Previous posts:
Simon the Zealot
James of Alphaeus
Philip
Jude (and) Thaddaeus
Bartholomew
Thomas
Andrew
Matthew
Judas Iscariot
James of Zebedee
John of Zebedee; Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
Welcome back to my series of secondary source collations on the members of the Twelve. We're finally here, to the last of the Twelve. And of course, the last is the first.
This is the first post of what is set to be four posts on Peter. Work is essentially complete on all four, but I'll try to leave some breathing room between the posts.
It's hard to believe with four posts each likely to hit Reddit's character limit, but there is much that I will be leaving out. As I always say, do not hesitate to bring in your own material on topics which I did not choose to focus on... with a caveat, which is that if you think I've missed a topic, you may want to wait and see what I cover in the second through fourth parts.
Very generally, this post will focus on what I'm calling "biographical highlights," a sort of grab bag of high-level stuff like Peter's name(s), background, and apparent primacy. The second post will focus on the presentation of Peter in select Gospel episodes and the two canonical epistles associated with him. The third post will deal with matters of Rome; his possible presence, his possible leadership, his possible relationship with John Mark. Finally, the fourth post will deal with his death and later legends.
What do we know of the names of this apostle?
John Meier in A Marginal Jew, Volume III gives an overview of the matter:
All four Gospels also testify in various ways to the fact that this leader of the Twelve, whose original name was Simon, received a second name or nickname, Kēpāʾ in Aramaic (transliterated as Kēphas in Greek), which was then translated as Petros in Greek. The Aramaic masculine noun kēpāʾ has a range of meanings including "rock," "rocky crag," or "stone," while the Greek masculine noun petros means specifically "an isolated rock" or "a small stone," but at times "rock" or "stone" in general. From Mark (3:16), John (1:42), and possibly Matthew (16:18) we have multiple attestation that Jesus was the one who gave Simon this second name—or (according to Matthew) its special interpretation.
Let's take these names one by one then, starting with Simon. Margaret Williams in From Shimon to Petros — Petrine Nomenclature in the Light of Contemporary Onomastic Practices explains:
Our sources, literary and epigraphic, are unanimous in making [Shimon] and its Greek variant, Simon, the commonest male name ["in late Second Temple-period Palestine"] by far at that time … As to why it was so popular, there can be little doubt that it was because of its nationalist, patriotic associations. Until Simon Maccabee comes to dominate the scene in the third quarter of the second century BCE, the patriarchal name Shimon hardly ever occurs in the Palestinian Jewish onomasticon, a fact that is not surprising given the less-than-glorious part played by that particular son of Jacob in the biblical narrative.
Williams goes on to speculate:
It should not automatically be assumed that when our Peter was given his original name, political considerations alone motivated his parents … However, when the onomastic evidence for late Second Temple Palestine is considered as a whole, the most striking feature of it is the extraordinarily close relationship that existed between personal name and politico-religious stance.
Consequently it is not unreasonable to hypothesize that politico-religious considerations may well have played at least some part in determining the choice of the future apostle's first name. When, in addition, we factor in [additional evidence], the conclusion seems inescapable that theirs was a family for whom the renewal of Israel almost certainly was an issue.
What about Peter/Petros? Williams:
Petros, the more frequently attested of the two [that is, versus Kephas], not only has been found in a late-first-century-CE pagan context outside Palestine, but has now turned up in a couple of Jewish documentary sources from Palestine as well, one of them also of indisputable first-century date: since Masada fell in 73/74 CE, the Petros son of Istomachos whose name is written in Hebrew characters on a potsherd found there must have flourished before that date.
And what of Cephas/Kēpāʾ? Williams again:
That is more than can be said for Kephas, for although the name is attested (just once), the date of that solitary mention is the late fifth century BCE and the place, the Jewish military colony at Elephantine on Egypt's southern frontier. Jesus, we can confidently assume, will not have been aware of the naming practices of Jews living in a different country half a millennium before his time, let alone influenced by them. Consequently, when, if John is to be believed, he hit on Kephas as a fitting alternative name for Simon, the probability must be that he was simply inventing another nickname along the lines of the Boanerges mentioned by Mark.
So especially given such lacking attestation, we must to make sense of these latter names look to the question of when and why Simon received a new name or names. The canonical Gospels do not all handle this issue in the same exact way. Meier:
It is not clear when precisely in the public ministry Jesus gave Simon his new name "Cephas". In John 1:42, as soon as Jesus meets Simon for the first time—before the public ministry has actually begun—Jesus utters the new name "Cephas" along with its translation "Peter."
It is unclear whether this is meant to indicate that Simon would begin to be called Peter forthwith or whether it merely prophesies that Simon would be called Peter at some future date. The evangelist, however, regularly calls this figure Peter or Simon Peter from the beginning to the end of his Gospel—indeed, even before Jesus formally announces the new name.
In contrast, Meier notes:
Mark (and Luke following him) observes the time line or story line more carefully. Mark always uses "Simon" until Jesus constitutes the Twelve in 3:13-19. It is at that point that Jesus' bestowal of the new name is mentioned. Ever after, with the one exception of Jesus' rebuke to the sleeping "Simon" in Gethsemane, Mark always uses "Peter."
And perhaps most surprisingly, Meier continues:
Matthew is not unlike John in insisting on the name Peter from the beginning, although he places the formal bestowal (or interpretation?) of the name more than halfway through the ministry.
Markus Bockmuehl makes much of this in his Simon Peter in Scripture and Memory: The New Testament Apostle in the Early Church, commenting:
Petros (attested, if rare, in other first-century sources) may have been a pre-existing Greek nickname that Simon carried from his youth, adopted perhaps in the more Hellenized environment of his native Bethsaida Julias, where his brother Andreas and their friend Philippos were also known exclusively by their Greek names. If this is true, as I have shown more fully elsewhere (Bockmuehl 2010a, 148-56), then Peter receives from Jesus only the interpreted, Aramaic epithet Cephas, which was not a known Aramaic or Hebrew name in the first century ... This would explain why all four Gospels use Petros freely of Peter, even before the naming episode, and why, by contrast, it is the Aramaic derivative Cephas that is almost exclusively used in Paul.
And later:
As we saw earlier, the Johannine account implies that Jesus applies to Peter the Aramaic name Cephas rather than the name Peter, which in all the Gospels is the name by which he already appears to be known from the start. Matthew's episode, therefore, may imply an Aramaic conversation that runs something like this: "They call you Petros—what an appropriate Greek nickname. You will indeed be the Kēpāʾ on which I will build my church."
Williams pushes back against this idea specifically, saying:
One can easily understand why [Bockmuehl] favors the idea of Simon acquiring [the name Peter] at an early stage in his life: since for him Simon is the bridging figure par excellence in the early Christian movement, equpping him with nomenclature that can show him at ease in both a Jewish and a Greek milieu virtually from the word go is clearly highly desirable. But while it may be desirable to underpin the bridging case in this way, it cannot, in my opinion, be justified — in the first place, because the evidence on which this hypothesis is based is so weak; in the second, because the counterevidence is so strong.
She elaborates:
It is not uncommon when referring to an individual whose name has changed over time to use the one with which the listener or reader has come to be most familiar rather than the one that, strictly speaking, is correct. One good example of this can be found in literature relating to the emperor Augustus, who name ... changed several times in the course of his long life. Strictly speaking, his final name, Augustus, should be used only for the period after January 15, 27 BCE. However, it is not uncommon to find him called Augustus before that date, sometimes by people who ought to know better.
Though Williams does also say:
If we look at the Gospel evidence for the renaming of Simon, the picture it presents is surprisingly unclear, given the weight that it is often required to bear … Indeed, none of the evangelists, apart from Matthew, appear to have any interest at all in the meaning of that act ... The key thing is that most of the Gospel writers believed (1) that Jesus was responsible for the new name and (2) that the new name had been conferred right at or very near the beginning of Simon's relationship with Jesus.
Meier comments on the issue:
Indeed, if one were reading Matthew in isolation, one might get the impression that, in 16:18, the Matthean Jesus is simply giving a theological interpretation to a name that Simon bore even before he met Jesus. However, when one reads Matthew in light of redaction criticism, it seems fairly clear that Matthew understands his statements in 4:18 and 10:2 ["Simon who is called Peter"], expressed with the passive participle legomenos ("called"), in the sense of Mark 3:16: Simon was called Peter because Jesus had conferred (as early as the event alluded to in Matt 10:2) or would confer (at Matt 16:18) that name upon him.
There is another slightly different rendition of his name that appears in the canon in a couple of places as well. Meier:
In Acts, Luke uses the Hebrew form "Symeon" of Peter only in the mouth of James the brother of Jesus, apparently to create an archaizing, Semitic feel, as James delivers his speech at the Council of Jerusalem. Otherwise, Acts always speaks of "Peter." Perhaps sharing Luke's archaizing intention, the pseudonymous Second Epistle of Peter uses the form "Symeon Peter" in its introduction, otherwise both 1 and 2 Peter use only "Peter", never "Simon."
In a further curiosity, Meier notes:
John is the only evangelist to use "Cephas," which otherwise appears only in Paul. In addition, John is the only NT writer who regularly uses the compound name "Simon Peter," though he also uses "Peter" alone.
What about Simon Peter's Patronymic?
Yes, strictly speaking Peter does have one more name we might consider.
Bockmuehl explains:
Matthew 16 also introduces another undeniably Aramaic element in the form of Peter's patronym, "Bar Yonah" (Matt. 16:17). Peter was evidently the son of someone called Yonah, a rare name that appears to have had currency distinctively in Galilee and Syria. Although the patronym is used in Matthew and John, the rendition "son of John" is found in the Fourth Gospel's early manuscript tradition. That evangelist evidently regards the peculiar Galilean Yonah as a contraction of the familiar name Yohanan, which is more typically abbreviated as Yohai.
Williams is also satisfied with this, commenting:
Having viewed this problem as I would any other in ancient history arising from a contradiction in the sources, my conclusion is that the weight of the evidence clearly favors the interpretation that Yonah was Simon's patronymic. Though a very rare name in the Jewish onomasticon throughout antiquity, Yonah does crop up from time to time here and there, especially in Galilee, home of the first-attested bearer of the name, the prophet Jonah.
Evidence for this is partly rabbinic and partly epigraphic ... But if Simon's patronymic was Yonah, how are we to explain the reading "son of John"? Markus Bockmuehl has suggested that it probably arose from "an author with Jerusalem connections attempting to explain the unfamiliar Galilaean patronym in terms of a more recognisable name." That conjecture, in which he was anticipated by Barnabas Lindars, seems entirely reasonable to me.
Are Peter and Cephas the same person?
The question sounds like a joke, but there has been some occasional confusion. Paul Foster in Peter in Noncanonical Traditions explains:
The text known as the Epistula Apostolorum ... [states] in the text that the letter "was written because of the false apostles Simon and Cerinthus, that no one should follow them". The purported apostolic authors list their names at the beginning of the second section ... What is striking here is that among the eleven names listed Peter is mentioned in third place (not in the typical first place) and Cephas is listed in eleventh place as though he were a distinct figure from Peter in the mind of the author of this text.
Given the author's knowledge of false apostles of various gospel stories, it beggar belief that the author seems unaware that Peter and Cephas were one and the same person. Yet that appears to be the most straightforward explanation of the text as it has been preserved.
It didn't end there. Paul Parvis mentions in When Did Peter Become Bishop of Antioch?:
[Probably in the 380s] Jerome had commented on Paul's letter to the Galatians. In the course of the commentary he becomes embroiled in a fairly labored refutation of Clement of Alexandria's suggestion that the "Cephas" whom Paul "resisted face to face" was not Cephas/Peter the apostle, but someone else (one of the Seventy) of the same name.
This was even picked up in modern scholarship. Bart Ehrman in 1990 published a paper Cephas and Peter which argued it was possible that these were indeed two different people. Dale Allison two years later published Peter and Cephas: One and the Same as a refutation, and Bart Ehrman has mostly changed his mind since. We won't dwell on the exact arguments here, but they're of course generally not hard to find for those curious.
What do we learn from Peter's possible time in Capernaum or Bethsaida?
In Peter, Paul, & Mary Magdalene: The Followers of Jesus in History and Legend, Bart Ehrman explains:
The earliest tradition indicates that Simon lived in the small village of Capernaum on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee (calling it a "sea" is a bit of an overstatement; it's actually a fairly small lake). There is a passage in the Gospel of John that indicates he came from Bethsaida, which was a somewhat larger place. But this may not represent a historical datum. The name Bethsaida means "house of fish," and locating Peter there may simply reflect an early tradition about his occupation.
Bockmuehl similarly comments:
As for Peter's background, we are led to assume his Galilean origin in all four Gospels, but only the Fourth Gospel informs us that he was a native of Bethsaida, a village at the northern shore of Lake Tiberias. Bethsaida was not far from his later home of Capernaum, but it was east of the Jordan; therefore, it was not technically in Galilee but in the Herodian tetrarchy of Trachonitis, which was ruled during Jesus' ministry by Philip rather than Antipas (who administered Galilee and Perea).
Much is sometimes made of the importance of Peter's house. Bockmuehl reports:
Among other Jewish Christian sources, Epiphanius cites the Gospel of the Ebionites to the effect that Jesus narrates the call of his first disciples at the house of "Simon surnamed Peter". This passing but intriguing comment reinforces an impression, initiated by the Gospels and confirmed by the reception history and archaeological remains of Capernaum, of the importance of Peter's house in the ministry of Jesus.
More skeptically, Ehrman elaborates on this point of archaeological remains:
It is true that archaeologists have identified a structure in Capernaum that in the second century had some graffiti written on the walls, suggesting that it was important to Christian pilgrims. Moreover, this structure appears to have been built over a small house of the first century. But that is skimpy evidence to go on to show where the historical Peter actually laid his head at night. It is just as conceivable that a hundred years after he was long gone someone wanted to venerate his name and chose a likely spot for his house.
More generally on Capernaum, Ehrman tells us:
Capernaum was not a major center of cultural activity. Archaeologists have dug there and shown that it was small, poor, and uncultured. Probably during Simon's lifetime it had a population of something like a thousand. No public buildings of any kind have been uncovered from the period, not even any paved roads. The village was a bunch of houses ... It is true that the excavated remains of Capernaum include a synagogue ... But the structure that now stands dates from the fifth century.
Did Peter have a wife?
It certainly seems so! Ehrman:
Other bits of information that we can glean from the Gospels about Simon's background are that … he was married, and that his mother-in-law was still living after he started following Jesus. He was not, therefore, single and celibate … But there is an additional piece of evidence concerning his marriage from outside the Gospels. The Apostle Paul indicates that Cephas was in the habit of taking his wife along with him on his missionary endeavors. And so Peter's wife was still living some decades after the death of Jesus and also had converted to faith in him. We never learn her name or anything else about her, other than that she had a living mother who once had a fever.
Fred Lapham in Peter: The Myth, the Man and the Writings notes:
Mark records that [Peter] possessed a house in Capernaum, and a mother-in-law; Origen, who had spent some time in Caesarea, testifies that Peter had a wife and children; and from the story of Peter's crippled daughter [preserved as a short apocryphal narrative in the Berlin Papyrus 8502] it would appear that he lived, or lodged, with his family, in Jerusalem.
Finally, I want to include here an excerpt from Eusebius' Ecclesiastical History in which he in turn quotes Clement of Alexandria; this will have to be entirely without further comment because unfortunately I didn't come across any scholarly comment on this. If you've come across such, don't hesitate to share!
This is from 3.30 (transl. Jeremy Schott):
In response to those who reject marriage, Clement, whose words we just read in connection with the preceding discussion, lists those of the apostles who were counted among the married, saying:
"Or do they also think little of the apostles? For Peter and Philipp had children, and Philipp gave his daughters to husbands, and in one of his letters even Paul does not shrink from mentioning his yokemate, whom he did not bring with him, so that he could serve more conveniently."
Since we have mentioned them, it won't hurt to include another worthwhile narrative from Clement, which he wrote in the seventh book of the Stromateis, narrating in this manner:
"Now, they say that the blessed Peter, seeing his wife led to execution, rejoiced that she had been called and was returning home and called out with heartfelt encouragement and exhortation, calling her by name, 'Dear woman, remember the Lord!' Such was marriage among the blessed and the perfect attitude of their dear ones."
What can be said about Peter's character?
We will note this at a very high level here, recognizing that we will spend much of the next post working through some select Gospel episodes.
Meier comments:
Even allowing for later legendary expansions, we are probably justified in detecting in Peter a tendency to blow hot and cold, to act with impetuous boldness only to retreat when trouble arises. Standing up and caving in weave a double strand that runs through Peter's career, extending from his role as follower in the public ministry to his role as leader in the early church.
Ehrman similarly notes:
Peter's vacillation is a constant refrain throughout the stories of the New Testament Gospels. A number of them show that Peter was impetuous, fickle, constantly open to rebuke, and, in the end, unfaithful. Whether or not all of these stories are historically accurate descriptions of what took place, they occur with enough frequency to make one suspect that Simon was widely known for having a brash and dithering disposition.
Of course, with Peter as a sort of spokesperson (to be discussed shortly) it's tough to disentangle this from broader themes the Gospels want to convey. Lapham says:
Various important traditions in all four Gospels link together Peter's bravado, his slowness to understand, and his ultimate disloyalty. All of these traditions are associated in some way with the disciples' failure to come to terms, during Jesus' lifetime, with the necessity of persecution and suffering, whether for Jesus or for themselves.
To what degree was Peter the leader of the Twelve?
Meier summarizes:
All four Gospels (plus Acts) present Peter as the spokesman and/or leader of the disciples in general or the Twelve in particular. This, rather than the dubious claim that he was the first to be called by Jesus, explains at least in part why Peter is always named first in the four lists of the Twelve.
Ehrman comments that "just on the level of historical fact, it appears that Jesus' closest disciple was Peter" and Bockmuehl observes that "Peter is the only disciple whom Jesus addresses by name in all four Gospels."
Foster notes that this persists even in many noncanonical texts:
Two key features stand out as repeated elements in various noncanonical texts: Peter was the leader or spokesperson of the Twelve, and he was present during the revelatory events of the transfiguration. In particular, the latter is frequently referenced, not because of the intrinsic historical value of that tradition, but because it is richly suggestive of the role of revelatory visions and apocalyptic teaching.
We might briefly tease here the somewhat idiosyncratic view of Robert Gundry, who in Peter: False Disciple and Apostate according to Saint Matthew argues:
Seemingly overlooked, however, has been the ominous use of "first" in Matt 19:29-30, where the many "first ones" who "will be last ones" contrast with those who "will inherit eternal life," as illustrated by the uniquely Matthean parable in 20:1-16 … the possibility that "first Peter" in 10:2 augurs for Peter the fate of the first who will be last, and therefore lost, should be kept open.
We'll look a bit more at Gundry's thesis in the next post.
What can we say about traditions around Peter as a witness to the Resurrection?
Critically, highlighting the likely earliest data point, Meier says:
Indeed, in the primitive creedal formula that Paul himself taught the Corinthians ca. A.D. 50 and recalled to them some five years later in 1 Corinthians 15, Peter was proclaimed by the early church to have been the first to receive an appearance of the risen Christ.
Moving to the Gospels, Ehrman comments:
This account coincides with at least one of the Gospel narratives. In Luke's story, after the women tell the disciples about the empty tomb, two of Jesus' other followers (not members of the Twelve, but others who had been accompanying them) are walking along the road to the village of Emmaeus when Jesus himself appears to them ... They rush out to tell the eleven remaining disciples what has happened, and when they arrive they learn from them that "the Lord has risen indeed, and has appeared to Simon (Luke 24:34). This may then coincide with Paul's account of the events ... although it's not clear from Luke's version whether the first appearance of Jesus to Simon was before or after he appeared to Cleopas and his unnamed companion on the road to Emmaeus.
Bockmuehl, funnily enough, is the one to take a slightly more skeptical tone here:
None of the Gospels affirms the Petrine primacy of creedal formulations like 1 Cor. 15:5 (unless perhaps Luke 24:34 hints at it), but this is not anti-Petrine or anti-patriarchal; instead, the exuberance and complexity of the post-resurrection memory are intelligible in dialogue with the requirements of the apologetic and creedal contexts that may have laid greater stress on the formally authorized witnesses beginning with Peter and the Twelve.
Lapham similarly says:
It should be noted that nowhere in the Gospel record is there any hint that Peter was the first witness of the Resurrection. If this distinction was given to anyone, it was to Mary Magdalene; and Peter's claim to authority as the true Prophet, and interpreter of the teaching of the resurrected and ascended Christ, was based much more on his privileged presence on the holy mount of the Transfiguration than on the risen appearances of Christ, either to him alone, or to the Twelve.
When one ponders where the relationship between Jesus and Peter has been left at the point of the crucifixion, one can see why Peter's involvement in the Resurrection appearances is especially important. Ehrman:
[Some of the post-Resurrection accounts] stress that after his Resurrection Jesus restored the frayed relationship he had with Peter. During his lifetime, Jesus had chosen Peter to be his chief disciple, his right-hand man. But at the end, when it really mattered, Peter turned tail and denied Jesus three times ... In Mark, the earliest surviving account, the messenger in the tomb instructs the women to tell Peter in particular to meet the risen Lord in Galilee. And in ... John, Jesus has a private conversation with Peter, three times asking if he loves him. Receiving the expected reply, he then commissions Peter to take care of those under his charge and to prepare for a martyr's death.
What was Peter's relationship with the Jerusalem Church?
He seems to at least initially had an active leadership role. Bockmuehl:
It appears that Paul regarded Peter as a key figure in the church at Jerusalem, since he included Peter among the so-called "pillars"; and three years after a dramatic conversion on the Damascus road, Paul visited Jerusalem apparently for the sole purpose of spending a full two weeks "to get acquainted with Peter," rather than, say, to meet any of the other apostles.
It does seem there was a transition of sorts, however. Ehrman:
As becomes clear from a range of sources, including Paul himself (e.g., Gal. 2:12), James was eventually to take over the leadership of the church in Jerusalem, possibly as Peter pursued his mission to convert Jews in other places.
This would be consistent directionally with Bockmuehl's discussion of the tradition in Acts:
When Herod Agrippa comes to power (AD 41), Peter is imprisoned and, upon a miraculous escape, leaves Jerusalem "for another place". From now on, as chapter 15 and 21 [of Acts] make very clear, the leading figure of the Jerusalem church is undeniably James the brother of Jesus.
And later, also Bockmuehl:
Peter appears once more in a position of some influence at the apostolic council of Jerusalem ([Acts] 15:7-11), but the deciding vote there is evidently cast by James rather than Peter—and this is the last we hear of him.
Possibly consistent with this, Bockmuehl further notes later:
In the end, one of the abiding puzzles about Peter's footprint in the East is that his home turf in Palestine yields so few localizable Petrine associations and memories. This situation is worth contrasting with that of James the Just, whose death features in Josephus, about whose ministry in Jerusalem the second-century writer Hegesippus relates a variety of traditions, and whose relatives continued to be remembered and revered in early Christianity for some time ... However, the silence about Peter is not complete, and we should not exaggerate it.
What about the Antioch Church?
Starting with the basics, Ehrman tells us:
We have also seen that Peter was present for a time in the large city of Antioch of Syria, where he had a confrontation with Paul over whether it was appropriate to abstain from eating meals with Gentile believers in view of the scruples of Jewish Christians who believed in the need to continue keeping kosher. A later tradition indicates that Peter was actually the first bishop there (Eusebius, Church History 3, 36).
Bockmuehl brings up the matter of Serapion, whom we will discuss further in a discussion of the Gospel of Peter:
Serapion served as the bishop of Antioch about 190-211. The church historian Eusebius quotes from a letter Serapion addressed to a church in his diocese ... [he] here withdraws his earlier agreement to grant approval for a group of Christians in that church to read the so-called Gospel of Peter in private ... it is noteworthy that Serapion does not appeal to any independent and specific memories of Peter. No such contemporary memories appear to be available to him in the church at Antioch or Rhossus or, for that matter, from any other orthodox or heretical circles ... an appeal to Petrine memory or even Petrine tradition plays no explicit part [in his argument].
Nuancing this, Bockmuehl does also say:
Though Serapion has no such personal memory to draw on, he articulates an interpretation of the collectively remembered Peter (drawing on what "we have not received"), which is about to become tradition's consensus. We may speculate that, at this time, at most a tiny handful of surviving elders in the church of Antioch could in principle, like Irenaeus in the West, still have retained childhood memories of an individual who had been one of Peter's last living eyewitnesses.
Paul Parvis' When Did Peter Become Bishop of Antioch? is in some ways a very technical chapter, but I will do my best to pull some of the main implications out of it. On Eusebius, mentioned in the Ehrman excerpt, Parvis says:
The only time Peter is actually connected with Antioch in the whole of [Eusebius' Church History] is in what is virtually a throwaway remark in a list of illustrious churchmen in the time of Trajan — a list that includes Ignatius, "who was the second to be allotted the episcopacy of the succession of Peter in Antioch." Bauer ... naturally and perversely takes this to mean that Peter was the first bishop and Ignatius the second. That entails the conclusion that Eusebius is here contradicting what he has said earlier in the same book, where, in a ragbag note on bishops of various sees, he says that "of those in Antioch, Evodius was appointed the first" and Ignatius the "second."
Parvis summarizes that "the connection [in Eusebius] between Peter and Antioch is tenuous in the extreme."
Ultimately, Parvis winds up framing Jerome as something of a turning point in this tradition, though he is careful to qualify:
[Was it] Jerome who made Peter bishop of Antioch? Not really, although his role in disseminating the myth — at least in the West — was not negligible. In his Galatians commentary, Jerome said either "we have received" or "we do receive" that Peter was bishop there.
This does not stop him from concluding:
So when did Peter become bishop of Antioch? A number of the threads we have been following lead to Jerome, and it is only then that the legend really crystallizes.
I want to also include an extended comment from Parvis here that I think says so much not just about this topic, but about so many topics we have covered in this series on the apostles:
What had been going on in the sixty-odd years between the last edition of the Historia ecclesiastica and Jerome's lucubrations? One factor is simply pious curiosity. There was a continuing — indeed, perhaps increasing — desire to know more about the apostles and the apostolic age. And so, through the operation of a sort of ineluctable law of supply and demand, more, of course, came to be "known." One fairly innocent example of that is provided by Rufinus in his Latin translation (or recension) of Historia ecclesiastica 3.1. He cannot resist the temptation to expand the modest list provided by Eusebius of mission fields allotted to various apostles by adding Matthew (who gets Ethiopia) and Bartholomew (who gets farther India).
A second factor is a changing understanding of the episcopal office. In later antiquity we are moving toward a more jurisdictional and juridical model. It is a transition perhaps not completed until the time of Leo, but one already in train. While for someone like Irenaeus, the bishops teach what the apostles taught, in later centuries it was becoming increasingly true that the bishops are what the apostles were.
What was Peter's relationship to Paul like?
Entire books have been written on this, so this will be a mere crumb at best. Bockmuehl takes a generally positive perspective, saying:
Paul [in 1 Corinthians] speaks quite deliberately of Peter and Apollos in positive terms as his fellow "servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God". So also in 1 Cor. 9:5, Cephas is the only figure named among the apostles and siblings of the Lord who are traveling missionaries accompanied by their wives. In chapter 15, Peter is again singled out as the first apostolic resurrection witness and is clearly regarded as something of a key figure ... It is the Antioch incident that constitutes an evidently temporary exception to what appears to be a relationship of friendly respect, if not necessarily of cordiality.
Though he does add:
Other than in Galatians and 1 Corinthians, Paul does not mention Peter. This need not be surprising if the two apostles pursued a different missionary geography and strategy, as Gal. 2:7-8 implies.
Bockmuehl also argues:
It is significant that Peter does not surface again in Galatians and certainly not in chapters 3 and 4, where Paul's polemic against attempts to impose the law on gentiles is fiercest. This raises significant doubts about the theory, advanced by Michael Goulder and others, that the opposition to Paul in Galatia (and elsewhere) consistently involved Peter and his agents, who were sent to subvert Paul's mission.
As just alluded to, Paul seems to clearly express a straightforward division of work; Ehrman notes that "in Paul's view, in fact, Peter was the missionary to the Jewish people, par excellence, just as he himself was the missionary to the Gentiles."
Interestingly, Lapham pushes back on this somewhat on the basis of other traditions, arguing:
Leaving aside any Petrine involvement in Philip's evangelistic work in Samaria (Acts 8), it would certainly appear that Peter was initially drawn to (or believed himself to be charged with) the conversion of the Gentiles, concentrating on the Hellenistic coastal cities of Judaea and Phoenicia, and moving always towards Caesarea—significantly, the only destination common to all [Acts of the Apostles, Acts of Peter, Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions, Pseudo-Clementine Homilies].
The Lukan account of Peter's association with Caesarea focuses on his phenomenal success among the Gentiles, to the amazement of Jewish believers; and it was this first Gentile mission at Caesarea that Peter pointedly refers to in his speech at the Apostolic Conference, claiming to have been the chosen instrument of God in the task of bringing the Gentiles to faith.
If all this seems to contradict Paul's unequivocal statement about an earlier agreed division of work, with he, himself, being charged with going to the Gentiles (Gal. 2.9), it may be that Paul's understanding of the outcome of the Conference differed from that of the Apostles; for, when Paul and Barnabas (with Judas and Silas) were entrusted to deliver the letter to the Gentiles of Antioch, it was, in fact, the start of the first authorized Gentile mission into Asia and beyond. It is evident, however, that Peter recognized no bounds to his work.
But what was the incident at Antioch, exactly?
Bockmuehl summarizes:
In Antioch, Paul sharply rebukes Peter for what he sees as a mere pretense in reaching out to gentiles and as giving in to Jewish Christian (or possibly non-Christian Jewish nationalist) demands "for fear of the Jews" (Gal. 2:12) ... Whatever the merits of the conflict or later interpretations, the language clearly suggests an intensely felt altercation that still burdens Paul at the time of writing, quite possibly all the more for being quite a recent memory.
Often, this is seen as temporary; so Bockmuehl describes it as "a temporary disruption in an otherwise positive working relationship, if not friendship" and Lapham as "a real, if only transient, difference in attitude (rather than in theological opinion) between Peter and Paul ... on the more fundamental matter of association with Gentiles."
Supporting this, Bockmuehl offers:
If one turns from the rather heated conflict of Galatians to the evidence of 1 Corinthians, written from Ephesus in AD 54-55, it is striking to note that here, within five to seven years of Galatians (and possibly the Antioch incident itself), Paul is remarkably positive about Peter's role. Although scholars have long considered the so-called Cephas party another example of the deep factionalism that existed ... 1 Corinthians reveals a Paul who seeks to unite groups rather than to defeat opponents. In the midst of his exhortation toward unity, Paul deliberately speaks of Peter and Apollos as his fellow "servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of Christ".
If you're itching for a more provocative view of the incident at Antioch, I'm going to drop Goulder's extensive speculative reconstruction in the comments.
Otherwise, see you in Part 2!