I'm excited that you've come back at me with this update. Here is something I can work with. I suppose you could say that, if I was looking for anything, this kind of reasoning is it. It seems as though we have a kind of appeal to a principle of resemblance here - or a 'like begets like' argument, if you will. To me, it's the most compelling thing you've offered even if, as you say, it might not be what you personally judge to be the most compelling of your rebuttals so far. I've been thinking about it for an hour or so since you've brought it to the table, and I think it's more compelling than you give it credit for. The idea would be that if some belief (including its time component) existed in the church, call it T, then it had to resemble a way of thinking which existed at T-1. Of course, the idea of change is present here, and it would be critical that we be able to say that what persisted throughout {T, T-1, T-2.....T-n} never spontaneously added an element called 'vicar of Christ'. Was that unadulterated element there from the start? We can weight this against what I've suggested as the possibility that the papal office was instituted by the intentional choices of some combination of Roman politicians and Church officials together in concert, or as the direct brainchild of Constantine himself as a means to paganize the Christian church. We'd have to do a serious analysis of these possibilities and identify which was the likeliest. It may be that the idea of Constantine suddenly inserting this facet into Church doctrine is simply unthinkable, given some kind of 'innate immunity' within the Church itself which would have rejected it as a cancer instantly (had it been anathema). That's a real consideration, because although I hadn't considered this, my initial idea from 6. seems to imply that without the Church herself having believed this prior, Constantine made a doctrinally significant and perhaps pagan alteration to the entire Christian church that, for some reason, the entire Church acquiesced to. That could be insanely unlikely, giving us reason to think that at the time this change did become explicit, it couldn't have been *altogether outside* what the Church had already believed. That might even be supported by the fact that the schism didn't occur for at least another 5 centuries after the first direct evidence of ubiquitous belief in Papal supremacy enters the record. If the concept of Pope is pagan anathema, why did the Orthodox church take another 5 centuries before it had enough? Why did protestants take another 5 centuries after that? It's difficult to understand how the Orthodox church could have gone this long without accepting the Pope, unless it was simply something they understood totally differently from what the modern Catholic suggests about the tradition - put another way, either something in the Orthodox opinion today has changed, or the extent of the significance of the papacy took 5 centuries to reach the Orthodox awareness. I will have to think about this more. @KingOfWhiteAmerica