Simon Peter: The Fisherman Who Became the Rock

The first in a series on the popes.

When Jesus of Nazareth walked along the shore of the Sea of Galilee one morning around the year 28 and called two brothers away from their nets, He set in motion a chain of events that would, within a single human lifetime, place a Galilean fisherman at the head of a worldwide movement and, within three centuries, make his bones the cornerstone of the largest basilica in Christendom. Simon Peter is the most prominent and best-attested of Jesus’s twelve apostles. His name appears more often in the New Testament than that of any other disciple—156 times as “Peter” plus another 9 as “Cephas”—and the cumulative testimony of Scripture, the Church Fathers, and modern archaeology gives us a portrait of him at once vivid and contested.¹

For Catholics, Peter is something more than the most colorful of Christ’s followers. He is the rock on which Christ built His Church, the bearer of the keys, the first in a line of bishops of Rome that has endured for two thousand years. To begin a series on the popes is necessarily to begin with him—and to do so honestly means reckoning with both the certainty of faith and the genuine ambiguities of history. What follows is an attempt to take Peter seriously on both fronts.

A Fisherman from Bethsaida

He was born around the turn of the first century as Shimon bar Yonah—Simon, son of Jonah—in the Galilean village of Bethsaida.² His given name was a common one; it had surged in popularity among Palestinian Jews roughly two centuries before his birth, very likely in connection with national hopes for restoration after the Maccabean revolt. The patronymic “bar Yonah” was not a fixed surname but a personal identifier in the standard Aramaic style; “bar” simply means “son of.” A small puzzle attaches to the patronymic itself, since John’s Gospel calls him “son of John” (Iōannou) rather than son of Jonah, and scholars have suggested that the underlying Aramaic forms may have been variants or abbreviations sharing similar consonants.³

Bethsaida—Bet Tsaida, “House of the Fisherman”—was the hometown Peter shared with his brother Andrew and with the apostle Philip.⁴ Two archaeological sites have competed for identification with the biblical village. The site of et-Tell, excavated by Rami Arav since 1987, sits awkwardly two kilometers inland and twenty feet above the lake. The more recently excavated site of el-Araj (Khirbet el-Araj), where Mordechai Aviam and R. Steven Notley have been digging since 2016, lies directly on the lakeshore where the Jordan River enters the Sea of Galilee, and has now emerged as the leading candidate. Excavators have unearthed first-century Jewish houses, stone vessels indicating concern for ritual purity, lead fishing weights, and—strikingly—an inkwell found alongside fishing equipment in a domestic setting, suggesting at least functional literacy among some of the village’s fishermen. Above the Roman layer stands a Byzantine basilica with a Greek mosaic invoking “the chief of the apostles and the keeper of the keys of heaven”—an unmistakable reference to Peter himself.⁵

The Synoptic Gospels consistently place Peter’s adult residence not at Bethsaida but at Capernaum (Kefar Nahum), a few miles west along the lake’s north shore. Archaeology paints Capernaum as a modest Jewish fishing village of perhaps a thousand to fifteen hundred souls, lacking monumental architecture, paved streets, or the Hellenistic luxuries of nearby Sepphoris and Tiberias. Houses had coarse basalt walls and thatched or earthen roofs.⁶ Most scholars reconcile the two locations by supposing Peter was born in Bethsaida and moved to Capernaum upon marriage, where he set up house with his wife and his mother-in-law—the same mother-in-law whom Jesus would heal of a fever (Matt 8:14–15; Mark 1:29–31; Luke 4:38–39).

That Peter was married is one of the more underappreciated facts about him. Paul takes it for granted in 1 Cor 9:5, where he notes that Cephas, like the Lord’s brothers and the other apostles, was accompanied on missionary journeys by his wife. Clement of Alexandria, writing around 202, preserves a striking tradition about her death: “They say that the blessed Peter, on seeing his wife led to death, rejoiced on account of her call and conveyance home, and called very encouragingly and comfortingly, addressing her by name, ‘Remember the Lord.‘“⁷ Her actual name has not survived in any reliable source.

The Franciscan archaeologists Stanislao Loffreda and Virgilio Corbo, excavating Capernaum from 1968 onward, made one of the most evocative discoveries in modern biblical archaeology: beneath an octagonal Byzantine church on the western edge of the village they uncovered a first-century domestic dwelling, slightly larger than its neighbors but otherwise unremarkable, with one extraordinary feature. From around AD 50, a single room of this house had its floor, walls, and ceiling plastered—“a feature that does not appear anywhere else in the village.”⁸ Over the following centuries, the room was expanded into a house-church, its walls covered with painted images and pilgrim graffiti in Greek, Syriac, Hebrew, and Latin, including the name of Peter. When the pilgrim Egeria visited around 380, she wrote: “In Capernaum the house of the prince of the apostles became a church. The walls, however, of the house have remained unchanged to the present day.”⁹ In the mid-fifth century a domed octagonal martyrium was built directly over the room. Jerome Murphy-O’Connor’s verdict has been widely accepted: “The most reasonable assumption is the one attested by the Byzantine pilgrims, namely, that it was the house of Peter.”¹⁰

The Fisherman’s World

The fishing economy of the first-century Sea of Galilee was not the free enterprise of romantic imagination. As K. C. Hanson’s foundational work has shown, it operated within an “embedded economy”—state-regulated, taxed at every node, and woven into political and kinship networks. Fishermen typically required leases; comparable Egyptian arrangements taxed catches at twenty-five to forty percent. Profits flowed up a chain that ran from Roman emperor through the tetrarch (Herod Antipas drew some 200 talents annually from Galilee and Perea) to administrators, then to the fishing families themselves.¹¹

Peter’s economic standing is a matter of genuine scholarly debate. Some historians have placed Galilean fishermen at bare subsistence; others, working from papyrological evidence, argue that they “enjoyed a level of income well above subsistence.” Matthew Grey’s balanced assessment positions Peter as “lower-middle-class”—neither wealthy nor destitute.¹² Several details support this. Peter and Andrew operated a fishing partnership (koinōnoi) with the Zebedee family (Luke 5:10), who employed hired men of their own (Mark 1:20). Owning a boat represented a real capital investment. The 1986 discovery of the so-called “Jesus Boat”—a first-century vessel exposed when drought lowered the Sea of Galilee, carbon-dated to roughly 40 BC ± 80 years—gives us a tangible sense of the equipment: a cedar craft 8.2 meters long and 2.3 meters wide, built with mortise-and-tenon joints, large enough for four rowers and a sail or, as a ferry, around fifteen passengers. It had been repaired so many times that it may have been in service for nearly a century before being scuttled.¹³

For all this, Peter’s world was unmistakably that of the am ha-aretz—the “people of the land”—Jews who kept the Torah but lacked the formal scribal training of the Pharisees and rabbis.¹⁴ He was nonetheless deeply observant: stone vessels and ritual baths are common in the archaeology of his region, and pig bones are entirely absent. His own visceral refusal to eat unclean food during the Joppa vision decades later—“By no means, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is common or unclean” (Acts 10:14)—bespeaks a lifetime of kashrut. His Galilean speech also marked him; Matthew records that the bystanders in the high priest’s courtyard could pick him out by his accent (Matt 26:73). Galilean Aramaic was distinguished from Judean speech by softened gutturals and vowel shifts, and Judean rabbis are remembered as mocking the “foolish Galileans.”¹⁵

Acts 4:13 famously calls Peter and John agrammatoi kai idiōtai—“unlettered and ordinary.” The terms are technical: agrammatoi contrasts with grammateis (scribes), and idiōtai designates laymen rather than fools. They locate Peter outside the religious establishment without necessarily implying total illiteracy. Bart Ehrman has argued the words mean exactly what they say; Martin Hengel, by contrast, points to the multilingual environment of Bethsaida near the tetrarchy of Philip, where some Greek would have been a practical necessity. The inkwell at el-Araj—found among fishing tackle—suggests at least the possibility of functional literacy in Peter’s world.¹⁶ The most defensible conclusion is that Peter possessed little formal education but enough working literacy to function in the commercial life of his trade.

The Call and the Renaming

Peter’s call appears in all four Gospels with notable variations. Mark and Matthew describe Jesus encountering Simon and Andrew casting nets on the shore and issuing the laconic summons that has echoed through two thousand years: “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men” (Mark 1:17; cf. Matt 4:19). Luke offers a more elaborate version centered on the miraculous catch of fish, after which Peter falls at Jesus’s knees crying, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord” (Luke 5:8). John places the first encounter farther south, near John the Baptist: Andrew, already a disciple of the Baptist, hears Jesus identified as the Lamb of God, follows Him, and then hurries to find his brother. When Andrew brings Simon to Jesus, the Lord looks at him and says: “You are Simon son of John. You will be called Cephas” (John 1:42).

The renaming carries enormous theological weight. In the Hebrew tradition, name changes signal divinely appointed roles—Abram becomes Abraham, Jacob becomes Israel—and Jesus’s act fits this pattern unmistakably. The Aramaic Kepha (כֵּיפָא) and the Greek Petra both mean “rock”—a stable, foundational stone, not a pebble. Paul preserves the Aramaic form when he calls him Cephas; the Gospels Hellenize it as Petros. Strikingly, Petros had never previously been attested as a personal name in Greek; it became common only through Christian usage, a small linguistic monument to the novelty of the renaming itself.¹⁷

The relationship between petros (masculine) and petra (feminine) in Matthew 16:18 has launched centuries of polemic. Older Protestant exegesis tried to drive a wedge between the two, arguing that petros meant a small, movable stone while petra meant the bedrock on which the Church would actually be built. Most modern scholarship has abandoned that reading. As D. A. Carson—a Protestant whose Catholic sympathies are nonexistent—concedes, the underlying Aramaic was certainly kepha in both instances, and the Greek difference in gender is simply a grammatical necessity, since a feminine noun could not serve as a masculine personal name. The Syriac Peshitta, working in a Semitic language, makes no distinction at all.¹⁸ Whatever else one says about Matthew 16, the rock is Peter himself.

Peter Among the Twelve

Peter is listed first in every New Testament catalog of the apostles: Matthew 10:2 explicitly calls him prōtos, “first.” Throughout the Gospels he functions as the spokesman of the group—asking the questions, making the declarations, and earning both the praises and the rebukes that define the disciples’ collective experience. With James and John he forms an inner circle of three, the exclusive witnesses to the raising of Jairus’s daughter (Mark 5:37), the Transfiguration (Mark 9:2–13), and the agony in Gethsemane (Mark 14:33).

The great moments of his discipleship cluster around two poles: dazzling insight and dramatic failure, often in immediate succession. At Caesarea Philippi, when Jesus asks “Who do you say that I am?”, Peter answers with the words that have become the bedrock of Christology: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matt 16:16). Jesus responds with the famous declaration that has shaped Catholic ecclesiology more than any other passage in Scripture:

Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. (Matt 16:17–19)

The imagery is unmistakably royal. The keys of the kingdom evoke Isaiah 22:20–22, where the steward Eliakim is given “the key of the house of David”—opening what none can shut, shutting what none can open. To “bind and loose” was, in rabbinic usage, to declare what was forbidden and permitted under the Law. Catholic interpretation has read this passage as the constitutional charter of the papacy—the foundation on which every ex cathedra papal statement ultimately rests: Peter is given a unique stewardship, and that stewardship—like Eliakim’s—is meant to pass to successors.¹⁹ The reading is exegetically defensible and historically venerable, though, as we shall see, it does not exhaust the questions a careful historian must ask.

Just verses later comes the dramatic reversal. Jesus begins to predict His suffering and death, Peter takes Him aside to rebuke Him, and Jesus turns on him with devastating force: “Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me; for you are not on the side of God, but of men” (Matt 16:23). The juxtaposition is uniquely Petrine—blessed rock and stumbling block in the same breath. It is also recognizably the same man who, a chapter earlier, had asked to walk on water and had begun to sink the moment he looked at the wind (Matt 14:28–31), and who would shortly impulsively offer to build three tents at the Transfiguration (Mark 9:5).

The pattern culminates in the passion. At the Last Supper Peter protests Jesus’s washing his feet (“You shall never wash my feet!”), then overcorrects by demanding a full bath (John 13:6–10). At Gethsemane he sleeps when he was meant to watch and then draws a sword to fight when he was meant to surrender, severing the ear of the high priest’s servant Malchus (John 18:10). And in the courtyard of the high priest he denies his Lord three times—once to a servant girl, once to the bystanders, once to a relative of the man whose ear he had cut off. Only Luke records the unbearable detail that “the Lord turned and looked at Peter,” whereupon Peter went out and wept bitterly (Luke 22:61–62).²⁰

If the Gospels’ portrait of Peter were nothing more than this—bold, blundering, broken—he would still be one of the most fully drawn characters in the New Testament. But the resurrection narratives extend the portrait further. Paul preserves what is almost certainly the earliest written witness to the resurrection in 1 Cor 15:5, where the risen Christ is said to have appeared “to Cephas, then to the twelve.” Luke 24:34 confirms this priority: when the Emmaus disciples reach Jerusalem they are told “the Lord has risen indeed, and has appeared to Simon!” Whatever happened in that private encounter, it was important enough to lodge in the church’s earliest creedal memory. Then, on the Galilean shore, comes the reinstatement scene of John 21. By a charcoal fire—the only other charcoal fire in the Gospel is the one in the courtyard of the high priest—Jesus asks Peter three times, “Do you love me?”, mirroring the three denials. Each time Peter answers yes, and each time Jesus responds with a commission: “Feed my lambs”; “Tend my sheep”; “Feed my sheep” (John 21:15–17). The popular notion that Jesus shifts subtly between agapaō and phileō across the three exchanges has been demolished by careful scholarship; the two verbs are used interchangeably throughout John’s Gospel, and the real point is the threefold repetition itself.²¹ Peter is grieved, the text says, because Jesus said it to him a third time. The wound is being cauterized.

From Pentecost to the Council of Jerusalem

In the first twelve chapters of Acts, Peter dominates the narrative. He presides over the selection of Matthias to replace Judas (Acts 1:15–26); he preaches the inaugural sermon of the Church on Pentecost morning, reportedly winning some three thousand converts (Acts 2:14–41); he heals the lame man at the Beautiful Gate (Acts 3); he confronts the Sanhedrin with a boldness that astonishes its members (“when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were uneducated, common men, they wondered”—Acts 4:13); and he pronounces the chilling judgment on Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5:1–11). Luke records that the people brought their sick into the streets so that even Peter’s shadow might fall on them as he passed by (Acts 5:15).

The hinge of Acts—and arguably of Christian history—comes in chapter 10. At Joppa, on a rooftop, Peter falls into a trance and sees a sheet lowered from heaven containing all manner of unclean animals, with the command, “Rise, Peter; kill and eat.” Three times he refuses; three times the voice replies, “What God has made clean, do not call common.” When messengers arrive from the Roman centurion Cornelius at Caesarea, Peter understands that the vision was about people, not food. He goes to Cornelius’s household—itself a transgression of standard Jewish practice—and as he preaches, the Holy Spirit falls on the Gentile listeners before they are baptized, mirroring Pentecost. Peter orders their baptism. It is the first recorded incorporation of uncircumcised Gentiles into the Christian community, and Luke underscores its weight by retelling the episode three times (Acts 10, 11, 15).²²

Two further moments shape Peter’s career in Acts. The first is his miraculous escape from Herod Agrippa I’s prison around 42–44, after which he tells the believers to inform James and then “departed and went to another place” (Acts 12:17). That phrase marks a quiet but important transition: leadership of the Jerusalem community is passing to James the Just, the brother of the Lord, while Peter takes up an itinerant ministry whose details Luke largely declines to record.²³ The second is the Council of Jerusalem around 49 (Acts 15), at which the question of whether Gentile converts must be circumcised reaches its crisis. Peter rises and appeals to the Cornelius precedent: “God, who knows the heart, bore witness to them, by giving them the Holy Spirit just as he did to us; and he made no distinction between us and them, but cleansed their hearts by faith” (Acts 15:8–9). His speech opens the way for James’s ruling that the Gentile converts will not be required to keep the Mosaic Law in its entirety. After this, Peter vanishes from Acts altogether.

Peter and Paul at Antioch

The most uncomfortable episode in Peter’s post-resurrection life is preserved not in Acts but in Paul’s letter to the Galatians. Paul recounts that when Peter came to Antioch, he had been freely eating with Gentile Christians until “certain men came from James”—at which point Peter withdrew from the common table out of fear of “the circumcision party.” Even Barnabas, Paul writes ruefully, was led astray. Paul “opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned,” and rebuked him publicly: “If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?” (Gal 2:11–14).

The Antioch incident is one of the most discussed passages in Pauline studies. James D. G. Dunn argued that Peter functioned as a “bridge-man” between the Pauline and Jacobean wings of the early Church, and that the Antioch confrontation marked a real, if recoverable, breach.²⁴ What Paul accuses Peter of is not heresy but hypocrisy—acting against his own convictions out of fear of the visiting delegation. The implication is that Peter agreed with Paul in principle and faltered only in practice; whatever else it shows, the episode does not depict a Peter wedded to a Judaizing program. Whether the conflict was ever formally resolved in this life is unknown, though 2 Pet 3:15–16—if it preserves authentic Petrine sentiment—refers to Paul as “our beloved brother.”

A nineteenth-century school of German scholarship, descending from F. C. Baur and the Tübingen School, made the Peter–Paul tension the master key to all early Christian history, positing a deep and lasting rift between a Jewish-Petrine and a Gentile-Pauline Christianity reconciled only by a second-century Catholic synthesis. Few scholars hold the Tübingen thesis in its strong form today; the work of J. B. Lightfoot and Adolf Harnack dismantled its foundations more than a century ago, and modern scholarship sees the Peter–Paul relationship as more nuanced—a real but limited disagreement over practical table fellowship rather than a fundamental theological cleavage.²⁵ Dunn’s “bridge-man” model has come closer to commanding consensus.

The Petrine Letters

Two letters in the New Testament bear Peter’s name, and both raise authorship questions that any honest treatment must face.

1 Peter is written in remarkably accomplished literary Greek, drawing heavily on the Septuagint, and is addressed to Christians scattered across five Roman provinces in Asia Minor. Its themes—suffering as a sharing in Christ’s passion, the believers’ identity as “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation” (1 Pet 2:9), submission to civil authority, and steady hope under persecution—have given it a permanent place in the Church’s pastoral imagination. The chief difficulty is precisely its quality of Greek. Critical scholars have long doubted that an “unlettered” Galilean fisherman could have produced such polished prose. The traditional Catholic and conservative response appeals to 1 Pet 5:12, where Peter writes, “By Silvanus, a faithful brother as I regard him, I have written briefly to you.” On this reading, Silvanus—the same Silas who had served as Paul’s companion—acted as Peter’s secretary and gave the letter its literary form. Critics object that the Greek phrase more naturally identifies Silvanus as the carrier of the letter, not its scribe.²⁶ The amanuensis hypothesis is not provable, but neither is it refutable, and it preserves a coherent path to apostolic authorship.

The reference at the letter’s close to “she who is in Babylon, who is likewise chosen, sends you greetings” (1 Pet 5:13) is read by virtual scholarly consensus as a coded reference to Rome, on the model of the same usage in the Apocalypse, 4 Ezra, 2 Baruch, and the Sibylline Oracles. This identification was uncontested until Erasmus.²⁷ If 1 Peter is genuinely Petrine, it is one of our few direct windows into Peter’s voice, written from Rome shortly before his death—perhaps in the early 60s.

2 Peter stands on much shakier ground. Its Greek style and vocabulary differ dramatically from 1 Peter; it shows clear literary dependence on the Epistle of Jude; and it contains Hellenistic philosophical terminology (aretē, theia physis) not found in the first letter. It also refers to a collection of Paul’s letters as “scripture” (2 Pet 3:15–16), implying a date late enough for Paul’s correspondence to have achieved canonical status. The majority of critical scholars regard 2 Peter as pseudepigraphal—possibly the latest book of the New Testament, composed in the early second century in Peter’s name to defend his legacy against rising skepticism about the parousia.²⁸ Catholics are not bound to this conclusion, and the inspired status of the letter does not depend on its precise authorship. But honesty requires noting that the case for direct Petrine authorship of 2 Peter is the weakest of any New Testament book.

The Church Fathers and the Road to Rome

Outside the New Testament, the earliest mention of Peter’s death comes from Clement of Rome, writing to the Corinthians around 96. In a meditation on the destructiveness of envy, Clement names recent victims: “Peter, through unjust envy, endured not one or two but many labors, and at last, having delivered his testimony, departed unto the place of glory due to him.”²⁹ Clement does not explicitly name Rome as the place of Peter’s death, but he writes from Rome to a community that knew the apostles personally; the inference of a Roman martyrdom is not strained. The Greek verb martyrēsas—“having borne witness”—already in this period carried martyrological overtones.

A decade later, Ignatius of Antioch, on his way to his own martyrdom in Rome, wrote to the Roman Christians: “I do not, as Peter and Paul, issue commandments unto you. They were apostles; I am but a condemned man” (Rom. 4.3). The pairing of Peter and Paul with apostolic authority over Rome is unmistakable.³⁰ Ignatius was himself, by tradition, the third bishop of Antioch, and he placed Peter in the line of his own city’s bishops as well.

Papias of Hierapolis (c. 60–130), preserved by Eusebius, reports that Mark “became Peter’s interpreter (hermēneutēs) and wrote down accurately, though not in order, all that he remembered of what was said and done by the Lord.”³¹ This is the foundation of the ancient tradition that the Gospel of Mark is, in essence, Peter’s preaching put to writing—a tradition that modern scholarship has treated more sympathetically in recent decades.

Irenaeus of Lyons, writing around 180, gives us the clearest early statement of the Roman Petrine tradition. In Against Heresies he calls Rome “the very great, the very ancient, and universally known Church founded and organized at Rome by the two most glorious apostles, Peter and Paul,” and provides the earliest list of the bishops of Rome: Peter to Linus to Anencletus to Clement.³² Irenaeus had been a pupil of Polycarp, who had himself known the apostle John, and he wrote within living memory of men who had known men who had known Peter.

Tertullian, writing around the year 200, becomes the first surviving author to state explicitly that Peter was crucified in Rome: “How happy is its church, on which apostles poured forth all their doctrine along with their blood! Where Peter endures a passion like his Lord’s!” In another work he writes: “The budding faith Nero first made bloody in Rome. There Peter was girded by another, when he was bound to the cross.”³³ Origen, around 230, adds the detail that Peter “was crucified at Rome with his head downwards; for he had requested that he might suffer in this way.”³⁴ Eusebius of Caesarea—who would help convene the First Council of Nicaea that same year—gathers the whole tradition together and quotes the testimony of Gaius of Rome (c. 200), who challenged a heretic by appealing to physical landmarks: “I can show the trophies of the apostles. For if you will go to the Vatican or to the Ostian Way, you will find the trophies of those who founded this church.”³⁵

The convergence is remarkable. From Clement to Eusebius, across two and a half centuries and through writers separated by language, geography, and theological temperament, the testimony is consistent: Peter went to Rome and died there under Nero. There is no surviving ancient counter-tradition placing his death anywhere else.³⁶ This is the kind of cumulative evidence that historians, including Protestant historians like Oscar Cullmann, have generally found compelling. Cullmann, no friend to papal claims, concluded in his 1953 study that while Peter’s grave could not be conclusively identified, his Roman residence and martyrdom were “more probable” than not.³⁷

How Later Christians Remembered Peter: The Apocryphal Tradition

Alongside the canonical and patristic witnesses, a substantial body of apocryphal literature grew up around Peter in the second, third, and fourth centuries. These texts are not, on the whole, historically reliable as biography, and the Church rightly declined to include them in the canon of Scripture. But they are important to any full picture of Peter for two reasons. First, they preserve the way later Christian communities remembered Peter—what they thought he had said, what stories they associated with his name, what virtues they wanted to claim under his patronage. Second, in scattered places they may preserve genuine older traditions that the canonical texts did not record. A Catholic reader can engage them with neither credulity nor dismissiveness.

The most important of these texts is the Acts of Peter, composed in Greek around 180–200 and surviving today mainly in a Latin translation from Vercelli. It is from this work that two of the most enduring Petrine traditions ultimately derive. The first is the Quo Vadis episode, in which Peter—fleeing Rome during Nero’s persecution at the urging of his fellow Christians—encounters the risen Christ on the Appian Way. “Lord, where are you going?” he asks. “I am going to Rome to be crucified again,” Christ replies. Shamed and emboldened, Peter turns back to the city and his death.³⁸ The second is the earliest narrative account of Peter’s inverted crucifixion, in which Peter himself requests to be hung head-downward and delivers an allegorical speech about the upside-down state of the fallen world (Acts of Peter 37–38). The Acts of Peter also contains the famous miracle contest with Simon Magus in Rome, complete with legendary embellishments—talking dogs, a flying Simon Magus brought down by Peter’s prayer—that strain credulity past the breaking point. Most scholars distinguish carefully between the manifestly legendary episodes in the body of the text and the Martyrdom section (chapters 33–41), which may have circulated independently and could preserve earlier tradition.³⁹ The Quo Vadis story is unverifiable but theologically powerful; the inverted crucifixion is consistent with documented Roman practice, as we have seen.

The Gospel of Peter, a fragment of which was discovered at Akhmim in Upper Egypt in 1886–87, is a different kind of document. It presents an alternative passion narrative told in Peter’s first person, shifting responsibility for the crucifixion away from Pontius Pilate and onto Herod Antipas, and showing unmistakable docetic tendencies—at one point Christ on the cross “remained silent, as though he felt no pain.” Bishop Serapion of Antioch initially permitted its use in his diocese around 190, but on closer reading he found its Christology unsound and forbade further reading. His letter on the subject, preserved in Eusebius, is one of the earliest surviving examples of episcopal discernment over which Christian writings were trustworthy and which were not.⁴⁰

The Apocalypse of Peter, written around 100–150, is the earliest detailed Christian depiction of heaven and hell. In it, Peter receives visions from Jesus that lay out—at considerable and often gruesome length—the rewards of the righteous and the punishments of various classes of sinner. The text was widely respected in some early Christian circles: it appears in the Muratorian fragment (the earliest surviving proto-canon, around 170–200), and Clement of Alexandria treated it as Scripture. It influenced the Sibylline Oracles and, through a long chain of transmission, the topographical imagination of Dante’s Divine Comedy.⁴¹ Its eventual exclusion from the canon was not universal or uncontested; for a Catholic, this is a useful reminder that the canon emerged through a long process of ecclesial discernment and was not self-evident from the beginning.

Finally, the Pseudo-Clementine literature—surviving in two related works, the Clementine Homilies (twenty books) and the Clementine Recognitions (ten books), both composed in the third and fourth centuries—presents a Christian novel narrating the conversion of Clement of Rome and his travels in Peter’s company. The most striking feature of these texts is the extended series of theological debates between Peter and Simon Magus, in which Peter is depicted as the supreme apostolic authority and the guarantor of orthodox teaching. Some scholars have detected a quietly anti-Pauline undercurrent in the Pseudo-Clementines, suggesting that the figure of Simon Magus in the debates is, at points, a coded stand-in for Paul. If so, the texts offer a window onto a strand of Jewish-Christian piety that remained suspicious of the Gentile mission long after the Council of Jerusalem had settled the formal question.⁴²

How should a Catholic read this material? The Church’s verdict is clear enough: none of these works belongs in the New Testament, and none should be treated as a source of doctrine. But that verdict does not require us to ignore them. They are evidence of how second- and third-century Christians honored Peter, what stories they told about him around the lamp at night, and how they made sense of his death. Some of what they preserve—the inverted crucifixion, the inter duas metas location, the encounter on the Appian Way—may rest on older oral tradition that the canonical writers did not record. The canonical Peter and the apocryphal Peter are not two different men; they are the same fisherman seen, respectively, through the disciplined memory of the apostolic Church and through the warmer, looser, and sometimes overheated devotion of the generations that followed.

The Vatican Excavations and the Bones of Peter

Beneath the high altar of St. Peter’s Basilica, two stories of stone separate the modern visitor from one of the most consequential archaeological investigations of the twentieth century. In 1939, Pope Pius XII authorized excavations under the basilica that continued through the next decade and uncovered a Roman necropolis on the southern slope of Vatican Hill—a “street of the dead” of some twenty-two mausolea and roughly a thousand burials, dating from the late first to the early fourth century. At the heart of this necropolis stood a structure the excavators identified, with growing confidence, as the Tropaion—the “Trophy of Gaius” mentioned by Eusebius.

The Tropaion is a small two-story aedicula or shrine, built into a red-plastered wall around the year 160, marking a grave that had clearly been venerated long before. Adjacent to the shrine, a sustaining wall built around 250–260 was covered with centuries of pilgrim graffiti—the so-called Graffiti Wall—testifying to continuous Christian devotion to the spot.⁴³ In the 1940s, monsignor Ludwig Kaas, supervising the excavations, removed a bundle of bones from a marble-lined niche in the Graffiti Wall without proper archaeological documentation—a procedural sin that would haunt the investigation for decades.

The bones were eventually examined by the Italian epigraphist Margherita Guarducci, who also deciphered a partial Greek inscription on the wall as PETROS ENI—“Peter is within”—though the reading remains contested among epigraphers. The bones themselves, when forensically analyzed, were determined to belong to a single male of robust build, aged sixty to seventy, wrapped in remnants of an expensive purple cloth shot through with gold thread. Bones from every part of the skeleton were represented except the feet—a detail that excited those who already accepted the tradition of Peter’s inverted crucifixion, on the supposition that his feet had been left attached to the cross when his body was cut down.⁴⁴

In 1968, Pope Paul VI announced that the bones had been “identified in a manner considered convincing” as the relics of Peter.⁴⁵ Catholic scholarship has generally regarded the identification as plausible; non-Catholic and even some Catholic specialists have been more cautious. Antonio Ferrua, the lead archaeologist of the original team, was unconvinced. Cullmann remarked dryly: “What tomb has been found? There was no name, there were no bones.” Daniel O’Connor’s exhaustive 1969 survey concluded only that “archaeological investigation has not solved with any great degree of certainty the question of the location of the tomb of Peter.”⁴⁶

What the excavations do establish, beyond serious doubt, is that a venerated grave existed at this precise spot from at least the middle of the second century, that Constantine (around 324) chose to build his immense basilica over this exact site at enormous engineering cost—leveling the hill and partially demolishing the necropolis when he could have built on flat ground nearby—and that he oriented his apse directly over the aedicula, encasing it in marble and red porphyry. This is not the behavior of an emperor in doubt about what lay beneath.⁴⁷ The Catholic conviction that Peter’s bones lie beneath the high altar of St. Peter’s stands on a foundation that is partly archaeological, partly historical, and partly the assent of faith—but it is not the merely sentimental tradition that some critics have alleged.

Nearby evidence reinforces the picture. The Circus of Nero—also called the Circus of Caligula—has been confirmed by excavation as having stood at what is now Vatican City, and the obelisk that once marked its central spina still stands in St. Peter’s Square, moved to its present location in 1586. Tacitus describes how Nero, after the Great Fire of 64, used his gardens adjoining the circus for the mass execution of Christians, who were “fastened on crosses, and, when daylight failed, were burned to serve as lamps by night.”⁴⁸ The Acts of Peter, that strange and partly legendary second-century narrative, locates Peter’s death inter duas metas—“between the two turning-posts” of the circus. And on the Via Appia, the catacombs of San Sebastiano contain a porticoed hall whose walls bear over six hundred third- and fourth-century graffiti invoking Peter and Paul together: “Paul and Peter, pray for Victor”; “I, Thomas Caelius, have taken refreshment here in honor of Peter and Paul.”⁴⁹ Many archaeologists believe the relics of the apostles were temporarily moved here during the Valerian persecution in 258 and then returned to the Vatican and the Ostian Way once the threat had passed.

The Death of Peter

The dating of Peter’s martyrdom falls somewhere between 64 and 68—that is, somewhere within the four-year window of Nero’s persecution following the Great Fire of Rome in July 64 and Nero’s own death in June 68. The earlier date is favored by those who tie the martyrdom directly to Tacitus’s account of the post-fire executions; the later, by those who follow Jerome’s chronology.⁵⁰ The traditional liturgical date of June 29—celebrated as the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul—does not specify a year and likely reflects a much later commemoration of the translation of relics rather than the day of death.

The tradition that Peter was crucified head-downward first appears in the late second-century Acts of Peter and is independently attested by Origen around 230. The Acts of Peter is a complicated document—much of it is clearly legendary, including the marvelous Quo Vadis episode in which the fleeing Peter encounters the risen Christ on the Appian Way (“Lord, where are you going?”—“I am going to Rome to be crucified again”) and turns back to face his death. But the inverted-crucifixion detail is not historically implausible. Seneca the Younger, a contemporary of Peter, wrote that he had seen crosses “not just of one kind but made in many different ways: some have their victims with head down to the ground; some impale their private parts; others stretch out their arms on the gibbet.”⁵¹ Josephus describes Roman soldiers crucifying Jewish captives “in various ways” during the siege of Jerusalem. The detail is unprovable but consistent with documented Roman practice and may well preserve genuine memory.

Scripture itself contains what may be the earliest hint of Peter’s manner of death. In John 21:18–19, after the threefold reinstatement, Jesus tells him: “Truly, truly, I say to you, when you were young, you used to gird yourself and walk wherever you would; but 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 immediately interprets this as a prophecy of “the kind of death by which he was to glorify God”—and “stretch out your hands” had become, by the late first century, a recognized euphemism for crucifixion.⁵²

The Rock and the Keys: Theological Significance

The interpretation of Matthew 16:18 has been the single most consequential exegetical debate in Christian history, and any honest Catholic treatment of Peter must engage the alternatives.

The Catholic interpretation holds that Peter personally is the rock, that the binding-and-loosing authority conferred upon him is real and unique in scope, and that this Petrine office was intended by Christ to be transmitted to Peter’s successors as bishops of Rome. The First Vatican Council (1870) made this doctrinally explicit in Pastor Aeternus, drawing partly on the Isaiah 22 parallel of the Davidic steward whose office passes from one holder to the next. The eastern Orthodox tradition has historically recognized a primacy of honor for the bishop of Rome—Peter as protos, “first” among equals—but has resisted any claim to universal jurisdiction; the 2007 Ravenna Document marked an important if partial convergence on this question.⁵³

Protestant interpretations have varied. At Vatican I itself, the assembled cardinals reportedly held at least five different readings of the rock—Peter, Christ, Peter’s confession, the apostolic college, the body of believers—with the largest group (forty-four) identifying the rock specifically with Peter’s faith or confession rather than his person. Modern Protestant exegesis, including evangelical scholars like Carson, has largely conceded that the rock is Peter himself but has denied any concept of transferable office.⁵⁴ A recurring Protestant argument points out that the binding-and-loosing authority of Matt 16:19 is extended to all the disciples in Matt 18:18.

The Catholic response to that observation has typically distinguished between the collegial binding-and-loosing exercised by the apostolic college as a whole and the unique Petrine stewardship of the keys, given only to Simon. This distinction has scriptural plausibility, though it cannot be proven from Matthew 16 alone; it rests as well on John 21 (“Feed my sheep”), Luke 22 (“I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail; and when you have turned again, strengthen your brethren”—Luke 22:32), and the cumulative testimony of the early Church to a Petrine primacy that Peter himself seems to have exercised in Acts 1–15.

A more difficult historical question concerns the claim that Peter served as the first bishop of Rome in any institutional sense. Protestant and secular historians, joined by a number of careful Catholic scholars including the late Raymond Brown, have observed that there was probably no single monarchical bishop in Rome before the middle of the second century. The earliest Roman Christian community appears to have been governed by a council of presbyter-elders, with a single bishop emerging only later.⁵⁵ The traditional claim—found in Jerome—that Peter held the Roman see for twenty-five years is also chronologically impossible, since we know from Galatians and Acts that Peter was demonstrably elsewhere during much of this period.

How should a Catholic respond to this? The cleanest response is the one the Catechism implicitly takes: the Petrine office is not the same thing as monarchical episcopacy as it later developed. Peter’s apostolic primacy is given by Christ; its concrete institutional expression took shape over time, as the early Roman community grew, organized, and remembered. The historical fact that the Roman church in the year 90 may not have had a single ruling bishop in the later sense does not falsify the theological claim that Peter held a unique office and that the bishop of Rome is his successor. It does, however, mean that the simplest version of the claim—Peter as full-fledged “bishop of Rome” in the modern sense, holding court for twenty-five years—needs to be refined in the direction of historical accuracy. The development of the papacy is real and gradual, like the development of every other Christian institution. None of this is fatal to Catholic doctrine; what it requires is a more theologically mature articulation of how an apostolic charism takes institutional shape over generations.

A Reconstructed Chronology

What We Still Do Not Know

A responsible biographer must mark the limits of historical knowledge as carefully as its findings. Peter’s movements during the roughly fifteen-year period between the Council of Jerusalem and his death are almost entirely unrecorded in primary sources. The authorship of both letters bearing his name is contested in modern scholarship, and the strongest historical arguments touch his theology only obliquely. The bones beneath St. Peter’s Basilica cannot be conclusively identified as his by any scientific test, though the convergent evidence is suggestive. The institutional question of exactly how Peter’s apostolic primacy related to the developing leadership structures of the Roman church is one we can only partly answer.

Above all, Peter’s inner life—his theological maturation, his understanding of Christ and the Law as he aged, the texture of his daily prayer, his memory of the Galilee mornings when the nets were full and the lake was bright—lies almost entirely beyond historical recovery. The Gospels give us snapshots of a temperament: impulsive, passionate, fiercely loyal, capable of dramatic failure and equally dramatic recovery. The mature Peter—the man who, in a letter that may or may not be his own, told persecuted Christians to “cast all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you” (1 Pet 5:7)—we glimpse only through the thinnest of literary windows.

What is not in doubt is the scale of his impact. A fisherman from a small Galilean village became, within his own lifetime, the public face of the most consequential religious movement in human history. The basilica raised over the place where he died, and the global Church that traces its visible unity to his office, are not the inventions of medieval ambition but the natural—if mysterious—outworking of a Galilean morning when Christ said, “Follow me, and I will make you a fisher of men.” For a Catholic, this is more than ancient history. It is the beginning of a story that has not yet ended.

Frequently Asked Questions

Was Saint Peter really the first pope?

Catholic tradition holds that Peter was the first pope—the first bishop of Rome and the head of the universal Church—by virtue of Christ’s commission in Matthew 16:18–19 and John 21:15–17. Virtually all ancient sources, from Clement of Rome (c. 96) through Irenaeus (c. 180) and Eusebius (c. 325), identify Peter as the founder or co-founder of the Roman church. However, the institutional papacy as it later developed—a single monarchical bishop with universal jurisdiction—took shape gradually over the second and third centuries. Peter’s apostolic primacy is a matter of faith; its precise institutional expression evolved over time.

What evidence is there that Peter went to Rome?

The evidence is cumulative and multi-layered. Clement of Rome (c. 96) alludes to Peter’s martyrdom in a letter written from Rome; Ignatius of Antioch (c. 107) pairs Peter and Paul as apostolic authorities over the Roman church; Irenaeus (c. 180) names Peter first in his list of Roman bishops; Tertullian (c. 200) and Origen (c. 230) explicitly state he was crucified in Rome; and Eusebius (c. 325) preserves Gaius of Rome’s claim to show the “trophies” (burial monuments) of Peter and Paul. No surviving ancient source places Peter’s death anywhere else.

Did the Vatican excavations prove Peter is buried under St. Peter’s Basilica?

The 1939–1949 excavations confirmed that a venerated grave existed beneath the basilica from at least the mid-second century, and that Constantine built his enormous basilica directly over this spot around 324 at great engineering cost. Bones found in a marble-lined niche were identified in 1968 by Pope Paul VI as Peter’s, but the scientific identification remains debated among scholars. What is beyond serious doubt is that early Christians believed Peter was buried there—and acted on that belief for centuries.

Why was Peter crucified upside down?

The tradition of Peter’s inverted crucifixion first appears in the late-second-century Acts of Peter and is independently attested by Origen around 230. According to these sources, Peter himself requested to be hung head-downward, considering himself unworthy to die in the same manner as his Lord. The detail is historically plausible—Seneca the Younger, writing during Peter’s lifetime, noted that Roman soldiers crucified victims “in many different ways,” including head-downward.

What does “upon this rock I will build my church” mean?

In Matthew 16:18, Jesus responds to Peter’s confession of faith by declaring: “You are Peter (Petros), and on this rock (petra) I will build my church.” Most modern scholars—Protestant and Catholic alike—agree that the “rock” refers to Peter himself. The underlying Aramaic was Kepha in both cases; the Greek shift from masculine Petros to feminine petra is a grammatical necessity, not a theological distinction. Catholic tradition reads this as the constitutional charter of the papacy: a unique stewardship meant to pass to Peter’s successors.

Notes

1. 1. The 156-times figure counts occurrences of Petros and “Simon Peter” combined; Cephas (Kēphas) appears nine times, all in the Pauline corpus and once in John. For the standard scholarly survey of Peter in the New Testament, see Raymond E. Brown, Karl P. Donfried, and John Reumann, eds., Peter in the New Testament: A Collaborative Assessment by Protestant and Roman Catholic Scholars (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1973).

2. 2. For Peter’s name and patronymic, see Markus Bockmuehl, Simon Peter in Scripture and Memory: The New Testament Apostle in the Early Church (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012), 137–58.

3. 3. The discrepancy between Matt 16:17 (Bariōna) and John 1:42 / 21:15–17 (Iōannou) is discussed in Bockmuehl, Simon Peter, 142–44; see also Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke I–IX, AB 28 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1981), 564.

4. 4. John 1:44; cf. John 12:21.

5. 5. For the el-Araj excavations, see R. Steven Notley and Mordechai Aviam, “Searching for Bethsaida: The Case for el-Araj,” BAR 46.2 (2020): 28–39; Mordechai Aviam et al., “Excavations at el-Araj 2016–2019: Final Report,” Israel Exploration Journal 70 (2020): 64–95. The Byzantine basilica with the Petrine mosaic is discussed in subsequent reports of the el-Araj expedition.

6. 6. Stanislao Loffreda, Recovering Capharnaum, 2nd ed. (Jerusalem: Franciscan Printing Press, 1993). Population estimates for Capernaum vary; the figure of 1,000–1,500 represents a middle-of-the-road estimate.

7. 7. Clement of Alexandria, Strom. 7.11.63; trans. ANF 2:541. On Peter’s family, see also Strom. 3.6.52.

8. 8. Stanislao Loffreda and Virgilio C. Corbo, La Casa di San Pietro a Cafarnao (Jerusalem: Franciscan Printing Press, 1981); see also James F. Strange and Hershel Shanks, “Has the House Where Jesus Stayed in Capernaum Been Found?” BAR 8.6 (1982): 26–37.

9. 9. Egeria, Itinerarium 5; trans. John Wilkinson, Egeria’s Travels, 3rd ed. (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1999), 137.

10. 10. Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, The Holy Land: An Oxford Archaeological Guide from Earliest Times to 1700, 5th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 219.

11. 11. K. C. Hanson, “The Galilean Fishing Economy and the Jesus Tradition,” BTB 27 (1997): 99–111. The 200-talent figure for Antipas is from Josephus, A.J. 17.318.

12. 12. Matthew J. Grey, “’The Redemption of the Fishermen’: Peter’s Socioeconomic Status in Light of Recent Archaeological Discoveries,” in The Ministry of Peter, the Chief Apostle, ed. Frank F. Judd, Eric D. Huntsman, and Shon D. Hopkin (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, BYU, 2014), 191–230. For the revisionist view, see Raimo Hakola, “The Production and Trade of Fish as Source of Economic Growth in the First Century CE Galilee,” NovT 59 (2017): 111–30.

13. 13. Shelley Wachsmann, The Sea of Galilee Boat: A 2000-Year-Old Discovery from the Sea of Legends (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2009).

14. 14. On the am ha-aretz, see Aharon Oppenheimer, The Am Ha-Aretz: A Study in the Social History of the Jewish People in the Hellenistic-Roman Period, ALGHJ 8 (Leiden: Brill, 1977).

15. 15. For Galilean Aramaic and its perception among Judeans, see Bruce Chilton, “The Galilean Dialect of Aramaic and the Sayings of Jesus,” in The Aramaic Approach to Q (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 27–50. The “foolish Galileans” tag is attested in b. Eruvin 53b.

16. 16. Bart D. Ehrman, Forged: Writing in the Name of God—Why the Bible’s Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are (New York: HarperOne, 2011), 75–77; Martin Hengel, Saint Peter: The Underestimated Apostle, trans. Thomas H. Trapp (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), 18–25.

17. 17. On the novelty of Petros as a personal name, see Joseph A. Fitzmyer, “Aramaic Kepha and Peter’s Name in the New Testament,” in To Advance the Gospel: New Testament Studies, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 112–24.

18. 18. D. A. Carson, “Matthew,” in The Expositor’s Bible Commentary, rev. ed., vol. 9, ed. Tremper Longman III and David E. Garland (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010), 415–18.

19. 19. For the Isaiah 22 parallel, see Stanley E. Porter and Gordon L. Heath, The Lost Gospel of Judas: Separating Fact from Fiction (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), and more directly Scott W. Hahn, “Kingdom and Church in Luke-Acts: From Davidic Christology to Kingdom Ecclesiology,” in Reading Luke: Interpretation, Reflection, Formation, ed. Craig G. Bartholomew, Joel B. Green, and Anthony C. Thiselton (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005), 294–326.

20. 20. For a careful treatment of the harmonization questions raised by the four denial accounts, see Craig L. Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels, 2nd ed. (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2007), 188–92.

21. 21. D. A. Carson, The Gospel According to John, PNTC (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), 676–78; Andreas J. Köstenberger, John, BECNT (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004), 596–98; Leon Morris, The Gospel According to John, rev. ed., NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 768–71.

22. 22. For Acts 10 as a hinge of Lukan theology, see Joel B. Green, The Theology of the Gospel of Luke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 134–38.

23. 23. On the leadership transition from Peter to James, see Richard Bauckham, “James and the Jerusalem Church,” in The Book of Acts in Its Palestinian Setting, ed. Richard Bauckham (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 415–80.

24. 24. James D. G. Dunn, “The Incident at Antioch (Gal 2:11–18),” JSNT 18 (1983): 3–57.

25. 25. For the Tübingen thesis and its dismantling, see Horton Harris, The Tübingen School: A Historical and Theological Investigation of the School of F. C. Baur (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975).

26. 26. For the amanuensis hypothesis, see Karen H. Jobes, 1 Peter, BECNT (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), 5–19; against, see John H. Elliott, 1 Peter: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, AB 37B (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 118–30.

27. 27. Jobes, 1 Peter, 320–22, lists more than fifteen scholars supporting the Rome identification.

28. 28. Richard J. Bauckham, Jude, 2 Peter, WBC 50 (Waco: Word, 1983), 158–62, gives the standard scholarly case for pseudepigraphy. For a Catholic defense of substantive Petrine authorship of at least a core, see Ben Witherington III, Letters and Homilies for Hellenized Christians, vol. 2 (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2007), 256–60.

29. 29. 1 Clem. 5.4; trans. Bart D. Ehrman, The Apostolic Fathers, LCL 24 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 1:43.

30. 30. Ignatius, Rom. 4.3; Ehrman, Apostolic Fathers, 1:275.

31. 31. Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 3.39.15; trans. Kirsopp Lake, LCL 153 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926), 1:297.

32. 32. Irenaeus, Haer. 3.3.2–3; trans. ANF 1:415–16.

33. 33. Tertullian, Praescr. 36; Scorp. 15; ANF 3:260, 648.

34. 34. Origen, in Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 3.1.2; Lake, LCL 153, 1:191.

35. 35. Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 2.25.7; Lake, LCL 153, 1:181.

36. 36. This point is emphasized by Daniel William O’Connor, Peter in Rome: The Literary, Liturgical, and Archaeological Evidence (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 3–25.

37. 37. Oscar Cullmann, Peter: Disciple, Apostle, Martyr; A Historical and Theological Study, 2nd ed., trans. Floyd V. Filson (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1962), 70–152.

38. 38. For the text and discussion of the Acts of Peter, including the Quo Vadis episode, see J. K. Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament: A Collection of Apocryphal Christian Literature in an English Translation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 390–430. See also Christine M. Thomas, The Acts of Peter, Gospel Literature, and the Ancient Novel: Rewriting the Past (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

39. 39. On the independent transmission of the Martyrdom section (chapters 33–41), see Thomas, Acts of Peter, 14–39; and Bockmuehl, Simon Peter, 91–113.

40. 40. Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 6.12.2–6, preserves Serapion’s letter; Lake, LCL 153, 2:41. For an English text and commentary on the Akhmim fragment, see Paul Foster, The Gospel of Peter: Introduction, Critical Edition and Commentary, TENTS 4 (Leiden: Brill, 2010).

41. 41. For the text, dating, and reception of the Apocalypse of Peter, see Richard Bauckham, The Fate of the Dead: Studies on the Jewish and Christian Apocalypses, NovTSup 93 (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 160–258. The Muratorian fragment lists it among accepted writings while noting that “some among us are unwilling for it to be read in church”; see Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 305–7.

42. 42. F. Stanley Jones, Pseudoclementina Elchasaiticaque inter Judaeochristiana: Collected Studies, OLA 203 (Leuven: Peeters, 2012); see also Annette Yoshiko Reed, “’Jewish Christianity’ after the ‘Parting of the Ways’: Approaches to Historiography and Self-Definition in the Pseudo-Clementines,” in The Ways That Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. Adam H. Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), 189–231.

43. 43. For the standard report of the Vatican excavations, see Margherita Guarducci, The Tomb of St. Peter: The New Discoveries in the Sacred Grottoes of the Vatican, trans. Joseph McLellan (New York: Hawthorn, 1960). A more recent summary is provided by Paolo Liverani and Giandomenico Spinola, The Vatican Necropoles: Rome’s City of the Dead (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010).

44. 44. Margherita Guarducci, The Tradition of Peter in the Vatican in the Light of History and Archaeology, trans. Joseph M. Champlin (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1963).

45. 45. Paul VI, general audience, June 26, 1968. The text is available in the Acta Apostolicae Sedis for that year.

46. 46. O’Connor, Peter in Rome, 207. Cullmann’s quotation is from a 1965 lecture, cited in subsequent literature on the controversy.

47. 47. For Constantine’s basilica and its relationship to the Tropaion, see Richard Krautheimer, Rome: Profile of a City, 312–1308 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 23–31.

48. 48. Tacitus, Ann. 15.44; trans. John Jackson, LCL 322 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1937), 4:285.

49. 49. For the catacombs of San Sebastiano and the third-century apostolic graffiti, see L. Michael White, From Jesus to Christianity (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004), 426–28.

50. 50. For the dating debate, see Bockmuehl, Simon Peter, 114–32.

51. 51. Seneca, Ad Marciam de consolatione 20.3; trans. John W. Basore, LCL 254 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932), 2:69.

52. 52. For “stretch out the hands” as a euphemism for crucifixion in early Christian usage, see Carson, John, 679–80.

53. 53. Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue between the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church, Ecclesiological and Canonical Consequences of the Sacramental Nature of the Church: Ecclesial Communion, Conciliarity and Authority (the “Ravenna Document”), October 13, 2007, §§41–46.

54. 54. For the range of patristic and modern interpretations of Matt 16:18, see Ulrich Luz, Matthew 8–20: A Commentary, Hermeneia, trans. James E. Crouch (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001), 355–69.

55. 55. Raymond E. Brown and John P. Meier, Antioch and Rome: New Testament Cradles of Catholic Christianity (New York: Paulist, 1983), 159–83; Peter Lampe, From Paul to Valentinus: Christians at Rome in the First Two Centuries, trans. Michael Steinhauser (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), 397–408.