Peter the Apostle

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The name is a pun that hardened into a title. A fisherman of Galilee called Simon — Shim’on, a common Jewish name — was given by Jesus a second name in Aramaic, Kepha, meaning a rock or a crag. Greek-speaking Christians rendered it two ways: as a loanword, Kephas (Cephas), and as a translation, Petros, from petra, stone. In English both survive, but the translation won: the man is Peter, and the ordinary noun for a rock became, for one person, a name no one else had carried. The Gospels make the wordplay audible. In Matthew’s account, at Caesarea Philippi, after Simon names Jesus the Messiah, Jesus answers, “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church,” and promises him “the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven.” The sentence is the most consequential pun in the history of the West: on its reading hangs the entire architecture of the papacy.

The wordplay works cleanly only in one language and not in the one Jesus spoke. In Aramaic Kepha serves for both halves — you are Kepha and on this kepha — so the name and the rock are one word. In Greek the translator was forced to split them, because petra is feminine and unsuitable as a man’s name, leaving the masculine Petros; the grammar, not the theology, produced two words where the original had one. Centuries of argument have hung on whether the rock is Peter himself, his confession of faith, or Christ, and the Syriac and Aramaic substrate will not settle it, because in Aramaic there is nothing to settle. What the saying does establish, in any reconstruction, is that the renamed fisherman stood at the head of the company Jesus gathered.

What can be established

The earliest documentary trace of Peter is not in the Gospels but in the letters of Paul, the oldest Christian writings, composed in the 50s of the first century, a generation before any narrative life of Jesus. Paul names Cephas as one of three “pillars” of the Jerusalem community, alongside James the brother of the Lord and John, and records that the risen Christ appeared “first to Cephas, then to the twelve” — a tradition Paul says he received, older than his own conversion. He also records, with undisguised heat, a public quarrel between the two men at Antioch. Peter had eaten freely with gentile converts until emissaries arrived from James, at which point he drew back and kept apart; Paul accused him to his face of hypocrisy. The dispute was the central question of the first Christian generation: whether gentiles entering the movement must take on the Jewish law — circumcision, the food rules, the calendar — or whether faith in Christ sufficed. That the two most authoritative figures of the early church are remembered as having clashed openly over it, in a letter Paul wrote while both were alive, is among the firmest things known about either man.

The Gospels, written from roughly AD 70 onward, give Peter a portrait of unusual candor. He is impulsive and devoted, the first to speak and the first to fail: he walks on water and sinks, confesses Jesus as Messiah and is at once called Satan for refusing the cross, swears he will never fall away and then, on the night of the arrest, denies three times that he ever knew the man. The denial is told in all four Gospels, and scholarship treats it as old precisely because it is the kind of memory a community has no reason to invent. A movement constructing a founding hero does not write into its charter the scene in which that hero curses and swears he never knew its Lord. The early church kept the failure in view, and the keeping is itself a historical datum: the figure was too well remembered, too early, to be smoothed.

What the Gospels and Paul together yield, then, is real but bounded — a Galilean fisherman from the lakeside towns of Bethsaida and Capernaum, brother of Andrew, prominent among the disciples named alongside Philip and the rest, first named witness of the resurrection, a leader of the Jerusalem church, and a man whose authority Paul could acknowledge and contest in the same breath. Beyond this the record thins, and tradition takes over.

The road to Rome

That Peter went to Rome and died there is attested early and widely, though never with the precision the later church would want. The letter known as 1 Clement, written from Rome about AD 96, recalls Peter and Paul as apostles who suffered and bore witness, and sets them among those martyred in the city, without describing how either died. By the late second century Dionysius of Corinth, Irenaeus of Lyon, and the Roman presbyter Gaius all speak of Peter at Rome; Tertullian writes that he was crucified there. The historian Eusebius, in the early fourth century, gathers these strands and places the death under the emperor Nero, in the persecution that followed the fire of AD 64. Most scholarship accepts the core — that Peter reached Rome and was executed under Nero in the mid-60s — while holding the surrounding detail at arm’s length.

The most famous detail of all is the latest and the least secured. That Peter asked to be crucified head downward, judging himself unworthy to die as his Lord had, appears first in the apocryphal Acts of Peter, a Greek narrative of the late second century — over a hundred years after the event — which also stages his Roman contest with the magician Simon (the figure the heresiologists fused with Simon Magus) and his flight from the city, turned back by a vision of Christ on the road. The inverted crucifixion is a legend before it is anything else: vivid, theologically apt, and absent from every first-century source. Origen repeats it in the third century, and through Eusebius it entered the common store of the church, where art fixed it permanently — Peter on the cross, upturned, his keys nearby. The Acts of Peter is not the Acts of the Apostles, the canonical book in which Peter dominates the opening chapters, preaches at Pentecost, and confronts Simon in Samaria; the two share a name and a hero and nothing of authority.

The rock and the keys

The claim built on Peter is larger than the man. From the conviction that he was the first bishop of Rome, and that the bishops of Rome inherit his office, his authority, and his keys, the institution of the papacy raised its entire juridical structure. Matthew’s “on this rock” and “the keys of the kingdom” became, in time, the charter of a primacy claimed over all churches.

The history is more layered than the claim. The earliest sources show no single bishop at Rome in the first century; the church there was led by a college of elders, and the monarchical episcopate — one bishop over a city — emerges only across the second century, earlier in Antioch and Asia Minor than at Rome itself. The orderly succession list of early Roman bishops, with Linus, Cletus, and Clement following Peter in sequence, was assembled by Irenaeus around AD 180 in his argument against the heretics, and modern scholarship reads it as a construction projected backward onto a period whose church government is poorly documented. It was Pope Stephen, in the mid-third century, who first turned Matthew 16:18 to the see of Rome and to his own office. Even Oscar Cullmann, whose 1953 study did more than any other modern work to make the historical Peter credible to both Catholics and Protestants, concluded that the saying attaches to the apostle himself and supplies no historical bridge to a line of successors. Where Peter ranked first among the apostles by the church’s earliest memory; whether that rank was meant to pass to an office, and to one office in particular, is a reading the centuries supplied. Christianity divided in part over the answer, and the Eastern Orthodox churches honor Peter as chief of the apostles while declining the Roman inference drawn from him.

The grave beneath the church

Under the high altar of the basilica that bears his name lies a Roman necropolis, and at its heart a second-century shrine — the aedicula later called the Trophy of Gaius, after the presbyter who around AD 200 named the “trophies” of the apostles at the Vatican and on the Ostian Way. Excavations ordered by Pius XII ran beneath the basilica from 1939 to 1949 and uncovered the shrine, set against a red-plastered wall, beside a later wall thick with Christian graffiti. The epigrapher Margherita Guarducci, studying the graffiti through the 1950s and 60s, read among them invocations of Peter and identified bones that had been removed, years earlier and almost by accident, from a niche in the graffiti wall — the remains, on testing, of a heavily built man of sixty to seventy. On 26 June 1968 Paul VI announced that the relics of Peter had been identified in a manner he judged convincing. The identification is cautious by the Vatican’s own framing and contested by others, and the fuller account of the necropolis, the shrine, and the bones belongs to St. Peter’s Basilica as its own subject; what stands here is the grave, venerated as the fisherman’s from the second century forward, with a church the size of a city built above it.

Texts under his name

Two letters in the New Testament carry Peter’s name. The First Epistle of Peter, a polished Greek circular to scattered Christians under pressure — famous for its “chosen race, a royal priesthood” — is attributed to him, though its command of literary Greek raises the question of how a Galilean fisherman came to write it, and the letter itself names a scribe, Silvanus. The Second Epistle of Peter, warning against scoffers and false teachers, is widely judged the latest writing in the canon and pseudonymous, composed in Peter’s voice after his death. A larger apocryphal literature — a Gospel, an Apocalypse, the Acts — gathered around him as around no other apostle, the gravity of the name pulling texts into its orbit. The early manual called the Didache, among the oldest non-canonical Christian writings, preserves the church order of the generation that remembered him.

The Peter of scholarship

The historical Peter is one of the most worked-over figures in New Testament study. The decisive modern work is Oscar Cullmann’s Peter: Disciple, Apostle, Martyr (Westminster, 1953), which separated the historical question — Galilee, Jerusalem, Antioch, Rome — from the exegetical one of Matthew 16:17-19, and concluded that the Roman ministry and martyrdom are probable while the succession claim is a later inference. The ecumenical volume Peter in the New Testament, edited by Raymond Brown, Karl Donfried, and John Reumann (1973), assembled Protestant and Catholic scholars to trace every reference to Peter and the growth of his image across the first century. The linguistic crux — whether the Petros / petra distinction carries weight or is an artifact of Greek — turns on the Aramaic Kepha, examined in light of Joseph Fitzmyer’s reconstruction (Jerusalem Perspective). The archaeology has its own literature, from Margherita Guarducci’s epigraphic studies of the Vatican graffiti to recent reassessments of the necropolis dig, where the identification of the bones is still argued and the underlying record remains the necropolis itself rather than any document. Across these strands the method is consistent: read Paul first as the earliest witness, weigh the Gospels as memory shaped by a generation, and mark the line where attested history gives way to the traditions the church grew around the name.

In devotion he is the keeper of the keys, set at the gate of heaven, the rock on which an institution was raised — and at the same time the man who wept after the cock crowed. The sources hold both at once and never quite resolve them: the fisherman who left his nets and broke under questioning in a courtyard, and the cornerstone of one of the most durable institutions the world has known. The tradition built its house on the second and refused to forget the first.

→ Related: St Matthew · Gospel Of St Matthew · The Didache · Jesus Christ · Paul The Apostle · New Testament · Acts Of The Apostles · Andrew The Apostle · Philip The Apostle · Simon Magus · Christianity · Eastern Orthodox Christianity · First Epistle Of Peter · Second Epistle Of Peter · St Peter S Basilica