We don’t know who started the church or when. Later tradition said that it was founded by the disciple Peter (allegedly the first bishop there, hence the first “pope”), but this seems unlikely: Paul’s letter provides us with the first surviving evidence for the fact that a church existed in Rome at all, and in it he greets the various people he knows there. But he never mentions Peter. This is hard to imagine if Peter was there—especially if he was the leader of that church.
