Holy Apostle Peter

Era

First century, died at Rome in the 60s

Region

Bethsaida and Capernaum, Jerusalem, Antioch, and Rome

Category

Apostle, chief of the apostles, and martyr

Principal feast for this profile

June 29, with the Apostle Paul

About 16 minutes to read Sources listed at the end

Jump to Simon, Son of John The Man in the Gospels The Courtyard The Shore Acts: The Man Who Went First Antioch: The Part That Is Usually Left Out Where the Record Comes From Why the Church Remembers Him What His Life Asks of Us

Simon, Son of John

He was from Bethsaida on the Sea of Galilee and had a house at Capernaum. His brother was Andrew. He was a fisherman in partnership with James and John, and he was married — the Gospels have Christ heal his wife’s mother, and Paul mentions in passing that the apostles travelled with their wives, Cephas among them.

The name is worth slowing down for, because devotional writing usually fuses three separate scenes into one.

In John’s Gospel, Andrew brings his brother to Christ near the Jordan, and Christ looks at him and says: You are Simon the son of John; you shall be called Cephas. The verb is future. It is a promise of a name, given at first sight.

In Mark and Luke, the name is actually conferred later, on the mountain, when the Twelve are appointed: and Simon He surnamed Peter.

And in Matthew, at Caesarea Philippi, the name is neither promised nor given — it is explained. Matthew has been calling him Simon Peter since chapter four. What happens at Caesarea Philippi is that the meaning of a name the reader already knows is unfolded.

Three scenes, three different things happening. A life of Peter that says “Jesus renamed him Peter and said, on this rock” has fused the first and the third and dropped the second altogether.

The Man in the Gospels

The Gospels do not flatter him, and that is the first remarkable thing about them.

Luke alone has the miraculous catch, the nets breaking, and Peter on his knees in the bottom of the boat saying the strangest thing anyone says to Christ in the Gospels: Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord. He asks the Lord to leave. He is told he will be catching men.

He walks on the water — and it is in Matthew alone; Mark and John have Christ walk on the sea with no Peter in it — and he sinks, and is caught, and is asked why he doubted.

At the Transfiguration he offers to build three tabernacles, and Mark adds the flat editorial note that he did not know what to say, because they were afraid.

At Caesarea Philippi he makes the confession. Six verses later he takes Christ aside to tell Him He must not suffer, and is answered: Get behind Me, Satan; you are a stumbling-block to Me. Matthew puts the rock and the stumbling-stone six verses apart, and he did it on purpose.

And at the supper he says that even if everyone else falls away, he will not.

The Courtyard

All four Gospels have the denial, and each keeps something the others do not. Mark alone has the cock crow twice. John alone has the other disciple who was known to the high priest getting Peter in through the door, and the third challenge coming from a kinsman of the man whose ear he had cut off. Luke alone has the detail that stops the heart: and the Lord turned and looked upon Peter.

All four have him go out and weep.

Luke also keeps the sentence spoken before it happened, which is the key to everything that follows: Simon, Simon, Satan has desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat; but I have prayed for you, that your faith fail not — and when you have turned again, strengthen your brethren. In the Greek, the you that Satan asks for is plural: all of them. The you that Christ has prayed for is singular: Peter. The failure was foreseen, and so was the turning, and so was the job afterwards.

The Shore

Beside the Sea of Tiberias the risen Christ asks him three times whether he loves Him, and three times gives him a charge: feed My lambs, tend My sheep, feed My sheep. Three denials by a fire in a courtyard; three confessions by a fire on a beach.

Much is made of the fact that Christ uses one Greek verb for love and Peter answers with another, until the third time, when Christ uses Peter’s word. Some read this as Christ descending to the level of the claim Peter dares to make. Others note that John’s Gospel varies its synonyms freely everywhere — it does the same thing with two words for knowing and two words for sheep in these very verses — and that the underlying Aramaic would have had one word. The second reading is the majority among modern commentators. The traditional one is old and beautiful, and it is not the only one available.

Then, in the same passage, comes the first evidence in the New Testament that Peter died violently: when you are old you will stretch out your hands, and another will gird you and carry you where you do not wish to go. The evangelist adds an aside — this He said, signifying by what death he should glorify God — which tells us something important. The readers already knew how Peter had died. The Gospel does not have to say.

Acts: The Man Who Went First

At Pentecost the man who could not admit to a servant girl that he knew Christ stands up with the eleven and preaches to Jerusalem, and three thousand are baptised. He heals the lame man at the Beautiful Gate with the line every Christian knows — silver and gold have I none, but such as I have I give you. He is arrested, and the council notes that he and John are unschooled, ordinary men, and marvels. He answers: we ought to obey God rather than men.

And then the thing that changed the shape of the world. On a roof in Joppa he sees a sheet let down with every kind of animal in it and is told to kill and eat; and when he refuses, is told not to call common what God has cleansed. He goes to the house of a Roman centurion, says God is no respecter of persons, and watches the Holy Spirit fall on Gentiles before anyone has baptised them. He then has to go back to Jerusalem and defend it.

He is imprisoned by Herod Agrippa, and an angel takes him out past the guards, and he knocks at a door where the church is praying for him, and the servant girl who answers is so overjoyed she forgets to let him in.

Then Acts says: he departed and went to another place. It is the most consequential silence in the New Testament. After that Peter appears in Acts only once more, at the council in Jerusalem. Luke’s attention moves to Paul. Acts never mentions Rome in connection with Peter, and never tells us how he died.

Antioch: The Part That Is Usually Left Out

Paul records that Peter came to Antioch and that he opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned.

What happened: Peter had been eating with the Gentile believers. Then men came from James, and he drew back and separated himself, out of fear of the circumcision party — and the other Jewish believers followed him, and even Barnabas was carried along. Paul says he told Peter so, in front of everyone.

Four honest things about that passage. First, Paul does not record Peter’s answer; we do not know how it ended, and any account of a reconciliation is inference. Second, the charge is not false doctrine but hypocrisy — Peter’s own stated theology, at the Jerusalem council, is the very position Paul is defending. Third, Peter is not singled out as uniquely weak; Barnabas yields too. Fourth, whether this happened before or after the Jerusalem council is genuinely disputed and cannot be settled.

There is a bonus in this passage which is worth more than the passage itself. The Fathers argued about it in writing, openly, for years. A Greek tradition going back to Origen — and taken up by Chrysostom and later by Jerome — held that the whole exchange was staged for the benefit of onlookers, and that neither apostle actually sinned. Augustine would not have it: if Paul wrote that Peter did wrong when he had not, then nothing in Scripture can be trusted. The two of them wrote back and forth about it for a decade. Augustine’s reading prevailed in the Latin West; the Greek tradition largely kept Chrysostom’s.

That is what the Fathers disagreeing looks like. It is not a scandal. It is the normal condition of a Church working things out.

Where the Record Comes From

“Upon this rock.” This has to be handled carefully on an Orthodox site, and handled fairly, because it is the single most argued verse in Christendom.

Start with a fact of the text that both sides acknowledge: Mark and Luke record the confession at Caesarea Philippi and have no you are Peter, no rock, no keys, no binding and loosing. The whole logion is unique to Matthew.

The Greek argument popular on both sides — that Petros is masculine and petra feminine, so two different things must be meant — proves nothing in either direction. The change of ending is required by grammar; a man cannot be called petra. And the Aramaic Christ spoke would have used Kepha in both places with no distinction at all, which is exactly why John’s Gospel preserves the Aramaic form. Anyone offering that argument as a knock-down proof, in either direction, is not being straight with you.

The Fathers give four readings, and most of them use more than one: that the rock is Peter’s confession; that the rock is Christ, whom Peter confessed; that the rock is Peter himself as the confessing believer and representative of the apostles; and that the rock is every believer who makes that confession.

Chrysostom, preaching on Matthew, takes the first — upon this rock, that is, on the faith of his confession — and the same Chrysostom elsewhere calls Peter the leader of the choir of the apostles, the mouth of the disciples, the foundation of the Church. Both are his. Ambrose says faith is the foundation of the Church, and is also extravagant about Peter personally. Origen generalises the promise: anyone who confesses as Peter did becomes a Peter.

And Augustine, at the end of his life, reviewing his own works, sets out two readings — the rock as Peter, and the rock as Christ — and then writes: which of these two interpretations is the more probable, let the reader choose. A Father of the Church saying, in so many words, that the meaning of Matthew 16:18 is open.

Two other texts belong here and are usually cut. Binding and loosing is given to all the disciples, in the plural, two chapters later; and the forgiveness of sins is given to the assembled disciples in John 20.

What Orthodoxy actually holds. Positively: Peter is koryphaios, chief of the apostles, and the Church says so in its hymns without the slightest embarrassment — though notice that the kontakion for 29 June carefully distinguishes Christ the Rock from Peter the rock of faith. Every bishop sits on the chair of Peter; Cyprian, writing in 251, says the episcopate is one and each bishop holds the whole of it. And Rome held the first place in order among the sees of the undivided Church, which no Orthodox body denies.

Where it differs: on where that first place came from. The canons say it in as many words — Chalcedon’s twenty-eighth canon grants Rome its prerogatives because that is an imperial city, and gives New Rome the same on the same grounds. And on what the primacy is: honour and order exercised within a council, not jurisdiction over other churches. Rome, for its part, refused to ratify that canon, which is part of the honest story too.

The most careful statement of the difference is not from either side’s polemicists but from the two churches talking to each other. The Chieti document of 2016, agreed by the joint Orthodox–Catholic theological commission, records that the Western understanding developed by reference to Peter’s role among the apostles, and then says plainly: this understanding was not adopted in the East.

Rome and the martyrdom. The evidence, in order of date.

That he died a martyr is attested by the end of the first century — John 21, and Clement of Rome writing to Corinth around 96, who says Peter endured many labours and, having borne his witness, went to the place of glory owed him. Clement does not name Rome, or Nero, or the manner. That he was writing from Rome, and says “let us set these before our eyes,” is why nearly everyone reads it as local memory — but it is a reading.

Ignatius of Antioch, writing to the Roman church around 110 on his way to die there, says he does not issue commandments to them as Peter and Paul did. He does not say either died there. But the remark only works if his Roman readers recognise the relationship.

The first surviving text that says both apostles taught in Italy and were martyred there is a letter of Dionysius, bishop of Corinth, from about 170 — and it matters that it comes from Corinth rather than Rome, since that makes it independent. Irenaeus, around 180, says the Roman church was founded by Peter and Paul together.

And around the year 200 a Roman churchman named Gaius, arguing with a Montanist opponent, says: I can show you the trophies of the apostles — go to the Vatican or the Ostian Way. There was a visible monument on the Vatican hill by then.

No ancient source anywhere says Peter died elsewhere, and no other city ever claimed his tomb. In a world where relic claims were common and profitable, that silence counts for something. The scholarly consensus, including among historians with no stake in the question, is that Peter was at Rome and died there. What is genuinely uncertain is the year, how long he was there, and everything about the circumstances.

The upside-down cross. This one is the clearest example of the site’s method, so here it is in full.

Tertullian, around 200, is the first to say Peter was crucified — where Peter endures a passion like his Lord’s. But notice what he is doing: he reads it out of when you are old you will stretch out your hands, which is an interpretation of John 21, not an independent report. He says nothing about the cross being inverted.

The inversion first appears in the Acts of Peter, an apocryphal work of the later second century — the same book that gives us the Quo vadis scene on the road out of Rome. Eusebius names that book among the spurious ones and says no churchman ancient or modern has used it. It has an encratite streak the Church did not receive, and a flying contest with Simon Magus.

From there the detail travels: Origen reports it in the 230s, though as received tradition rather than as a citation of that book; Eusebius quotes Origen; Jerome, in 392, gives it with the motive attached — that Peter asked for it, being unworthy to die as his Lord had died — and after that it is everywhere.

So the earliest surviving text containing the detail is a book the Church rejected. Whether the tradition behind it is older than that book, nobody can say. And the Church has been entirely free to keep a detail from a book it did not receive as Scripture; it has done so here, and in the iconography, and in the hymns. The Orthodox Church in America’s own life of Peter says it exactly right: according to Tradition, he asked to be crucified upside down. That is the correct label, and it is the one this site uses.

The tomb. In 1939, work in the grottoes under St Peter’s broke into ancient burials, and Pius XII authorised a full excavation. It ran ten years and found a Roman street of tombs beneath the nave and, directly under the papal altar, a small shrine built against a red wall and dated to about 150–170.

The most telling fact in the whole file is an engineering one: Constantine’s basilica was built at enormous and otherwise pointless cost — cutting into the hill, filling and levelling a working cemetery — in order to put its altar precisely over that shrine. Whatever the shrine was, the fourth-century Church believed it marked Peter’s grave and paid heavily to enshrine it. It is very probably the monument Gaius pointed at around the year 200.

The bones are a different matter and the honest account is messier. In 1942 the administrator of the works, disturbed at how remains were being handled, had bones removed and stored elsewhere without telling the archaeologists — which breaks the chain of custody for everything afterwards. In his Christmas message of 1950 Pius XII announced the tomb had been found but said plainly that it could not be proved the bones were Peter’s. Margherita Guarducci, a Greek epigrapher, later read a fragmentary inscription on the adjoining wall as Peter is here, located the removed bones, and had them examined: one individual, male, robust, about sixty to seventy, the feet missing, with traces of purple cloth shot with gold. Paul VI announced in 1968 that the identification was convincing.

The objections deserve to be stated without hedging. The excavation’s own senior archaeologist, Antonio Ferrua, was never persuaded. The inscription is broken and its reading is contested. The missing feet are an absence, not evidence of cutting — small distal bones go missing in disturbed deposits as a matter of course. The area contained a jumble of remains including animal bones, as crowded reused cemeteries do. And a first-century Roman man of sixty to seventy is not a rare find in a first-century Roman cemetery.

The fair summary: that the site was venerated as Peter’s grave by the middle of the second century is well founded; that it is his grave is likely; that the particular bones are his is contested, and two popes said different things about it, neither of which binds anybody.

One more, because it shows the Church’s own scholars doing honest work: the Cathedra Petri, the throne enshrined in Bernini’s great gilt burst in the apse of St Peter’s, was examined scientifically between 1968 and 1974 and found to be a Carolingian chair, most likely the one given by Charles the Bald around 875. The Vatican’s own investigation established it.

And a note on the epistles. The first letter of Peter was never disputed in the ancient Church; Eusebius lists it among the acknowledged books. The second was. Eusebius says outright that it was not reckoned canonical though many found it profitable, and lists it among the disputed writings. Jerome, in 392, says it is thought by many not to be Peter’s on account of its difference from the first in style — which is exactly the ground modern scholars use. Both books are Scripture in the Orthodox Church, and have been for sixteen centuries. Canonicity is a judgement of the Church about a book’s authority; authorship is a historical question; and the Church’s own greatest historians recorded that the second question was argued while the first was being settled. That is worth knowing, and it costs nothing to say.

Why the Church Remembers Him

Because the Gospels made no attempt to clean him up. Four accounts of the Church’s chief apostle, written by and for the Church, and every one of them keeps the sinking, the rebuke, the babbling on the mountain, the sword in the garden, the courtyard, and the tears. Paul’s letters then add, in writing, that he had to be corrected to his face at Antioch years later.

That is not how movements write about their founders. It is how people write when they are more interested in what is true than in what is impressive.

And because of the shape of his life. He is not remembered for never having failed. He is remembered because the failure was foreseen, prayed over, and then used: when you have turned again, strengthen your brethren. The sifting was permitted. The turning was promised. The work came after.

What His Life Asks of Us

Failure tempts us two ways, and Peter shuts both doors. One way says it did not really matter. The other says it disqualifies you for good. Peter’s tears are real and Christ’s threefold question is real, and neither cancels the other.

The question on the beach is the one that reaches everybody, and it only ever has one honest form of answer. Do you love Me? is not answered by feeling. It is answered by feed My sheep — by going and looking after somebody.

And then, at the end, the sentence about the hands. There is a kind of discipleship that looks like going where you like, and a kind that looks like being taken where you would rather not go. He was told, from the beginning, that his would end as the second kind.

Holy Apostle Peter, pray to Christ our God that our failures may lead us to repentance, and that our love for Him may become the care of someone else.

A note. These lives are written to introduce, not to direct. Ascetic feats described here belong to particular people under obedience, not to a method anyone should take up alone. Anything touching your own rule of prayer or fasting belongs with your priest or spiritual father.

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