Objection: <The Popes could not have primacy over the whole Church because Peter never acted as though he was the supreme head of the Church. >
Reply: He had been appointed as such by Jesus (Mt 18:18, 19). We do not have complete records of all his actions, but it is quite likely that he never had to. In those early days of innocence it probably never occurred to anyone that the day would come when bishop strove against bishop, and that the successor of Peter would have to intervene, even to deposing a bishop for heresy. But Christ had laid the structure, and when the time came, it was there waiting to be invoked.
Objection: <Paul never recognised Peter as the supreme head of the church.>
Reply: Why, because he corrected him once when he was in the wrong? That argument would have force only if Peter had claimed to be all right all the time.
There is no record of Paul vying with Peter for authority. That is a different matter from the question of eating with the Jews.
Objection: <Even Peter could not understand some of the things in Paul's letters! Paul's was the most learned of all the apostles.>
Reply: It is nothing unusual at all for one in charge to delegate tasks to experts. Every wise king does this – and every modern leader.
Objection: <Bring forth the magisterial documents of the first millennium which teach the infallibility of the bishop of Rome.>
Reply: There are two mistakes:
(i) to deny any possibility of development at all. This is exemplified by Luther's famous ‘Search for the Acorn' in the mature oak tree. It involves a great deal of imaginative reconstruction from passages in the NT without either admitting that the imagination is at work, or that there could be any alternative explanations;
(ii) to think that the Catholic Church as it existed in, e.g. 1955 dropped out of Heaven in 34 AD, & that if it did not, that the RCC is invalid. In fact, every generation has seen a further deepening of insight - but a development of what was already there implicitly, not the addition of what was not already there..
*Development has also, in the RCC, taken the form of the final closing of doors on a disputed issue once it has been ‘quod bene contempláta’ – that which is well contemplated.’ Newcomers to the subject might be surprised at how few positive statements are made. A dogmatic statement is nearly always in the form of the rejection – the anathematising – of one specific error, which ever afterwards cannot be maintained while remaining a Catholic.
*A very great number of things were taken for granted, sometimes for centuries, before a definitive statement had to be made. It is therefore a (common) mistake to assume that a certain point was not believed before the first public written declaration.
*Yet another point is that some issues simply were not thought about until some crisis brought it to general attention. Again, it is a common mistake to attempt to assign historical figures to one or other side of a controversy that had not yet actually arisen at the time.