Moreover, it was in Damasus’s time that Peter came to be regarded not merely as the founder of the Christian Church in Rome, but also as its first bishop.13 Ironically, it was actually a North African bishop, point-scoring against his local Donatist opponents by stressing the North African Catholics’ links to Rome, who is the first person known to have asserted on the basis of Matthew 16.17–19 that ‘Peter was superior to the other apostles and alone received the keys of the kingdom, which were distributed by him to the rest’; yet significantly it was in the time of Damasus that this thought
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