Ignatius writes to six churches about 110 and tells each of them to do nothing without the bishop. Whether that is evidence of a new thing or of an old one is the oldest live argument about the shape of the early church, and this dataset's succession lists sit on top of it. Lightfoot, whose edition is still the standard, read the letters as the moment a single bishop emerges from a college of presbyters — a development, complete in Syria and Asia by 110 and not yet elsewhere. The Orthodox reading takes the same letters the other way: a man writing on his way to the lions, to churches he is not correcting on this point, describes what he assumes they already have, and the apostolic ordinations in Clement and Acts are the thing he assumes. The texts do not settle it. What can be said is what each side rests on: Lightfoot on the interchangeable vocabulary of the New Testament and of Clement's letter, the Orthodox reading on the letters' tone, which nowhere argues for the office it invokes. This project keeps both readings and grades the earliest entries of every line accordingly, which is why the first names on the Rome chain carry ordinals the second century did not use.
The Apostolic Fathers · Ignatius, Ephesians 6, Magnesians 6-7, Trallians 3, Smyrnaeans 8; Lightfoot, Apostolic Fathers II.1, the dissertation on the Christian ministry