section_path: Church beginnings/Origins
section_name: Origins
paragraph_text: Origins
  
  According to sacred tradition, the Catholic Church was founded by Jesus Christ. The New Testament records Jesus' activities and teachings, His appointment of the twelve Apostles, and His instructions to them to continue His work. The Catholic Church teaches that the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the apostles, in an event known as Pentecost, signaled the beginning of the public ministry of the Church. Catholics hold that Saint Peter was Rome's first bishop and the consecrator of Linus as its next bishop, thus starting the unbroken line which includes the most recent pontiff, Pope Leo XIV. That is, the Catholic Church maintains the apostolic succession of the Bishop of Rome, the Pope – the successor to Saint Peter.
  
  In the account of the Confession of Peter found in the Gospel of Matthew, it is believed that Christ designates Peter as the "rock" upon which Christ's church will be built. While some scholars do state Peter was the first Bishop of Rome, others say that the institution of the papacy is not dependent on the idea that Peter was Bishop of Rome or even on his ever having been in Rome. Many scholars hold that a church structure of plural presbyters/bishops persisted in Rome until the mid-2nd century, when the structure of a single bishop and plural presbyters was adopted, and that later writers retrospectively applied the term "bishop of Rome" to the most prominent members of the clergy in the earlier period and also to Peter himself. On this basis, Protestant theologians Oscar Cullmann and Henry Chadwick question whether there was a formal link between Peter and the modern papacy; Catholic scholar Raymond E. Brown says that, while it is anachronistic to speak of Peter in terms of a local bishop of Rome, Christians of that period would have looked on Peter as having "roles that would contribute in an essential way to the development of the role of the papacy in the subsequent church". These roles, Brown says, "contributed enormously to seeing the bishop of Rome, the bishop of the city where Peter died, and where Paul witnessed to the truth of Christ, as the successor of Peter in care for the church universal".