On the Unity of the Church

Cyprian wrote the treatise in 251, in the months when Novatian had himself made bishop of Rome against Cornelius and a party at Carthage broke with Cyprian. Its theme is that the church is one, that its unity is held by the bishops in common, and that no one who leaves it can be saved.

Chapter 4 has come down in two forms. Both quote Christ’s words to Peter in Matthew 16 and both say that the other apostles had the same honour and power. One form, often called the Primacy Text, adds that a primacy is given to Peter and asks whether a man who deserts the chair of Peter can think that he is in the church. The other, the Received Text, lacks those sentences and stresses the equal power of all the apostles. The translation linked here in the main follows the second form and gives the extra sentences of the first in its notes, where the editor calls them spurious. Maurice Bévenot, who studied the manuscripts (St. Cyprian’s De Unitate chap. 4 in the Light of the Manuscripts, 1938) and later edited the text (De Lapsis and De Ecclesiae Catholicae Unitate, Oxford, 1971), concluded that both forms come from Cyprian himself: the Primacy Text written in 251, and the Received Text a revision made during his dispute with Stephen I.