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copied, circulated and read aloud during worship just as the letters of Clement and Soter had been. The letters breathe the distinctive sense of dignity and responsibility which was becoming the mark of the Roman church: ‘The brethren who are in chains greet you, as do the priests and the whole Church which also with deepest concern keeps watch over all who call on the name of the Lord’. 9
    By the beginning of the third century, then, the church at Rome was an acknowledged point of reference for Christians throughout the Mediterranean world, and might even function as a court of appeal. When under attack for teaching heresy, the great Alexandrian theologian Origen would send letters appealing for support not only to the bishops of his own region, but to faraway Bishop Fabian at Rome, where he himself as a young man had made a pilgrimage. For the earliest Christians apostolic authority was no antiquarian curiosity, a mere fact about the origins of a particular community. The Apostles were living presences, precious guarantors of truth. The apostolic churches possessed more than a pedigree, they spoke with the voices of their founders, and provided living access to their teaching. And in Rome, uniquely, the authority of two Apostles converged. The charismatic voice of Paul, bearer of a radical authority rooted not in institution and organisation but in the uncompromising clarity of a Gospel received direct from God, joined with the authority of Peter, symbol of the Church’s jurisdiction in both heaven and earth, the one to whom the commission to bind and to feed had been given by Christ himself.
    Yet we should also bear in mind that all these signs of the special status of the church and Bishop of Rome were a matter of degree, not of kind. No other community could claim succession to two Apostles, but apostolic authority and the responsibilities and status itbrought could be matched elsewhere. Other bishops and other churches sent gifts abroad, wrote letters of advice, rebuke or encouragement, and broke off communion with churches which were believed to have fallen into grave error. Irenaeus and Tertullian, in praising the glory of the Roman church, were praising the most notable example of a wider phenomenon. Come, urged Tertullian, ‘recall the various apostolic churches … Achaia is very near you, where you have Corinth. If you are not far from Macedonia, you have Philippi, if you can travel into Asia, you have Ephesus. But if you are near Italy, you have Rome, whence our authority [in Africa] is derived close at hand.’ 10
    Africa, in the person of its greatest theologian before Augustine, acknowledged the weight of Rome’s authority. Yet even Africa might qualify and withdraw that allegiance. One of the most divisive issues in the life of the Church of the third century was the question of the treatment of those who lapsed from the faith during periods of persecution. Christianity had prospered within the empire, and by the early third century was a force to be reckoned with. In Rome, it was already a substantial property-owner, and by AD 251 the church employed forty-six elders, seven deacons, seven subdeacons, forty-two acolytes and fifty-two lesser clerics, readers and door-keepers: it had over 1,500 widows and other needy people receiving poor-relief. Its total membership in the city may have been as many as 50,000.
    In an empire which was now threatened by internal breakdown and by the external pressure of the Gothic hordes, the visibility and expansion of Christianity provided an ideal scapegoat. Pope Callistus (c. 217—22) was murdered inTrastevere by a lynch-mob who were probably angered by recent Christian expansion in the crowded district. Rome celebrated a thousand years of prosperity under its ancestral gods in 247. The ills of the empire were now laid at the door of the growing numbers of those who refused to honour those gods. Riots against Christians became commonplace, and in 250 the Emperor