The earliest canonical pronouncement on synodality and the function of a protos is found in canon 34 of the Apostolic Canons from the early fourth century:
The protos (i.e., "the one who is first") of the Apostolic Canon 34 is called "Bishop of the Metropolitan See" and "Exarch of the province" in canon 6 of Sardica.
Among his perspectives are Jews and Christians in the scholarly debate, council texts as a different kind of source material, archaeological and literary evidence for Jews and Christians in Spain before and during the fourth century, the Council of Laodicea, Jewish evidence in Anatolia, the
apostolic canons, the text of the Statuta Ecclesiae Antiqua, and latter Gallic councils from 465-541.
The canons of the baptismal council of 257 held by Cyprian in Africa were adopted into the
apostolic canons; they explicitly rejected baptism outside of the church.
Numerous canons as well as the civil law sought to limit the practice without much success, e.g., Canon 29 of the Apostolic Canons, Canon 2 of the Council of Chalcedon, Canon 22 of the Council "in Trullo," and Canons 4 and 19 of the Second Council of Nicaea, in Rhalles and Potles, Syntagma, vol.
The prohibition is to be found in number 23 of the Apostolic Canons, in Rhalles and Potles, Syntagma, vol.
On the one hand, since the council in Trullo (692), the canonical collections authoritative in Orthodoxy have included the enactments of 3rd-century North African councils presided over by Cyprian of Carthage, as well as the important late-4th-century Eastern collection, the apostolic canons. Cyprian's position, supported by his contemporary bishop Firmilian of Caesaraea in Cappadocia, was that salvation and grace are not mediated by schismatic communities, so that baptism administered outside the universal apostolic communion is simply invalid as an act of Christian initiation, deprived of the life-giving Spirit (see Cyprian, Epp.
Thoroughly in sympathy with the decree of 1755, and moved by his attachment to a perceived golden age in the patristic past, he underscored the antiquity and hence priority of the African councils and apostolic canons, and argued strenuously, in fact, for the 1st-century provenance of the latter.