Pope Linus

Pope Linus is counted by the ancient Church as the second Bishop of Rome, the immediate successor of the Apostle Peter. He is almost certainly the Linus named in the New Testament: in the Second Letter to Timothy, written from Rome, Saint Paul includes him among those who send greetings (2 Timothy 4:21). In the late second century Saint Irenaeus of Lyons, who had known Polycarp of Smyrna and thus stood close to the apostolic generation, recorded that the blessed apostles Peter and Paul, having founded and organized the Church at Rome, entrusted the episcopal office to Linus. Eusebius of Caesarea, writing in the early fourth century and relying on earlier succession lists, likewise placed Linus first after Peter and stated that he held the Roman see for twelve years. The same succession—Peter, Linus, Anacletus (Cletus), Clement—appears in other early witnesses, including the Roman priest Hegesippus as reported by Eusebius, and it is reflected in the Roman Canon of the Mass.

No contemporary document records the year of Linus’s birth or the precise year of his death, and modern historians treat the chronology of the first-century bishops of Rome as approximate. Traditional catalogues, including the fourth-century Liberian Catalogue and the later Liber Pontificalis, have commonly assigned him a pontificate of about eleven or twelve years ending around 76, though other reconstructions, taking different dates for the martyrdom of Peter, have proposed a death around 79 or 80. Of his origins the Liber Pontificalis, a sixth-century compilation whose early lives mix genuine memory with later legend, says only that he was an Italian from Tuscany (natione Italus, de regione Tuscia) and that his father was named Herculanus. A still later local tradition associated him with the city of Volterra. None of these biographical particulars can be confirmed from second- or third-century sources.

Little that is historically secure can be said of Linus’s government of the Roman Church. The Liber Pontificalis credits him with a decree that women should have their heads covered in church, a regulation that simply restates the teaching of Saint Paul in First Corinthians and is widely regarded as an anachronistic attribution. Whether he died a martyr is likewise uncertain. The Liber Pontificalis and some medieval martyrologies present him as a martyr, yet Irenaeus, Eusebius, and Jerome do not describe his death as martyrdom, and the current Roman Martyrology commemorates him on 23 September simply as pope, without the title of martyr. In an age when the distinction between bishop and presbyter was still taking shape and when the Roman community suffered intermittent pressure under Nero and the Flavians, Linus would have been responsible for preserving apostolic teaching and the unity of a church that already attracted notice in the capital of the empire.

According to the Liber Pontificalis he was buried at the Vatican, close to the resting place of Saint Peter. This tradition is consistent with the early Christian practice of burial near the apostle and with the later development of the Vatican necropolis, though no inscription that can be dated to the first century identifies his tomb with certainty. His name entered the liturgy of Rome at an early date. In the Communicantes of the Roman Canon he is commemorated immediately after the apostles, together with Cletus, Clement, Sixtus, Cornelius, Cyprian, and other martyrs and popes, a sign that the Roman Church from antiquity regarded him as a link in the authentic succession from Peter. His feast day, 23 September, has been observed in the West for many centuries.

Because the earliest popes left no writings that survive under their own names, and because later compilers filled gaps with pious reconstructions, the figure of Linus remains historically modest. What can be affirmed with confidence is the unanimous testimony of the second-century Church that a man named Linus, known already to Saint Paul, was the first to succeed the apostles in the episcopal care of Rome, and that the Roman community remembered him as a saint. Subsequent bishops of Rome, the medieval papal lists, and the liturgical books of East and West have all preserved that memory, even while the precise years of his life and the details of his ministry recede beyond the reach of verification.