The RCC celibacy requirement is unscriptural...
Consulting Google, the first search result was this article:
When Did the Catholic Church Decide Priests Should Be Celibate?
Which generally confirms what you say:
...the early Christian church had no hard and fast rule against clergy marrying and having children. Peter, a Galilee fisherman, whom the Catholic Church considers the first Pope, was married. Some Popes were the sons of Popes.
The first written mandate requiring priests to be chaste came in AD 304. Canon 33 of the Council of Elvira stated that all"bishops, presbyters, and deacons and all other clerics" were to"abstain completely from their wives and not to have children." A short time later, in 325, the Council of Nicea, convened by Constantine, rejected a ban on priests marrying requested by Spanish clerics.
The practice of priestly celibacy began to spread in the Western Church in the early Middle Ages. In the early 11th century Pope Benedict VIII responded to the decline in priestly morality by issuing a rule prohibiting the children of priests from inheriting property. A few decades later Pope Gregory VII issued a decree against clerical marriages.
The Church was a thousand years old before it definitively took a stand in favor of celibacy in the twelfth century at the Second Lateran Council held in 1139, when a rule was approved forbidding priests to marry. In 1563, the Council of Trent reaffirmed the tradition of celibacy.
But also gives the following as scriptural authority for the policy:
Jesus lived a chaste life and never married and at one point in the Bible is referred to as a eunuch (Matthew 19:12), though most scholars believe that this was intended metaphorically. The implication was that Jesus lived a celibate life like a eunuch. Many of his disciples were also chaste and celibate. Paul, in his first letter to the Corinthians, recommends celibacy for women: "To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is well for them to remain single as I do. But if they cannot exercise self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion." (1 Cor. 7:8-9)
So chastity was an issue in the early Church. On the one hand, you had Jesus and Paul as exemplars. On the other hand, you had Paul's advice in 1 Timothy and Titus, that church elders should be blameless husbands of one wife. And for the unmarried (men as well as women?), Paul says to stay unmarried and exercise self-control.
I don't think 1 Timothy and Titus are saying that ONLY married people can be priests, otherwise Paul would have been warning against himself! He was saying that if a priest was married, he should at least avoid extramarital hanky-panky.
Perhaps the seeming contradiction could also be resolved by noting that early Christianity was growing rapidly and priests needed to be recruited from the ranks of men who had already married, whereas later on it became feasible to insist that they never got married in the first place?
At any rate: if there is a contradiction in Scripture, which supports various readings and interpretations, then who gets to decide what is right? You and me on an Internet forum, having a debate? Or the Holy Roman Church with a billion adherents, and an apostolic tradition dating back to Peter and Jesus himself?
So the clay-footed impetuous married disciple Peter is not the monolithic Rock upon which the church was built, but he was a mere pebble in it.
Not so fast! A Catholic reply is found here:
https://www.scripturecatholic.com/qa-petros-versus-petra/
1. The Greek word for rock is “petra” (there is no word “petros”).
2. Jesus called Simon “Kepha” which, in Aramaic, means a large rock, or massive rock formation.
3. When the Gospel was translated into Greek, the writers translated Kepha into Petros (not petra). This was done to masculinize the name of Peter as Petros.
4. Because petra in Greek can mean a small rock and the translation reads Petros, Protestants attempt to say that Jesus was calling Peter a small rock, in order to diminish Peter’s significance.
5. But if Jesus wanted to call Peter a small rock, the translation would have read “lithos” (meaning small pebble in Greek), not “Petros.”
6. Nevertheless, Jesus said Kepha (not “evna” meaning small pebble), so the
Petra v. Petros comparison (which really doesn’t exist in Greek anyway) is
irrelevant.
Also remember that this was written in ancient Koine Greek, and there are no living native speakers of ancient Greek. Richard Carrier likes to boast of his knowledge of Koine Greek, and certainly he knows more than I do. But nobody can claim to have more than an indirect, scholarly and ultimately conjectural understanding of this ancient language.
Once again, I have to ask: how dare you think that YOU know more than the Holy Roman and Apostolic Church and its Pope??? At the very least, their opinion deserves at least the same weight as yours or mine, when it comes to determining how to read the Bible.
