The Legend of Apostolic Succession

The Roman Catholic Church—and many others—trace their authority back through the apostles to Jesus—but the doctrine is built on shaky foundations.

Feb 09, 2025

Many Christian churches have long claimed that their teachings—and the authority of their priests, pastors, and other officials—can be traced back directly to Jesus: He delegated power to his apostles both during his ministry and after his resurrection; the apostles spread the gospel, founded churches, and in turn delegated authority to their successors—the bishops, in the Roman Catholic account—who passed it along to their successors, and so on, in an unbroken line to the present day.

This ecclesiastical power, church leaders held, afforded them exclusive rights to interpret scripture, to forgive sins, and to decide who was—and was not—a Christian. The Roman Catholic Church pushed this theory the furthest, declaring Rome’s primacy over other churches, and ultimately elevating the Bishop of the Church of Rome to the title of Pope, who had the final say. (In 1870 they pushed it even further, when they officially adopted the doctrine of papal infallibility.)

Many other churches make similar claims of apostolic succession, including the Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Church of the East, Scandinavian Lutheran, Anglican, Moravian, Hussite, and Old Catholic traditions, although many disagree on the validity of the accounts of apostolic succession of other churches.

Venerable though the doctrine may be, apostolic succession seems more like a legend when looked at through the lens of history.

The First Century

The Acts of the Apostles, which follows the gospel stories in the New Testament, is devoted mostly to the acts (and speeches) of the Apostles Peter and Paul. Little is told about the acts of the other apostles, although there was a wide literature of (non-biblical) stories about them—and even gospels attributed to them—written mostly in the second century.

The Apostle Paul was not one of the original twelve apostles. He became a Christian years after Jesus’s crucifixion, after seeing a vision of the risen Lord. But he was in many ways the most consequential. Paul’s epistles to the early churches are the earliest Christian writings that have survived. (They date from around 40 CE to 60 CE—just a decade or two after Jesus’s crucifixion, while the gospel stories are later.) Paul’s letters, far from describing early churches with single leaders following teachings set forth by the apostles or their successors, characterizes them as an unruly lot, with differing factions and differences of opinion on theology and church matters.

The sparse evidence that exists of first-century church organization suggests that leaders of the various early churches were collegial, with authority shared by bishops, deacons, and presbyters (elders).

The first account of something like apostolic succession comes in a letter addressed “from the church of God that temporarily resides in Rome, to the church of God that temporarily resides in Corinth,” (remember, the early Christians thought the end was near), generally dated to the last years of the first century. It is attributed to Clement, a leader of the Roman church, although he is not mentioned in the letter.

The author of I Clement, as the letter is usually identified, is denouncing a schism and change in leadership in the church of Corinth (in Greece). Historian Bart Ehrman summarizes the key points:

The letter gives no concrete information concerning who the new leaders were or what they stood for. We do not know, for example, whether they embraced theological positions that Clement found to be untenable; whether they were people whom Clement himself simply didn’t like or admire; or whether Christian leaders in Rome opposed a change of church leadership on general principle, perhaps out of fear that if such things could happen abroad, they could happen at home as well.
Whatever the real historical situation, I Clement states firmly its primary guideline for church governance, a guideline that is imbued with divine authority and backed by the words of sacred Scripture. The leaders of the Christian churches have been appointed by the apostles, who were chosen by Christ, who was sent from God. Anyone who deposes these leaders is therefore in rebellion against God.

Interestingly, Clement does not describe a rebellion against an individual: he writes that members of the church of Corinth “have created a faction against its presbyters,” and instead “should be subject to the presbyters and accept the discipline that leads to repentance.”

The Rise of the Bishop

The idea of a “monarchial episcopate,” with a bishop running the show, certainly began to take hold in the second century. Ignatius, patriarch of the church in Antioch, (c. ? – c. 108 /140) suggests, in letters to other churches in the early second century, that bishops should have authority over other church officials. He does not, however, cite apostolic succession as the source of that authority, instead basing it solely on “the will of God, who desires that the bishop be head of the administration of his house.”

The formal theory of apostolic succession is described in the late second century by Irenaeus (c. 122 – c. 202), a prominent Christian theologian and historian. Irenaeus, who was appointed Bishop of Lyons, was one of the most consequential figures in the emerging proto-orthodox church (which later evolved into the Roman Catholic and other orthodox churches). He wrote a five-volume series of books, Against Heresies, attacking other Christian teachers, including Marcion and Valentinus (both of whom were popular, rival Christian teachers in the mid-second century) as heretics.

But Irenaeus was a very unreliable historian, who sometimes let his opinions and theology get in the way of his history. He believed, for example, that Jesus must have lived into old age to have been able to be fully representative of humankind, ignoring the evidence in the Gospels (otherwise unrefuted) that Jesus was in his thirties when he was crucified.

One of the primary goals of the proto-orthodox Christians was to establish that their interpretation of Christianity predated those of other Christian church movements, such as Marcionism and Valentinianism. (A secondary goal was to assert that Rome was the preeminent Christian Church.)

Saint Irenaeus; Stained glass windows by Lucien Bégule (1901), Saint-Irénée Church, Lyon. Photo by Gérald Gambier, via Wikimedia Commons.

Irenaeus prosecuted his heresiological case, in part, by developing the idea of apostolic succession. The views of the proto-orthodox movement must be true, he wrote, because the leadership and teaching of their churches could be traced back directly to Jesus himself. And since the apostolic succession predated the “heretics” who were teaching in the second century, the proto-orthodox account of Christianity was older, and therefore, more authoritative.

The Church of Rome, Irenaeus declared, had been founded by the apostles Peter and Paul. (The former having been told by Jesus, “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church;” the latter having been appointed by Jesus in a vision as the apostle to the gentiles.) Irenaeus then went on to list the successive bishops of Rome who followed Peter and Paul, well into the second century, as Linus, Anacletus, Clement, Euarestus and Alexander.

Virtually no historical evidence supports this account. There is nothing in the New Testament itself to show that either Peter or Paul ever went to Rome, much less were the founding bishops of the Roman church. There is only a muddle of later stories and legends that solidified into orthodox tradition.

“When one looks at Irenaeus’s list,” according to historian Charles Freeman,” one can see that it is made up.” Freeman notes that when Ignatius had written to the church of Rome around 107, there was no presiding Bishop to whom he could address his letter. The claim that Peter and Paul founded the Roman church is disproved by Paul’s own (much earlier) letter to the Romans, which “makes it clear that the church was already in existence when Paul wrote to it,” and does not mention Peter, even though he and Paul were well acquainted with each other. As for the names that Irenaeus lists as successors to Peter and Paul, Freeman notes that “they seem to have no other historical support.”

But the facts often don’t get in the way of a good story. Irenaeus’s theory of apostolic succession was repeated, adopted, and amplified by later church theologians and historians, and effectively became part of Roman Catholic dogma, as it remains today.

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