Saint Pius I

The one solid fact about Pius comes from a scrap of second-century Latin known as the Muratorian fragment, which says that The Shepherd was written "very recently, in our own times, in the city of Rome, by Hermas, while his brother Pius the bishop occupied the chair of the church of Rome." Hermas describes himself as a former slave who had prospered and gone soft, and his book, a rambling sequence of visions about repentance, was the most widely read Christian text in Rome after the scriptures. Its author is the only pope's brother in this timeline whose voice survives, and he mentions no bishop at all, only "the elders who preside over the church," which suggests that his brother's chair was less of a throne than the fragment implies.

Pius's Rome was crowded with teachers. Justin, the philosopher from Samaria, opened a school above a bathhouse and wrote the emperor an account of what Christians did on Sundays, presided over by "the president of the brethren." Valentinus taught his elaborate Gnostic system and, Tertullian says, nearly became bishop. And Marcion, the shipowner from Pontus, who held that the creator God of the Jews was a lesser being than the Father of Jesus, gave the church two hundred thousand sesterces and in July 144 was expelled from it, his money returned. He founded a rival church that outlived Pius by centuries. It was the first time the Roman community drew a line and pushed a rich man outside it.