The historical study of the papacy begins with Peter and the study of Peter can only be undertaken in a scriptural context. I use the word ‘scriptural’ advisedly. Only if one gives the New Testament a special status as part of ‘Scripture’ does it make sense to sift its texts relating to Peter in the way traditionally done. Now one cannot accord the New Testament documents the status of Scripture on scholarly criteria alone. Scholarship has a very important part to play but it is necessarily subsidiary and incomplete.

It is conceivable, though after the last few generations of international scrutiny improbable, that evidence might come to light, or some great scholar notice something previously missed, that would make it intellectually impossible to accord the texts we have scriptural status. It is conceivable that a scholar might demonstrate that the thought of the New Testament and the language that went with the thought were impossible for the first century AD, as Lorenzo Valla did with the Constitutum Constantini. But after a century of scholarship trying to demonstrate just this, we are left with texts, all almost certainly originally written in the first century and therefore much nearer the autographs than any Latin or Greek classical texts, that so far as scholarship can tell are ‘authentic’. But this has only negative value. It means it is not intellectually disreputable to take them as texts of the time and place they purport to come from. It means that arguments of the kind one still meets that there is no evidence that Jesus ever lived can only be accepted if the same criteria be applied generally and it be freely admitted that there is no evidence that Julius Ceasar ever lived, or that Cicero wrote a line in his life—if he ever had one— or that there ever was a people called the Germans.