Yes — and the case rests not on a later Roman claim but on how Christ treated one particular apostle. Throughout the Gospels Peter is singled out: named first in every list of the Twelve, speaking for them, and at Caesarea Philippi renamed. A new name, in Scripture, marks a new mission — Abram becomes Abraham, Jacob becomes Israel. Simon becomes Peter, “Rock”: “thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church… and I will give to thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 16:18–19). The promise is singular — to thee, one man.

Those “keys” are not a throwaway image. Jesus is quoting Isaiah, where God appoints a royal steward over the house of David: “I will lay the key of the house of David upon his shoulder: and he shall open, and none shall shut” (Isaiah 22:22). The steward is not the king; he is the king’s chief minister, holding delegated authority over the whole household while the king is away. And the office outlives the man — in Isaiah one steward, Shebna, is removed and another, Eliakim, installed. A key handed from holder to holder is, by its very nature, an office with successors. That is the seed of the papacy hidden inside the metaphor.

After the Resurrection, Christ makes the charge explicit. Three times He asks Peter whether he loves Him, and three times commissions him: “Feed my lambs… Feed my sheep” (John 21:15–17). Not part of the flock — the whole of it, lambs and sheep alike. Peter had denied Christ three times; he is restored and entrusted three times. The shepherd of the entire flock is one man, by the appointment of the risen Lord.

And the earliest Christians outside the New Testament read it exactly so. Around AD 180 St. Irenaeus pointed to the Church “founded and organized at Rome by the two most glorious apostles, Peter and Paul,” who then “committed into the hands of Linus the office of the episcopate”1 — Peter, then a named successor, then a list reaching to Irenaeus’s own day. Here is the honest concession: the developed papacy, with its later jurisdiction and titles,2 took centuries to unfold, and a critic is right that first-century Rome had no curia. But development is not invention; the acorn is not the oak, yet it is no less an oak in seed. The full biblical case for the papacy and the unbroken chain of successors trace the line from Peter to the present.