Cyprian came from a wealthy family with a tradition of public service to the empire: within two years of hig conversion he was made a bishop. He had to face the practical proble ms of persecution, survival and defense against attack. His solution was to gather together the develo ping threads of ecclesiastical order and authority and weave them into a tight system of absolute control. He reason ed as follows. The Church was a divine institution; the Bride of Christ; Mother Church, the metriarch of all salvation. It was one, undivided and catholic. Only in association with her could Cathol ics have life. Outside her holy fellowship there was nothing but error and darkness. The sacraments, Episcopal ordination, the confession of faith, even the Bible itself, lost their meaning if used outside the true Church. The Church was also a human, visible community, found only in an organized form. The individual could not be saved by direct contact with God. The carefully graded hierarchy, without which the Organized Church could not exist, was established by Christ and the apostles. The laity was allowed to be present at the electio n of the bishop but the actual choice was made by all the presbyters, especially by other neighboring bishops. And bishops, under the Metropolitan, had the right of removal. Through the bishop ‘all ecclesiastical measures whatso ever must be carried out’. Without the office of bishop there could be no Church; and without the Church , no salvation. The man who determined who was, or was not, a member of the Church, and therefore eligible for Salvation, was the bishop. He interpreted the scriptures in the light of the Church's needs in any given situation; the only unambiguous instruction they contained being to remain faithful to the Church and obey its rules. With Cyprian, then, the freedom preached by Paul and based on the power of Christian truth was removed from the ordinary members of the Church; it was retained only by the bishops, through whom the Holy Spirit still worked, who were collectively delegated to represent the totality of Church members. They were given wide powers of discretion, subject always to the traditional and attested truth of the Church and the scriptures. They were rulers, operating and interpreting a law. With Bishop Cyprian, the analogy with secular government came to seem very close. But of course it lacked one element: the ‘emperor figure’ or supreme priest. Cyprian was stil thinking in terms of a collectivity of bishops, as, it might be argued, were the elders or pillars of the Jerusalem Church, more than a century and a half before. Yet since the bishops themselves based their authority on the tradition derived from apostolic descent, it was evident that some Churches, and therefore some bishops, carried more weight than others. Jerusalem was the mother-Church, where all the apostles had operated; but the Jerusalem congregation had ceased to exist by AD 70, and it never, recovered its pristine status. The only other apostolic foundation was Rome, since both Peter and Paul were believed to have been martyred there. Peter's martyrdom was alluded to in John's gospel, 13:36 and 21 :18-19, and both Clements's epistle to the Corinthians and Ignatius's Letter to the Romans indicate it took place in Rome. The claim was made explicit by Eusebius, who quoted Gaius(c. 200) and Dionysius Bishop of Corinth as his authorities; and there is a further statement in the Chronicle of Sulpicius Severus (d. 420). Eusebius and Dionysius agree that Paul was beheaded, Peter crucified. This belief that the two apostles were executed and buried in Rome was evidently very ancient. Tertullian accepted it as fact; by his day there was already a monument on the Vatican Hill, built about 160. Recent excavations make it clear that it was set up in Peter's honor and that those who did so thought he was buried there. Gaius mentioned this monument and also one to St Paul on the Ostia road, the present site of St-Paul's-Without-the-Walls. There was also a third joint monument on the Appian Way, where services were held on 29 June as early as the second century. Thus Rome's connection with the two greatest apostles was never disputed and it was exploited from the earliest times. Rome had the most impressive genealogy of all the earliest churches. Indeed, it had an embarrass de richesse -not one apostle, but two. Peter, however, was the more valuable founder, as he was in some sense the chief apostle, Jesus’ closest associate, and the beneficiary of the famous ‘rock and keys’ text in Matthew. There is no evidence that Rome exploited this text to assert its primacy before about 250 - and then, interestingly enough, in conflict with the aggressive Episcopalian Cyprian - but what is clear is that in 36