I think this argument rests on a fundamental confusion between three entirely different questions:
Who chooses a bishop?
Who confers the episcopal ministry upon him?
What constitutes apostolic succession?
Those are not interchangeable.
You are absolutely right that ancient bishops did not normally require personal appointment by Rome or Constantinople, but that doesn’t undermine apostolic succession, because neither Catholic nor Orthodox theology defines apostolic succession as “being chosen by Rome or Constantinople.”
The most obvious counterexample is Orthodoxy itself. Rome does not appoint Orthodox bishops, yet the Catholic Church explicitly recognizes the Eastern Orthodox Churches as possessing apostolic succession, priesthood and Eucharist.
So the statement “centralized Roman appointment of bishops developed later” may be historically true, but it is irrelevant to the issue under discussion.
The original claim concerns succession in episcopal ministry, not the later canonical mechanism by which candidates were selected, and your appeal to early local elections does not establish what you think it establishes.
Cyprian provides an exceptionally clear third-century description: the local faithful participate in choosing the bishop, but neighboring bishops assemble, the episcopate is conferred through their judgment, and hands are imposed upon the candidate. Cyprian explicitly calls this a practice derived from “divine tradition and apostolic observance.”
So local election does not imply presbyteral consecration.
A church could elect its own bishop while the episcopal ministry itself was still conferred by bishops.
By Nicaea in 325 the rule is explicit. Canon 4 requires the bishops of the province to establish the new bishop; where universal attendance is impossible, at least three are to participate, with the other bishops giving their assent and the metropolitan ratifying the act.
Notice what this proves and what it does not:
- It does not prove a modern centralized papal appointment system.
- It does show that, by the early fourth century, the normative structure is that bishops perpetuate the episcopate.
And the underlying concept of succession is considerably older than Nicaea: around A.D. 180, Irenaeus argues against the Gnostics precisely by appealing to those whom the apostles established in the churches and to “the succession of these men to our own times.” He describes them as men whom the apostles left behind as their successors, and then actually enumerates the episcopal succession at Rome.
That is extraordinarily important because Irenaeus’ argument is not “Rome appointed everybody”, It is: apostles → successors → continuing ecclesial succession → preservation of apostolic teaching.
So apostolic succession as a criterion of continuity is already explicit in the second century.
Now consider your statement that all of this gives Anglican and Lutheran claims to apostolic succession “a solid foundation”, because that conclusion simply does not follow.
The fact that ancient bishops could be locally elected tells us nothing by itself about whether a sixteenth-century church preserved the same episcopal ministry when it altered the theology and practice of ordination.
And this becomes especially obvious in the Lutheran case: the Lutheran Smalcald Articles explicitly say that episcopal ordination may be retained “for the sake of love and unity,” but “not from necessity”; because the existing bishops would not ordain Lutheran ministers, the Lutheran churches claimed the authority to ordain suitable ministers themselves.
That is not merely a change in who administratively selects the bishop, it’s a theological claim that continuation of ministry does not depend upon transmission through the existing episcopate.
That is precisely why much of Lutheranism cannot simply appeal to the same historic episcopal succession claimed by Catholics and Orthodox.
Anglicanism is a more serious case because the English Reformation retained bishops and a physical line of episcopal consecrations.
But here again, a genealogy of laying on of hands does not settle the issue, and the real question is: “did the English Reformation continue intending to confer the same sacramental priesthood and episcopate that the pre-Reformation Church had intended to confer?”
Rome’s answer was no.
And importantly, Rome’s argument was not:“The Pope stopped appointing Anglican bishops.”
Nor was it: “No bishop ever laid hands on the next bishop.”
In Apostolicae Curae, the Catholic judgment concerned the reformed Edwardine Ordinal and what Rome regarded as defects of sacramental form and intention. Modern scholarly analysis of the document likewise identifies defective form and defective sacramental intention as its principal grounds.
That distinction is very important, because during the English Reformation, the ordination rites and the theology surrounding priesthood were deliberately reworked in a Protestant direction.
So even if the physical sequence “bishop → bishop → bishop” continued, the Catholic question is: was the same sacramental Order still being intended and transmitted?
That is a fundamentally different question from: “Can you produce a genealogical chain of consecrators?”
Anglicans obviously dispute Rome’s conclusion, but the very existence of that dispute demonstrates why your argument is insufficient: nobody needs to deny the physical chain. The dispute concerns what was being transmitted through that chain.
Orthodox ecclesiology makes the same conceptual point even more explicitly.
Here we need historical precision: Orthodox Churches have not always spoken with one voice about Anglican orders, some Orthodox Churches in the twentieth century gave favorable or provisional judgments, so it would be inaccurate to claim that Orthodoxy has universally and invariably declared Anglican orders invalid, but official Anglican–Orthodox dialogue contains a statement that directly undermines your argument: apostolic succession is “not merely continuity in the outward laying on of hands,” but involves continuity in apostolic faith and spiritual life.
That means a merely tactile genealogy is insufficient even within Orthodox ecclesiology.
And this is the central problem with your inference. You move from: “Ancient bishops could be locally elected without Rome choosing them” to: “therefore Anglican and Lutheran claims to apostolic succession have a solid foundation.”
But the first proposition does not entail the second. Not at all. Because both Catholics and Orthodox already agree that Roman appointment is not what constitutes apostolic succession.
You then move from: “a church could elect one of its elders as bishop” to: “therefore another bishop was not necessary to confer episcopal ministry.”
Again, that conclusion does not follow. Cyprian explicitly combines local election with episcopal laying on of hands, and Nicaea explicitly places episcopal ordination within the episcopate.
And finally you move from: “some Protestant churches can trace historical episcopal consecrations” to: “therefore they necessarily possess apostolic succession.”
Neither Catholic nor Orthodox theology grants that premise. For Catholics, succession requires valid transmission of sacramental Orders. For Orthodox theology, succession cannot be reduced to the external laying on of hands apart from continuity in apostolic faith and ecclesial life.
So the historically defensible picture is much more precise:
- The method of selecting bishops varied.
- Universal appointment by Rome was never the definition of apostolic succession.
- By Irenaeus in the second century, succession from the apostles through identifiable ecclesial successors is already explicitly being used as a criterion of apostolic continuity.
- By Cyprian, local election coexists explicitly with episcopal consecration.
- By Nicaea, episcopal transmission through bishops is formally normative.
- During the Reformation, much of Lutheranism explicitly rejected the necessity of maintaining ministry through the historic episcopate.
- Anglicanism preserved a physical episcopal lineage, but simultaneously reformed the theology and rite of ordination, producing the much deeper dispute over whether the same sacramental ministry continued to be transmitted.
So showing that ancient bishops were not appointed by Rome proves something nobody needs to deny. It doesn’t refute apostolic succession, and it certainly does not establish Anglican or Lutheran apostolic succession merely by itself.
The relevant question was never who selected the bishop.
The relevant question is whether the apostolic episcopal ministry itself was continuously transmitted.
And that final question is where the Reformation becomes historically decisive because, for much of Lutheranism, the answer is relatively straightforward: continuity through the historic episcopate was no longer treated as necessary for the continuation of ordained ministry. The Lutheran confessional documents themselves allow the Church to continue ordaining ministers when the existing bishops refuse to do so. That means the ministry is no longer understood as something whose validity depends on being transmitted through the existing episcopal succession.
So in that case, the rupture is not merely external. The principle governing the transmission of ministry itself has changed.
The Anglican case is more complicated, as mentioned, because the episcopal chain of consecrators was materially preserved.
But that does not settle the question, because apostolic succession is succession to an office with a determinate sacramental identity, not merely succession of persons.
The historical issue is therefore whether the English Reformation continued to intend to confer the same priesthood and episcopate that had been conferred before the Reformation.
And here there is substantial evidence of discontinuity.
Under Edward VI, the Church of England did not merely alter jurisdiction, it deliberately reworked the theology of priesthood, Eucharistic sacrifice, sacramentality, and ordination.
The Thirty-Nine Articles are especially important because they make the theological change explicit. Article XXV denies that Orders belongs among the “Sacraments of the Gospel” in the same sense as Baptism and the Eucharist. Article XXXI explicitly rejects the Catholic understanding of the sacrificial Mass.
Those are not minor administrative changes, they directly concern what priesthood is and what priests are ordained to do.
And the ordination rite itself was rewritten in that same theological context.
That is why the Catholic judgment in Apostolicae Curae did not rest on the claim that Anglican bishops lacked predecessors. It focused on the Edwardine Ordinal and argued that the reformed rite, considered together with the theological intention manifested by the English Reformation, no longer adequately signified the sacramental priesthood that the previous rite had conferred.
So the Catholic argument is not “the chain broke physically”, It is: “the meaning of what was being transmitted through the chain was deliberately altered.” And the Orthodox Church reaches pretty much the same conclusion.
That distinction is crucial, and shows that you didn’t actually attack the catholic and orthodox views, you attacked a strawman of your own making (inadvertently of course, I’m certainly not saying you were arguing in bad faith).
