the poor, decentralized Christian communities that Acts of the Apostles and the New Testament letters describe. When the Roman Empire fell, the bishop of Rome took on many of the trappings and administrative structures of imperial power. According to critics, that fact doomed Peter’s religious leadership to become the power-hungry and corrupt medieval papacy that some sixteenth-century reformers labeled with strong condemnations by calling the popes the Antichrist, the prince of Christ’s enemies,