Alas Babylon Chapter 4 Summary

The Apostle Peter in Rome

Jesus' chief disciple examined

Nicola Denzey Lewis May 26, 2022 82 Comments 98288 views

In this blog post, Brown University Religious Studies professor Nicola Denzey Lewis answers often asked questions nearly the apostle Peter. Denzey Lewis appears in the CNN series Finding Jesus: Religion, Fact, Forgery, which aims to investigate artifacts that shed lite on the world in which Jesus lived.—Ed.

What traditions connect the apostle Peter to Rome?

peter-el-greco

The Repentant St. Peter by El Greco. Photo: The Phillips Collection.

Jesus' chief disciple, Peter (also called Simon Peter or Cephas), has been associated with Rome for nigh 2,000 years. The earliest testimony to the apostle Peter'due south presence in Rome is a letter from a Christian deacon named Gaius. Writing probably toward the finish of the 2d century C.Eastward.—so, around 170 or 180 C.E.—Gaius tells about the wondrous things in Rome, including something chosen a tropaion (come across below for more) where Peter established a church—in fact, the Church building, the Roman Catholic church at the site where St. Peter's Basilica is today. Simply there are other traditions besides Peter's tropaion. 1 early Christian text, the Apocryphal Acts of Peter, recounts many things that Peter did in the city. At one point in Acts of Peter, Peter is taunted by a flamboyant heretic, Simon Magus. Simon challenges Peter to a flying contest around the Roman Forum, but Peter'southward prayers make Simon crash to the ground, proving that Simon's powers are not equally groovy as his own. At the end of this text, Peter, not wishing to be martyred for his faith, flees from Roman authorities on the Via Appia leading out of the urban center. Rather unexpectedly, Peter meets Jesus, who is traveling in the opposite management. He asks Jesus, "Where are you going?" Jesus tells Peter that he is going to Rome "to be crucified again." Peter realizes, from this, that he cannot flee from his fate. "Where are you going?" in Latin is "Quo Vadis?" and there's a medieval church in Rome called the Church of Quo Vadis at the spot where Peter met Jesus. To prove that his vision was real, you tin still see there a bit of marble pavement which the faithful say miraculously preserve Jesus' footprints.

Is it likely that the apostle Peter went to Rome and founded the church there?

Interestingly, the Bible says nothing about Peter ever traveling to Rome. When the gospels end, Peter is in Jerusalem. It's the same in the Book of Acts. The apostle Paul, in his letters, too talks about meeting Peter in the eastern Mediterranean. After Jesus' expiry, Paul says that Jesus' brother, James, and Peter are the co-leaders of the "church," or assembly, of Jesus-followers in Jerusalem. In short, there is no early textual evidence for Peter in Rome, then for some people, it'due south very hard to believe that he ever traveled there. Not but is information technology a very long way, according to the New Testament, Peter was a fisherman who was non very educated and who spoke only Aramaic; he was not the blazon of person that might travel widely across the Roman Empire to a large urban center where Latin and Greek were the dominant languages. The absence of connexion betwixt Peter and Rome in the New Testament, the lack of references to him in our primeval Roman Christian literature, and what we know of Peter's background and character all combine to make it unlikely, to my listen, that he always went to Rome.

Is there whatsoever evidence that the apostle Peter died in Rome?

st-peter-basilica

St. Peter's Basilica in State of the vatican city, the traditional burial site of the apostle Peter.

At that place is no solid evidence—textual or even archaeological—that Peter died in Rome. Starting effectually the end of the second century, Christian pilgrims went to see Peter's tropaion. But a tropaion is not a tomb. The word itself is very unusual; sometimes translated as "trophy," information technology means something similar a war memorial or a cenotaph (i.e., an empty grave). Information technology'due south not the word used in the Roman Empire for a burial identify. Yet this spot—which was originally in the middle of an aboriginal cemetery—was rapidly understood every bit the place where Peter was buried. When it was excavated in the 1950s, archaeologists were shocked to find that there was no grave and no bones nether the tropaion. Only later were some bones produced from that excavation, and information technology's a fascinating story we talk nearly in Finding Jesus. Are these Peter's bones? That appears to be a matter of faith. The official Vatican position, first stated in 1968, is that they might be.

Why are there 2 places in Rome where the apostle Peter was supposedly buried?

This is another fascinating thing we explore in Finding Jesus. Near people know about Peter's traditional burial site at St. Peter'due south. Merely it turns out that there'south a 2d site in Rome where pilgrims went for hundreds of years, which was known as the Memoria Apostolorum (the Memorial to the Apostles). Information technology'southward off the Via Appia at the modern site of the Catacombs of San Sebastiano, and you lot can still go and visit it today, although the memorial itself is largely congenital over. What's amazing is that the site preserves effectually 600 graffiti scrawled by Christian pilgrims in the early Eye Ages, well-nigh of them prayers to Peter and Paul, the joint patron saints of Rome. It certainly looks like people believed that Peter was cached there, simply excavators institute no evidence of a tomb there, either! As far equally I can tell, this leaves us with 2 options: Either Peter'southward trunk was at both these sites at one betoken and moved from 1 to the other, or Peter's body was never at either site, merely people yet associated him with the site. It didn't ever take a trunk or a tomb for a site to be sacred, after all.

This Bible History Daily feature was originally published on March 31, 2017.

nicola-denzey-lewis Nicola Denzey Lewis, Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Brown Academy, specializes in Gnosticism, Late Artifact, Roman social history, the history of Christianity, and women and gender. Her recent publications include Cosmology and Fate in Gnosticism and the Graeco-Roman World (Brill, 2013) and Introduction to "Gnosticism" (Oxford Univ. Press, 2013).