This totalitarian pagan-Christian thing called the RCC, masquerading as the original church, is one of the biggest hoaxes in all of history, a bigger hoax than even Mormonism.
Their origin is not the 1st century, one has to be blind not to see that the church in the Bible, in the book of Acts, bears no resemblance whatsoever to this thing called the RCC. It arose centuries later, under the auspices of the Roman emperor Constantine.
It hijacks the prerogatives that belong only to the true catholic church, the one you see in the book of Acts. A fraud plain and simple.
Nice theory but it does not work. There were bishops who lived, and gave their lives for Christ, before Constantine. The writings of the pre-Constantinian church Fathers show that they were Catholic. The theory of the Constantinian origins of the Catholic Church also does not work because one would have to believe that the church survived 300 years of brutal persecution only to be crushed by Constantine without a single word of objection. Sorry, that does not work.