greater historical value are the memories which belong to the Catacomb of Priscilla, memories which recent discoveries in that most ancient cemetery go far to lift many of the old traditions into the realm of serious history.
The historical fact of the burial (depositio) of some ten or eleven of the first Bishops round the sacred tomb of the Apostle S. Peter (juxta corpus beati Petri in Vaticano), gives additional colour to the tradition of the immemorial reverence which from the earliest times of the Church of Rome encircles the memory of S. Peter.
From the third century onward we find the Roman Bishops claiming as their proudest title to honour their position as successors of S. Peter. In all the controversies which subsequently arose between Rome and the East this position was never questioned. Duchesne, in his last great work,[1] ever careful and scholarly, does not hesitate to term the "Church of Rome" (he is dwelling on its historical aspect) the "Church of S. Peter."
This study on the work of S. Peter in the matter of laying the early stories of the great Church which after the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 indisputably became the metropolis of Christianity, has been necessarily somewhat long—the question is one of the highest importance to the historian of ecclesiastical history. Was this lofty claim of the long line of Bishops of Rome to be the successors of S. Peter, ever one of their chief titles to honour, based on historic evidence, or was it simply an invention of a later age?
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
- ↑ Histoire ancienne de l'Église, vol. i. p. 61 (4th edition, 1908).
