Your last sentence puzzles me. Perhaps you can clarify. This issue to me has less to do with Scripture than with history. The early Christians seem to have had remarkably little notion of Peter as a forerunner Pope or of any early Bishop of Rome as a Pope - or, indeed, of an office of the Papacy at all. If someone is a Catholic I can understand how the origins of the Papacy are believed to be traceable to Jesus' words to Peter, but this seems to me an instance of attempting to get way too much mileage out of a highly ambiguous verse. As with many doctrines, if Jesus had acfually been creating an office as powerful as the Papacy I believe that He (and the Bible) would have made this far more clear. I agree with your point that the Reformation was largely a disaster for Christianity, but I continue to believe the Eastern Orthodox have the strongest claim to being the one true apostolic church.
Keep in mind that the Church preceded the New Testament by quite a bit. The Church didn't decide which documents were worthy of being called Scripture (New Testament) till the late 4th century, at the Councils of Rome, Hippo, and Carthage.
The Early Church Fathers, those closest in time to Christ and the Apostles, believed that there was a primacy and authority in the office of the papacy. In a wide variety of ways, the Fathers attest to the fact that the church of Rome was the central and most authoritative church. They attest to the Church’s reliance on Rome for advice, for mediation of disputes, and for guidance on doctrinal issues. They note, as Ignatius of Antioch (appointed by St. Peter himself) does, that Rome “holds the presidency” among the other churches, and that, as Irenaeus explains, “because of its superior origin, all the churches must agree” with Rome. They are also clear on the fact that it is communion with Rome and the bishop of Rome that causes one to be in communion with the Catholic Church. This displays a recognition that, as Cyprian of Carthage puts it, Rome is “the principal church, in which sacerdotal unity has its source.”
Some writers, particularly Eastern Orthodox, have suggested that the Bishop of Rome enjoyed only a “primacy of honor” in the early Church. But this suggestion misunderstands the way that “primacy” and “honor” were understood in antiquity.
In both Greek and Roman usage, “honor” was a way of speaking of office and authority. It’s why Aristotle declares in his
Politics that “the offices of a state are posts of honor,” and those “excluded from power will be dishonored” and recounts how “riches became the path to honor, and so oligarchies naturally grew up.” Primacy was therefore something more than just “honor” in the narrow sense that we mean the term today, which is why the First Council of Nicaea (325) speaks of Alexandria having “jurisdiction” to name local bishops but then speaks of Jerusalem as having “the next place of honor” in doing so.
What the council was delineating was not who it liked best or thought the most honorable but which bishops had the jurisdiction in particular regions to select bishops. Recognizing the pope’s “primacy of honor,” properly understood, is a recognition of papal authority and papal supremacy.
The Church Fathers, taken individually or together, reflect the same structure of the Church: a small, collaborative family in which conflicts would occasionally arise, conflicts which could and would be adjudicated by the Bishop of Rome. In this way, the successors of Peter carried out (and continue to carry out) the unique mission entrusted to Peter by Jesus Christ.
