The Roman Church in the Third Century

Between the house-church world that ends around 200 and the Novatian schism of 251, the Roman church did most of its early growing up - and it did so in public argument with itself. Zephyrinus and then Callistus led a large and socially mixed congregation through questions that had no settled answers: whether a Christian who had committed grave sin after baptism could ever be restored, whether a noblewoman could contract a union the state would not recognise rather than lose her status, how to speak about Father and Son without saying two Gods. Hippolytus, a learned presbyter of the same city, thought Callistus wrong on all three and said so at length, eventually functioning as a rival bishop. Nearly everything known about the period comes from him, which is a problem: he is the losing party and a hostile witness. Callistus, a former slave who had been sent to the Sardinian mines, left nothing in his own voice.