EP 02 - The Real-Life Magisterium

The Missing Link

- Episode 02 -

The Real-Life Magisterium: the secret history of the Roman Catholic Church

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The Missing Link

22 October 2025

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The real life magisterium: the secret history of the ROMAN Catholic Church

EPISODE 2 THE MISSING LINK

Sarah Mullally, appointed first woman Archbishop of Canterbury

Why the myth of the apostolic succession is dangerous

The Church of England, like the Catholic Church at its roots, believes in the Apostolic Succession. According to those who left after women bishops were first ordained the very real problem was that one single woman laying hands on a priest would break this continuous line of male hands from the first apostles until now.

(Eight Anglican bishops have already said they won’t receive communion from the female hands of Sarah Mullally.)

The Apostolic Succession is the belief that Jesus ordained his apostles – the twelve leading men among his first disciples - and that they in turn ordained the first bishops, who have passed this ordination on in an unbroken succession of MEN laying hands on MEN ever since.

It’s why the Catholic church won't ordain women. It's why it does does not accept priests or people who have been ordained in other churches.

(In reality the Roman Catholic Church does accept Anglican priests who want to 'cross over.' They do of course have to be ‘properly’ turned into Catholic priests with a ceremony. But they can keep their wives and children! Catholic priests as you know are not allowed to be married)

The Didache is a brief anonymous early Christian document, written in Koine Greek

Apostles - 'wandering preachers' claiming bed and board in return for a dodgy sermon?

Words like ‘apostle’ and ‘bishop’ meant very different things in the second and third centuries.

Catholic theologian and presbyter (priest), Prof. Thomas O’Loughlin, has shown that the word ‘apostle’ (used in the documents that traditionalists wave at us) didn’t originally mean the twelve men chosen by Jesus. It meant something more like a ‘wandering preacher’.

In fact a document known as the Didache, probably originally written some time early in the second century, treats so-called ‘apostles’ as a nuisance. The document tells us that many of them were charlatans going round claiming a comfortable bed and fine food in return for a dodgy sermon.

Nobody wants to claim a direct line back to these ‘apostles’.

#114 The Missing Link - Ep 2 The Real-life Magisterium: the secret history of the Roman Catholic Church

What do you do if you have a MISSING LINK in your genealogy? Make it up.

6th Century Syriac portrait of Eusebius of Caesarea, writing in AD305-330

The early Church didn’t keep records of the first apostles who knew Jesus

After the New Testament book of the Acts of the Apostles – written in the first century – there seems to be no historical record of Jesus's close mates for two and a half centuries.

Fortunately there’s an early manuscript dating from the AD460s (although only in a fragmentary Syriac translation) by the earliest ‘historian’ of the Catholic Church, Eusebius of Caesarea, writing between AD305 and 330.

His 10-volume writings were accepted as the official of the history of the 4^th Century Roman church, and it is still referred to today.

We look at what Eusebius says about the first 12 Apostles and the key link (but oh so missing!) between Jesus Christ and the Church’s bishops.

A medieval genealogy tracing the line back to Adam and Eve

The problem with genealogies!

There are lists of bishops in Eusebius' writings – (or not-quite bishops – he can hardly bring himself to use the word) which the 4th Century Church used to bridge the missing link between it and Jesus's first Apostles.

But what Eusebius calls ‘the successions of the apostles’ were just pedigrees, like any others from this period. As Catholic theologian and historian O’Loughlin shows, it’s what you did if you wanted to bolster your argument. They are no use at all as historical evidence of a direct line of ordained bishops from Jesus to the present day.

Jewish teachers listed their rabbis and their rabbis’ rabbis. There are two genealogies of Jesus in the Gospels, different from each other, one stretching back to Abraham, and the other to Adam himself. Even the Catholic Church wouldn’t claim they are historical.

Meanwhile, wealthy Roman families drew up family trees tracing back their ancestry to the gods – say, Apollo or Jupiter. It was just like medieval English families who would later claim they were descended from the men who came over with William the Conqueror. It was a way to stake your claim to the land you occupied.

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