other · 272 · Antioch
Paul of Samosata had been deposed by a synod at Antioch in 268 (seed 223) and had simply stayed, holding the church building with the backing of Zenobia's Palmyrene administration. When Aurelian took Antioch in 272 and broke Palmyra, the bishops appealed to him. His ruling was that the building should be given to those to whom the bishops of Italy and of the city of Rome should write — that is, to whoever the recognised communion recognised. Three things are worth marking and this dataset marks all of them. It is the first recorded case of Christians asking a Roman emperor to settle an internal dispute, forty years before there was a Christian emperor to ask. Aurelian himself was no friend of the church and issued or planned a persecution before he died two years later. And the test he used is precisely the one this project is a map of: not doctrine, which he could not judge, but communion with a known line of bishops. A pagan soldier looking for the simplest available criterion reached for the succession.
Who decides who owns a church?
In 272, a pagan emperor — and he decided it by asking who was in communion with Rome.