On the 1st anniversary of his election to the papacy, Leo the nice stood prior to the meeting of bishops convening in Rome and forcefully asserted his privileged place because the inheritor of Peter the Apostle. This statement marked the start of a strong culture: the Bishop of Rome could henceforth leverage the cult of St. Peter, and the preferred organization of St. Peter with town itself, to his virtue. In The Invention of Peter, George E. Demacopoulos examines this Petrine discourse, revealing how the hyperlink among the old Peter and the Roman Church bolstered, shifted, and developed through the papacies of 2 of the main inventive and dynamic popes of overdue antiquity, finally shaping medieval Christianity as we now comprehend it.

By emphasizing the ways that this rhetoric of apostolic privilege was once hired, prolonged, reworked, or resisted among the reigns of Leo the nice and Gregory the nice, Demacopoulos bargains another account of papal background that demanding situations the dominant narrative of an inevitable and unbroken upward push in papal energy from overdue antiquity in the course of the heart a long time. He unpacks escalating claims to ecclesiastical authority, demonstrating how this rhetoric, which just about continually invokes a hyperlink to St. Peter, doesn't unavoidably symbolize real energy or status yet as a substitute displays moments of papal anxiousness and weak point. via its nuanced exam of an array of episcopal activity—diplomatic, pastoral, political, and administrative—The Invention of Peter deals a brand new point of view at the emergence of papal authority and illuminates the effect that Petrine discourse exerted at the survival and unparalleled prestige of the Bishop of Rome.