Bishop of Lyon · c. 177 (Pothinus, first attested bishop, dies in the persecution)
The first see in Gaul, and the church that wrote its own martyrdom down. Pothinus was over ninety when the amphitheatre took him in 177; his presbyter Irenaeus was away in Rome carrying the confessors letter and came back to succeed him, and spent the rest of his life arguing that an unbroken line of named bishops is what answers a claim of secret tradition. Lyon kept the primacy of Gaul long after. Only those two second-century holders are carried in this dataset: an ordinal asserts a position in a list, the rest of the Lyon list is not established here, and a later bishop with no tenure is better than one with a wrong number.
4 holders in the record.