became even clearer when I began to study the structure of this passage in the Old Testament and where Jesus takes the important symbol of the keys.

Reading the Old Testament we find two places where keys are mentioned.-The first is Judges 3 and is not of great theological importance since it only deals with the time after a judge of Israel killed a king from another place, the king’s servants took a key and opened the door to the room in which their master fell dead.-The other passage where the key is mentioned is in the one we saw previously -Isaiah 22- where the key is the symbol of the authority of the first minister of the house of David. Since it is the only passage in the Old Testament where the key is used as a symbol, Isaiah 22 must be the symbolic structure on which Matthew 16 is based, meaning that Jesus, the new David, was making Peter the treasurer of the house of the new David. Peter would then be the chief steward, under King Jesus.

This is what this passage actually says. This is something that I have only shown in Catholic terms and that I certainly had not understood from the Protestant point of view.

I would like to share this brief excerpt from one of the writings of FF Bruce, who is recognized as one of the most important Protestant Evangelical Bible scholastics of the twentieth century. In this section of the book, “The Difficult Expressions of Jesus,” Bruce comments and writes:

“And what about the ‘Keys of the Kingdom’? The keys of a royal and worthy establishment would be entrusted to a chief steward or employee. In other times, it was this personage who carried them on his shoulder as a badge of the authority entrusted to him. About the year 700 BC an oracle of the Lord announced that this authority of the royal palace in Jerusalem would be conferred on a man named Eliakim: ‘I will put the key of the house of David on his shoulder; he will open it, and no oneit will close, it will shut, and no one will open’ (Is 22:22). So in the new community that Jesus would build, Peter would be, so to speak, the chief steward. In the first chapters of Acts, Peter is seen exercising this responsibility in the early Church. He acts as leader of the group of disciples in Jerusalem even before the arrival of the Spirit at Pentecost (Acts 1:15-26);so effective that there are three hundred listeners who believe the message and join the Church (Acts 2:14-41); some time later he would be the first to preach the Gospel to the Gentiles, at which time the door of faith is opened to both the Gentiles and the Jews (Acts 10:34-38).”

Here we can realize that, a person who is not Catholic and does not believe in the papacy, someone who is considered one of the great scholastics of this century, respected even by critics of the liberal Bible, who despised his evangelical faith, was able to admit that in this passage Jesus is commissioning Peter to be head of the house of the new David, meaning that while Jesus the king is away in Heaven, Peter will be in charge of the Church on earth. In other words, Peter is the Pope. Because he is the prime minister of the house of the New David, since he holds the keys of the New Kingdom, he is also our father in the Church. He does not in any way infringe on the Fatherhood of God – because God is the fundamental character who defends and provides for us – but following the parallelism of the Old Testament, we can say that the treasurer of the house of Christ is “the father of those in Jerusalem and Judah.”He is the one to whom – within the Church – we turn to defend our ecclesial rights and who provides us with spiritual food. The Pope is a great and special gift to the Church because he is qualified to intervene when problems arise. Any group needs a leader. This applies to both religious groups and groups in non-Catholic churches. A typical Protestant congregation may be governed by a council of deacons or a council of elders, but it will still have one person – the pastor – who can intervene and put an end to disputes. In the Eastern Orthodox Churches it is the bishop who assumes this important role. And since what is true on a small scale is true on a large scale, we can take as an example the election of the president of the Southern Baptist Convention. Similarly, the Orthodox Church has patriarchs who resolve disputes between the bishops of their areas. What these men recognize – correctly – is the need that every group has to have a leader who intervenes when crisis or conflict situations arise. And it is then that recognition is given to the designation of Peter, through Christ, as the seat of the Church as a whole. However, the power that this man must have has not yet been recognized. Even if he is a person nominally assigned to the position, if he is only a model or if he has very little real authority, he will simply not be able to act effectively and thus maintain the unity of the group. Without intending to discredit our non-Catholic brothers, it will be enough to observe the reasons why the Eastern Orthodox communion is so divided and fragmented into autonomous churches and with a large number of conflicts. The system of patriarchs is not capable of maintaining an effective union between them, since the patriarchs do not have enough authority to resolve disputes, and also because the patriarchs have disputes among themselves and are not capable of resolving them. This is another reason, again without trying to discredit our non-Catholic brethren in any way, why there are literally thousands of Protestant denominations. Without the influence of the patriarchs to keep the group together, the Protestant communion has fragmented into administrative units where, unfortunately, conflicts between one against another prevail.

Sometimes congregations make a big fuss over trifles. I remember a group I attended in a time of crisis, at that time someone in the group thought that the institution’s funds were being mismanaged. I returned another time and the pastor was commenting that when the new facilities opened, some people stopped coming because they didn’t like the color of the carpet they had chosen. These are just minor things that tend to cause division in a church, but they happen regularly. In Evangelical bookstores, specifically in the section for pastors, you can find numerous books on how to prevent, manage and overcome these divisions in the church. Things like this never happen in a Catholic community. Sure people may get upset about the color of the carpet or the way funds are handled, but the parish is never fragmented into two churches. This never happens in a Catholic community because the leaders have effective authority and can prevent these small things from becoming real crises. This is also the reason why Catholic communities are much larger than Protestant ones. The typical Protestant church consists of less than a hundred people; while the typical Catholic community consists of hundreds of families in it. Why? Because Catholic churches do not fragment.

This is the effective leadership that has allowed the Catholic Church to remain united and grow in numbers. Right now, the Catholic Church includes 18% of the human race. One in six people is Catholic, and the fundamental reason is the Pope. He is the ecumenical center of the Church, the starting point that keeps it united and safe from divisions. This only shows the wisdom of Christ in providing the Church with a leader to carry out his function during his absence. The papacy is a great gift to the Church, and is the reason it has prospered as it has until now, becoming the largest Christian group on earth, larger even than all Christian groups combined. If God had not chosen to bless us with a leader with effective administrative authority, someone with sufficient administrative jurisdiction to solve the different crises throughout the Church, this would never have been possible. In order for the Church of Christ to come to fruition, there had to be someone who, in the absence of Christ, served with papal primacy.

But not all disputes in the Church are merely administrative. Some are of a doctrinal nature, which are precisely the most serious, not only because doctrinal matters are more serious than matters of practice and administration, but because they are also the most common cause of division between people. When you have a deep-rooted and fundamental disagreement about doctrine, the divisions are on another level. This means that the Pope truly carries out, effectively, his work of keeping the Church united, since there must be a mechanism by which doctrinal disputes are resolved. Of course, this is the meaning of an ecumenical council. This is the biblical model applied to maintain the union of the Spirit: the council described by Acts 15, where it is decided that Gentiles can convert to Christianity without having to adhere to the Mosaic Law. But sometimes a council is not timely enough, either because it is not physically appointed – as was the case during the Roman persecutions – or because the council may have been deeply divided on some issue, or simply because the solution to a crisis had to be given immediately and there was not enough time for the council to meet. In these cases, when an ecumenical council is not practical, God has given the person of the Pope who has the definitive power to resolve these conflicts. With this the gift of infallibility has been given to the Pope. This gift is frequently confused. It is often inferred that this means that the Pope does not commit sins, but this was not the case even for Peter himself. In the same Scripture their sins are clearly shown, just as the sins of all the figures are found throughout those pages. But this did not prevent Peter from acting infallibly in writing the books of Scripture: the two epistles that bear his name, the First and Second Letters of Peter.

The gift of infallibility is also usually understood as the Pope being infallible in everything he does, in everything he says. This is not true either. The object of the Pope’s infallibility refers to questions of faith and morals. He cannot speak infallibly unless he refers to the teachings of faith and morals, this is what theologians call the secondary object of infallibility. But the Pope is not infallible when he refers to topics of science, history, mathematics, interior decoration or any other topic that does not have to do with the defense of Christian faith and morals.

Not only is its infallibility limited in these terms, but it is also limited in terms of the time in which it is applied. The overwhelming majority of things the Pope says are not infallible. The only moment in which the Pope has infallibility when speaking is, definitively, during the declaration of the doctrine that must be adopted by all, when he himself indicates that it is a definitive decision and that there is no room for doubts, debates or interpretations in this regard. This is the end of the line and everyone must stick to it. This only happens occasionally. Sometimes there will be elected Popes who prefer never to make a judgment of infallibility in encyclicals, books or apostolic letters that they write throughout their office. Normally, these judgments are reserved only for certain times of crisis, when some dangerous teaching is being disseminated in the Church.

So, even though the expression ‘infallible’ is used infrequently, it remains a valuable and much-needed tool in these times of growing doctrinal crisis. This is why Christ gave it to the Church, because he promised that the Church would never teach dogmatic heresies. Let us remember, Christ made a promise to Peter: “I will build my Church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.”If ever the Church were to dogmatically teach any heresy, uniting the conscience of believers in something wrong, then it would cease to be the Church of Jesus and the gates of hell will have prevailed against it. So there is no way for the Church to teach erroneous dogmas. If it does, the gates of hell will have prevailed against it and it will no longer be the Church of Jesus. He himself promised that this would never happen. From this it follows that when the Church teaches a dogma and says, “You must truly believe this. This is the truth of God,” then that dogma is true. That is why Paul, in 1Tim 3:15, refers to the Church as “the pillar and foundation of the truth.”It is the Church that reaffirms the truth of God in the world. And just as the Pope is the shepherd of the Church – the focus of pastoral authority – so he is the teacher of the Church – the focus of doctrinal authority – and is capable of making infallible statements.

This is by no means new in the history of God’s people. If we look at the high priests of the Old Testament, for example, they had a similar, although not identical, revelatory charisma.-Reading Exodus 28:30, for example, we find that the high priest had to wear a special breastplate, known as the Breastplate of Judgment, which consisted of two objects called ‘Urim’ and ‘Tummim’.The high priest had to place the Urim and the Thummim in his heart and ask God for a solution to the disputes, then obtaining the directions that God’s people should follow.-In Numbers 27:21, for example, Moses is sent to take Joshua and place him in front of the priest so that he can consult according to the rite of Urim and Thummim about when and where the Israelites should enter and leave.-In 1 Samuel 14:41, Saul asked the priest to use the Urim and the Thummim to find out what the fault had consisted of in a particular situation.-After the exile, in Ezra 2:63 and Nehemiah 7:65, the governor decided that certain men who claimed to be priests and who could not prove that they were worthy of eating the sacred foods in the temple, should wait until a high priest consulted with the Urim and the Thummim and then were sure that they really were priests. Therefore, there is nothing new in thinking that a religious leader of God’s people must have a special charisma from God that allows him to resolve conflicts. And of course, when God operates through this charisma, the results are infallible, thus implying that in certain situations the high priests of the Old Testament have, in some way, the charisma of infallibility.

This charisma also operates in regards to whether the high priest is a saint or a scoundrel. For example, in John 11:49-52 we read: “49 But one of them, Caiaphas, who was the High Priest of that year, said to them: ‘You know nothing, 50 nor do you realize that it is to your advantage that one die for the people and that the whole nation not perish.’51 He did not say this on his own, but, as he was High Priest that year, he prophesied that Jesus was going to die for the nation, 52 and not only for the nation, but also to gather into one the children of God who were scattered.”Here we have the high priest who sent the Messiah to death – he was certainly not a holy man – without having believed in him, fulfilling a prophecy. And he didn’t do this because he was a good person and was on God’s side – since he was sending the Son of God to death – but John says he did it because he was the priest that year. By the simple fact of being in the position of high priest, he manages to fulfill the prophecy. This was very meaningful to me when I was Protestant. I recognized that the High Priest has a special charisma from God that operates regardless of the quality of the person, simply because of his position. I told myself that, “It is a good thing that Catholics are wrong in comparing Peter to the rock, because if he had been the rock, then this rock could be equivalent, in the New Testament, to the high priest as leader – on earth – of God’s people, and we might expect his position to give him the investiture of some similar charisma, meaning that Catholics would have a big point in the Pope’s infallibility.”

Later, when I found out that Peter was the Rock, it was much easier for me to accept the Pope’s infallibility. Still pointing to Scott Hahn, I found that he also uses it in his commentary on the gospel of John. This provides an excellent parallel to the infallibility of the Pope. Because they lived in the era when the revelation was still taking place, the high priests were in time to receive new revelations, while now that the era of revelation has ended, the Pope does not have to continue this work, but rather has to appease the dogmatic controversies that arise after the revelation has been given, with the investiture of the high priest through this charisma. In fact, if the Jewish high priests were more enterprising in using this charisma by asking God for the truth, the Jewish world of Jesus’ time may not have been so theologically divided, even with some Jews – such as the Pharisees – asserting the existence of souls, angels and the Messiah, and other Jews – such as the Sadducees – denying it. Then God provided excellently for the Church by choosing a man to serve as a leader while Christ is in heaven, endowing this man with the necessary authority to end controversies within the Church, granting him the ability to speak with authority on matters of doctrine and make solemn definitions; The Christian can know that what he says is the truth. In all of these things Christ met the needs of the Church excellently, allowing the Catholic Church to grow and progress throughout history.

The Popes have used all their power to support the Church from the beginning. Even at the time of the Roman persecutions, a time when the Church was a hidden organization and the Popes were prevented from carrying out their tasks as completely, quickly and efficiently as they could once the Church operated freely. They did everything they could. An example of this dates back to the first century, in the 90s AD Pope Clement I wrote a letter to the Corinthians – in distant Greece – to help them resolve an internal dispute in their churches. In fact, reading Clement’s letter to the Corinthians, we find that they wrote to him to ask for his intervention. We infer this because at the beginning of the letter Clement apologizes for not having been able to respond sooner due to Roman persecution. Clement was a man of immense power in the early Church, and some thought that his epistle to the Corinthians should be included in the New Testament canon. This of course caused difficult behavior for him to follow, and not just any Pope would live up to the highest demands of personal holiness and good judgment, but even when popes of that time made mistakes, we see them behaving under the banner of popes even under Roman persecutions. For example, a century after Clement, around 190 AD, the Church became embroiled in controversy over issues to which we would not give the same importance today. It is concerning the most appropriate date for the celebration of Easter. Some Christians were of the opinion that Easter should be celebrated on the same day of the month each year, while others thought that it should be celebrated on the same day of the week each year (Sunday). The problem was that the same day of the month did not necessarily fall on the same day of the week, so the controversy was whether Easter should be celebrated as an established or variant holiday on the calendar. Christians in the province of Asia Minor thought that it should be an established festival, while elsewhere Easter was considered a festival that should always be celebrated (like the resurrection of Christ) on the Lord’s Day, on the day of the week on which his resurrection occurred. The controversy grew so heated that Pope Victor I briefly excommunicated the province of Asia Minor.

JND Kelly, Protestant historian of the early Church, explains the situation: “At his request, assemblies were held in Rome and in some other center, from Gaul to Mesopotamia, and most opinions leaned towards him.

Author: James Akin

Taken from Apologetica.org 
Translated by: Oscar and Liliana Pons