PETER AND THE PAPACY
There is ample evidence in the New Testament that Peter was first in
authority among the apostles. Whenever they were named, Peter headed the
list (Matt. 10:1-4, Mark 3:16-19,Luke 6:14-16, Acts 1:13); sometimes it
was only "Peter and his companions" (Luke 9:32). Peter was the one who
generally spoke for the apostles (Matt. 18:21, Mark 8:29, Luke 12:41,
John 6:69), and he figured in many of the most dramatic scenes (Matt.
14:28-32, Matt. 17:24, Mark 10:28). On pentecost it was Peter who first
preached to the crowds (Acts 2:14-40), and he worked the first healing
(Acts 3:6-7). And it was to Peter that the revelation came that gentiles
were to be baptized (Acts 10:46-48).
His preeminent position among the apostles was symbolized at the
very beginning of his relationship with Christ, though the implications
were only slowly unfolded. At their first meeting, Christ told Simon
that his name would thereafter be Peter, which translates as rock(John
1:42). The startling thing was that in the Old Testament only God was
called a rock. The word was never used as a proper name for a man. If
you were to turn to a companion and say, "from now on your name is
Asparagus," people would wonder. Why Asparagus? What is the meaning of
it? What does it signify? Indeed, why Peter for Simon the fisherman?
Why give him as a name a word only used for God before this moment?
Christ was not given to meaningless gestures, and neither were the
Jews as a whole when it came to names. Giving a new name meant that the
status of the person was changed, as when Abram was changed to Abraham
(Gen. 17:5), Jacob to Israel (Gen. 32:28), Eliacim to Joakim (4 Kgs.
23:34), and Daniel, Ananias, Misael, and Azarias to Baltassar, Sidrach,
Misach, and Abdenago (dan.1:6-8). But no Jew had ever been called rock
because that was reserved to God. The Jews would give other names taken
from nature, such as Barach (which means lightning. Jos. 19:45),
Deborah(bee, Gen. 35:
, and Rachel(ewe, Gen 29:16), but no rock. In
the New Testament James and John were surnamed Boanerges, Sons of
Thunder, by Christ, but that was never regularly used in place of their
original names, Simon's new name supplanted the old.
Not only was there significance in Simon being given a name that had
only been used to describe God, but the place where the renaming occurred
was also important, "Then Jesus came into the neighborhood of Caesarea
Philippi" (Matt. 16:13), a city that Philip the Tetrarch built and named
in honor of Caesar Augustus, who had died in A.D. 14. The city lay near
cascades in the Jordan River and a gigantic wall of rock about 200 feet
high and 500 feet long, part of the southern foothills of Mount Hermon.
The city is no more. Near its ruins is the small Arab town of Banias,
and a the base of the rock wall may be found what is left of one of the
springs that fed the Jordan. It was here that Jesus pointed to Simon and
said, "Thou art Peter" (Matt. 16:18). The significance of the event
must have been clear to the other apostles. As devout Jews they knew at
once that the location was meant to emphasize the importance of what was
being done. None complained of Simon being singled out for this honor,
and in the rest of the New Testament he is called by his new name, while
James and John remain just James and John, not Boanerges.
When He first saw Simon, "Jesus looked at him closely and said, Thou
art Simon the son of Jonah; thou shalt be called Cephas (which means the
same as Peter)"(John 1:42). The word Cephas is merely the
transliteration of the Aramaic Kepha into Greek. Later, after Peter and
the other disciples had been with Christ for some time, they went to
Caesarea Philippi, where Peter made his profession of faith: "Thou art
the Christ, the Son of the living God"(Matt. 16:17). Jesus told him
that this truth was specially revealed to him, and then he reiterated:
"Thou art Peter" (Matt. 16:18). To this was added the promise that the
church that would be founded would, in some way, be founded on Peter
(Matt. 16:18) Then two important things were told the apostle.
"Whatever thou shalt bind on earth shalt be bound in heaven; whatever
thou shalt loose on earth shalt be loosed in heaven"(Matt. 16:19). Here
Peter was singled out for the authority that provides for the forgiveness
of sins and the making of disciplinary rules. Later the apostles as a
whole would be given similar power, but here Peter received it in a
special sense.
Then Peter alone was promised something else. "I will give to thee
[singular] the keys to the kingdom of heaven" (Matt. 16:19). In ancient
times keys were the hallmark of authority. A walled city might have one
great gate and that gate one great lock worked by one great key. To be
given the key to the city (an honor which exists even today, though its
import is largely lost) meant to be given free access to and authority
over the city. The city to which Peter was given the keys was the
heavenly city itself. This symbolism for authority is used elsewhere in
the Bible (Isa. 22:22, Apoc. 1:18).
Finally, after the Resurrection, Jesus appeared to his disciples and
asked Peter three times, "Dost thou love me?" (John 21:15-17). In
expiation for his threefold denial, Peter gave a threefold affirmation of
love. Then Christ, who is the Good Shepherd (John 10:11,14), gave Peter
all the authority He earlier promised: "Feed my sheep"(John 21:17). Thus
was completed the prediction made just before Jesus and his followers
went for the last time to Olivet. Immediately before his denials were
predicted, Peter was told, "Simon, Simon, behold, Satan has claimed power
over you all, so that he can sift you like wheat; but I have prayed for
thee [singular], that thy faith may not fail; when, after a while, thou
hast come back to me [after the denials], it is for thee to be the
support of thy brethren"(Luke 22:31-32). It was Peter that Christ prayed
would have faith that would not fail and that would be a guide for the
others, and His prayer, being perfectly efficacious, was sure to be
fulfilled.
Now take a closer look at the key verse: "Thou art Peter and upon
this rock I will build my church" (Matt. 16:18). Disputes about this
line has always concerned the meaning of the term rock. To whom, or to
what, does it refer? Since Simon's fresh name of Peter itself means
rock, the sentence could be rewritten as: (Thou art Rock and upon this
rock I will build my church." The play on words seems obvious, the
commentators wishing to avoid what follows from this-namely the
establishment of the papacy-have suggested that the word rock could not
refer to Peter but must refer to his profession of faith or to Christ.
From the grammatical point of view, the phrase "this rock" must
relate back to the closest noun. Peter profession of faith ("Thou art
the Christ, the son of the living God") is two verses earlier, while his
name, a proper noun, is in the immediately proceeding clause. As an
analogy consider this artificial sentence: "I have a car and a truck and
it is blue." Which is blue? The truck, because that is the noun closet
to the pronoun "it." This is all the more clear if the reference to the
car is two sentences earlier, as the reference to Peter's profession is
two sentences earlier to the term rock. The same kind of argument goes
for whether the word refers to Christ himself, since He is mentioned
within the profession of faith. The fact that he is elsewhere, by a
different metaphor, called the cornerstone (Eph. 2:20, 1 Pet. 2:4-8)
does not disprove that here Peter is the foundation. Christ is naturally
the principle and, since he will be returning to heaven, the invisible
foundation of the church that will be established, but Peter is named by
him as the secondary and, because he and his successors will remain on
earth, the visible foundation. Peter can be a foundation only because
first Christ is one.
Here is another analogy. At times we ask our friends to pray for
us, and we pray for them. Our prayers ask God for special help for one
another. When we pray in this way, what are we doing? We are acting as
mediators, as go-betweens. We are approaching God on someone else's
behalf. Does this contradict Paul's statement that Christ is the one
mediator (1 Tim. 2:5)? No, because our mediatorship is entirely
secondary to His and depends on His. He could establish His mediatorship
in any way He chose, and He chose to have us participate when he
commanded us to pray for one another (Matt. 5:44, 1 Tim. 2:1-4, Rom.
15:30, Acts 12:5), even for the dead (2 Tim. 1:16-18). So, just as there
can be secondary mediators and a primary one, there can be a secondary
foundation and a primary one.
Opponents of the Catholic interpretation of Matt. 16:18 also argue
that in the Greek text the name of the apostle is Petros, while rock is
rendered as petra. The first means a small stone, while the second means
a massive rock. If Peter was meant to be the massive rock, why isn't his
name Petra? The first thing to note is that Christ did not speak to the
disciples in Greek. He spoke Aramaic, the common language of Palestine
at that time. In that language the word for rock is kepha. What was
said was thus:"Thou art Kepha, and upon this kepha I will build my
church." When Matthew's Gospel was translated from the original Aramaic
to Greek, there arose a problem which did not confront the evangelist
when he first composed his account of Christ's life. In the Aramaic the
word kepha has the same ending whether it refers to a rock or is used as
a man's name. In Greek, though, the word for rock, petra, is feminine in
gender. The translator could use it for the second appearance of kepha
in the sentence, but not for the first because it would be inappropriate
to give a man a feminine name. So he put a masculine ending on it, and
there was Petros, which also happened to mean a small stone. Some of the
effect of the play on words was lost, but that was the best that could be
done in Greek. In English, like Aramaic, there is no problem with
endings, so an English rendition could read: "Thou art Rock, and upon
this rock I will build my church."
Another point: If the rock really did refer to Christ (based on 1
Cor. 10:4, "and the rock was Christ"), why did Matthew leave the passage
as it was? In the original Aramaic, and in the English which is a closer
parallel to it than is the Greek, the passage seems clear enough.
Matthew must have realized that his readers would conclude the obvious
from "Rock ... rock."If he meant Christ to be understood as the rock, why
didn't he say so? Why did he take a chance and leave it up to Paul to
write a clarifying text (presuming, of course, that 1 Corinthians was
written after Matthew's Gospel; if it came first, it could not have been
written to clarify it)?
The reason, of course, is that Matthew knew full well that what the
sentence seemed to say was just what it really was saying. It was Simon,
weak, Christ-denying Simon, who was chosen to be the first link in the
chain of the papacy. After all, as G.K. Chesterton remarked when
writing of the popes, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.
--Karl Keating
Catholic Answers
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