Midway Between God and Man the Oxford Dictionary of Popes by J.N.D. Kelly; Oxford University; 347 pages; $24.95

By Otto Friedrich

First there was Peter, who had denied Jesus three times before the cock crowed and who finally was martyred, according to Origen's histories, crucified upside down on a hillside. Then came St. Linus, St. Anacletus and St. Clement I, who may or may not have been drowned off Crimea with an anchor around his neck. These were the first of the heirs of St. Peter, the Popes of Rome, some of them loved, some feared, some venerated, some murdered. One of the proudest and most powerful, Innocent III (1198-1216), started calling himself the Vicar of Christ because he said he was "set midway between God and man" and given "the whole world to govern."

The Oxford University Press, whose famous anthologies have recently been diversifying from poetry into such novelties as The Oxford Book of Dreams and The Oxford Book of Death (not to mention The Oxford Book of Legal Anecdotes and The Oxford Book of New Zealand Plants), has now had the intriguing idea of compiling brief biographies of all 263 Popes (plus 39 antipopes) from St. Peter to John Paul II. It entrusted this enormous task to J.N.D. Kelly, an Anglican priest who has served as principal at Oxford's St. Edmund Hall and as canon of Chichester Cathedral, as well as chairman of the Archbishop of Canterbury's commission on Roman Catholic relations. His dictionary is correspondingly scholarly, cautious, meticulous, yet still a rich mine of arcane nuggets.

The dawn of the papacy, Kelly repeatedly confesses, is too shadowy for even the most intrepid scholar. Of St. Evaristus (c.100-c.109), for example, he says, "Nothing is in fact reliably known about him." St. Felix I (269-74) "is one of the obscurest Popes, even his dates being conjectural." Then there was Pope Joan, whose entire existence is conjectural. Kelly dutifully traces the oftretold legend of a disguised woman Pope (who was found out when she gave birth while trying to mount a horse) to a 13th century work called the Universal Chronicle of Metz. The only Pope who never existed even in legend was John XX, whose nonexistence apparently occurred because John XXI (1276-77) was mistaken about the number of his predecessors. John was a bookish type who ordered a special cell built for his studies; his reign was cut short when the ceiling fell in on him.

Kelly is no seeker of scandals, but by the 10th century, Peter's heritage had fallen into some rather unworthy hands. Pope Sergius III seized the papal throne by armed force and imprisoned his predecessor Christopher, who had already imprisoned his predecessor Leo V. Sergius then had both Popes strangled in jail. He also fathered an illegitimate son by a 15-year-old heiress named Marozia, who eventually got the debauched son chosen as Pope John XI soon after his 21st birthday. John's nephew, who was even more debauched, duly became John XII when barely 18.

Yet even then the seeds of renewal were sprouting. The great reformer Odo of Cluny went to Rome on a diplomatic mission, and there soon began the line of Cluniac Popes who rebuilt the entire church. They reached their apogee of power when Gregory VII marched northward in 1077 to depose the disobedient German King Henry IV by sheer willpower. His march was halted only when the humbled King knelt for three days in the snow at Canossa to plead for the Pope's forgiveness.

Kelly does his best to be fair to all. Of Clement VI (1342-52), who proclaimed that his predecessors "had not known how to be Popes" and then began staging bacchanalia for his "niece" and his courtiers, Kelly says judiciously, "The charges brought by contemporaries against his sexual life cannot be explained away, but he was personally devout, a protector of the poor and needy who showed charity and courage when the Black Death appeared at Avignon in 1348-49, and defended the Jews when they were blamed for it." So he did know something about how to be Pope after all.

Even the villainous Alexander VI (1492-1503), who won election by bribery, reputedly hired assassins and fathered the even more villainous Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia, gets good marks as an administrator and patron of the arts. It was he who persuaded Michelangelo to undertake the grand rebuilding of St. Peter's.

The modern Vatican is, of course, a somewhat less colorful place, but it remains a center of controversy. Pius XII (1939-58) "saw himself as the Pope of peace," as Kelly puts it, but his efforts to remain "strictly neutral" during World War II led to sharp criticisms of his failure to speak out strongly against the Nazis. Despite the claims of Pius' defenders that he did speak out, Kelly concludes, "What remains clear is that the veiled or generalized language traditional to the curia was not a suitable instrument for dealing with cynically planned world domination and genocide."

Kelly offers measured praise to all the last four Popes: John XXIII ("warm-hearted and unaffectedly simple"), Paul VI ("He was able to steer the church through a period of revolutionary change"), John Paul I ("a man of practical common sense") and John Paul II ("Few Popes have had such wide- ranging intellectual equipment as John Paul, and none has had such a far- reaching impact"). Such judgments are quite unexceptionable, but a secular- minded reader will find more of interest in some of the bad old days.