Читать книгу The World's Christians - Douglas Jacobsen - Страница 46

The Catholic tradition claims roots back to the earliest followers of Jesus, identifying the apostle Peter, to whom Jesus gave “the keys of the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 16:19), as the first Pope. In actuality, the office of the papacy took centuries to develop, but bishops of Rome frequently claimed (and were acknowledged to have) special powers and privileges even during the earliest centuries of the Christian movement. Over the course of these centuries, Catholicism developed its central doctrines of the Trinity and the combined humanity and deity of Christ. This is also when the Latin‐speaking Roman Church codified its particular version of the Bible (which is slightly longer than the Protestant Bible) by accepting Jerome’s Latin translation of the Bible (known as the Vulgate) as its official biblical text.

Ancient Catholicism was closely associated with the Roman Empire, which became Christian after the conversion of the Emperor Constantine in the early 300s. The “fall of the Roman Empire” (which refers only to the “fall” of the western, Latin‐speaking half of the ancient Roman Empire) was therefore devastating. Catholic Christians wondered if God had forgotten them or was punishing them. It was Augustine, bishop of the city of Hippo in north Africa, who was most effective in helping Catholics come to grips with this disaster. He argued that life in this world would always be marked by tragedy and sin and that it was foolish to hope for any kind of earthly utopia. The fall of Rome and the writings of Augustine led the emerging Catholic tradition to embrace a more other‐worldly focus than was the case with Orthodoxy.