“The blessed apostles, then, having founded and built up the Church, committed into the…”
The blessed apostles, then, having founded and built up the Church, committed into the hands of Linus the office of the episcopate. Of this Linus, Paul makes mention in the Epistles to Timothy. To him succeeded Anacletus; and after him, in the third place from the apostles, Clement was allotted the bishopric.
Irenaeus · Against Heresies · ANF I, Against Heresies, Book III, Chapter III, 3
The opening of the oldest list of the bishops of Rome, written about 180 and naming the men in order from the apostles. Every later Roman fasti this project holds descends from this paragraph, and the first three names in it are the first three rows of the Roman line here.
How this is known
These words were matched, word for word, against this project’s own copy of the volume cited.
Book III, chapter iii, section 3 of Against Heresies, the passage from which the Roman succession list in this dataset ultimately derives, in the region of ANF vol. 1 that carries the third book. The volume's own footnote 2654, printed in its introductory matter to Against Heresies, records that Roberts englished the first two books and that the groundwork of the third and of the part of the fourth carried here was furnished by W. H. Rambaut, which is why this row names them and not Donaldson.
Read in Roberts & Rambaut, ANF vol. 1 (1885) · Alexander Roberts and W. H. Rambaut, revised by A. Cleveland Coxe
Also by
- Irenaeus every saying recorded of this person, and their page