The Primacy Text (De Unitate 4)

Chapter 4 of De Unitate — the passage on Peter and the unity of the Church — survives in two distinct recensions: a longer one (the Textus Receptus or “Primacy Text”) that stresses the primatus given to Peter and the one cathedra Petri, and a shorter one that speaks of Peter only as the figure of the one episcopate shared equally by all. This file presents both recensions in parallel with their sources, reports the modern scholarly conclusion (associated above all with Maurice Bévenot) that both are genuinely Cyprian’s own, and sets out as a structured dispute the Roman-primacy reading and the Orthodox reading of the passage.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father / Latin)

The Two Recensions

Chapter 4 of De Unitate exists in two forms. The text-critical situation has been recognized since the seventeenth century (Bishop John Fell and Pierre Coustant first laid out the variants) and was settled in its modern form by the editions of M. Bévenot in the mid-twentieth century, which named the two the “Primacy Text” (Textus Receptus — the longer, traditionally received reading) and the shorter or “original” text (Bévenot, St. Cyprian’s De Unitate Chap. 4 in the Light of the Manuscripts, 1938; OECT introduction, 1971). Both turn on the same scriptural base — Matthew 16:18–19 (“Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church… I will give unto thee the keys”) and John 21:17 (“Feed my sheep”) — and both reach the same conclusion, that the Lord founded the Church on one man in order to display its unity. They differ in what they add in between.

The Primacy Text (Textus Receptus / longer recension)

“The Lord saith unto Peter, ‘I say unto thee, that thou art Peter; and upon this rock I will build my Church… And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven…’ And again He saith to him after His resurrection, ‘Feed my sheep.’ Upon him being one He builds His Church, and although to all the apostles after His resurrection He gives an equal power… yet, that He might set forth unity, He arranged by His authority the origin of that unity as beginning from one. Assuredly the rest of the apostles were also that which Peter was, endued with an equal partnership both of honour and power; but the beginning proceeds from unity, and the primacy is given to Peter, that there might be shown one Church of Christ and one chair (ut una ecclesia et cathedra una monstretur)… And He says to him, ‘Feed my sheep.’ He builds the Church upon one.” (Cyprian, De Unitate 4, longer recension [the Textus Receptus]; trans. ANF 5, which prints this version)

The clauses in bold — “Upon him being one He builds His Church,” “the primacy is given to Peter” (primatus Petro datur), and “one Church and one chair (cathedra una)” — are the distinctive additions of the Primacy Text. They make Peter not merely the figure of unity but the recipient of a primatus and the holder of a single cathedra that the Church’s unity is said to manifest.

The shorter (original) recension

“The Lord saith unto Peter, ‘I say unto thee, that thou art Peter…’ … and although to all the apostles He gives an equal power, and says, ‘As the Father hath sent me, even so send I you… whose sins ye remit…’ yet, that He might set forth unity, He arranged by His authority the origin of that unity as beginning from one. Assuredly the rest of the apostles were also that which Peter was, endued with an equal partnership both of honour and power; but the beginning proceeds from unity, that the Church of Christ may be shown to be one (ut ecclesia Christi una monstretur).” (Cyprian, De Unitate 4, shorter recension; ed. and trans. Bévenot, OECT)

The shorter text omits the “Feed my sheep” / “He builds upon one” repetition, omits primatus Petro datur, and replaces “one Church and one chair” with the plain “that the Church of Christ may be shown to be one.” Peter remains the starting-point of unity, but there is no language of a Petrine primacy or a single chair.

What the Scholarship Concluded

The decisive question is whether the longer Primacy Text is an authentic composition of Cyprian or a later (papal-interested) interpolation. The nineteenth-century critics generally suspected interpolation. The twentieth-century consensus reversed this:

  • Dom John Chapman (1902–1928) argued that both recensions are Cyprian’s own work — that Cyprian himself wrote two editions of the chapter (Chapman, Studies on the Early Papacy).
  • Maurice Bévenot, in a long series of studies culminating in his OECT edition (1971), established the dominant view: both texts are genuinely Cyprianic, the Primacy Text is the earlier of the two, and the shorter text is Cyprian’s own later revision — Cyprian himself toned the chapter down, most plausibly during or after the rebaptism controversy with Stephen, when language of a Roman “chair” had become dangerous to his own anti-Roman argument (Bévenot, OECT introduction; ACW 25 introduction).
  • This conclusion was confirmed by D. van den Eynde and O. Perler, and is the settled position of most editors today (Bévenot, OECT; cf. the surveys in Burns, Cyprian the Bishop, and Brent, Cyprian and Roman Carthage).

The upshot is double-edged for both traditions. Against the older Protestant and some Orthodox polemic, the Primacy Text is not a forgery slipped in by Rome: Cyprian wrote it. Against the maximal Roman reading, the primatus/cathedra language is the wording Cyprian chose to remove, and even in the Primacy Text it stands beside his insistence that “the rest of the apostles were also that which Peter was, endued with an equal partnership both of honour and power” — so that the primatus is a primacy of origin and figure, not (in Cyprian’s usage) of jurisdiction (Bévenot, OECT introduction; see The Contested Ecclesiology).

The Disputed Reading

[Disputed: (A) The Roman-primacy reading takes the Primacy Text at full strength: Cyprian, a non-Roman bishop, testifies that the Lord conferred a primatus on Peter and established “one chair” (cathedra una), and that the Church’s unity has its origin and visible centre in the Petrine office — which, on the Roman reading, is continued in the bishop of Rome as Peter’s successor. Catholic scholarship from the Catholic Encyclopedia through modern apologetics reads primatus Petro datur and cathedra una as Cyprian’s witness to a Roman/Petrine primacy, and reinforces it from his letters, where Cyprian calls the Roman church “the chair of Peter and the principal church whence priestly unity has its source” (ecclesia principalis unde unitas sacerdotalis exorta est) (Cyprian, Epistula 59.14 [CSEL 3.2:683]; trans. ANF 5, Ep. 54), and where he reports referring the Novatianist affair to Rome. On this reading Cyprian is a third-century African witness to the doctrine later defined as the Roman primacy. The Catholic Encyclopedia article on Cyprian and works in this tradition (Chapman, Studies on the Early Papacy) develop the position, while granting the tension with Cyprian’s later conduct.

(B) The Orthodox (and much critical) reading holds that Peter in De Unitate 4 is the type of episcopal unity, not the holder of a jurisdiction, and that the “one chair” is the one episcopate held by every bishop in solidum (see De Unitate), not the see of Rome. Three things are urged. First, Cyprian’s own gloss undercuts the maximal reading even within the Primacy Text: “the rest of the apostles were also that which Peter was, endued with an equal partnership both of honour and power” — the primatus is one of temporal origin (“the beginning proceeds from unity”), establishing that the Church is one, not that one bishop rules the rest (Cyprian, De Unitate 4–5; trans. ANF 5). Second, Cyprian elsewhere applies “the chair of Peter” not to Rome alone but to the episcopate as such — every bishop sits on Peter’s chair, because every bishop holds the one episcopate (Cyprian, Epistula 43.5; Ep. 33; Bévenot, “Primatus Petro datur”: St Cyprian on the Papacy, JTS 1954). Third, and decisively for the Orthodox case, Cyprian’s conduct construes his own words: in the rebaptism controversy he flatly refused to let the bishop of Rome impose Roman custom on Africa, declared that “none of us sets himself up as a bishop of bishops” (neque enim quisquam nostrum episcopum se episcoporum constituit) at the Council of Carthage in 256, and died out of communion-fellowship with Pope Stephen (Cyprian, Sententiae Episcoporum, preface [CSEL 3.1:436]; trans. ANF 5; see The Clash with Stephen). On the Orthodox reading the same Cyprian who wrote primatus Petro datur shows by these acts that he meant by it no Roman jurisdiction; the ecclesia principalis of Letter 59 is Rome’s honoured primacy of origin among the churches, not a power over them. Afanasiev, Meyendorff, and the contributors to The Primacy of Peter, and Orthodox patristic scholarship generally, develop this reading; it is also broadly that of Bévenot himself, who concluded that for Cyprian the primatus is the primacy of the one episcopate, not of the Roman see (Bévenot, JTS 1954; Meyendorff et al., The Primacy of Peter).]

What Both Sides Grant

Stated fairly, the two readings share ground. Both grant that Cyprian wrote both recensions, so that the Primacy Text is genuine and the shorter text is also genuine. Both grant that Cyprian honoured the Roman church as the ecclesia principalis and as in some sense the “chair of Peter,” and that he made Peter the figure of the Church’s unity. Both grant that Cyprian nowhere obeyed Rome as a superior and explicitly refused, at the end, to treat any bishop — Roman or other — as a “bishop of bishops.” The disagreement is over the inference: whether Cyprian’s Petrine and “chair” language is the seed of the later papal primacy of jurisdiction (reading A), or a primacy of honour and origin within a college of bishops who each hold the one episcopate entire (reading B). The methodology of this collection requires both to be set out with their own sources and without triumphal adjudication (see METHODOLOGY, §4); the most that can be said neutrally is that Cyprian’s words admit a strong and a modest sense, that he himself revised the strong language out, and that his conduct in 255–258 is the strongest single datum, pulling toward the modest reading.

See Also

References

  • Cyprian of Carthage. De Ecclesiae Catholicae Unitate 4–5, in both recensions. Ed. M. Bévenot, Cyprian: De Lapsis and De Ecclesiae Catholicae Unitate, Oxford Early Christian Texts, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971 (the critical edition that prints both texts); CSEL 3.1 (Hartel); PL 4:497–501. Trans. Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 5 (which prints the longer/Primacy Text). Online: https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/050701.htm
  • Cyprian of Carthage. Epistula 59.14 (ecclesia principalis unde unitas sacerdotalis exorta est); Epistula 43.5; Sententiae Episcoporum, preface (neque enim quisquam nostrum episcopum se episcoporum constituit). CSEL 3.1–3.2; trans. ANF 5 (Epp. 54, 33; the Seventh Council of Carthage).
  • Bévenot, Maurice. St. Cyprian’s De Unitate Chap. 4 in the Light of the Manuscripts. Analecta Gregoriana 11. Rome: Gregorian University, 1938 — the foundational text-critical study of the two recensions.
  • Bévenot, Maurice. “Primatus Petro datur: St Cyprian on the Papacy.” Journal of Theological Studies n.s. 5 (1954): 19–35 — the argument that the primatus is the primacy of the one episcopate, not of the Roman see.
  • Bévenot, Maurice, ed. Cyprian: De Lapsis and De Ecclesiae Catholicae Unitate. Oxford Early Christian Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. Introduction on the priority of the Primacy Text and Cyprian’s own revision.
  • Chapman, John. Studies on the Early Papacy. London: Sheed & Ward, 1928 — the argument that both recensions are Cyprian’s, read in the Roman-primacy sense.
  • Meyendorff, John, ed. The Primacy of Peter: Essays in Ecclesiology and the Early Church. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, rev. ed. 1992 — the Orthodox reading of Cyprian’s Petrine language.