The Primacy Text
Cyprian, De Unitate 4 (Primacy Text recension)
Cyprian, bishop of Carthage
Two extra sentences about Peter, and seventeen centuries of people arguing about who put them there.
- Catch rate
- 70 / 255
- Base research
- 142
- Stat total
- 232
Base stats
Every stat is a checkable fact about the actual book, not a designer's mood. Bars are drawn against the highest value any book reaches.
Why these numbers
The game's own explanation, as a reader sees it in the backpack.
The longer of the two versions of chapter 4 — two extra sentences, and they are the two everybody argues about. It says more than the received text does.
"The primacy is given to Peter… there might be shown one Church of Christ and one See." That sentence has been carried into more arguments than the rest of the treatise put together.
And this is what it costs. Every copy of these lines has to be defended before it can be used, because for four hundred years the standard edition printed them in brackets and called them a forgery. Low Defend on a text nobody lets you simply cite.
These two sentences get quoted constantly, and always with an argument attached about who wrote them. A text you have to defend before you can use it reaches the floor slower than one you can simply cite.
Cited for this book
For most of the last four hundred years the standard editions printed these two sentences in brackets and called them a later forgery. They are not. Following Perler and Bévenot, both recensions are now generally held to be Cyprian’s own work — which means the interesting question was never "who faked this," but "why did a bishop go back and cut his own best line."
Development
A book develops as it is read — the fragment becomes the work, the work becomes the corpus.
Moves learned
By levelling up. A book that develops keeps what it knew and learns the rest on its new schedule.
| Lv | Move | Type | Cat. | Pwr | Acc | PP |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | One Chair | Ecclesiology | Argument | 72 | 100% | 10 |
| 1 | Random Verse | Bible | Argument | 10 | 100% | 30 |
| 8 | Martyr’s Resolve | Ethics | Argument | 50 | 100% | 15 |
| 14 | Chapter… | Bible | Scripture | — | — | 12 |
| 20 | Produce the Records | Ecclesiology | Argument | 70 | 100% | 10 |
Read it: Three Sentences He Later Cut
The passages the Scriptorium holds on screen, word for word from a public-domain translation. Written in Latin.
“Upon him, being one, He builds His Church, and commits His sheep to be fed.”
Cyprian, On the Unity of the Church 4, the Primacy Text recension (trans. Wallis, ANF 5, public domain).
“And the primacy is given to Peter, that there might be shown one Church of Christ and one See; and they are all shepherds, and the Rock is one, which is fed by all the apostles with unanimous consent.”
Cyprian, On the Unity of the Church 4, Primacy Text (trans. Wallis, ANF 5, public domain).
“Who deserts the chair of Peter, upon whom the Church is founded.”
Cyprian, On the Unity of the Church 4, Primacy Text (trans. Wallis, ANF 5, public domain).
“Assuredly the rest of the apostles were also the same as was Peter, endowed with a like partnership both of honour and power; but the beginning proceeds from unity.”
Cyprian, On the Unity of the Church 4 — this sentence stands in BOTH recensions (trans. Wallis, ANF 5, public domain).
Three sentences. That is the entire difference between this copy and the shorter one, and people have been fighting about them for four hundred years.
Both recensions are Cyprian’s own. He wrote this one first and cut it four or five years later, while Stephen of Rome was quoting his own words back at him in the quarrel over rebaptism.
⚑ The nineteenth-century editors who printed this text also called it “beyond all question spurious.” That verdict does not stand. Following Perler and Bévenot, the long recension is Cyprian revising Cyprian.
Now read the fourth passage, which is in both. Whatever he was doing with Peter, he was not making him the other apostles’ superior — he says so in the copy that is supposed to be the Roman forgery.