The Roman primacy, or, rather, the acknowledgement of Rome as the criterion of the right apostolic faith, is older than the canon of the New Testament, than “Scripture”. We must be on our guard here against an almost inevitable illusion. “Scripture” is more recent than “the scriptures” of which it is composed. It was still a long time before the existence of the individual writings resulted in the “New Testament” as Scripture, as the Bible. The assembling of the writings into a single Scripture is