Where Did the Pope Get His Title?

If someone asks why the bishop of Rome is called the pope, the obvious answer is that the title means “father.” That is true, but it leaves out most of the history. The word existed long before it became closely associated with Rome, and its journey from an ordinary term of respect to a distinctive title involved centuries of changing customs. Along the way, another title entered the story: Pontifex Maximus — once held by the chief priest of ancient Rome and later adopted into the language of the Renaissance papacy.

These histories are often combined, particularly in arguments about where papal authority came from. One familiar version treats Peter as the first pope in both office and title. Another claims that Christian bishops simply inherited the title of Rome’s pagan high priest. Neither explanation does justice to the surviving evidence. We need to separate three questions: where the word pope came from, when it became especially associated with the bishop of Rome, and how Pontifex Maximus entered papal usage. They are related questions, but they don’t have the same answer.

A Word That Meant “Dad”

The English word pope comes from the Latin papa, from the Greek pappas, a familiar word for father, something like “papa” or “dad.” In Christian use, it became an affectionate, respectful way to address a spiritual father. It was not originally a word that identified one particular bishop, nor did its meaning contain a claim that the person addressed ruled the entire Church.

That does not mean the people who used it thought bishops had no authority. Christian communities already had leaders, disputes over discipline, and different understandings of how churches should relate to one another. It simply means that the meaning of an honorific and the authority of the person receiving it are different matters. A word can begin as a familiar form of address and eventually acquire a much more specialized meaning.

This also explains why popular attempts to turn papa into an acronym fail. One expansion, Petri Apostoli Potestatem Accipiens (“receiving the authority of the apostle Peter”), reads a later theological explanation back into a word that already existed. The abbreviation PP in papal documents is a separate matter: explanations of those letters have varied, and some historical discussions expand them as pastor pastorum. Whatever the conventions of a particular document, they do not explain the origin of papa. The Greek and Latin history of the word does.

The Early Evidence Leads Beyond Rome

One of the earliest clear examples of papa applied to a Christian bishop comes from Alexandria. Dionysius of Alexandria, writing in the middle of the third century to a Roman presbyter named Philemon, recalled a practice he had learned from his predecessor Heraclas, who led the Alexandrian church from about 232 to 248. Dionysius called him “our blessed papa Heraclas.” He was discussing how people returning from heretical groups should be received into the Church, not making a claim about the bishop of Rome.

There is an important qualification. Dionysius’s original letter has not survived independently. We know the passage because Eusebius of Caesarea quoted it in Book 7 of his Ecclesiastical History in the early fourth century. That is valuable evidence, but it is still a quotation preserved by a later writer. What the passage shows is that papa could be used for the bishop of Alexandria in the third century, well before it became exclusive to Rome in the Latin West.

The evidence from Carthage is just as revealing, and in one respect even more pointed. Around 250 AD, the presbyters and deacons of the Roman church addressed a letter to Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, with the salutation Cypriano papae; “to papa Cyprian.” Here we have Roman clergy themselves using the title for a bishop who was not their own bishop of Rome. Whatever particular prestige Rome already possessed, the word had not yet been reserved for its bishop.

That example also helps us avoid turning Alexandria into a misleading origin story. We cannot identify the first Christian ever to use papa in this way. Surviving texts allow us to document particular uses, not to reconstruct every conversation that took place in third-century churches. Alexandria and Carthage show how broad the term could be, not that someone in Egypt invented it.

When Did Rome Begin Using It?

The title was being applied to bishops of Rome by the end of the third century. A catacomb inscription associated with a Roman deacon named Severus refers to work undertaken at the order of papa Marcellinus, the bishop of Rome from 296 to 304. The words matter because this is not merely a later list of popes calling Marcellinus by a title familiar to its own author. It is early inscriptional evidence for the usage. By 314, a letter associated with the Council of Arles addressed Silvester, the bishop of Rome, as papa as well.

The harder question is not whether anyone called a Roman bishop papa around 300 AD. They did. It is when, and in what setting, that address began to suggest a status different from the same word applied to other bishops. There is no single document that captures the moment of change, and it would be a mistake to treat the earliest surviving example as the first time the title was ever spoken.

We can see the shift more clearly over the following centuries. The association with Rome grew stronger in Western usage, particularly as Roman bishops developed and defended claims of authority beyond their own city. But the old, broader usage did not disappear overnight. Bishops elsewhere continued to receive the title, sometimes long after Rome had begun using it distinctively.

How a General Title Became a Roman One

It is tempting to identify a pope who supposedly ordered everyone else to stop using the word. The evidence is less accommodating. Some accounts attach the narrowing of papa to Leo I in the fifth century, others to developments in the sixth century or later, and many popular summaries name Gregory VII in the eleventh century. Those dates may mark stages in the process, but they should not be confused with a securely documented moment when the title changed meaning everywhere.

Gregory VII’s Dictatus papae is particularly important here. Entered into the papal register in 1075, it consists of twenty-seven brief propositions about the authority of the Roman church and its bishop. Proposition 2 asserts that the Roman pontiff alone may rightly be called “universal.” Proposition 11 says, more cryptically, that “this name is unique in the world.” Both statements belong to a larger argument for the Roman see’s special status.

The Dictatus is sometimes presented as if it said, in so many words, “Only the bishop of Rome may be called pope.” It does not. Proposition 11 is commonly understood as supporting the exclusivity of the papal name, but its wording is less explicit than the modern paraphrase. Nor should we describe the Dictatus as a fully developed code of canon law. Historians have debated precisely what the list was for and how it related to Gregory’s program of reform.

This is why the frequently repeated claim that Gregory issued a separate decree in 1073 formally banning other bishops from using papa needs caution. Gregory’s pontificate certainly belongs to the history of Roman claims to distinctive authority, and later writers associated him with restricting the title. But the surviving Dictatus is from 1075, and it cannot by itself establish the existence or wording of an additional decree from 1073. The sounder conclusion is that an older honorific gradually became an increasingly distinctive Roman title in the West, with the eleventh-century reforms reinforcing a separation that was already well advanced.

A Different Title: Pontifex Maximus

The history of Pontifex Maximus takes us into a different world. In the Roman Republic, the pontifex maximus was the leading member of the College of Pontiffs, one of the central institutions responsible for Roman public religion. The office carried considerable influence over religious law and practice, including the calendar. It was restricted to patricians until 254 BC, when Tiberius Coruncanius became the first plebeian to hold it.

The office was religious, but Roman religion and politics were not neatly separated. Julius Caesar served as pontifex maximus, and Augustus took up the office in 12 BC. It then became a regular part of imperial titulature. Christian emperors initially retained it too. We therefore cannot assume that the title vanished from the imperial court the moment Constantine favored Christianity.

This is where a popular argument about the papacy goes astray. The fact that Roman emperors used Pontifex Maximus, and Renaissance popes later used the same words, does not establish that the emperors handed the office to the bishops of Rome. To make that argument, we would need evidence of an actual transfer. The historical record tells a different story.

What Happened Under Gratian?

The emperor Gratian, who died in 383, is central to the usual account. According to the late antique historian Zosimus, Gratian refused the insignia of the pagan pontificate because he considered them inappropriate for a Christian ruler. However, Zosimus wrote more than a century later, and his account has long been debated. Alan Cameron challenged its reliability, pointing to problems with its chronology and its description of the office. Other scholars have maintained that the story may preserve some memory of a real change in imperial practice.

There is evidence of change, but not the simple abandonment often described. Later Christian emperors continued to use pontifical language, including the modified title pontifex inclitus, meaning something like “distinguished pontiff.” This usage survived into the following centuries. Whatever happened under Gratian, imperial priestly language did not simply pass out of use and reappear on the bishop of Rome.

A more elaborate version claims that Gratian personally offered the office and title to Damasus, bishop of Rome from 366 to 384, and that Damasus accepted them. The story is familiar from later anti-Catholic polemics, but there is no contemporary source documenting such a handover. Neither the contested report about Gratian nor the subsequent history of the imperial title supplies one. The specific transfer to Damasus should therefore be treated as an unsupported legend, not an event that historians can date.

What Christians Meant by Pontifex

There is a separate reason Christian writers could use the word pontifex without taking over a pagan office. In Latin biblical and ecclesiastical language, pontifex could designate a high priest. It was used in connection with the priesthood of Israel and with Christ’s priesthood, especially in the context of the Letter to the Hebrews. From there, the word could be applied to bishops more generally. But sharing a word did not make a Christian bishop the holder of the same civic-religious office as the Roman pontifex maximus.

The distinction becomes especially clear in a passage from Tertullian’s De pudicitia, written in the early third century. Tertullian sarcastically calls an unnamed bishop pontifex maximus and episcopus episcoporum, “bishop of bishops,” while attacking his approach to reconciling Christians guilty of serious sexual sins. Scholars disagree about his target. Callixtus of Rome is a familiar candidate, but Agrippinus of Carthage and other possibilities have also been discussed. Tertullian never names the bishop in the passage, though.

What we can say is that Tertullian was mocking a fellow Christian’s claim to disciplinary authority. His language shows the phrase was available for such a dig. It is not evidence that Pontifex Maximus had already become an official papal title. The joke depends, in part, on how grandiose the words sounded.

Other forms of pontifex continued to circulate much more widely. Medieval texts could describe bishops outside Rome with expressions such as summus pontifex. The same words did not always have the sharply defined institutional meaning a modern reader might expect. That is one reason we must distinguish the general Christian use of pontifex, the more specific titles associated with the Roman bishop, and the classical phrase Pontifex Maximus. They did not all travel through history in the same way.

The Renaissance Makes Pontifex Maximus Papal

The decisive period for the regular papal use of Pontifex Maximus was not the fourth century but the fifteenth. Some earlier-looking examples are difficult to date. A statue associated with Boniface IX, who reigned from 1389 to 1404, bears an abbreviated form, while medals and inscriptions from the first half of the fifteenth century point to growing use. Scholars have warned that inscriptions on older monuments could be added or recut later. The evidence becomes much firmer under Nicholas V in the middle of the century, and the wording became familiar in papal representation under Paul II and his successors.

Why then? The work of Roald Dijkstra and Dorine van Espelo places the change in the culture of Renaissance Rome. Humanists admired classical Latin and the surviving monuments of the Roman Empire. A title associated with antiquity suited the inscriptions, medals, architecture, and public image of a papacy presenting itself as an heir to Rome’s past. The choice also carried obvious political possibilities at a time when papal authority was being asserted and contested.

We should not reduce that development to either a clever public-relations strategy or a sudden adoption of pagan religion. The appeal of the title came partly from its classical language and partly from the prestige it could give papal representation. It was an adaptation of an ancient expression in a new setting, not a documented continuation of the old pagan priestly office.

There is an additional distinction that popular discussions often miss. The phrase Pontifex Maximus appears on papal monuments, coins, and other public representations, but it has not been included among the listed papal titles in the Annuario Pontificio, the Vatican’s annual directory. Its widespread use does not make it identical to a formally listed title such as “Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church.”

Forged Documents and the Growth of Roman Authority

The Renaissance also brings us to the Donation of Constantine, although we need to be careful about the connection. This document was composed in the early Middle Ages, probably in the eighth century, and presented itself as a decree issued by Constantine. It claimed that the emperor, after being healed and baptized by Pope Sylvester, granted the Roman bishop extraordinary honors and jurisdiction, including authority in Rome and over western imperial territories. The story gave medieval defenders of papal power a useful account of an ancient imperial grant.

By the fifteenth century, scholars were challenging its authenticity. Nicholas of Cusa questioned it in 1433, and Lorenzo Valla made a devastating case in 1440 by examining its language and historical claims. Valla’s work did not immediately erase the document’s influence, but it helped expose a major pillar of medieval arguments about papal temporal authority as a forgery.

It would be easy to tell a neat story in which the old forged title to power collapsed and Pontifex Maximus was adopted to replace it. We do not have the evidence to draw that direct causal line. What we can say is that both developments took place in a world where the papacy’s relationship to ancient Rome was being argued over and represented in new ways. The Donation was exposed as medieval fabrication, while Renaissance papal inscriptions increasingly borrowed the language of classical Rome.

The Donation was not the only forged material to affect medieval debates. The ninth-century Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals combined genuine and fabricated texts, including purported ancient papal letters. Their main purpose was to protect bishops from abuses by powerful secular and metropolitan authorities. Appeals to Rome were part of that strategy, and the collection also strengthened later arguments for papal jurisdiction. It would be misleading; however, to describe the entire project as if its only purpose had been to invent papal supremacy.

Alongside forged documents, genuine institutions were developing. Roman bishops issued decretals on matters of discipline and church government. In 445, Emperor Valentinian III supported Leo I’s position in a dispute involving Hilary of Arles. By the twelfth century, Gratian’s Decretum brought together legal authorities in a work that became enormously influential in the study of canon law, even though it was not itself a papal decree officially promulgating a new legal code. The growth of Roman authority cannot be reduced either to forgeries or to the history of a single title.

That growth also had a practical side. After the collapse of western imperial government, Rome did not suddenly lose every administrator or governing institution. Ostrogothic rulers, imperial officials from Constantinople, and local elites continued to matter. But as political circumstances changed, bishops of Rome sometimes assumed more visible roles in diplomacy, relief, and the management of local affairs. The papacy’s territorial position developed further through its alliance with the Frankish rulers, including Pepin’s interventions and grants in the 750s. These changes helped give Roman bishops resources and influence that the word papa itself could never supply.

What About Peter?

At this point, a Catholic reader might reasonably object that the history of the word does not settle the question of papal authority. That is correct. The Catholic argument for Roman primacy rests chiefly on an interpretation of Peter’s role in the New Testament and the continuity of that role through the Roman episcopate. Matthew 16:18–19, Luke 22:31–32, and John 21:15–17 are central passages. Their theological interpretation cannot be decided by discovering when Christians began using the word papa.

The historical argument involves other evidence as well. Around 180 AD, Irenaeus of Lyon connected the Roman church to Peter and Paul and supplied a succession of leaders beginning with Linus. Later Christian writers continued to appeal to Rome’s apostolic associations. Leo I developed an especially forceful understanding of the Roman bishop’s relationship to Peter, while the First Vatican Council in 1870 defined doctrines concerning papal jurisdiction and infallibility in Pastor aeternus.

There is nevertheless a legitimate historical debate about the earliest organization of the Roman church. The first-century evidence does not clearly depict a single bishop functioning in precisely the way later Roman bishops did. Some historians argue that leadership was shared among presbyters and that the later succession lists arrange an earlier, less centralized situation into a familiar pattern. Others maintain that a single presiding bishop may have existed earlier than the surviving texts make obvious. By the middle or later second century, the evidence for an identifiable bishop in Rome is much stronger.

Neither side should claim more than this material can establish. A later exclusive title does not prove that the Roman office began late; equally, a succession list does not by itself settle every question about how that office functioned in the first century. The history of papa belongs in the discussion, but it cannot carry the whole argument for or against the papacy.

The Title Did Not Disappear Elsewhere

One of the best reminders that papa was not originally Rome’s exclusive property is that another Christian leader still bears the title. The head of the Coptic Orthodox Church is the Pope of Alexandria. Tawadros II has held that office since 2012, continuing a tradition that makes particular sense when we remember Dionysius’s reference to Heraclas in the third century.

Related words have also survived in ordinary Eastern Christian usage. Forms such as Russian, Serbian, and Bulgarian pop, Ukrainian pip, and Romanian popă can refer to priests, although their tone and formality differ by language. These are not all equivalent to the modern English title Pope. They do, however, preserve a wider family of words associated with Christian clergy.

That survival matters because it prevents us from turning the Western narrowing of a term into a universal Christian rule. In Latin Christianity papa eventually became a distinctive designation for the bishop of Rome. In other churches and languages, related usage followed a different course.

What the Vatican Calls the Pope Today

The distinction between familiar and formally listed titles remains visible in the Vatican’s own publications. The Annuario Pontificio lists “Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church” (Summus Pontifex Ecclesiae Universalis) among the pope’s traditional titles, not Pontifex Maximus. It also includes “Vicar of Jesus Christ,” rather than treating “Vicar of Christ” as the precise wording of the directory’s entry. The shorter expression is common in ordinary Catholic speech, but that is not the same thing as reproducing the formal list word for word.

In 2020, the Annuario placed particular emphasis on “Bishop of Rome” and moved the other traditional designations under the heading “Historical Titles.” That change drew criticism from some Catholics who worried it diminished important theological claims. The Vatican’s spokesman explained that the titles had not been suppressed; the new presentation was intended to make clear their historical connection to the office of bishop of Rome.

“Patriarch of the West” illustrates how the list can change. It was removed in 2006 under Benedict XVI and returned in the 2024 Annuario as a historical title. The words did not create or abolish the pope’s authority on either occasion, but their removal and return carried significance for discussions of Rome’s relationship with Eastern Christianity.

Other titles have their own histories. Gregory I, for example, helped popularize Servus servorum Dei, “Servant of the Servants of God,” during a period of tension with Constantinople over claims to universal ecclesiastical rank. The expression stressed humility, even as Gregory argued vigorously about authority. It eventually became a familiar part of papal documents. Once again, the history is not a matter of a title suddenly appearing fully formed, but of words gaining particular institutional associations through repeated use.

Where This Leaves Us

The word pope did not begin as a title reserved for the bishop of Rome. We find it used for bishops in Alexandria and Carthage, including by Roman clergy addressing someone outside Rome. It was also applied to Roman bishops by about 300 AD. Over the following centuries, it became increasingly associated with Rome in the Latin West, until the broader use largely disappeared there. The evidence points to a gradual narrowing of usage, not a single moment when an ordinary word was invented for the papacy.

Pontifex Maximus followed a different path. It was a title of ancient Roman priesthood and later imperial representation, but there is no documented transfer of that office from Gratian to Damasus or any other fourth-century bishop of Rome. The phrase became prominent in papal representation during the Renaissance, when the language of classical antiquity offered a powerful way to present the papacy’s connection to Rome.

None of this settles whether Catholic teaching about Peter and his successors is correct. That question requires a separate examination of scripture, early Christian leadership, succession, and the development of doctrine. What the history does show is that we cannot simply assume a title has always carried its modern meaning. The words changed, the institutions changed, and sometimes one changed long before the other.