Liber Pontificalis

Liber Pontificalis

The Liber Pontificalis, or the Book of the Popes, is another of the instruments by which papal Rome sought to create the appearance of continuity between the bishopric of Rome and Christ, through Peter, and to produce the historical precedent that was lacking, to support the Roman bishop's grandiose claim to be the Vicar of Christ. As in the False Decretals and the Donation of Constantine and other like frauds, historical truth was expendable in the interest of legitimizing papal dominion.

The Liber purports to be the history of the popes, consisting of the individual biographies of each, beginning with Peter. It was formerly thought to have originated in the 8th or 9th century:

32. With some minute difference, the most learned critics, Lucas Holstenius, Schelestrate, Ciampini, Bianchini, Muratori (Prolegomena ad tom. iii. pars i.), are agreed that the Liber Pontificalis was composed and continued by the apostolic librarians and notaries of the viii^th and ix^th centuries; and that the last and smallest part is the work of Anastasius, whose name it bears. The style is barbarous, and the narrative partial, the details are trifling—yet it must be read as a curious and authentic record of the times. The epistles of the popes are dispersed in the volumes of Councils.
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1788): Vol. V, Chapter XLIX, note 32, by Edward Gibbon, © The Electric Book Company 2001

More recently, Theodor Mommson and G. Waitz believed it belongs to the early 7th century; but Louis Duchesne successfully argued that the earliest portion was written about 530. Duchesne and Mommson each compiled scholarly editions of the work in the late 19th century, but Mommson's was never completed. Louise Ropes Loomis, Phd, who translated the Liber into English, says of this earliest portion:

… is itself a mesh of veritable fact, romantic legend, deliberate fabrication and heedless error. It deals with persons and things which seemed often as remote to the author as they do to us and of which he had only the scantiest and most fragmentary accounts; it describes achievements which he had little means of estimating justly and which he had sometimes the strongest motive to exaggerate or misrepresent … Yet the very frauds and uncorroborated assertions and mistakes and venerations have a value to us of a sort. It is interesting to know what could be believed about some of these matters in the sixth or seventh century.
¶ The decrees for the organization and government of the church ascribed to the various bishops are practically all spurious until they reach the latter half of the fifth century.
Book of the Popes (1916), Liber Pontificalis, trans. by Louise Ropes Loomis, Phd

Probably to give the appearance of greater antiquity, the book began with forged letters between Jerome (340-420) and Damasus (366-384):

In most of its manuscript copies there is found at the beginning a spurious correspondence between Pope Damasus and Saint Jerome. These letters were considered genuine in the Middle Ages; consequently, in those times St. Jerome was considered the author of the biographies as far as Damasus, at whose request it was believed Jerome had written the work, the subsequent lives having been added at the command of each individual pope. When the above-mentioned correspondence was proved entirely apocryphal, this view was abandoned.
¶ … The conclusive researches of Duchesne have established beyond a doubt that in its earlier part, as far as the ninth century, the Liber Pontificalis was gradually compiled, and that the later continuations were added unsystematically. In only a few cases is it possible to ascertain the authors.
¶ The compiler of the Liber Pontificalis utilized also some historical writings e.g. St. Jerome, "De Viris Illustribus"), a number of apocryphal fragments (e.g. the Pseudo-C1ementine Recognitions), the "Constitutum Silvestri", the spurious Acts of the alleged Synod of 275 bishops under Silvester etc., and fifth century Roman Acts of martyrs. Finally the compiler distributed arbitrarily along his list of popes a number of papal decrees taken from unauthentic sources; he likewise attributed to earlier popes liturgical and disciplinary regulations of the sixth century.
New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia, Liber Pontificalis

The historical accuracy, after the earlier portion, seems to have become more reliable:

Duchesne has proved exhaustively and convincingly that the first series of biographies from St. Peter to Felix III [IV (d. 530)], were compiled at the latest under Felix's successor, Boniface II (530-2), and that their author was a contemporary of Anastasius II (496-8) and of Symmachus (498-514). His principal arguments are the following. A great many biographies of the predecessors of Anastasius II are full of errors and historically untenable, but from Anastasius II on the information on the ecclesiastico-political history of the popes is valuable and historically certain.
ibid.

In his treatise, Forgeries and the Papacy, William Webster lists the Liber along with other major papal forgeries, as having been incorporated into Gratian's Decretum, the foundation of papal Canon Law:

… It was at this time that the Decretals were combined with two other major forgeries, The Donation of Constantine and the Liber Pontificalis, along with other falsified writings, and codified into a system of Church law which elevated Gregory and all his successors as absolute monarchs over the Church in the West. These writings were then utilized by Gratian in composing his Decretum. The Decretum, which was first published in 1151 A.D., was intended as a collection of everything that Gratian could find which could give historical precedent to the teaching of papal primacy, and therefore the authority of tradition, which could then carry the force of law in the Church. It had such success that it became the standard work of the law of the Roman Church and thus the basis of all canon law and Scholastic theology.

The same was also stated by Philip Schaff:

Soon afterwards arose, in the same hierarchical interest, the legend of the donation of Constantine and his baptism by Pope Silvester, interpolations of the writings of the Fathers, especially Cyprian and Augustine, and a variety of fictions embodied in the Gesta Liberii and the Liber Pontificalis, and sanctioned by Gratianus (about 1150) in his Decretum, or collection of canons, which (as the first part of the Corpus juris canonici) became the code of laws for the whole Western Church, and exerted an extraordinary influence. By this series of pious frauds the medieval Papacy, which was the growth of ages, was represented to the faith of the Church as a primitive institution of Christ, clothed with absolute and perpetual authority.
The Vatican Decrees in Their Bearing on Civil Allegiance, and A History of the Vatican Council (1875), By W. E. Gladstone, M.P., and Philip Schaff, D.D., p. 100

Throughout the Middle Ages the Liber was considered authentic, and was used to support and strengthen papal claims to authority over the entire church:

Throughout the Middle Ages and until comparatively modern times the Liber Pontificalis was accepted as not only the oldest but as also the most authentic existing history of the papacy. Extracts from it were incorporated in church liturgies. It was quoted as an authority by countless historians and ecclesiastical writers from the eighth century to the eighteenth. It served as model for other chronicles, both secular and religious, in particular for the Gesta Episcoporum and the Gesta Abbatum, the records which were kept in cathedral chapters and monasteries of Western Europe during the later Middle Ages. Because of its unmistakable antiquity and because of the profound importance of its subject matter it was reckoned as a source of unimpeachable veracity and as one of the indisputable proofs of the primitive power and activity of the popes.
Book of the Popes (1916), Liber Pontificalis, trans. by Louise Ropes Loomis, Phd

The most critical portion of the Liber—that covering the first centuries after Christ—is filled with errors and deliberate fabrications, and is unreliable. But, of such are the foundations of the papacy.

… but a considerable part of it is obviously legendary. It assumes that the bishops of Rome exercised authority over the Christian Church from its earliest days.
1911 Encyclopedia, Liber Pontificalis

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