Popes of the Apostolic Era

By Thomas V. Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Feb 10, 2026 | In Lives of the Popes

This is the first installment of an ongoing series covering the lives of the popes.

As I mentioned in the introduction to this series, we know very little about many of the early popes, especially in the first two centuries. Thus this first installment will take us quickly through the first century Anno Domini.

Note: the dates in the heading for each pope in this series refer to the years of his reign, not of his life.

1—St. Peter (c.33-c. 64)

I will not repeat here what is widely known about St. Peter from the New Testament. The Gospels attest to Simon Peter’s unique office as the chief of the Apostles and the rock on which Christ built His Church, while the Acts of the Apostles and his two canonical epistles give us a picture of his early apostolic activities.

After the events in Acts, St. Peter is said to have founded and led the church at Antioch for several years before moving on to found the church at Rome (together with St. Paul).

His first epistle was almost certainly written from Rome, sometimes referred to by the early Christians allegorically as Babylon: “The church that is in Babylon, elected together with you, salutes you: and so does my son Mark” (1 Peter 5:13). There is a credible tradition that Peter gave his testimony to this Mark, so that the earliest Gospel, named after Peter’s “son” in baptism, is actually the memoirs of St. Peter “as told to” St. Mark.

The two best-known extra-Scriptural traditions about St. Peter have to do with his martyrdom, which, like St. Paul’s, came about from Nero’s persecution. First, that having left Rome to avoid execution, he encountered our Lord walking toward him. Peter asked, “Where are you going, Lord?” (Quo vadis, Domine?) To which Jesus responded, “I am going to Rome to be crucified a second time”—prompting Peter to turn around and return to his diocese. Second, that Peter was crucified upside-down, having requested this turn out of humility toward our Lord’s inimitably perfect Passion.

A less-known tradition explains one of the reasons St. Peter went to Rome in the first place. Aside from the great imperial city’s appropriateness to be the preeminent See of the Catholic Church, it was said that Peter went there to confront Simon Magus, the Samaritan who had previously tried to purchase spiritual powers from Peter. After this small role in the Acts of the Apostles (8:9-24), Simon became a major villain in the memory of the early Fathers, who called him the founder of Gnosticism. In any case, Simon is supposed to have gone to Rome and used sorcery to trick many Romans into worshipping him as a god. Upon Peter’s arrival, Simon challenged him by various magic tricks, but was outmatched by Christ, in whose name Peter performed true miracles.

St. Peter was likely the longest-reigning pope in history, having reigned somewhere between 31 and 38 years (the second-longest reign being that of Bl. Pius IX at 31).

2—St. Linus (c. 66-c. 76)

Many modern scholars claim that the Church in the city of Rome was, in its infancy, ruled by a group rather than by a single bishop, and while this is exaggerated in order to debunk papal claims, it may actually be true that St. Peter was not the only bishop in Rome. The medieval Liber Pontificalis says that St. Peter consecrated two of what we might now call auxiliary bishops, so that they could serve priestly functions in the Roman Church while St. Peter devoted himself to prayer and preaching. If true, those two other bishops would have been Linus and Cletus.

It is said that Peter initially hand-picked yet another man, Clement, as his successor, but that out of humility Clement insisted that Linus and Cletus should hold the office before him, so that St. Clement ended up becoming the fourth rather than the second pope.

At any rate, the first successor to St. Peter was St. Linus, a man of Etruscan descent, whom we find mentioned as a companion of St. Paul in the Second Epistle to Timothy (4:21). The Liber Pontificalis, whose attributions of ancient Church disciplines to any particular pope must be taken with a grain of salt, said Linus was directed by Peter to command that women should veil their heads in church (and at any rate, this was already a practice of the churches of God, as witnessed by St. Paul in 1 Cor 11). St. Linus was said to have raised the dead and cast out devils, and for this latter act of mercy he was executed by the consul Saturninus, whose daughter he had exorcised.

St. Linus is named in the Roman Canon along with a few other martyred popes: his immediate successors Cletus and Clement, as well as the somewhat later Sixtus and Cornelius.

3—St. Cletus or Anacletus (c. 76-c. 91)

A fourth-century catalogue of popes lists one Cletus as the third pope and one Anacletus as the fifth pope. But these are two forms of the same name, and the other early sources, such as St. Irenaeus, only list Anacletus as the third pope. Virtually nothing is known about him. His name gives potential hints as to his race and origin; Anacletus is Greek for “blameless”, and was a common name for a slave. St. Anacletus is supposed to have been born in Rome and martyred under Emperor Domitian.

4—St. Clement I (c. 91-c. 100)

St. Clement of Rome is renowned as the first of the Apostolic Fathers—that is, non-Scriptural, saintly ecclesiastical writers who were direct disciples of the Apostles or whose lives overlapped with the Apostles—and also the first pope after St. Peter whose writing we possess. He may have been the Clement mentioned as St. Paul’s fellow-worker in Philippians 4:3. He seems to have been born in Rome, was perhaps a freedman (liberated slave) of the emperor, and there are various speculations about his family relations.

St. Clement wrote a letter to the Corinthians on behalf of the Church of Rome, using a tone of authority to restore order to the Corinthian Church after they had deposed their bishop and other presbyters. He reminded them of the establishment of bishops and deacons by the Apostles, and the proper mode of passing on these offices. This letter was treated as part of the New Testament canon by some early Christians. Other works have been attributed to him but are considered inauthentic. (Hear more about St. Clement on Way of the Fathers, and listen to our free audiobooks of his First and apocryphal Second Letters.)

The ancient Roman church was at some point divided into seven ecclesiastical regions ruled over by seven deacons. Pope Clement is credited with having made this sevenfold division of the diocese, but so are a few other early popes, so there is no way of knowing who actually did it.

The legend of St. Clement’s martyrdom is that he was banished by Emperor Trajan to an island in the Crimea, where Christians were condemned to quarry marble. After miraculously providing water to the thirsty laborers, Clement was tied to an anchor and cast into the Black Sea. However, the earliest sources mentioning St. Clement do not call him a martyr, and there is no solid evidence for this story.

That said, St. Cyril, the Apostle to the Slavs, is said to have miraculously discovered the anchor and St. Clement’s remains in 861. Cyril brought the relics to Rome a few years later, and died there, which is why Cyril’s relics too were kept in the Basilica di San Clemente in Rome—a church traditionally held to be built on the house of St. Clement.