When was it decided that a pope should take a new name?
—Mike
Here’s what I found in The Oxford Dictionary of Popes by J.N.D. Kelly. The first pope to take a new name was John II in 533. His given name was Mercury, the name of a pagan god and hardly suitable for a pope, so he adopted the name of the martyred John I instead.
There wasn’t another papal name change until John XII (originally Octavian) in 955. Name changes became common after that, but not every pope took a new name. Several eleventh-century Johns kept the name John, for example.
It’s possible that some very early popes took different names. We know almost nothing about many of the popes (then called bishops of Rome) who served during the church’s first centuries, so tidbits like given names could easily have been lost.
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